Nancy Ann Barnes, 73

It is with a broken heart that her family shares that Nancy Ann Barnes, 73, passed from this world to the next Oct. 7, 2022, at her Garfield Bay home. She lived in Garfield Bay with her husband, Tom, since moving there from Priest River in 2012. Nancy was born in Muskogee, Okla., on Sept. 4, 1949.

Nancy’s laughter and joking with her husband, family and friends will be sorely missed. Nancy loved life and lived for her husband, Tom. She was Tom’s rock. She and Tom shared 35 wonderful years of laughter and love. They first met in Utqiagvik (formerly Barrow), Alaska, in June 1982 while working for the North Slope Borough and were married in June 1986 in Anchorage. She always lit up the deck at their Garfield Bay home with her hilarious and sarcastic humor, often at Tom’s expense, which he loved. She was both a writer and a very talented builder.

She won several awards writing poetry, essays and several books. Her crowning literary achievement was "South To Alaska," a story chronicling her father’s sailing adventure in a boat named the Red Dog, after a famous bar in Juneau. Her father built the Red Dog in his Fort Smith, Ark., backyard in 1971-72. He sailed it down the Arkansas and Mississippi rivers, through the Gulf of Mexico, through the Panama Canal and north to Ketchikan, Alaska, mostly by himself. Nancy and Tom acquired her father’s third home-built boat, a 42-foot aluminum cruiser built in Ketchikan, named Pretty Lady, in 2008 from his estate. After having Pretty Lady shipped to Seattle and then Coeur d’Alene, Tom and Nancy had repairs made, repainted it and remodeled the inside before “splashing” it on Lake Pend Oreille in 2012.

Nancy loved to build. She built a bunk bed for her two young sons, a wooden rocking horse, a large dog house for her Great White Pyrenees that her neighbor nicknamed the Dog Majal for its size and design, a gate made from driftwood with antique letters T & N, a small greenhouse, removable garden fence enclosure sections for Tom’s garden, jelly bean “machines,” which she sold locally and gave away as gifts to family and friends, an automatic crow feeder, an eagle model made from driftwood and bark, a “kitty condo” for the cats, a squirrel peanut feeder that Nancy named “Tom’s Nut Bar” and most recently, a hydroponic strawberry garden she built this year with her oldest son, Devin, that produced loads of berries this summer.

Unfortunately, a planned cruise through the Panama Canal in December 2022 in which she hoped to recreate as much as possible her father’s 1972 voyage to Alaska with the Red Dog had to be canceled. The original cruise in March of 2020, and rescheduled in March 2021, was canceled due to COVID-19.

Nancy accompanied Tom on camping and fishing trips in Alaska and the Yukon, pack trips into the High Sierras and the Sawtooth Mountains of Idaho, and a cruise to Italy and the Caribbean.

Nancy is survived by her loving husband, Tom, her son, Devin Shackle (Donna) of Apex, N.C., Nick Barnes (Lindzey) of Fort Eisenhower, Ga., her grandson, Ryan and granddaughter Kelly, and their mother, Donna Shackle, also of Apex, N.C., both of her brothers, Gene (Winona) and Jerry (Cathlene) Owens of Oklahoma and Arkansas, and her longtime friends Janet and John Cote of Priest River as well as many cousins and nephews.

A service will be conducted for family, friends and acquaintances in the spring or summer of 2023 in the Garfield Bay park.