Excerpts from the book . . .
Winter Tales and Trails :
Skiing, Snowshoeing and Snowboarding in Idaho, the Grand Tetons and Yellowstone National Park
Stories from the book . . .
View the South East Idaho Trail Chapter
Never, Never Turn Off Lum's Lights
From Winter Tales and Trails: Skiing, Snowshoeing and Snowboarding in Idaho, the Grand Tetons and Yellowstone National Park by Ron Watters, Copyright 1998.
I FIRST met Lum Turner in a Riggins bar in the mid 1970s. For me it was propitious. He had lived in Idaho since 1908, most of it in the Salmon River Country. He was tall and lean with huge hands weathered by years of work in the outdoors. Lum was known as one of the most colorful and well-known old timers on the lower Salmon River, and in my experiences with him, I found nothing to the contrary.
He still lived alone in a cabin that he built 40 years before our meeting near the end of a road leading east along the Salmon River out of Riggins. He was in town to pick up his social security check when I had met him, and after a few drinks he invited me to his cabin.
I followed him as he weaved back and forth on the narrow one lane track along the Salmon. He pulled off here and there, stopping to relieve himself and to tell me a story. At a narrow bridge which crosses the river, 14 miles east of Riggins, he pointed to where a trail climbed up and back down to pass around a cliff. He explained that one night in the 1930s while the bridge was being built, several workers were walking back on the trail. One of the workers in the front had a flashlight and had just gone up and around the small stretch above the cliff. Manning, another of the workers, lagged behind, and as he walked towards the light, he must not have seen that the trail climbed upwards. With the light shining in the dark in front of him it probably appeared to him that the trail went straight. Walking towards the light, he stepped off the cliff and was killed. Since then, the bridge has always been known as the Manning Bridge.
Lum also bragged how he was the first to cross Manning's bridge. One night when the steel framework was in place and before the workers had begun to cover the top of the bridge with timbers, he drove his automobile to the edge. Hopping from beam to beam, he placed a couple of boards just wide enough for his automobile tires. He drove to the edge of the first set of boards and then placed two more boards down and drove to the edge of those. Then, balancing on the beams, he walked back and got the first set of boards and set those in front and continued to drive and set boards down until he had driven all the way across.
After the Manning Bridge, the road narrows even more and has no shoulder, dropping straight into the river. Several times on that last portion of the trip, I watched horrified as Lum drifted towards the edge of the road, but he always corrected, steering his truck back on track.
At his cabin as he puttered around making dinner for me, he talked of his skiing job. In the 1930s each weekend, he would ski 10 miles south of his cabin up the Carey Creek drainage to the Kimberly Mine where he would pick up, of all things, parachutes. Because winter closed off transportation routes to the mine, the parachutes were used for the air dropping of supplies. Parachutes were a valuable item, and no further supplies could be dropped to the miners unless someone carried the parachutes back out. That was Lum's job.
Lum would load approximately 80 pounds of chutes in his pack and then take off down the steep trail leading back to the Salmon River. "I didn't follow any trails, I just took off down the drainage," Lum said.
Lum used a single pole between his legs to slow himself down as he made the descent. "Hell," he said, getting exited and waving his arms, "when you get going 40 miles per hour, you need that pole. You got to stop!"
All the time he was telling me stories of skiing, he had been preparing something on the stove. When he finally put the plate down in front of me, I lost my appetite. It was the worst looking concoction I'd ever seen: black, brown and white lumps. He called it "maiden heads," but when I had a close look at the jar in his waste basket sometime later, I found that he fried up pickled cauliflower.
Lum had been draining a whiskey bottle all this time and as the night went on, he began to mumble and become incoherent. Eventually, he fell asleep on the coach. I went around and turned off most of the lights in the house and slipped into my sleeping bag. All of a sudden, Lum was yelling.
"My lights! My lights!" he cried. "Who turned off my lights? Who turned off my lights?"
I jumped out of my bag and quickly turned on some lights. "It's all right," I reassured Lum, thinking that the whiskey had been giving him bad dreams.
He stared at me with an unnerving wild look. I tried to step back, but he grabbed my arm, startling me by the power that he still possessed in his old body.
"Never, never, never turn off Lum's lights," he shouted. "Never, never turn off Lum's lights." Then he let go and fell back to sleep on the coach.
Hoping that Lum would stay asleep this time, I left all of his lights on. Unfortunately, he was a fitful sleeper. Every so often he would wake and mumble or shout something unintelligible. Unable to sleep and uneasy with his drunken dreams, I eventually went outside where it was quiet, and I finally went to sleep on his porch.
In the morning, I learned what the ruckus had been about. The power for his cabin came from a generator on a stream, and without the electric load that the lights in his cabin provided, the generator would burn out. By turning out all his lights, I risked destroying his whole electrical system. Fortunately, everything was working fine that next morning, and I was spared the great embarrassment of being known along the Salmon River as that damn fool that burned out Lum's generator.
Before I left later in the day, he showed me his skis. He had made them, and the beautiful reddish hue of the wood of the skis, he told me, came from alder. Many years prior he had used them with leather bindings, but more recently he had mounted a set of metal bindings providing him better control. Just in front of the bindings, he had attached a wooden thread spool which was used to tie on climbers or skins for going up steep hills. When I asked him what sort of climbers he used, thinking that a sleek pair of seal skin climbers used by arctic explorers would look nice against the red wood of his skis, he told me that the material from the leg of a worn out pair of Levi's did the job just fine.
He seemed perplexed why anyone would be interested in his skiing stories or skis, and before I drove off, he offered me his skis. "I can't possibly take them," I said. But he wouldn't hear any arguments to the contrary and insisted I take them. To this day, Lum's skis, another old pair of skis and a canoe paddle that was hand made by my friend, Walt Blackadar, are my most prized possessions.
I visited Lum on a couple of other occasions. Then one year, I heard the news of his death. Knowing Lum, it didn't come as a surprise. Lum had been in Riggins, perhaps picking up his monthly Social Security check as he had when I first met him. Returning home, he drove off the narrow road and his pickup plunged into the Salmon River.
Of Bugs and Snowstorms
From Winter Tales and Trails: Skiing, Snowshoeing and Snowboarding in Idaho, the Grand Tetons and Yellowstone National Park by Ron Watters, Copyright 1998.
VOLKSWAGEN Bugs are like pets. There’s never been an uglier car, but they grow on you, and not long after they come home, they’ve acquired a name and end up becoming more of an integral part of the family than you are. Mine was called Trolley—as in the Tooterville Trolley. I believe that Trolley was male, but having never done any serious repair work on the exhaust system, I’m not sure.
I’ve owned three different Bugs, and based on my experiences, I’ve come up with a list of three guiding principles of Bug ownership. The first principle is that all Bugs have their own personality, and if ignored for any period of time, they will misbehave. They generally can be nursed back to health, but not without a generous expenditure of time and money. The second, related to the first, is that all Bug owners, no matter how mechanically challenged or how resistant they are to getting their hands oily, eventually do get their hands oily and learn how to do their own repairs. I didn’t know a thing about repairing cars when I purchased my first Bug, but by the time Trolley, my third Bug, came around, I could stop down at Frank’s Repair and actually engage in small talk about head gaskets, piston rings, points and fly wheels.
The third principle? Let me come back to that. First, a quick skiing story. In 1976, I had been skiing all day in the Priest Lake area. As in most parts of Idaho, cross-country skiing was just starting to catch on and there wasn’t much information floating around about the trail possibilities. I had talked to the Forest Service earlier at the Priest Lake station, and they had admitted that they didn’t really have any ideas for cross-country trails, but if I found some good ones to let them know.
That day I skied a couple of different trails, the last one being the Chipmunk Rapids area which later was developed into a ski trail system.
I had spent quite a bit of time searching along the edge of the tree-covered embankment above Priest River for a view of Chipmunk Rapids. When I had finally found it and turned around, it had gotten dark, and I needed a headlight to guide my way back to the car. A storm had been brewing all day, and by the time I reached the Bug, snow was falling heavily.
Chilled and looking forward to returning to Sandpoint for a hot meal, I threw my pack in and lashed the skis to the outside rack. There’s always an anxious moment for any Volkswagen owner before turning the key, especially during times when you really want it to start, like during a storm, but I heard the clicking of solenoid and . . . varrooom. Trolley started and I was off. It would take about 30 miles before the Bug warmed up, but I was used to that.
For a two wheel drive vehicle, Volkswagen Bugs are great on snow. With their high wheel base and engine positioned over the drive wheels, they can get through in some pretty bad conditions. Consequently, the several inches of snow which had by now accumulated on the highway didn’t bother me.
It turned into quite a storm. Not a soul was on the road. Visibility was limited to only a few feet ahead and a narrow white band of snow flashing past the side windows. Snow was coming down so hard now, that the wipers weren’t moving enough out of the way. I rolled down the window and while driving with my right hand, used my left hand to brush excess snow away.
I love the feeling of isolation that accompanies a snow storm. You know that there’s a much larger world out there, but the wind and swirling snow compresses everything in that larger world to a small white space. As I was lost in thought, my nose detected a strange odor. It smelled like a plastic bag that someone had thrown in a campfire.
Something caught my eye: smoke was coming out of the front hood! Then, the headlights went black, and I couldn’t see a thing. I quickly brought the Bug to a stop and got out to take a look.
I popped the hood and was engulfed in smoke and swirling snow. Tossing gear out on the highway, I cleared the front cargo space and stripped back the black vinyl covering. The problem and the source of the smell became immediately apparent. There in front of me was a mass of melted, steaming plastic where three or maybe four wires had shorted out.
I stood there looking at the mess for a long time. No cars had passed me. Even on a pleasant night, traffic is scarce in that country. I was pretty much on my own.
I rummaged around in my tool kit and couldn’t believe that I had actually brought along a spool of wire. Then for the next couple of hours as the storm continued, I worked cutting away and replacing the wires. Miraculously—and it was miraculous since even though I was a Bug owner I wasn’t much of a mechanic—the headlights came back to life.
The storm started letting up, and I hurried on to Sandpoint, still thinking about a warm meal. By the time I arrived, however, everything in town was closed, and I settled for a dinner of cheese and crackers from my day pack.
I should have known that I would arrive late. It relates to the third and last guiding principle of Volkswagen Bug ownership. And that is: If you’re traveling in a Bug, never be in a hurry. You’ll never be there on time anyway.
[END]
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