Coeur d’Alene
Windstorm, March 2021
In the deep of our darkened street
the asphalt is heavier than the soft ally wet with dirt.
A whole week of rain loosened the winter thaw
and then the wind
came in gusts, mythological, toppling ponderosas thick as summer.
We had watched from our dining room window
in the late afternoon
the cake cutter still in my hand,
lights blown out above the table
as our favorite crown heavy ponderosa
gave
one quick nod and wiped the face off our neighbor’s house,
siding sluffing off as if exfoliated, their teenage son running out
eyes wide
as two and then three ponderosas
further along 12th
sucked the air up from the ground as they fell.
Night falls with the powerlines,
and our house on this powerless street
looks bright in its old blue dress.
Next door the uplighting is clapped out
the flickering streetlight finally quiet,
the electric illusion of each house spooned back towards the earth.
When I was little, I would visit my grandparents
in the Wood River Valley
where the dark sky bent
to kiss the ground
in volumes.
My grandparents lived next to the only highway
shuttling north. At night, high beams trafficked the wall,
arching out the darkness in a rhythm that felt like longing.
Home, I walk a circle from my house
the darkness has a smell, near buds and branching
where its depth continues up from the water,
not just hugging the periphery,
but everywhere iron dented, exposed
I wade the lint thick night to the little jog where the lady who loves roses lives
the heaviness sways and I stop
inches from a downed power line, the pole severed by a toppled birch.
Into the airplane engineer’s lawn,
I skip around the down line and linger,
the houses glow
with candlelight.
Not knowing the tiny fist of my son grows in my belly,
feeling only, eagerly alone, but not apart
deer trail underfoot under layers of road
my neighbors’ houses somehow less removed in this darkness.
Almost none of us were born here, but it feels as though we all belong
cerebral birds shuffling the horizon’s pupil.
Some came in the 70’s & 80’s to a place where single mothers could afford a house,
children roaming the unbuildable rocky outcroppings, the lumber yard edges
and then later they came for political safety
or an idea of what it meant to be at home in a political ideology.
Another wave of mothers during the pandemic
and retirees for a freedom they could articulate,
even if it wasn’t written here.
This place of heart and awl,
threading itself through
Migration the pattern of making
and remaking a home.
One neighbor
he knows everyone and everyone him,
born here in the house his grandfather built when the Coeur d’Alene still camped
beneath the tall ponderosas,
their roots deep without asphalt to pave them over,
dark night everywhere still.
In this darkness I don’t think about who someone voted for
only that they, like me, need warmth this March night and they’ve found it here,
even in extraordinary circumstances.
None of us are the center of the narrative of this place,
but an experience passing through.
Tim comes through our yard occasionally with his metal detector.
He doesn’t find much, a rusted mason jar lid still threaded
to the thick broken neck that once held something canned in this kitchen
and what had dropped in a move or thrown at a husband back too late from the bars,
when the working class was of clear extraction
before this working class of tourism, an extraction of the self
and what it means to experience place
ghost in the throat, when our rental sells, we pour over the map online,
12 long term rentals,
77 short term ones in the blocks that we call home.
Late one night I reach out to one and cry
for my desire to live in this place we are selling to visitors.
He responds in equal cry
that I should have read the writing on the wall.
This is a tourism economy, and I think of the room
in my grandparent’s home in the most expensive valley in the state,
the light scooting across the wall in a way that will always make me safe
and I think of the camp that used to unroll beneath the house where I sleep now
and the pattern we have of displacing others
and the role of this council not merely to enact thoughtful legislation
but to govern in a way that will ensure none of us are disposable to the places we call home.
I think about this room and the stories that happen here,
and walking in that dark, the night asks
When the lights come back on what will we say was here before and what will be after?
- Jennifer Passaro, Coeur d’Alene Poet Laureate
15 April 2025, City Council Meeting
