Idaho magic

By Soncirey Mitchell
Reader Staff

Growing up in Sandpoint means learning to identify “Idaho magic” — and I don’t mean admiring the sun-drenched mountains or the sparkles on the snow. For local kids, Idaho magic is about having the time of your life playing with pine cones, a baseball bat and a pile of rusty scrap metal. We would take unwanted and unloved things and turn them into castles and pirate ships captained by dragons.

This is a poor state, but Idaho kids know that the best toys are free.

Since I grew up in a funky ‘70s cabin and my best friend bounced from rental to rental, we had a never-ending supply of Idaho magic. There was one place, the “white house,” that was a particular menagerie of imaginary treasures and some very real dangers, which made it more fun. It was — and is — more than 100 years old, and at that time under constant DIY renovation.

When my friend moved in, the backyard was paved with soggy dog turds, which were a nightmare for the adults and a goldmine for us. They were rank, pitted with rain and covered in mold, and they made for the greatest and most high-stakes games of “the floor is lava” ever played. Losers would end up with dookie on their sweatshirts, but I rarely lost (unless pushed).

Dookie dodging was always followed by a thorough search of the back shed, which housed broken tools, armies of stink bugs and a single, ceramic light that had probably seen both world wars. The main games in there were “S-P-Y-S,” where we would eavesdrop on people while they walked past the house, and an unnamed occupation that involved flicking the light switch on and off until sparks flew. That game came to an end one day when the frayed wire snapped, sending a light fixture bigger than a basketball and heavier than a toddler crashing down on my head.

When we’d had our fill of looking at slugs and half-rotten tennis balls, we’d make our way to the woodsheds, which were less poop-filled but more liable to collapse at any moment. They were about seven feet tall, and the only thing keeping them from sinking into Sandpoint’s soggy soil was a network of tree roots.

The woodsheds were a great place to test if we were magic or part robot, mostly by jumping off of them while holding various items. My thought process was: If we jumped enough times, either some fairies would take pity on us, we’d unlock hidden superpowers or we’d discover that our Payless Sketchers were, in fact, rocket boots. (The umbrellas and balloons were mostly fail-safes.)

Though the yard had its charms, most of the white house’s Idaho magic was housed in the basement. There, we would trek through the wild jungles of fiberglass insulation and daddy longlegs nests in search of “treasure,” which ranged from water-damaged ‘70s paperbacks to antique coins.

The basement was molding and frequently flooded, but every time the house shifted or the puddles receded, we would find old keys, pens and jewelry that had fallen through the floodboards or out of old moving boxes.

Whether historical discovery or bodice ripper, every tatter we found was priceless to us. We occupied ourselves for hours inventing stories about the people who owned them and where they were now (or, rather, which room they were haunting). That damp basement contained an entire world, with thousands of lives lived only in our minds.

Growing up in Sandpoint means being one with nature and knowing all your neighbors, yes, but it also means building a life out of scraps and cherished junk. It’s about ingenuity, creativity and learning how to make the best of what other people take for granted. I will always be grateful for the new toys I had growing up, but I’m equally as grateful for the hand-me-downs, the Dufort Mall finds, and the derelict odds and ends around which I built my childhood fantasies.