A stranger by the lake: Notes from a Pole in North Idaho

By Marcin Prokop
Reader Contributor

I came to your corner of Idaho the way I try to come everywhere — without a thesis. My name is Marcin Prokop; back home in Poland I host a television series that has wandered through Alaska, Hawaii and Puerto Rico, and this summer it brought a small, sleep-deprived crew to the shores of Lake Pend Oreille. We arrive in a place as guests, not prosecutors. We point the camera and we listen. What we found here is harder to fold into a suitcase than anything we packed.

The first thing that stopped me was the water. Pend Oreille is so deep and so still that it seems to be keeping a secret, and the Selkirks stand over it like something out of my own part of the world. I have spent years chasing the Balkans on a motorcycle precisely because they refuse to be comfortable, and North Idaho spoke the same rough dialect to me at once.

Before I met a single soul, the landscape had already told me why a person might drive across an entire continent to live here and never explain themselves to anyone again.

Of course, I had read the headlines before I came. Aryan Nations at Hayden Lake, Ruby Ridge, the “American Redoubt,” a pastor in Moscow with friends in Washington. I confess I half-expected to land in a trench, with two armies dug in on either side of the water. Instead I kept meeting people — and people are stubbornly worse at being symbols than the internet would like.

I met two women in Sandpoint, Jen and Rachel, who described what it feels like to become a minority in your own hometown. What has stayed with me is not their politics but a question their daughters keep asking them: “Why don’t we just leave?” I have no clean answer to that, and neither, honestly, did they. They stay anyway. There is a kind of courage that never makes the news, and I think I filmed some of it.

Then there was Tim Remington, the pastor in Coeur d’Alene who was shot six times in a church parking lot and lived. He sat down at a piano and played for us with fingers that no longer feel — he has taught himself a workaround and calls it a small miracle on loan from God. Ten minutes later he was showing off his antique cars, and the grave clergyman vanished; in his place stood a delighted teenager drunk on the smell of gasoline as a Dodge Charger coughed to life. 

We disagreed about a great many things. I liked him enormously. Both of those sentences are true, and America keeps insisting they can’t be.

I met Captain Bob, who looks exactly like the man the coastal papers warn you about — cap, moustache, battered truck — until you notice the bumper stickers, which announce an old hippie and a lifelong liberal who lives on a boat he rebuilt himself, surrounded by his favorite books and records. He is 70, still tending bar because there was never enough to set aside, gloriously analog, faintly lonely and freer than most millionaires I know. His little boat is wedged into a corner of a marina full of gleaming ones, and he seemed perfectly content to live just off to the side of everything.

And I met Toby, a real estate agent I teasingly called a modern Moses, because he told me God instructed him to find a land ringed by mountains and lakes and settle there. He and his friends are preppers, quietly rehearsing for a collapse — canning food, keeping livestock, teaching their children skills my grandparents’ generation in Poland had by necessity. 

Some of what I heard at his kitchen table unsettled me; some of the certainties were harder than the granite outside. And yet these were among the warmest, most hospitable people we encountered on the whole trip, which complicated every neat story I might have told about them. One of his sons played guitar for us and lit up at the idea of auditioning for Poland’s Got Talent. I hope he does.

Here is where being Polish changes what a person hears. My country was erased from the map of Europe for 123 years. My own grandfather survived Auschwitz. When I meet people stockpiling for an apocalypse that has never actually visited them, I don’t feel superior — I feel a strange tenderness, because I come from a place that knows what real collapse costs, and I understand the instinct to build a wall of tins between yourself and the dark. I only wonder, gently, whether the dark they fear is out there, or whether some of it has been imported in the moving trucks.

What struck me most, in the end, was not the divide but the thing on both sides of it. Everyone I met in North Idaho loves freedom with an almost religious intensity. Bob loves it and Toby loves it; the women in Sandpoint love it and the pastor loves it. They simply define it in opposite directions, and then treat the other definition as an invasion. But a shared love is a bridge, even between people who currently prefer to shout across the ravine. 

The only question — and it is yours to answer, not mine — is whether you will one day meet in the middle of that bridge, or set it on fire.

I don’t get a vote. I’m the stranger who came to look, ate at your tables, swam in your cold lake and will now carry it all home to a country on the other side of the world. 

Thank you — to Ben Olson and the Reader, to the believers and the doubters, to everyone who opened a door to a Pole with a camera and too many questions. A place is never its headlines. It is its people, standing by an astonishing lake, arguing about how to be free. I left rooting for the bridge.

Marcin Prokop is a Polish journalist, television and radio personality. He hosted Poland’s Got Talent from 2008-2022 and since 2024 he has been a judge on the program. He is also the host of a documentary road trip series called Uncommon States of Prokop, which recently filmed an episode in North Idaho.