Stories by Gazette-Tribune Staff

To all you parents out there, I desperately hope you will not take your kids to see “The Golden Compass” showing at the theater. I know it looks like a good, exciting, story of adventure. I’m sure it is, but the problem is where it comes from.

It’s all about legacy.

Dr. Bruce Amundson, an expert in rural health care, compared the North Valley health complex to the Mayo Clinic. “It’s an anomaly. It has no business being there.” Just as the Mayo Clinic rises out of a cornfield in Minnesota, the North Valley medical complex seemingly rises out of nowhere in Tonasket. When most small rural towns would do anything just to have a doctor, Tonasket has a hospital, nursing home, assisted living, two medical clinics, physical therapy, dentist office and optometry office all on the same campus with satellite clinics in Oroville. We are unique. Just as the Mayo Clinic didn’t appear by accident, our health care system has evolved with hard work, determination, sacrifice, foresight and tenacious community support.

A few nights ago an event took place near our home; an event that could have been an accident and the driver not even aware of the occurrence. However, in my experience the driver probably was aware, probably was not traveling in an emergency mode and probably didn’t even care. The car sped off; the cat might have instantly died but probably not. However it did die sometime during the night and probably had a very painful last few minutes or hours. And, probably as the car sped off, the driver said to himself, “Oh well it was just a cat.” But it wasn’t just a cat. This cat was a friends and a pet in addition to being part of God’s creation.

What? No snow here in the highlands? In thirty years I have never seen an October or a November without snow on the ground. Only five days left in November maybe; most unusual. Snow may have been abrogated by an authoritative act to prove Mr. Gore’s Nobel-winning theory of Global Warming. Not many years ago there were near promises of the “big freeze” and now the “melt down”? As is usually the case, something one hears proves true, and sometimes false.