Sandpoint's unfolding story is a fractured fairytale

This has been a nice run: 26 weeks of saying mostly what I want. After eight years of the much more limiting vocabulary of electoral politics, it has been refreshing.

And since in ending this column I am leaving Sandpoint for the foreseeable future - ironically in its centennial year - it's time to take stock on a broader level, both past and future.

Whatever anyone else says about it, Sandpoint is a fundamentally amazing and unique place. Where else can you find Zen Buddhists and Libertarians holding office simultaneously? Where else is there a community so involved with itself that it literally volunteers itself into exhaustion?

In a world that looks, feels and smells increasingly like a day- old burger patty that has been beaten, stomped and fried into tasteless oblivion, Sandpoint stands apart, still offering a smorgasbord character to taste, and savor, if not always to enjoy.

I remember encountering the more bitter taste in the first few months I came to town. That fall a meeting was scheduled for a sizeable room in the largely unoccupied Bonner Mall. The topic was some bypass thing or other. In attending I found this bypass was neither an issue nor a political topic but much more of a community religion.

The Idaho Transportation Department high priests of the early 1990s were there preaching their papal highwayisms.The local radical Martin Luthers were nailing their writs of truth on themselves and anyone else who would listen.

In general, the population seemed to moan and lament how no one in heaven really cared about their very simple problem - getting around town.

Every town has such a stifling issue but there are few that are so persistent - enshrined for over 40 years - or so symbolic. For if one negative black vein runs through the silver and gold of this town, it's that it is so diverse, so multi-belief, that it has a damned hard time agreeing about anything.

Certainly, that is part of the rugged individualism of America. It is equally a child of the West, with its cowboys, guns and independence. But it also is part of the 1960s hippie movement that left corrupt society behind and headed for the hills, as well as the Los Angeles and Microsoft retiree complex that gets people out of a city life of regulations and schedules to just be left alone. So after 100 years Sandpoint has become the receptive melting pot of 100 strains of independence all having found a pleasant if at times disagreeable life here on the lake.

And this fits with the way we talk about ourselves. The Republicans, having recently ascended to the high throne of political power (the budget committee) have announced they now have some real clout to help North Idaho. They seem to forget that the team of Democrats - Tucker, Keibert, Stoicheff, etc. - they replaced had in their day the same power. Such self-righteousness is typical of our local polity.

"No one else could do it, but I can," you hear from people again striking an alarmingly independent pose.

Another example is the Mayor's Council. Set up over two years, the idea was to create a space for common discussion and common empowerment. What has evolved is little more than a chit-chat group that offering a therapy roundtable of my woes as mayor, mostly empty of the deeper engagement required to sense a common struggle, a common need and, out of that, a common solution.

Mayors from Clark Fork to Priest River are fiercely independent and as such remain disempowered and fragmented, mirroring the lack of a common vision and even a common language among their constituents.

Finally, there is a whole pile of lesser evils that show the same tendency for argument and divisiveness: conflicts concerning how to protect the environment, divisions about the role of planning and zoning, disagreements about whether there should be dogs in the parks. And in all of this, "difference" becomes so central to how people see themselves that agreement and the compromise it requires seems to be against the law.

And so it seems to go on. Some years are better than others, as our basically fragile social cohesion runs the risk of being shattered. The swiftness with which the far right took over the county courthouse in 1994-1996 is a direct testament to such realities.

In that atmosphere, one that's been building for generations, is the rise of a host of players big and small who may change that historic self-destructiveness. From Coldwater Creek to North Idaho Pathways, a cooperative and visionary energy has begun to emerge. But what future that energy may mold still is up for grabs.

Next week, my reading of the crystal ball.

Copyright 2001 Cowles Publishing Company
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