The stranger I should have hugged

Bonding over love and loss in Idaho

My latest story is below. It appears in the most recent issue of Cowboys and Indians Magazine. I hope you’ll go buy it because the pictures in it are stunning. I’ll share a link when it drops online, too.

Magazine writing is a strange business. With some stories, I become deeply emotionally invested for weeks, or even months. When I finally turn the story in, it feels like a departure, like a roommate moving out or a favorite co-worker leaving for another job. Sometimes, I’m glad to see it go. Sometimes, I miss it … and then the story comes out and I relive all of it.

The day on the boat in Idaho that I describe in this story was an extremely powerful one. As I say in the story, I brought some temporary personal baggage with me on the trip. That personal baggage got intense after I got home, and then a million other things happened, and, apparently, all of that drama crowded out the day on the boat in Idaho.

The trip was almost a year ago, and at some point, I forgot all about this story, as if I never had that roommate or worked with that co-worker. Then the editor emailed me to say it made her cry. Normally that would bring everything back. But even that didn’t jog my memory. What in the hell did I write from Idaho that made her cry?

Then I re-read the story, and suddenly I was right back on that boat. I bet if I had hugged the man I write about, I would have never forgotten the day.

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The boat stopped in front of a sandy stretch of beach along the Snake River near Lewiston, Idaho.

A man named Jeffery Scott stood up. He’s Nez Perce, also known as Nimiipuu, and the boat had arrived at an important place in his ancestral history. He told a long story about the beach, tracing his forebears from there to an encounter with Lewis and Clark to Sitting Bull’s camp in the mid-1800s to modern-day Lewiston.

I studied him as he gave an impromptu speech during a cultural tourism tour called “Hear the Echoes of Your Ancestors aboard the River Leader.” His cracked hands had obviously seen hard work. His face, weathered and taut, had spent many hours in the sun and wind. His personal history lesson turned into a heartbreaking and funny tribute to his mother, who had died a few months earlier. He sounded like I felt when I gave my mom’s eulogy less than a year before.

Scott said his mom spoke the Nez Perce language (nimipuutímt), and he didn’t. When she spoke it in front of him, he knew, somehow, that she was talking about him. He smiled at that memory, a smile that gave the rest of us on the River Leader permission to laugh as we wondered what our moms would say about us if they spoke a language that we couldn’t understand.

Scott walked toward the front of the River Leader. He said he wanted to sing a goodbye song to her. The captain maneuvered the boat until it was perpendicular to shore; then he cut the engines. The 48 passengers had excitedly chitter-chattered for the hour we had spent on the boat. We had gaped at bald eagles, marveled at bighorn sheep, laughed as a huge flock of pelicans flew by.

Now nobody talked. The whole world stopped making noise. All eyes focused on Scott.

As Scott spoke, Stacia Morfin, chief executive officer of Nez Perce Tourism, which owns the River Leader, looked on. Decked out in full Nimiipuu regalia, she wore a dress made of skin from mountain sheep like the ones that live along the river. She founded the company to preserve and celebrate Nimiipuu culture and traditions. Her goal is to give cultural tourists real, lasting, and important experiences.

This maiden voyage of the River Leader was as real, lasting, and important as it gets. “Welcome home,” Morfin told Scott, her uncle, and hugged him. “We really are in a beautiful place of healing.”

Morfin’s Nimiipuu name is kuusnim q’icxneweet, which means “one who takes care of water.”

And now the water was taking care of us.

On the far side of the boat, a woman was transfixed, her blue eyes glistening. The man across from me wiped his. It was the day before Mother’s Day, and this son who loved his mother and missed her desperately started to sing.

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I travel for many reasons — to grow, to learn, to embrace adventure, and to escape. Especially on trips in which I write about Native American cultures, I love connecting with people whose ancestry and background — and their sense of pride in celebrating those two things — are different from mine.

My trip to Idaho started out as a way to learn about the Coeur d’Alene tribe and Nimiipuu people, cultures, and histories. And I did. But it became about so much more than that. In a powerful, unmistakable, and almost eerie way, I found connection again and again through our shared sorrow and pain. And also through shared beauty.

Northern Idaho in May is as green as an Irish postcard. Over a five-day trip, I hiked in that green lushness, jogged in it, drove in it, rode a horse in it, hit golf balls in it, sped in a boat in it, and marveled at it all the while. Wheat, grains, garbanzo beans, and other crops rolled along hills, ending in the distant dark green of Ponderosa fir forests.

Every time I mentioned my amazement at their state’s greenness to Idahoans, I heard the same response, given with a knowing, sighing resignation: It’ll turn brown in June. Fair enough, I suppose, but it also revealed a truth of travel: Sometimes an outsider appreciates a place’s beauty more than someone who lives there. “Appreciate it now because it will be gone soon,” became a lesson from the green...and so much more.

At the outset, my mood was more brown than green. Anxiety gnawed at me when I arrived at the Chief Joseph Foundation near Lewiston. Since leaving home a few days earlier, I had learned that our landlord was selling our house, and my wife, two kids, and I had to rush to find a new place to live.

House hunting in St. Louis is difficult enough. House hunting in St. Louis when you’re in Idaho is all but ridiculous. The market for buyers and renters were both bad. I hoped horseback riding in Lewiston would provide respite from that stress. I can’t ride a horse and worry at the same time. Nobody can.

Rain pounded the roof as I arrived at the Chief Joseph Foundation — named for the Nimiipuu leader who guided the tribe during its most tumultuous period, when violent encounters with settlers forced them to flee north in 1877.

Bonnie Ewing greeted me. She and her husband, Bill, started the foundation because they wanted kids from difficult backgrounds to feel the powerful connection between horse and rider. Bonnie and I stood outside the foundation’s small arena. She beamed at a sign on the front of the building. The foundation had kicked around ideas of what to call the building. As far as she knew at the time, no decision had been made. When it came time to formally open the building, Bonnie, who was mourning Bill’s death, did not want to go to the ceremony. She eventually allowed herself to be talked into it.

She was speechless when the sign was uncovered.

“Ewing Arena,” it said. “Dedicated to Bill & Bonnie Ewing.”

“Oh, man,” says Mike Ewing, Bill and Bonnie’s son, “she lost it.”

Mike Ewing was my guide, and he agreed to take me for a ride, rain or not.

Normally the way to end a drought is for me to plan a camping trip there. But the rain stopped shortly after we arrived at Spalding Park. I told Mike Ewing my housing sob story and said I was glad to be on a horse so I didn’t have time to think about it.

Then I changed the subject. Or thought I did, at least.

“What is it,” I asked him from atop an Appaloosa named Happy, “about kids and horses that is so powerful?”

He spun around from atop his horse named Quick to face me. “It’s exactly what you just said,” he said. Many of the kids come from troubled backgrounds; their stress is more permanent and powerful than mine, but the horses provide the same balm for them as they did for me. “They can forget about that for a while.”

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The people known as Coeur d’Alene call themselves Schi’tsu’umsh, which means “discovered people.” French traders gave them the name Coeur d’Alene, which means heart of an awl, because they were sharp traders.

I rode shotgun as Leanne Campbell, the cultural tourism coordinator for the Coeur d’Alene Casino, drove us across rolling hills on the way to the tribe’s eagle aviary, the first such facility in the Pacific Northwest.

The aviary is 75 feet long, 24 feet wide, and 16 feet tall. Inside are a pond, waterfalls, and climbing perches. One of the loudest and most aggressive birds is a bald eagle named Mqhwqin (muck-KEEN), which would never fly again. Across from her, on the other side of the aviary, sat Achaataq (aw-chaw-TALK), which means “blind.” She was a female golden eagle, and at 13 pounds is the largest bird in the aviary.

I watched as huge slabs of fish were placed inside the aviary. There was a pecking order to eating that the eagles somehow knew to follow. On the day I visited, all the birds eyed the food, for five, 10, 15 minutes. Maybe they didn’t want to eat in front of a stranger.

As they sat on their perches, the birds looked majestic, regal, stern, powerful ... and fully clothed. “Sometimes you come here and there’s no feathers [on the ground],” said Vince Peone, a tribal wildlife official who helped build the aviary. “And the next day there’s 10 or 15.”

Many Native American tribes revere eagles because they fly as high and close to the Creator as any animal, Campbell told me. That makes their feathers valuable, and to receive one is to receive a kingly gift. They are given as rites of passages, as symbols of respect, and simply out of love.

Like any gift, the most prized eagle feathers have heart-rending stories behind them. For Peone, that story is about a feather he gave away.

On Father’s Day in 2014, Vincent went salmon fishing in Alaska with his father, Sam Peone. Sitting in a drift boat, they threw their lines in the water. An eagle attacked a seagull. When the eagle flew away, a feather fell off it. Father and son watched, dumbfounded, as it slowly drifted down.

“It’s a huge blessing if you just find them in the wild,” Vince Peone said. And to see one fall right in front of you as you’re pulling salmon out of the river, with your dad, on Father’s Day ... the Peones almost couldn’t believe what they were seeing. They paddled the drift boat to where the feather landed, and Vince Peone plucked it out of the water. “I grabbed it, I lifted it up, and I said some prayers,” he said.

He gave the feather to his father, and Sam Peone proudly displayed it at his home for the rest of his life. He died of COVID in February 2022. His casket was full of eagle feathers, an unmistakable sign of the respect he commanded.

That special feather, the one the son gave to this father, was nowhere to be found. Vince knows he will never see it again.

But he’ll never forget it, either.

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I flew out for this assignment a few days early to see my cousins in Spokane, just over the Washington border from Coeur d’Alene. Their mom (my aunt) died a few months after my mom died. So did the mom of the editor who assigned this story. And after talking with Vince Peone and Mike Ewing about the deaths of their fathers, my heart was attuned to sorrow and pain.

Scott’s comments and song squeezed me like a python. I wanted to walk across the boat and hug him and tell him not that everything would be OK but that the pain shows how much he loved her, and that in my case that love was worth the pain that followed, and I hoped it would be the same for him. But I didn’t do that. I wish I had.

Nez Perce is an Americanization of the French phrase for pierced nose. They call themselves Nimiipuu, which means “The People.” They did not pierce their noses. There are a couple explanations for the name. One says a French fur trader saw a woman from a different tribe, and she had a pierced nose, which was common among her people. The Frenchmen mistook her for Nimiipuu and mislabeled an entire people based on that. Another is that the term Nez Perce arose from a misunderstood hand gesture.

There was no misunderstanding what was happening on the boat. It was a deeply personal and simultaneously universal catharsis happening in public.

Scott’s song comprised some words in nimipuutímt and some sounds that transcended language. I could not understand the words. I did not have to. His mournful lament crossed all borders of culture and language. I felt Scott’s pain as he talked and sang. I thought of my mom, of course. I wanted to call her to tell her that I had to move ... and about the incredibly powerful song I heard on a boat in Idaho.