Lake Pend Oreille, Idaho

 Is it pronounced ‘penned oriole’?  Nope.  Not even close.  Yet another thing named by those doggone French fur trappers, it’s pronounced ‘ponderay’.  The trapper dude didn’t bother writing the name down.  Later, an English-speaking dude came along, heard the name, didn’t see it written down anywhere, and so he named the nearby town Ponderay.  It may not have happened exactly that way but that's my story and I'm sticking to it.

The natives in these parts wore seashells in, or hanging from, their ears.  That’s what the words mean: ear hanging.  The Lake is the 3^rd largest in total volume in the US, not counting the Great Lakes.  It’s 43 miles long and is 1150’ deep in some places.  We’re at Farragut State Park in northern Idaho, named after Admiral Farragut, the guy who said, ‘Damn the torpedoes!  Full speed ahead’, when engaged in a vicious civil war naval battle. 

From 1942-46, this was the site of the 2^nd largest military training facility in the world.  Over 293,000 sailors did their initial (boot camp) training here.  There were 776 buildings back in the day, and an ongoing population of 55,000, including 2,000 civilians.  Now, there’s one building, a museum, that used to be the brig, above

This bronze memorial, above and below, was erected here in 2006.  Many of the sailors who trained here were in attendance at the dedication.  My friend Dave (he's the smaller guy on the right) was in the navy and his dad worked here as a civilian cook.  Look closely at the skin (no, not Dave's; the guy on the left) and you'll see dozens of heads of navy guys.  Several paces away, it looks like a bad case of acne.  

He looks extremely critical and dismayed,

definitely not liking whatever it is he's looking at, Nazis maybe?