Washington State Trooper saves the day...and other travel notes

Alert Journal readers will recall my wife and I make at least one annual trip to Washington state to dog sit Fiona, an aging, standard poodle. When dog sitting, we live near our daughter and are able to spend time with her family. It was especially nice being in the Pacific Northwest this time of year (normally we're there for Thanksgiving) when the weather and greenery is at its best. Some readers may recall these dog sitting ventures also have side stories. This trip was no different, here's a partial update on some of what happened this trip.

Washington State Trooper saves the day!

Our leaving from Chinook for the 800 mile-jaunt to Woodinville, Washington did not begin well. Our car would not start, so much for an early departure. Friend Terry Townsend helped jump the car and we headed west hoping that the battery would recharge on the trip and things would smooth out. We spent the first night in Ritzville, Washington, west of Spokane.

On the second day of the trip, we stopped for a break on I-90 at the Ryegrass Rest Stop on the west rim of the Columbia Gorge. Shortly after heading on west from the stop Sherry began frantically looking around her seat and shouted, "I left my purse in a toilet stall at the rest stop!" It was another 10 miles to an interchange where we could turn around. Then another 13 miles back to the rest stop on the east bound lanes with a huge, rough median between the rest stops. Instead of a restful visit I was envisioning two weeks of frantic phone calls stopping credit cards, renewing a driver's license, etc.

Desperate I said, "Call 911!" (In my view this qualified as an emergency.) Sherry had to use my cell phone because hers was in her purse back on the shelf at the rest stop toilet. The dispatcher said she would try to find someone in the area who could check on the purse, but no guarantees. We got turned around at the Ellensburg interchange and headed back east to the rim of the gorge.

As expected, once we got back to the rim of the gorge the rest stop we needed was across a mile-wide median accessed by only by a gravel road through a state storage area clearly marked "for official use only." The next turn around was at Vantage, a town at the Columbia River, another 20+ mile round trip. I decided to take the "official vehicles only" road through the storage area and, if need be, suffer the consequences. The road across the median exited on to the interstate at the off ramp to the rest stop where she left her purse-where this crisis began. We pulled in to the parking lot fearing the wild trip back was a wasted effort.

From the parking lot we saw a Washington State Trooper coming down the sidewalk talking to a woman. They were both laughing. I learned he had to yell in to the bathroom so he could check the stall and the woman helped him. But the best part of the scenario was he was carrying Sherry's purse! Sherry ran to him and threw her arms around his neck. Then they posed for the attached photo.

Later I contacted the Washington Highway Patrol Public Information Office to see if there was some way we could do a special thanks for Trooper Chase Forman. I was told, "Troopers can't take gratuities and we can't give out his address." I guess that all makes sense but the heartache Trooper Forman saved us is worth a generous thanks. We're still looking for a way to properly thank him.

As Paul Harvey used to say,

"And now the rest of the story."

We made it to Woodinville, got reacquainted with Fiona the poodle, and settled in. Three of our grandsons who still live at home were not currently at home...two were away at a baseball event in New York state and another was on a college trip to Italy. Our daughter, along with the one son still at home, had several things planned for us to do and the weather was perfect.

One day we visited two sites where there are trolls created and built under the direction of Danish sculptor Thomas Dambo. Last year Dambo did a 100-day tour across the United States building sculptures of trolls in multiple states. The trolls are between 12 and 20 feet tall. The heads are made in Dambo's shop in Denmark, then shipped to each site where volunteers gather recycled materials to create the bodies and build the sculpture. In the Seattle-Portland area he and a small paid crew plus many local volunteers built six trolls. It takes about ten days to complete a troll.

This year we visited two sites with trolls that are a part of Dambo's "Northwest Trolls: The Way of the Bird" project. The first was in Lincoln Park, a hilly, lush area set on Puget Sound in West Seattle. It was a bit of a hike down to the beach where Bruun Idun was built. A female troll, "Eden" is playing a flute asking "where have all the orcas gone?"

We took a lunch break, after the visit to Lincoln Park, and headed to Ballard, where the locks connecting Puget Sound (saltwater) to Lake Union (freshwater) are located. Ballard is home to many Scandinavians whose forebears immigrated to the U.S. to take seafaring jobs. Ballard is home to the National Nordic Museum and in front of the museum stands Frankie Feetsplinter. Frankie says "everything and everyone is dumb." With those words of wisdom, we called it a day of looking at trolls and drove through heavy traffic back to where we stay.

Closer to home

Back in Montana we made a couple more stops of interest. We spent the first night of our return trip at a motel in Superior, a peaceful town on I-90 about an hour west of Missoula. After a good night's rest, I got up early to take a walk north through Superior. Across the Clark Fork River, that runs through the middle of town, I came across a bit of a rundown building with a plaque on it. The plaque memorialized the site where Gideons International first placed Bibles in hotel rooms in 1908.

Gideons International was organized in 1899 to "provide a Christian witness to traveling salesmen." They started distributing Bibles to individuals early on but it was a few years later when they first placed 25 Bibles in the Superior Hotel's rooms. At that time the town was a rough and tumble frontier village catering to loggers and miners, many likely spending part of the harsh winters in town. The Gideon's website notes the group donated more than 1.4 million Bibles to hotels around the world between June 2018 and May 2019 alone, most in hotels in the U.S. I was very surprised to learn this practice began in Superior, Montana.

Wanting to make one last stop before home, we pulled in to Fort Benton to see how this summer's volunteer crew was coming along on their multi-year preservation project to stabilize the old Mandan keelboat. The only remaining boat of three made for a 1952 movie (Big Sky), the preservation of the Mandan has become a community project. It is believed to be an accurate representation of the keelboat used by Lewis and Clark and the Corps of Discovery. Funds raised are used to purchase materials, the labor is all donated by people who come from all over the country each summer to be a part of the project.

A spokesman at the site said, "This year we made a lot of progress on replacing the bow and have stabilized the old pilot house. But there is still more work to be done." Last year the group pushed their completion date to 2025. It's a labor of love and they seem to love returning the old keelboat to its former glory. From there a short trip home.