The Scenic Route

Finding the word - Sandy Compton remembers an encounter with Hazel Hall

It is full summer. My friend Don and I have been playing Huck Finn when I spy an old friend dining al fresco with her family. We smell of the lake, with hints of huckleberry and a good IPA. The sun is setting over Baldy and the river below the Long Bridge is a long heliotrope runway stretching east.

 “May we join you?” we ask. We won’t stay long — just long enough to say “hello,” and to ask a riddle. My friend will know the answer. She’s been here—Sandpoint, Idaho—longer than most residents have been alive.

“I want a word, friend,” I tell her. “Just one.” I want one word from her that will sum up what she thinks, feels, knows, intuits about this place.

She has seen much happen. The fall of mighty Humbird and the bleak days of the Depression. The beginnings and ends of wars that took young men and never gave them back and the arrival and departure of platoons of sailors. Smoked bluebacks by the thousands. Native encampments at City Beach, and the birth of POAC, the saving of the Panida and the first concert of the fledgling Festival at Sandpoint. On her watch, Schweitzer Basin mutated and morphed for 46 years into its latest iteration—but she knew how to ski long before they built Chair One.

My friend has been around.

This place where she—and I—live is the point of my query, and not just this little town with the big growing pains caught between Lake Pend Oreille and the Selkirks. I’m asking about the rivers with rapids where she watched them put dams; the high country at the end of the Pack and up behind Hope and Clark Fork, where the bears and berries and goats and westslope cutthroats still can be found—though not in the abundance she knew in her prime, when she taught kids to fill a berry bucket and flicked hooked ’hoppers into crystal pools for dinner.

She arrived in the middle of the night in the middle of the winter and doesn’t have that “Long Bridge experience” which many claim as a calling to sell everything they own and move here from everywhere else. She took a chance to be here; not with her money or her kid’s education or her husband’s business; but with her whole, complete, entire life. For better or worse, in sickness and in health, until death do them part, my friend as good as married this town when she came here.

She has never been unfaithful. She has raised her children and helped raise the children of her neighbors. She has stood up and had her say about things when she had something to add to the conversation, and kept her mouth shut when she didn’t. She has helped build things that only lasted a few seasons and others that will last beyond her children’s children. She has watched folks come and go, watched the city grow in odd directions and the country be cut up and sold, and seen success and failure standing back to back like duelists on First Avenue and come to know that in that contest being lucky is almost as important as being good, but not quite.

“So, friend,” I say, leaning close so she can understand me and I her, “what’s the word?”

She looks up toward the crest of Baldy, where the light and dark are welded together by the setting sun. She smiles a winsome smile, a smile of age and wisdom.

“Complete,” she says. “The word is ‘complete.’ ”

Dorothy Hazel Bridges Hall was born in 1913 in Kansas City, Kansas. At five, the family moved Montrose, Colorado, and then to Delta, Paeonia and Hotchkiss, where she graduated from high school. Hazel met her future husband, Ross Hall, at age 16 in front of a drugstore in Palisades, Colorado, where they were both working in the fruit harvest.

In January of 1932, the newlywed Hazel and Ross came to Sandpoint, where Ross was working for the Hines photography studio. Eventually, they would buy the studio and build a very successful photography business, Ross Hall Studio. Hazel had three children, Robert Ross, Dann and Loyce.

Hazel herself was a fine photographer. She was also a master at hand-tinting black and white photos.

As public as her life in Sandpoint often was, she seemed to me a private person; much content to live, not in the shadows, but in the back of the scene; but always ready to come to the front when need be. Her endless and tireless work in and for the Sandpoint community is alluded to above.

That search for a word happened last September, and now, truly, this thing we know as life is complete for my—our—friend Hazel, who went on without us a few weeks ago. It has been over four decades since I first met her, when she was one of the leaders of the Sandpoint Methodist Church youth group. Early on, she remembered me better than I remembered her. But that has changed. Now, I will never forget her.

Goodbye, Mrs. Hall. It was a pleasure to know you. Thank you for all you did while you were here.

Read Hazel's obituary here.

Read "A Life Beautifully Lived" here.