Spreading the Silver Valley Word

When a person loves a place, say Paris, that person wants to go out and help others understand what the love is all about. In March 2003, my good friend and fellow native Kelloggite, Kenton Bird, invited me to speak to his University of Idaho colleagues, as part of one of their rolling seminars entitled"Sense of Place: Time, Memory and Imagination in the Pacific Northwest", about my experience growing up in the Silver Valley (and Kellogg). I interpreted what the Silver Valley meant and still means to me. So, since Kellogg is my Paris, I tried to explain the meaning of Kellogg as a place where death was always present, explained how I had been nearly killed working in a flash roaster at the Zinc Plant, and explained how my guide to understanding what I do has been the poet Richard Hugo
and especially his poem, "Cataldo Mission".

Cataldo Mission
for Jim and Lois Welch

We come here tourist on a bad sky day,
warm milk at 15,000 and the swamp across
the freeway blinding white. No theory
to explain the lack of saint, torn tapestry.
Pews seem built for pygmies, and a drunk
once damned mosquitoes from the pulpit,
raging red with Bible and imagined plague.
Their spirits buoyed, pioneers left running
for the nothing certain nowhere west.
Somewhere, say where Ritzville is, they would
remember these crass pillars lovely
and a moving sermon they had never heard.

More’s bad here than just the sky. The valley
we came in on: Mullan. Wallace. Jokes
about the whores. Kellogg and, without salvation,
Smelterville. A stream so slate with crap
the name pollutes the world. Man will die again
to do this to his soul. And over the next hill
he never crosses, promises: love, grass,
a white cathedral, glandular revival
and a new trout, three tall dorsal fins.

We exit from the mission, blind. The haze
still hangs amplifying glare until
two centuries of immigrants in tears
seem natural as rain. The hex is on.
The freeway covers arrows, and the swamp
a spear with feathers meaning stop.
This dry pale day, cars below crawl thirsty,
500 miles to go before the nation quits.
--Richard Hugo

********

A few odds and ends.

We never knew this in Kellogg, Idaho, but turns out pickle juice is high in the elctrolytes the body loses when it dehydrates. Need a better hydrating sports drink? Try this one.

If you'd like to read an article by a University of Idaho professor explaining how Kellogg, Idaho has reinvented itself, read this.

When I was in Kellogg this summer for two months, I kept hearing basslines boom out of Honda Civics, sounding like a bowling ball in a dryer. It made me realize that I'm not that in tune with rap or hip-hop, so I decided to show Tupac: Resurrection to my English Composition class. Without trying to commit the post-modern sin of appropriation, I realized that in Kellogg, Idaho, thug life was alive when I went to school. I graduated from Kellogg High School in 1972.

One of my favorite stories is in Patrick's blog, Making Flippy Floppy when he writes about one of my fellow Class of '72 mates, the saucy Rhonda. Rhonda runs a video store in uptown Kellogg, across from the south end of Teeter's Field. As I sit here in Eugene, I can't remember the store's name, but I'll fill it in another time. Patrick thought Rhonda must be in her late 60's and I can attest to the fact that Rhonda and I are both 52 years old. She might even be younger!

Lastly, if you have a chance to see this movie, go. And don't compare it to Hoop Dreams. The comparisons might seem inevitable, but they are two different stories approached in two different ways and are projects begun at different points of time relative to their subjects. Let this movie stand on its own.