The first Saturday of every month is my Saturday to help run the library. We all, with the exception of 
Now, most of the library's mail is either magazines for our patrons, catalogs full of office supply things, notices for Inter Library Loan packages, or junk mail. What we do no often get are hand addressed letters on nice stationary. My interest was piqued.
Even more interesting was that The Letter had traveled all the way from Massachusetts. Why in the world would some gentleman on the East coast be sending a handwritten envelope all the way to a tiny North Idaho library? I just couldn't wrap my brain around it.
Perhaps it was a thank you letter from a summer resident. That was my first thought. Our town is a lake town, so we have plenty of summer residents. That was probably it my over imaginative yet rather taxed brain surmised.
To my surprise, The Letter was far more interesting. Inside the handwritten envelope was a hand written letter. It was in grey ink on a fine, heavy weight paper. My inner Katlock Holmes got all excitable as my eyes scanned the contents within.
The Letter was a request for depth maps of our lake. Apparently the Massachusetts man was an artist who was looking for topographical depth maps of our little lake. He had found federal GIS maps for our lake's shoreline and surrounding mountains, but couldn't find anything regarding the lake bed itself. He wondered if we had any resources that could help him.
Now, there is something magical about someone who takes the time to hand write a letter, in cursive no less, during these very advanced digital times. Don't get me wrong, I love to type and can fumble my way around the Google, but I still hand write letters to my grandma on a frequent basis. She loves them, and I love her, so I take the time to do so, even though she does spend a large part of her time on Facebook these days...
Anyway, it just seemed the right thing to do to try to help the guy. I dug out some of our old Aquifer study maps and perused the web a bit, but had no luck, so in the name of polite solicitation, I found the email of the Northern Panhandle Regional Manager for the Idaho Department of Water Resources. I wove him an email that I think captured the magic of the artist's request, for the Regional Manager responded to me within the hour. Interestingly enough, while he thought that the lake bed information had passed his desk at sometime for one reason or another, that there wasn't any actual formal data on the topography of the bed of our lake. His interest must have been as piqued as mine had been, for he said he also put some feelers out regarding the requested data and would forward anything he received.
So, even though I am not able to help the artist on the East coast, I am going to take the time to write him a hand written letter in return and give him a bit of hope, for at this moment I feel as if there is some water quality student looking for a master's thesis project, and someone is going to suggest that our lake bed needs a good mapping. It's like a serious dose of library infused serendipityness!
And as most of the time, the lone picture in this post was taken on the author's flustered and in need of a Dust Buster iPhone.
