Slag Life

(An aerial view of the Bunker Hill Superfund cleanup: Kellogg is leftmost; Smelterville on the right. This area is called The Box. Inside The Box the lead and zinc smelters were razed and scores of people's lawns were replaced. Silver Valley residents outside the box want to keep it that way. They don't want the stigma that's attached to being in The Box, of needing clean up. Whether their properties are contaminated is beside the point.)

If you drove through Kellogg until about ten years ago you might remember that the area just west of town was dominated by mammoth piles of black slag, dunes of mining waste. In the picture above, the large open area just above the freeway is where the slag piles were. The slag was useless. Attempts were made to make it useful. For a time, the City of Kellogg used the slag to "sand" icy, snowy roads. It was ugly, the black waste spread over the streets of snow. It didn't work, either. One year I showed up at Kellogg Country Club (a public course) to golf, and the sand traps were black. Slag made the traps toxic. It provided incentive to hit the ball straight and on target. Otherwise, a golfer had to anchor himself in black smelting biproduct, hit a shot behind the ball, an explosion shot, and have slag fly up in the air and into your face. But, the slag lacked the soft texture of sand. It was much harder. In fact, an explosion shot was nearly impossible, so golfers tried to pick the ball clean off the dirt slag, making it very difficult to control the shot. The slag traps didn't last long.

The slag piles combined with the hard life in Kellogg have me thinking about Kellogg in relation to Tupac Shakur. My English Composition classes have been studying the movie,Tupac: Resurrection and we've been working to understand Tupac's concept of thug life. Thug life is a warrior life. It embodies the idea that those who came from oppressive or squalid backgrounds and little opportunity can make a life for themselves and be proud.

Economically, the Kellogg (and Silver Valley) I grew up in was a mixture of the few who lived in luxury, the many who lived in modest comfort, and the too many others who lived in some degree of poverty. While I never saw anything quite like this boy scrounging barefoot in the snow for coal in a mine refuge just of a road in Scott's Run, West Virginia,



I am aware now, as I look back, that kids I knew who came to school reeking of unwashed clothes and of not bathing, who sometimes smelled of wearing shit-soiled pants, who had the green snot of infection running out of their noses, and who had to look to the school for food during the day and for coats in the winter, among other indignities, were poor. I know now, looking back, that for many of these kids, they were a part of an ongoing poverty cycle in their families they've never escaped. I know, too, that poverty and alcohol and the pressure of hard labor and the carrying forward of traditions of violence in families meant that classmates of mine were beaten at home and, I am more sure now than ever, many were also sexually abused.

Tupac wanted thug life to be a means of improving the ghetto. He wanted to inspire men and women of and on the streets to assert themselves, be proud, and work to help alleviate the neighborhoods of the social and economic and criminal maladies that plagued them. He called this thug life.

In Kellogg, the idea of self-improvement, which I'll call slag life, was to make a life for oneself, to work hard, to grow, but with the idea of getting out of the Valley. Slag life meant leaving the slag behind. It was as if those piles of slag out on the west side of Kellogg were reminders that a life in Kellogg would be a life of hard labor and danger and that one was best to go elsewhere.

"Are you kidding" we'd say to each other at high school reunions, "Is Randy/Rendayle still in the Valley?" Consequently, as I heard Vince Rinaldi say to the same Univ. of Idaho professors I spoke to in 2003, too many bright, talented people leave the Valley. As Vince said, there's got to be a way to keep them here.

But, as long as the code of slag life reigns, young talented people will continue to think of it as shameful to stay in the Valley or will not seek to come back after going to college. I am guilty of this. I took my father's advice. It was the summation of slag life: "Don't be like me. Get out of here. You don't want to stay in this stinkin' mess." He said that even as he loved the Silver Valley, but didn't want to see me have to stick my nose in one shit hole after another day after day the way he had at the Zinc Plant for thirty years.

Now I want to return to Kellogg. What the message of slag life never told me was that when I went to college and improved myself and when I left the Silver Valley, my soul wouldn't leave with me. I never realized that my love for the Silver Valley and my friends there would never diminish. It has grown. Thus, I did the slag life thing. I left the Silver Valley and made a life for myself that I could have never had in Kellogg. But, now, I live a life in Eugene, Oregon that is never anything like what I love the most in the Silver Valley. It's the difficult trade off of slag life. Slag life says follow your dream, but keeps it a secret that when you go after that dream, you might be leaving your deepest passion behind in the hometown you love.