An Idaho life explored

DOVER — Susan Moore’s sentences are crafted as simply and pragmatically as the small, work cottage that sits on her property.

Its logs are hewn for a tight fit and the corners are sharp enough to cut your finger.

Before moving to Idaho with her husband, Tom, in 1993, the Philadelphia suburbanite with the bright eyes and forward demeanor didn’t imagine that one day she would have a moose looking in the window of her log cabin, or a herd of mule deer would be flicking their black-tipped tails alongside her driveway, or that she would hear tom turkeys gobbling outside her door.

She didn’t expect to be adept at using a chainsaw either.

And if she ever considered writing a book, the retired educator with a master’s degree from an eastern college didn’t consider a life in Idaho as a topic.

That, however, is just what she’s done.

In her book titled “Hiberden: A North Idaho Adventure,” she recounts almost 20 years spent in rural Idaho from the perspective of a greenhorn whose color fades slowly with each winter spent in the Selkirks.

“After 2,700 miles of hard travel, we left Route 90 at Missoula, Montana, and turned onto imperfect two-lane highways that eventually followed the Clark Fork River into Idaho,” Moore writes in the opening pages of the self-published book. “The road crisscrossed the river as it worked its way between mountain ranges.”

Crisscrossing as well, between time, lessons learned and the kind of pragmatic observation that would make Thoreau proud, Moore’s coming of age account makes the seasoned reader see rural Idaho with new eyes.

The trees here, she found, were different than those in the East.

“The trunks are straight and not a tangle of branches like maples or oaks,” she writes. “That is why I am capable of cutting down trees forty to fifty feet tall with my small chainsaw.”

The task, though, is daunting at times.

“Even when facing a tree trunk of twelve-inch diameter, I was amazed at how much nerve it took to walk up to an object that large and cut it down,” she writes in chapter 7.

Moore is a petite, 60-something year old woman with a bite. She doesn’t mix words, and her observations are acute.

When she walks her 20-acre parcel west of Sandpoint she points out places where she shot the photographs that accompany her 160-page volume.

The moose was here, she tells.

It came for the mineral block and stayed for half a day ambling around the small cabin that her husband built for her not far from the main house. The cottage is where she spends time with her hobbies, which include genealogy and stitch-work. One day she walked out after seeing the moose, and thinking it gone, she rounded the side of the cabin and faced off with the bull.

“I asked him, ‘Do you mind if I take your picture?’

“He said, ‘OK,’ So I did.,” she recounts. “He never laid his ears back, which is what saved me. He was in a good mood.”

From animal encounters to observations on the fire season, snow shoveling, wood gathering to logging and getting around in the woods, Moore’s writing is testament to another trait that Thoreau would smile about.

“I always tried to be self-reliant,” she said.

After a windstorm left her woods a busted mess of down trees, broken tops and root balls, Moore hoisted her chainsaw and went to work.

She would clean up the place herself, she surmised.

It wasn’t long before she realized that living in the woods has another aspect that involved bending a bit, like a tree in a windstorm.

“My projections proved totally inaccurate,” she said.

The work, she found, was too much for her. She and Tom hired a logger.

Living in North Idaho where Second Amendment bumper stickers are as common as coffee shops it wasn’t long before Moore asked Tom, a big game hunting enthusiast and former guide, to teach her to shoot.

She learned, she said, but didn’t follow through with a proclivity for hunting.

Instead, when she takes to the woods, even now, it is with another instrument.

“The camera is fine,” she said.

She doesn’t plan on  writing a sequel to Hiberden, but she won’t stop writing.

“I will still maintain the journal,” she said.

The book is available at local booksellers and at Bonner Books.