Kellogg Spirit

Since the blizzard conditions in Eugene closed Lane Community College, I can return to blogging and write some more about the conflict I wrote about, here.

Whether we would outright admit it or not, we who were raised in Kellogg knew that it was pretty much just what outsiders said it was. When I would leave Kellogg and meet kids from other parts of the state and said I was from Kellogg, I'd be met either with awkward silence or a comment of this sort: "Yeah. I've been through there. It looked like some one dropped a A-bomb. What's it like living there?"

I don't know where defiance ends and defensiveness begins, but I'd respond with some blend of the two. Looking back, I'd say I was more defensive than defiant. My defensiveness was, in my opinion, born of a sense of inferiority. Like John Austin, who wrote in Huckleberries Online that "when I was at the U of I, I didn't want anyone to know I was from the Silver Valley. Known mostly for two things, its pollution and its prostitution, I was ashamed of the place. This, knowing as a miner every weekend I contributed to the former, while my college buddies contributed to the latter", I, too, felt shame. I developed a strong sense within myself that people who were from places that were not held in contempt or not seen as a joke, belonged in college or were more sophisticated or knew things I didn't know that I wanted to be a part of.

I also knew that what Idaho Escapee wrote in Huckleberries Online was true. Many years ago, Idaho Escapee spent a few years in Kellogg and he "always had the feeling like I was living at the end of civilization. But I suppose those who grew up there have a fondness for that area; it's only natural. But if I never see Shoshone County again in my lifetime, that's too soon for me."

There it is. On the one hand, growing up in a town void of much vegetation, split north and south by a river gray with tailings and sewage, with days with air so thick with air pollution it burned my lungs to ride my bike or run from the Junior High down to the football field, did, in fact, give me a sense of the acopalypse. The poet Richard Hugo expressed this to me most clearly in his poem "Cataldo Mission".

On the other hand, as Idaho Escapee says, I was fond of Kellogg. I was fond of it. I hated it. I wanted to leave. I never wanted to leave. I felt proud of how hard I worked in the zinc plant. I felt proud that I was doing a man's work at seventeen. At the same time, all the men I was working like told me was to go to college so I could get out of this shit hole.

I think the code in Kellogg was pretty clear. If you lived in Kellogg you could refer to it as a shit hole or a hell hole. But, if you were/are from the outside, don't. Outsiders never earned the right to call Kellogg a pit, to call it Leadtown, to call it Hellogg. Outsiders were/are seen as soft number crunching statistic makers with fancy studies and blood tests, but they lacked love for the Valley and were not to be trusted.

I've been gripped by this code. I'll never forget when children's blood began to be tested in, I believe, 1974. These tests weren't born of Kellogg. They were administered by outsiders. My memory says Atlanta, but I might be wrong. That fall I was at a college retreat at Mount St. Michael's, my junior year at Whitworth, and Spokane author Linda Lawrence Hunt rather innocently asked me about the blood tests and the conditions in Kellogg.

I got angry. I told her it was just poor kids with bad hygiene who were making the Valley look bad. I probably even said some crazy thing like they'd probably been eating pencils (not thinking that pencil "lead" is graphite). She was stunned by how vociferously I defied the tests and defended the Valley. I was agitated by a sense of inferiority, of feeling attacked and tried to sound strong by being vociferous.

Kellogg was ripe in 1974 for defiance and defensiveness. Gulf Resources of Houston, Texas had taken control of the Bunker Hill company about six or seven years earlier in a hostile takeover.
It meant that the mining and smelting operations were no longer home owned. It meant that the Bunker Hill Company was part of a larger corporate entity, so that its successes would be helping underwrite other facets of Gulf Resources' operations and if it slid, would be sucking money out of other operations.

This meant that efficiency experts began coming in to the company. It meant that men were being told how to do work in the Bunker Hill by other men who had never been in the place before. The days of home grown managers and home grown leadership were diminishing. It created resentment.

So did the post-1970 arrival of OSHA inspectors. Not only was the Company being run, now, from Houston, its operations were being inspected by Washington D.C. and the Company came up short. OSHA required modifications to make machinery safer and to make working conditions cleaner. Defensiveness/defiance resulted. OSHA was calling into question ways of doing things that many considered had worked just fine for years. Yes, it was an insular attitude. Yes, this defensiveness and defiance was probably unwise. But, it's not the wisdom of it I'm getting at.

I'm getting at the Kellogg Spirit. It's a spirit of defiance and defensiveness that has fueled much of the antagonism over the last twenty years as the EPA has worked to clean up the damage the smelting and mining of hard metals did over sixty to eighty years. For many in the Silver Valley, the EPA stands for yet another outside agency that interfered with the way things had always been and brought ruin to the industry. Many find the statistics and studies specious. The more years that pass, the more years that mining and smelting drift into the past, the better those years seem to many in Kellogg.

As Kellogg teeters on the edge of renewal as a tourist town, it is, of course, Eagle Crest, a subsidiary of Jeld-Wen, an outside corporation who holds the future of Kellogg's ski industry in its hand. Eagle Crest also has plans for a golf course. Many condos are springing up in Kellogg. These are not being built with local money, but with money from the outside.

And, lastly, the Bunker Hill Company originated in San Francisco and Tacoma. Kellogg was chosen as a place to smelt, not only because of the mines in the area, but more because Bunker Hill was looking for a remote area where the dirty air would affect fewer people. Bunker didn't want the lead smelter or the zinc plant in Tacoma. Too many people would have to live with the stench. Kellogg got the nod instead. Lots of jobs. A modicum of prosperity. And a long-term mess.

It's the mess that causes the conflict and the mess that we who love Kellogg never quite know just how to deal with. On Huckleberries Online, the long tradition of "don't tell us what the Silver Valley is about" rears its head as commenters from Coeur d'Alene or Spokane Valley make (accurate) observations or question the pride we from Kellogg have of the renewal there.

These comments and questions are often met with the same question: "Have you lived in the Silver Valley? Do you really know what you are talking about?"

It's the Kellogg/Silver Valley spirit. We know, deep down, the place is a mess. We are proud a long slow recovery is underway. We make fun of Mullan, Wallace, jokes about the whores, Kellogg, and Smelterville. But we are protective. It is as if we are mother bears protecting our cubs. It's a fierce spirit and a proud one.

As I've grown older and as I have lived away from Kellogg for many years, I am more accepting of outside voices than I used to be.

But, still, when I hear that someone from outside wants to write a book or do a study or comment on the Valley, that old defiance/defensiveness is triggered, immediately. But writers like Greg Olsen and Katherine Aikens have proved that outsiders can do some very good work and the improvements I've seen in Kellogg make me think that it's good that my home town has given itself over to the expertise and know-how of strangers.