Hi Hopes dream has arts on menu

The flat-roofed Hi Hopes Café facing wooded Warren Island on Lake Pend Oreille was Tom Newbill’s coffee retreat and social center.

Most people living along the lake’s east shore gravitated to the café, a century-old market/general store, sometime every day for Mike Geer’s fresh-roasted coffee. The café begged for fresh white paint, but no one noticed. It was a town landmark and packed with character like the old Hope school and the Hope Hotel.

Christine Holbert wanted it.

“I’ve been looking for the right place for five years,” Christine says, taking stock of the café’s round tables, bookcase heavy with jars of huckleberry jam and painted waferboard floors. She unloads from her arms a stack of books she hopes customers will notice. They’re from her nonprofit independent publishing company, Lost Horse Press. “I knew when the right place was available, it would happen.”

It happened in April. Christine and Kally Thurman, an artist and art dealer, bought the Hi Hopes, the building next door that houses the U.S. post office and four tiny studio cabins. They’re transforming the old market into an artist’s retreat with workshops for writers, a gallery for artists, stage and sound system for musicians and a performance area for authors, poets and speakers. They’ve even offered a budding community-access radio station in Sandpoint a home in their basement.

Now, Tom stops by the Hi Hopes with his guitar and sound equipment. He’s a folk and blues musician who played in Southern California bands in the 1960s. He controlled lights at the famous Golden Bear club in Huntington Beach, Calif. The Golden Bear is gone now and Tom’s thick hair is a shocking white under his golf visor. But he’s ready to start a new musical chapter at the Hi Hopes with Bruce Bishop, a jazz guitarist, college professor and former Los Angeles studio band musician who recently moved to Hope.

“Bruce and I’ll play Wednesdays and we may invite others,” Tom says, admiring the two-person metal stage that local kayak champ Ed Lucero built for Christine inside the Hi Hopes. “We’ll have guest artists. There’s no telling what might be happening here Fridays and Saturdays.”

Christine settled on 12 scenic acres east of Sandpoint five years ago. She opened Lost Horse Press hoping to shine a spotlight on Northwest writers. Her insatiable appetite for the written word at its artistic peak inspired her to start an annual writers workshop, regular poetry readings, writing programs for children, even full-moon kayak trips to dark islands where local writers read their work.

Her home was ideal for the press, but not for the writers workshops that attract up to 75 people from all over the country. Christine tried her writers conference in Sandpoint’s library, but it wasn’t large enough. She moved it around, searching for a roomy site with performance space near lodging. Nothing was quite right, but she managed.

Then she heard that coffee-roaster Mike Geer wasn’t taking his option to buy the Hi Hopes, where he rents space. She immediately asked him if she could buy it in his place. Field space behind the old market was a perfect spot to build a workshop and stage for writers. The café inside would cover her need for food during conferences. Her press would fit well in the old market’s warehouse area. There was plenty of room to camp and the Hope Hotel with its southern style second-story balcony was a refreshing walk away. Even the dilapidated cabins had potential as lodging.

With Mike’s thumbs-up, Christine called her friend Kally and invited her to buy in as a partner.

“I know the next two years of my life will be scrubbing and painting,” Kally says, frowning facetiously as she sips a lemonade in the non-air-conditioned café. She’s vocally more cynical than her business partner, but her work on the building since the sale closed shows definite optimism.

Kally pick-axed a wasted area in front of the café’s parking area into a garden. Hope residents stopped to talk with her as she worked. She invited them to bring plants and seeds. A colorful community garden started with nasturtiums, feverfew, sedum, calendula, sunflowers and two perfectly balanced rock towers.

Her gallery and a bookstore were next. Kally added on to the coffee roasting room and refinished walls for exhibit space. She wants a space where artists can display realistically marketable work, such as wearable art. She’s building a dressing room and plans to hire a curator. The first exhibit will open in August with Morse Clary’s variations on the form of an open book, for example a carving of an open book embedded with objects the artist found.

“My mission is to put art in the walk of everyday life,” Kally says.

Attached to the gallery is an enlarged closet Kally and Christine are remodeling into a book nook. It’ll stock the work of Northwest writers, small presses, memoirs and Northwest history. The writers workshop and performance stage out back are the next project.

The women’s work caught the attention of musician Bruce Bishop. He wandered into the Hi Hopes and asked Christine if he could install a sound system. The jazz musician who performs at the Beyond Hope Resort, Black Rock and in Sandpoint wanted an informal place to jam.

Bruce and Tom started the jam sessions last week with a portable sound system, lights from a yard sale and 40 decent office chairs Kally and Christine saved from death in an alley. An upright piano someone gave to Christine and Ed’s artistic stage add a funkiness inside the café that most clubs struggle for years to create.

Christine plans to restore an old green Hussman walk-in refrigerator in a warehouse area behind the café. The walk-in will increase the café’s potential for food, which should solve any of her food worries during conferences at the site. The café will continue to serve light meals, desserts and coffee to drop-by customers.

She also plans to install a 1906 letter press she owns in the warehouse to print poetry broadsides.

“I hope eventually to train out-of-work loggers to make invitations on it,” she says. “What it turns out is beautiful.”

Hope hasn’t lost the small-town friendliness that lured Tom to settle there in 1974.

“People took us in, showed us where to fish, find huckleberries,” he says. “I stayed.”

So did many people who needed to replace big city traffic, smog, crime and stress with breezes off Lake Pend Oreille, a view of the forested Pearl Island bird sanctuary and a town where trains still pause en route so engineers can grab an ice cream cone.

But, “The lake, sky and water weren’t enough,” Kally says. “Art feeds your spirit.”

And it’s now on the menu at the Hi Hopes.