“Cathedral Thinking” in Practice

By Theresa Shaffer

For years, when I stood on our property high above Cougar Bay on Lake Coeur d’Alene to observe osprey and sometimes a bald eagle as they soared above the shimmering water, I didn’t think a lot about how the south end of the bay had become a nature preserve.

It’s a wild wetland next to the lake, open to the public to hike, canoe, kayak, maybe do some fishing, and even duck hunting in the autumn. Whenever I hike its meandering trail along the shore, I observe plenty of songbirds and waterfowl, turtles, deer, and the occasional wading moose.

When I retired from the University of Idaho in 2018, a coworker named Juli took me to lunch and told me about her own discovery of the Cougar Bay Nature Preserve. She and her husband had lived in Coeur d’Alene for five years and when she came upon the preserve, she was amazed by its hiking trails, natural setting, and particularly its closeness to town.

Our lunch was serendipitous. I told Juli that my partner Wes and I had just sorted through old boxes stuffed with newspaper clippings, maps, legal documents, and stories that described the grueling thirteen-year effort to spare Cougar Bay from development. His deceased wife had saved every piece of research and correspondence from this campaign. 

I related to Juli a few of the stories I had read. As we talked, it occurred to me that I should write the story behind Cougar Bay’s preservation. I asked if she would be likely to read such a book and she enthusiastically urged me to write it. After our lunch, I drove to the preserve and hiked to a bench that sits under an old cottonwood along the trail.

I listened to red-wing blackbirds sing their trilling songs and watched a cinnamon teal duck float by in the nearby marsh. I realized how fortunate it was to have a public nature preserve on Lake Coeur d’Alene, where more than ninety percent of the shoreline is privately owned.  

Excited about the prospect of telling the Cougar Bay story, I went home to share the idea with Wes. I had not been involved in the Cougar Bay effort and did not know what I was in for. He didn’t particularly want to revisit the thirteen-year battle he and many others had fought. The campaign started in 1992 and did not end until 2005, during which time his wife had passed away. However, as I discovered, heartfelt feelings inspire persistence.