THE LONG BRIDGE HOME
Little Wolf playing at The Longshot - Sandpoint, Idaho 2019
An Essay About Music, Place, and the Quiet Work of Becoming
If you had asked the younger version of me who I was meant to be, I would have said something confident, rehearsed, and completely wrong.
I was a Boulder kid who went to Boston to major in music — the kind of student who imagined himself under stage lights, whatever success was supposed to look like back then. I believed, without ever articulating it, that real art lived in big cities, in big scenes, in places with reputations.
Which meant Sandpoint was — at best — a pleasant backdrop.
A place to raise kids.
A place to visit.
Not a place where the center of my life would suddenly shift.
But ego is just the armor we build before we know what we’re protecting.
And life has a way of loosening those bolts gently, then all at once.
For me, it began on a river.
THE RIVER AS A REWRITE
In 2017, a friend invited me to safety-kayak the Middle Fork of the Salmon for a group of rafters who’d pulled a permit. I had a one-year-old and a three-year-old at home — an age when stepping away for a cup of coffee feels dramatic, let alone disappearing off the grid.
But Mariah — in that instinctive way she moves through the world — said go.
And so I did.
Under the canyon walls and the cathedral of pines, the river stripped something off me. It loosened the cultural barnacles I’d been carrying since Boston — all the ideas about legitimacy, all the quiet insecurity dressed up as confidence.
Early in the trip, while swapping introductions, I mentioned I lived in Sandpoint.
Someone’s face lit up.
“That’s where the Shook Twins are from! They’re my favorite band.”
I had never heard of them.
And in my unearned musical arrogance, I thought,
If there’s a band this big from Sandpoint, I would obviously know.
But for the rest of that week, we listened to Shook Twins, Mandolin Orange, Elephant Revival — music that sounded like dawn light on water. Music that belonged to mountains and cedar groves and people who carry their stories plainly.
Something cracked open. Not loudly, but quietly and permanently.
Back home, the first thing I did once I had signal was look up the Shooks.
And sure enough — they grew up in this little town I had been underestimating for years.
It was the first hint that maybe Sandpoint had a depth I wasn’t yet calibrated to hear.
THE NIGHT SANDPOINT REVEALED ITSELF
Two days after my first Shook Twins Thanksgiving show — a concert that felt less like a performance and more like being welcomed into someone’s family — Mariah and I went to a tiny community venue called The Longshot.
It’s gone now. Most people never knew it existed. But that night, it was the center of the universe.
Honeysuckle opened, their songs warm and close, and after their set I chatted with Holly because I knew they were from the Boston area. When I mentioned Northeastern and the manager I’d worked for, her whole face lit up.
“I worked for Ralph too!”
Two people who once moved through the same micro-corner of the Boston music scene —
now standing in a small, snow-dusted room in Sandpoint.
A coincidence mathematically, but not spiritually.
Then Little Wolf — Josh Hedlund & Justin Landis — walked up with their guitars.
And here’s the thing about Josh:
He doesn’t sing songs.
He sings x-rays.
His voice carries the weight of someone who has lived through the kind of quiet heartbreaks and fragile hopes that don’t make headlines but shape entire lives. Justin Landis added these touches that felt like emotion made audible — small sonic gestures that didn’t decorate the music so much as reveal its inner temperature, its pulse, its truth.
Josh writes like someone taking inventory of their own soul in real time.
And I didn’t know it at the time, but I needed that more than anything.
THE MUSIC I DIDN’T KNOW I WAS STARVING FOR
When Josh began to play, something in me went still.
For years, I had been moving through life competently, even successfully — building, providing, parenting, pushing forward — but without realizing that my inner life had slowly thinned out. My emotional world had become functional rather than textured. I wasn’t unhappy; I was simply unlayered.
Josh’s music didn’t add layers.
It revealed them.
There’s a quality to his songwriting — honest, unadorned, unforced — that bypasses every intellectual defense. His music doesn’t knock. It walks right in and sits down where the truth is kept.
I didn’t know how much I needed that kind of art until I heard it.
It was like tasting real fruit after years of eating the processed version.
Then he sang the line:
“I took a short walk over a long bridge
to the small town where I come from,
and the people were smiling and saying,
‘it’s good to have you home again.’”
Behind him, giant snowflakes drifted past the window — slow, soft, impossible to ignore.
It felt mythical.
It felt like the room was breathing with us.
It felt like the universe nudging me gently and saying:
This is home.
This is where your soul can exhale.
And suddenly, I wasn’t listening to a musician.
I was hearing my own life spoken back to me in a language I didn’t realize I understood.
The part of me that still thought I needed to earn my place in the world dissolved.
The pretentiousness — gone.
The city-sized ego — gone.
The idea that meaning is elsewhere — gone.
In its place:
a quiet, fierce knowing.
I belong here.
This is where I become myself.
THE BANDCAMP MIRACLE
After that night, I went searching for Josh’s music the way someone searches for a lifeline. But he wasn’t on Spotify. No official albums. No big digital footprint.
I knew he plowed snow, and I needed someone to shovel at my downtown building. While hunting for his number online, I stumbled on something unexpected:
His entire catalog on Bandcamp .
It felt like finding a locked drawer of someone's private journals.
I bought all of it instantly.
Later that day, I texted him about shoveling.
He replied:
“Are you the Rick Decker who downloaded all my music today?”
It was one of the purest small-town moments of my life —
a little embarrassing, entirely human, and absolutely perfect.
And then, in the final poetic twist, he couldn’t shovel for us.
Already booked up.
Of course he was.
Because this wasn’t about snow removal.
It was about recognition.
This was the universe letting me know:
you aren’t just a spectator here anymore. You’re part of the story.
THE THREAD THAT TIGHTENS AND TIGHTENS
Years later, now deeply rooted in this community, raising our girls, shaping work that matters, I sit on the Arts, Culture & Historic Preservation Commission…
with Katelyn Shook.
The band I first learned about on a river.
The band that altered my trajectory.
The band whose annual Thanksgiving show became a family ritual.
All the threads — Boston, Boulder, Sandpoint, the Middle Fork, the Longshot, Josh — braid tighter and tighter until they’re less a web and more a calling.
THE REAL STORY
I once believed I was destined for big cities and big stages.
But the big time, it turns out, is not a spotlight.
The big time is:
a snowstorm outside a living-room show
a lyric that lands like a prophecy
a river canyon reshaping your insides
a tiny venue no one sees yet
musicians who become part of your town’s heartbeat
the moment your soul hears itself for the first time in years
The big time is home —
not the place you come from,
but the place that brings you back to yourself.
Sandpoint didn’t shrink my world.
It revealed its depth.
