Sibling Assignment #66: Bad Hops, Sliding Pads, and Smelting Ore

Silver Valley Girl gave the sibling assignment this week. Here's the prompt: Write about a Silver Valley memory where the central focus deals with one of the four Greek classical elements: fire, earth, air or water.

You will find her meditation on rain here and InlandEmpireGirl's exploration of water here.

Bunker Hill Lead Smelter

I'm not sure when the fact first registered in my young Kellogg mind that no other baseball or football field anywhere was all dirt: the rest were grass with dirt base paths.

It's funny. I went to many Spokane Indian games at the Fairgrounds and I must have thought that the infield and outfield grass was just a professional baseball fact.

I don't know what I thought when playing on grass in Silverton or Coeur d'Alene or Sandpoint.

Kellogg's Little League field and the playing surface at Teeter's Field were dirt. No grass.

And they were rocky.

Before games, Ray Faraca put a drag behind a tractor and dragged the field, the idea being to smooth out the dirt and get the most conspicuous rocks off the playing surface, but it was pretty futile.

Bad hops. In Little League, Chris Wellman fired a ball from center field to me, playing third base, when I was nine. His peg hit a stone and hopped right over my mitt and struck me between the eyes, knocking me out.

Wear sliding pads. Stealing bases or sliding under a tag in the rocky beds around the bases tore at the thigh flesh, leaving raw rasbberries. The sliding pads helped.

Mud puddles. Our dirt fields did not drain. Huge puddles formed in low spots. We played all the same and sometimes a runner would take an extra base after his hit landed in a puddle, stopped dead, and the outfielder was slowed down, splashing in the pool of mud and water to retrieve the ball and throw it, water and mud flying like a jetstream, to the infield.

When I went to work in the cell room stripping zinc, I never thought about how close to the earth my work was. The zinc covering the cathodes I pulled from the electrolyitic cells had been ore, galena mined in the Silver Valley and from other mines around the world.

Hot fires smelted the ore to extract the zinc from the other elements. The hot fires sent foul emissions into the Kellogg air, making growing grass on Teeter's Field and the Little League Field apparently impossible.

Work that relied on the ores of the earth required metal-making processes that abused the earth and air; the very work that kept food on our tables robbed our fields of play of grass, tore the flesh off our thighs, fired bad hops into our crotches and throats.

We watered our baseball fields before games to keep the dust down, dust we now know was composed, in part, with lead and zinc and magnesium and cadmium particulants, making our fields of play, to some degree, toxic.

I can't say that while I was hammering cathodes plated with zinc with a chisel and stripping the zinc from them that I was thinking about how connected this work was to the earth.

Looking back, though, I realize that life in Kellogg was all about the earth and what we extracted from it. Processing what we extracted relied on fire. In turn, this depedence on the earth and fire resulted in the fouling of the air, the dirtying of the Lead Creek's water.

The four elements of earth, air, fire, and water existed in a productive/destructive reliance on one another. Production was yin to destruction's yang, inseparable.

And when a batter from Missoula or Spokane or Coeur d'Alene or Sandpoint or Moscow hit a line drive in front of me when I played centerfield, I could never be sure how it would hop once it struck our grassless outfield.