Let's take a page from the past and construct wooden sidewalks

Folks, I have a confession to make. I know I am not alone  but that offers me no excuse. Now here is what has been nibbling at my conscience - I have never held any city or county office but I have often stood on the sidelines criticizing those out playing the game. I have never sat in the council chambers from five in the afternoon until after midnight laboring over such weighty problems as a sidewalk.

I use the sidewalk issue because our leaders have just emerged from a "sidewalk frenzy" that would have driven lesser people mad.

Can you imagine this kind  of anguish? I am sure most of them would like to discard the burden of being stuck in a sidewalk and deal with more concrete things like cementing internal relationships, saving our historic buildings, the condition of our streets, or how to save the people's money by not folding to some errant developer.

The sidewalk issue has quieted down but it is still out there and will show itself in the near future. We have a little time to allow us to get out of the problem and into a solution but we must use that time wisely.

That it why I confessed my past errors and hopefully I will be forgiven when I offer a solution that has worked in the past. I think there is something in the Bible that says, "Remember the old paths," and that is what I am offering today through the words of the late Bob Selle who was an old-timer in the Sandpoint area. Bob was a great storyteller and I want to share something he told me. Below, in his own words, Bob gives us a solution to our momentous sidewalk problem.

"There used to be a creek come from out of where the airport is now and it ran all down through (town) and it probably ended up in the river. Each street it crossed, they either had to have a little bridge or a culvert, and they had wooden sidewalks then. The sidewalks were elevated up on eight to ten-foot standards. They were four foot wide. They all were made out of wood and nailed down."

"I remember about those wooden sidewalks because there was one place on Lake Street where we used to plug the culvert and make the slough flood in the fall, on purpose. We would stuff anything we could find in there so the water could not get through and we would have a skating pond."

"Then we got to taking planks off of the sidewalks to build our bonfires for our skating get together. The police came and arrested me one night and took me downtown and then I had to go and report to the truant officer for about six months. Every Saturday I had to go and tell her I was being good and all that kind of stuff. So I remember about the wooden sidewalks. They picked on me because I was probably the instigator of the whole thing. They had to take somebody out of the bunch that had the bonfire going and the boards were lying there that we tore off the sidewalk."

Now do you see what I mean by looking to the past for an answer? I have been doing a lot of rocking and a-thinking about this and I have a suggestion for our leaders that just might save them time, save you money, and salve my conscience. It would give them time to relax from the pressures of how wide a sidewalk should be and enjoy themselves talking about how to save our city as we know it.

The answer is simple - build wooden sidewalks all over town. They would be easy to maintain with a hammer and a bucket of nails. It would eliminate all the fussing over how wide they should be. Each council member, and the mayor, could be issued a saw, hammer and nails, and they could adjust the width of the boards in their area to their liking - saw it off or nail a piece on. You can't get it any better than that.