Sibling Assignment #132: Fear of The Clearwater River

The Clearwater River and Orofino, Idaho

For this sibling assignment, InlandEmpireGirl made it simple: The Clearwater River. InlandEmpireGirl remembers past fears, and enjoys how calm the river looks today, here. Silver Valley Girl once feared being eaten alive by sharks in the Clearwater River, but got over it, and just took her daughters, a niece, three dogs, and her husband to the Clearwater River, here.

It's an Orofino Creamery truck. I'll say it's white. Mostly what I see is two red dots in the back as the truck belly flops off Highway 12 and into the Clearwater River.

I'll say it happens near Peck. It seems like that's close to where Aunt Lila nearly drowned in the Clearwater River as a girl.

It was a recurrent dream when I was a kid, the creamery truck going into the Clearwater River.

The dream was like a movie playing out my mother's fears of the Clearwater River.

Mom loved the river's meandering calm in August when our family traveled along the Clearwater River out of Lewiston on our way to vacation for a week or so in Orofino.

But the Clearwater River frightened her. It was where Lila nearly drowned. She'd seen the Clearwater River flood the Clearwater County Fairgrounds.

Cars went off the highway. They plunged into the Clearwater River.

Mom's fears made their way into my dream world, maybe as an act of sharing in Mom's anxiety so she didn't have to feel her fear of the Clearwater River alone.

On July 9, 2010 I saw my cousin Cyndi at our family's Last Cousin Standing Hootenanny at Lura and Lyle's place in Riverside, a section of Orofino near the Clearwater River.

I hadn't seen Cyndi since 1975 and that weekend back in 1975 was a reunion at our recently deceased cousin John's place and when Cyndi's memory goes back to that weekend, she remembers me as better and stronger than I was or am.

She remembers us going to Zann's Beach just east of Orofino on the Clearwater River and remembers me swimming across.

I know I didn't. For starters, I was physically unable to perform such a task because of the way the sulfur dioxide and zinc, cadmium, and magnesium dust had injured my respiratory system just two summers earlier when I fell to the bottom of a roaster at the Zinc Plant at the Bunker Hill Company.

Even if I'd been healthy, though, I doubt my psyche could withstand a swim across the Clearwater River. Repeated dreams of an Orofino Creamery truck going off Highway 12 and sinking into the Clearwater River so frightened me that no matter whether we went to Beaver Dam on the North Fork of the Clearwater River or to Zann's Beach on the main fork, I only waded or let currents running in shallow water carry me near the shore.

I also respected my mother's fear of the Clearwater River. I know I didn't swim across the Clearwater River because it would have shaken my mother.

Someone who remembers Orofino history better than I will have to tell me if they remember an Orofino Creamery truck in the waking world going off Highway 12 into the Clearwater River.

When Dad drove us down Highway 12, Mom acted like such a thing had happened as she drove her foot into the floorboard, braking, digging her nails into the car seat, sucking on gulps of air.

Today the Clearwater River along Highway 12 is better guarded by cement barriers and improved guard rails. Many stretches of Highway 12 from Lewiston to Orofino have been straightened. It seems a safer road.

Still, when I've taken Mom on a trip to Orofino from Kellogg, I'll suggest we go the back way, over the Cavendish Grade, down to Kendrick, and then up the hill to Troy and over to Moscow and up Highway 95 to Coeur d'Alene and on to Kellogg or we'll go from Kendrick up to Deary and Harvard and on to St. Maries and Rose Lake and take in the white pines and go to Kellogg that way.

It takes longer.

But it keeps us off the Clearwater River.

Sibling Assignment #94: A Commendation on Your Record

InlandEmpireGirl stayed with the rhythms of the Christian calendar and asked us to write about a vivid Easter. InlandEmpireGirl's piece about her church in the country is here and Silver Valley Girl's exploration of her marriage as a source of renewal and resurrection is here.

During my freshman year at North Idaho College, I worked weekends at the Bunker Hill Zinc Plant. Sometimes I stripped zinc in the cell room and sometimes I poured anodes with Sparky Jasburg, Mike Rieken, and Dale Fattu out in the anode shack.

Working weekends at the Zinc Plant was a good gig. I earned plenty of rent and spending money for the month and I was good enough at both pouring anodes and stripping zinc that I could come to work hungover or still kind of drunk, let the sulfuric acid fumes sober me up, grab a couple of naps during the shift, and get all my work done.

In the spring of 1973, I was working in the cell room, and I was on a lunch break, and into the lunch room strolled the Plant Superintendent, Bob Bird. I nearly shit my salami sandwich. I'd never seen Bob Bird in the lunch room before. I'd seen him stroll through the cell room a few times, but he was always talking with a shift boss or some other manager: he never talked to us workers.

I still don't understand why Bob Bird took on the matter he raised in the lunch room. I don't understand why he was at the plant on a weekend. It was close to Easter, either the weekend before or the weekend of. Easter was a paid holiday and the cell room was short-handed. That's kind of weird, actually, because working a paid holiday meant earning double time and a half.

Bob Bird explained the situation and asked if anyone would be available and willing to work on Easter Sunday. Now looking back, I wonder if there was some kind of labor action informally taking place. Looking back, I wonder if the strippers were trying to slow down production and make the company hurt a bit.

I don't know now and sure didn't know then.

I volunteered. Almost immediately.

I broad smile filled Bob Bird's face. He thanked me for my willingness to give up my Easter Sunday for the good of the Zinc Plant and, furthermore, exclaimed, "I will put a commendation on your record."

He said this in front of all my fellow workers.

I felt like the biggest ass kiss in the whole plant. I volunteered for the double time and half. I wasn't thinking about giving up my Easter and I didn't even know I had a record onto which a commendation could be entered.

Bob Bird left.

Bob Casady said, "Not bad, man. A fucking commendation on your record." He was sticking the needle in pretty deep.

The Easter Day shift came and went, I got my fat paycheck, and my life went down the track of earning a college degree, going to grad school, and picking up a two year temporary full-time job at Whitworth College in 1982-84.

In the spring of '84 I came home from Spokane for Easter. On Holy Saturday, Dad and I went to Dirty Ernie's uptown and got really drunk, so drunk the cops had to drive us home, and I had to walk uptown on Easter morning and get the car.

We got drunk with Bob Casady and the first words out of his mouth, after not having seen me for over ten years, were, "I will put a commendation on your record."

I about died and we laughed and laughed and drank schooner after schooner of draft lager beers and remembered how much fun we'd had at the Zinc Plant and laughed about all the psychos we worked with.

A couple or three years ago, I went to the University of Idaho to be a guest speaker in an American Studies course taught by Bob Bird's son, my friend for nearly fifty years, Kenton Bird.

Kenton had arranged for me to look at Bunker Hill records and artifacts in the afternoon. The University of Idaho holds these Bunker Hill records and artifacts.

I looked at different things for about an hour, and then I thought, "Hmmm, I wonder.....", but alas, search as I did, not only did I not find my Zinc Plant record, I didn't find my commendation either.

Three Beautiful Things 07/03/08: Happy Birthday, Zinc Plant Stories, Cal's Donuts

1. Silver Valley Girl was born July 3, 1963 and we had a good talk on the phone as her birthday began to take shape in Kellogg. I thought I'd post some pictures of her younger days:



2. Lamia prepared a knock out Indian dinner for Wayne and Beverly and Deke and me. Wayne worked summers at the Bunker Hill back in 1963 through about 1967 and it was really fun finding out people we know in common and to share stories about the wild and and dangerous days we both experienced working in the Zinc Plant.

3. I may have found a down to earth place to have morning coffee. Cal's Donuts on Garfield. I dropped in today and when I served myself the dregs from the bottom of the coffee pot, two different guys a little older than I am both commented that I must have been in the military in order to drink coffee like that. One guy said they used to use coffee like that in the Navy to scrub the decks. No one ever says anything like that to me at Starbucks. I was pretty fired up and, in addition, enjoyed the drama as the woman working the counter did not really know how to make a Mocha or a Latte, but she followed the directions written on a styrofoam cup and the two guys she made them for were happy and appreciated her dramatic efforts to produce their espresso drinks.

Sunday Scribblings: Mucking Out a Launder

This week's Sunday Scribblings topic is "First Job, Worst Job, Dream Job". Being the darkish sould I am, I've decided to write about the single worst day of work I ever had, doing the worst job I was ever assigned.

I did this job when I was a freshman in college over one of our holidays. I think it was Friday of Thanksgiving weekend. I was working at the Zinc Plant of the Bunker Hill Company. Uncle Bunker was very good about giving college students work during breaks from school and, on this particular day, I was an extra, so I didn't do my usual job of stripping zinc.

I got a job that needed to be done from time to time and that I'd never heard of anyone else doing.

At the Zinc Plant, the zinc was produced in electrolytic cells which had a solution of sulfuric acid running through them, with zinc particles in the solution. Thanks to a high electric charge, zinc collected on a cathode.

This process created waste, a slow building sulphuric acid sludge that collected below the cells in launders. These launders had to be cleaned.

My worst day of work ever was cleaning a launder of black sulfuric acid besotted sludge.

My shift boss took me to my work place. "Here, you'll need this shovel. Here, put on this rain gear." The rain gear was bright yellow, heavy. "I'll bring the ladder," he said.

Quietly, I gulped.

We went to a launder. The shift boss put the ladder down the launder for me, about six feet down. I started to climb down.

"Wait. I'll have to hand you the shovel. There's barely room down there for you. You go down there and get situated and I'll hand you the shovel."

I began my descent. The shift boss turned on a dim, naked light bulb so I could see a little bit, and when I got to the bottom, I stepped into the ankle deep sludge. My shoulders nearly touched each side of the launder. I had barely any room in front of me or behind me.

"It's kind of shitty down there, but do the best you can to shovel that shit and toss it up here. It's kind of tight, but you'll figure it out."

It was shitty down there. It smelled like rotten eggs. It was hot. The raincoat, which protected me from slow drips of sludge above me, was awkward. My footing was not secure, but, I didn't have anywhere to fall. I figured out how to angle the shovel and get scoops of the sludge and move them just over my head into a pile on the walkway the ladder leaned against.

I got the launder sufficiently clean. At least I shoveled enough out to reveal the wooden floor the sludge had piled on.

It wasn't an all day job. I finished before noon and went to eat my lunch, knowing I'd have some other extra job to do for the rest of my shift.

I went to the lavatory to clean up before I ate lunch. I noticed in the mirror that a spot of sludge was on my face. I tore off a paper towel to wipe off the black spot.

I wiped it off.

The skin over my upper jaw bone went with it.

I nearly shit.

Stripping Zinc: Sibling Assignment #29

Silver Valley Girl assigned InlandEmpireGirl and me the following topic: Share some information you learned about the Silver Valley as an adult that you had no clue about growing up as a student in Kellogg, and then how this information changed your thinking about the Silver Valley.

InlandEmpireGirl's piece is here. When Silver Valley Girl finishes the last Harry Potter novel, is done with the melodrama, gets her kids off the church camp, and temporarily relinquishes her role as busiest person in the universe, she will write hers and I'll post the link!


I hired on as a stripper in the Bunker Hill Zinc Plant in July of 1971. I was seventeen years old.

I walked into the cell room at about 2:45 p.m. It was scorcher outside and the cell room was about ten to twenty degrees hotter.

A light fog of sulfur dioxide gas suffused the cell room. The atmosphere was vaguely metallic. It was as if tiny pellets of zinc crept up my nose and into my throat.

Jim Hawkins broke me into this new job. Slowly, painfully, I grabbed a hook and raised my first zinc-covered cathode out of a cell, gingerly place it on the drainer, reached back clumsily for a new cathode, and replace the one I had just pulled out.

I coughed. Sweat drenched my shirt. Strippers around me were pulling cathodes and replacing them at four times the speed I was. After pulling seven cathodes out of my first cell, I awkwardly dragged the plates two at time on to my truck and cautiously powered my cathode truck forward. I'd heard stories about new strippers cross banking trucks, turning their truck into a five foot long electricity conductor, and being thrown to the ground by the current.

Ten cells later, I swerved my truck of sagging cathodes to the stripping room. The other strippers' plates were stacked upright and tight on their trucks. Mine looked they'd been stacked on the truck by a drunk.

It took me an hour to strip the zinc off the plates of my first load. I saw other guys come in, strip their zinc, stack and leave three times in the time it took me strip and stack this one load.

When I got home, my right hand was cramped closed from gripping the hook and then the stripping chisel.

Dad gave me the first beer I ever drank at home.

Before this day, I had no idea what the men in the Silver Valley really did to earn a living. Whether on the Smelter highline or punching roasters or mucking in the mine or pouring anodes in the anode shack, I had no idea just how intensely hot, dirty, and hellish work was at the Bunker Hill.

One day Dad's Bunker Hill identification card was lying on the television at home. The date of birth on it said 1929. I knew he'd been born in 1930. I asked him about it.

"I lied. I wanted to go to work and told them I was seventeen, not sixteen."

Jesus, I thought. Dad came to work in this hellhole in 1946 when he was only sixteen. He did what I'm doing now. Twenty-five years have passed. It's the same hellhole.

During one of my first weekday day shifts in the cell room, I saw my dad. He was a maintenance shift boss and needed to come to the cell room to check on a job some of his guys were doing.

I hardly recognized him. He was wearing safety glasses, dirtied by the SO2 mist. He was in work clothes, wearing a hard hat. He looked grim, more serious than I'd ever seen him.

I don't know if he knew I was nearby. I heard him give some cell room guys shit and his speech was laced with the f-word. He used every other form of profanity at home, but the f-word was off limits. So was crude sex talk. Here at work, I suddenly discovered, his speech had no such limits.

For the first time, I saw my dad as a worker, as someone with expertise, as someone who knew the inner workings of this damned place where I was just starting and where he had worked for most of the last twenty-five years.

He seemed alien.

After about a week or ten days, I got the hang of pulling, replacing, loading, stripping, stacking zinc.

My body adapted to the work conditions. I even got to where I could stand to eat my lunch and could take breaks to eat it.

I also adapted my thinking about my dad and all the other men who worked at the Bunker Hill.

I began to realize that for at least eight hours a day, the men in the Silver Valley suffered the danger, indignities, hard labor, and stress of metal industry labor.

The strikes made more sense. The drinking made more sense. The reckless recreation and gambling at the Playfair horse track in Spokane made more sense.

It all came together in that grim look on Dad's face. I saw that face more in the work place and began to notice that it didn't really go away when these men left work.

I learned to recognize the Silver Valley look. I've never forgotten it.

This was not so much a change in my thinking about the Silver Valley.

My days in the Zinc Plant began my thinking.

On My Blindness (Part 5)

(This is the fifth installation of an ongoing series of posts describing the events surrounding an accident I had at the Bunker Hill Zinc Plant in July, 1973. You can read the other installations, here, here, here, and here.)

***********

I entered Kootenai Memorial Hospital on Tuesday, after a night in Kellogg's hospital. I was released on Saturday. The doctors' primary concern had been my eyes. They sent me home, confident that the surgery that removed the burnt layers of cornea from my eyes had been successful and that once the cornea regenerated I'd have full sight again. That turned out to be true.

Once back in Kellogg, at home, I started to get sick. I began to vomit. Before long I had vomited out the contents of my stomach and I was in the grip of dry heaves. A fever set in. It was spiking. I started having fever dreams, most of them accompanied by the "Live and Let Die" by the Wings; it was in my head all night long.

By morning, Mom called the hospital to say we were returning. Mom became an ambulance driver as she listened to me wretch and hack in the back seat.

My temperature was about 104 degrees. Sweat poured from my whole body. We learned at the hospital, eventually, that I was suffering from toxic pneumonia. I don't know why, but my body's reaction to being exposed to the sulfur dioxide and hard metal dust was not immediate. Had my body been in shock? Does it just take a while for sulfur dioxide and zinc and cadmium and the other metals to turn the respiratory system toward pneumonia? I don't know.

What I do know is that I was in more trouble six days after my accident than I had been in its immediate aftermath. I know that I was on the cusp of being sent to the University of Washington. I know that my case was unique because it's rare for a person to have as long of an exposure to sulfur dioxide as I did: usually people get right out of it because it is so repugnant and if they don't, they are killed. Rarely does a person fall in the middle of escape and death.

In consultation with the University of Washington, my doctor in Coeur d'Alene treated me with respiratory therapy. I could barely handle sucking in the medicine from the machine. My bronchial tubes were so irritated that I couldn't fill my lungs with air.

I couldn't sneeze. I had the sensation of needing to sneeze several times. I couldn't pull it off. Finally, after several days in the hospital, I sneezed. What a great feeling! What a relief!

My illness ravaged my frame. I entered the hospital weighing around 170 pounds. I left weighing about 140. I could barely walk. Just a few steps left me doubled over, winded, fighting for air.

My doctor recommended that I not return to Kellogg immediately. He didn't think the Silver Valley air would be good for me. In addition, the streets around our house were being torn up in a dusty mess while natural gas lines were being installed.

We went to Spokane to stay with my Grandmother. Fields were being burned on the Rathdrum Prairie. I just couldn't seem to find good air! But things were better in Spokane and my out of hospital recovery began.

It was awful. Grandma's house was tiny. I couldn't walk without doubling over from her living room to the kitchen. Grandma fixed me my favorite dinner: fried chicken, mashed potatoes, garden grown green beans cooked with bacon, cucumbers and tomatoes in vinegar and oil. It all looked so good and I ate heartily and threw it all up.

My eyesight was still dim. My sister, Carol, was only ten years old and I asked her to read me the baseball box scores. She read me scores. Then I would say, well how did Bobby Bonds do and she would read across the Bobby Bonds line and answer me. I asked about the other Giants and the dreaded Dodgers and other teams.

Carol was so patient. I wanted to walk outside. Carol went with me. I made a snail seem like a hare. I could barely move, but I wanted to build my strength. She patiently walked at my side. My goal was to make it around the block. Eventually, I did and Carol was my chaperone.

After a few days, we went back to Kellogg and I continued to recover and my eyesight strengthened.

But, I had only begun my internal exploration set in motion by being blind. This exploration kicked into a higher gear in the fall when classes started at North Idaho College.

(Stay tuned.)

On My Blindness (Part 4)

I reached the top of the ladder welded into the roaster and Roger Grosvenor and other Zinc Plant workers pulled me out. I don't know if the ambulance was there at that moment or if it came later. What I do know is that my body was convulsing. I know I was so overcome by sulfur dioxide that I couldn't speak. I know that my sight was diminishing. It was as if the world around me was wrapped in cheesecloth. I know that someone put a mask of oxygen over my face. I know that I hated how the oxygen felt. I pushed it away. My respiratory system was so dominated by sulfur dioxide that oxygen felt alien. It hurt. Someone forced in on me again. I could only resist it so long.

Dad rode with me to the hospital. I remember nothing about that ride except that I could feel the eeriness of death. The quiet was heavy. I was hacking. I was going blind. It was as if I were tottering on the edge of a girder on a skyscraper being built. I thought I might fall any moment.

We arrived at the hospital. Dr. Whitesell was the M.D. attending to me. He was a drunk. His hands were shaky. I joked with my mom and dad about "old shaky". I joked about feeling worse in the morning with my hangover than I did right then, gassed. A nurse gave me a shot. No more jokes. The shot put me out. I went into a deep sleep.

I woke up later in the afternoon. I couldn't open my eyes. They weren't bandaged. They were, by the power of my body, sealed shut. I found out I'd be going to Cd'A in the morning for eye surgery. I don't remember if the Kellogg doctors knew that my cornea had been burnt by the way the tears became sulfuric acid or if I found that out the next day.

Dale Costa, son of Dick Costa, proprietor of Dick and Floyd's, drove me to Cd'A. An eye specialist removed the damaged tissue, bandaged my eyes and my blindness continued.

I was assured by the doctor that eyes heal quickly. He assured me that I could expect a full recovery. However, he said, I would have patches over my eyes for the next five days. I would be blind.

During those five days, because the external world was not available to me, all I could do was turn my vision inward. My blindness initiated an intense self-examination, a self-examination beyond my capacity to understand. For many years, I sorted out what happened during those five days. Here's some of what happened:

First of all, when blindness forced my eyes inward, I saw a void. Emptiness. It was if I were seeing a huge open sky over the expanse of the sea. It was as if I were standing at the far east end of a desert and looking west. It was as if a cloudy night had fallen over the Palouse and I was in the middle of a wheat field and it was inky dark with no star or moon.

Looking back, it was unsettling to me that I had created so little tangible meaning in my life. The positive side of this emptiness was that I could see, in retrospect, that I had plenty of emptiness to fill.

The unsettling part was that I had constructed so little.

Therefore, the overwhelming sensation of being blind for those five days didn't have much to do with the external physical world I couldn't see.

It had much more to do with the invisible inner world I had, until then, largely ignored.

On My Blindness (Part 2)

July 23, 1973 was a Monday morning. I was working as a Maintenance Mechanic's Helper with Stan Baldwin. I was unprepared for this job. Helping a maintenance mechanic required a certain dexterity with simple tools like wrenches and being able to do simple tasks the mechanic required. I had no experience with tools or with repairing machinery or anything. I would have had to learn such skills from my father or in some kind of industrial arts class in high school.

Dad's attitude about employing such skills at home was "I do that shit forty hours a week at work and I'll be goddamned if I'm going to do it on my time off."

I was nineteen. The two previous summers I had worked in the Zinc Plant cell room pulling cathodes lined with zinc from electrolytic cells, stripping the plates of the zinc, and stacking the zinc. I was a stripper. It was shift work. Most strippers worked six days on day shift, had two days off, came back to work on 3-11 shift, had two days off, and then back on graveyard, had two days off, came back on day shift and continued to rotate through the three shifts.

I worked shift work while playing American Legion baseball. When I worked 3-11 I missed practices and games. When I worked day shift I played games after eight hours of hard labor. When I worked graveyard, I went to work after games. Sometimes games and road trips fell on my days off.

The summer of 1973, Dad lobbied on my behalf to get me work where I'd be working straight days. For a while I cleaned floors and emptied waste cans and did other odd jobs around the machine shop. Then I was moved to the roaster floors to work as Stan Baldwin's helper.

Dad's intentions were good. He wanted me to have my evenings free to play softball and wanted me free of the gruelling demands of shift work. The problem was, I was unsuited for the work I was doing. I didn't know what I was doing.

My incompetence angered Stan Baldwin. We only worked together for about two days before I was injured, but already he had cussed me, sighed with exasperation, and pretty much quit talking to me because I was a millstone around his neck.

My incompetence didn't have much to do with the accident that occurred. The accident resulted from human error when the roaster flue was closed.

Nonetheless, I have often wondered what Dad thought, at my side, as I was given oxygen, was lifted onto a gurney, wheeled to the ambulance, and rushed to the emergency room.

He had wanted to make my work life easier. He wanted me out of the cell room. He had underestimated my incompetence. Like everyone else at the company, he hadn't imagined that a flue would ever be opened on a shut down roaster with workers inside. It had never happened before. Now it had happened to his son. I only know from later talking to friends of mine who got drunk with him the night of July 23rd how shaken he was as he drank beer and freely shared his fears and guilt, even as he tried to drown them.

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.

Kellogg Conflict

In the comments section of Huckleberries Online a conflict flared up that involved Kellogg. It's an old conflict and I doubt it will ever be settled. On the one hand, Kellogg is a contaminated town. The years of mining and smelting didn't end when the Bunker Hill mine and the Lead Smelter and the Zinc Plant closed. The toxic particulates that fell to the ground and the waste that befouled the river and the toxins that invaded houses and other physical structures remain.

To my way of thinking, this contamination has no precedent. The EPA has been working for a little more than twenty years to clean up Kellogg and Smelterville and other areas. It's a laudable effort. I just don't know how they know what they are doing. The kind of industrial project that dominated Kellogg for about eighty years was an entirely modern phenomenon. The clean up effort is an experiment, as far as I'm concerned. I hope the experiment succeeds, in the long run, but that won't be known until decades pass and the reclamation efforts' effectiveness can be evaluated.

So, on the one side of the conflict are those who don't see the EPA's efforts as sufficient and who cite studies demonstrating that Kellogg is not clean.

On the other side of the conflict are those who see the recovering environment, the cleaner Cd'A River, the trees greening Kellogg's hillsides, the gardens thriving in yards, the clean air, and are proud of the progress Kellogg has made toward becoming a place of beauty.

Many (not all) on this second side of the conflict hate the stigma they feel Kellogg suffers because it is a Superfund Cleanup site. Many (not all) of those on this side of the conflict would like to see the EPA pack up and leave the Valley alone. In particular, those outside the cleanup box do not want to see the circumference of the box extended because they don't want to see their communities suffer the stigma of being a part of a Superfund Cleanup.

I'm going to write more in future blogs about where I find myself in this conflict. It won't be easy because I have a complex response to all of this, and I'm not entirely committed to one side or the other.

What's not unclear and not very complex in my heart, however, is that I love Kellogg. I want what's best for Kellogg and that is often difficult for me to sort out as I read comments on HBO, listen to friends' discussions when I'm home, and as I read stories and testimony from Kellogg residents who feel strongly about one side of the conflict or the other.

Kellogg Tour: Uptown, Photos taken 12/30/2006 (Part 4)

In its heyday, Kellogg's uptown area bustled with taverns, churches, clothing stores, banks, cafes, the city library, the Elks Club, car dealerships, furniture stores, drug stores, a bakery, an office supply store, etc. It's hard to believe, looking back, that so much was going on. Today, January 1, things have slowed down considerably. Here's a view looking up Kellogg's empty Main Street:


Where there used to be clothing stores and a loan center, now these second hand stores operate:




My dad's favorite bar is gone. Here is Dick and Floyd's exterior:




Next door is the entrance to the old IOOF hall. Our church was too small to hold all the Sunday School classes, so we older kids had Sunday School class upstairs through this door:




It's a gymnastics center now, but until I was in about the fifth or sixth grade, this was the United Church of Kellogg:




In the last year, Emmanuel Episcopal Church merged with the parish in Wallace. Consequently, the church building uptown is up for sale:


For years, the most important place for me and my friends was the YMCA, long since closed:


Right next door to the YMCA was the little office and waiting room where Bunker Hill's employing agent Albi Sinks handed out orders, telling new employees where and who to report to when we started a new job for Uncle Bunker:



I hear that Dick and Floyd's and the YMCA and employment office are all being remodeled into condos. I hope the new residents don't mind the sounds of ghosts swimming, playing basketball, getting drunk, and being hired out on a new job.

Home Alone

In my blog writing, from now until eternity, I will refer to my wife as the Deke. The Deke is out of town this weekend. She is teaching a ukulele workshop in Seattle. She'll be home this afternoon and my weekend home alone will end. Damn. I mean, I enjoy my wife's company and all, but it's peaceful, sitting here at the kitchen counter, dishes piled up in the sink, having drunk a whole pot of coffee and having gone to Starbuck's for a venti house with room on top of that, having put the dogs in their crates for a rest, and having no one to answer to, no one to talk to, no one even moving in the house. It's rare.

My Oregon State University stepson is in town, but spent the night at a Halloween party in Portland and is conked out elsewhere. My Eugene stepdaughter has moved out of our house. She's working this morning. The phone has rung twice, but no big deal. I have only spoken face to face with two human beings this weekend: one was an election canvasser who I got rid of by saying right away I was voting for his candidate. I would have said that no matter whose button he was wearing. The second human I talked to was my stepdaughter, working at Starbuck's.

This is a perfect weekend. I can write, read blogs, lie down and nap, run to the window and see which group of loud-mouthed, disaffected youth is walking by the house this time, watch my next-door neighbor in his head to toe camaflogue hunting outfit and rifle case return home from the hunt, and no one asks me what I'm looking at or what I'm doing.

I'm not a misanthrope. I enjoy people. In small doses. Anymore, my mind is so occupied with poems, stories, memories, teaching ideas, the state of my marriage, my health, finances, songs, more memories, well, I just want to be alone and let my mental stew simmer.

Right now the dogs are quiet. The cat is at peace. The refrigerator runs quietly. The fan in my laptop kicks up every so often. I can hear the water on the street whining under under tires as cars pass.

I think about Kellogg and how quiet it has become. I visit my mother. I sit in her back yard, overwhelmed by the variety of flowers and vegetables in her SmelterSmoke-free garden. And it's quiet.

Growing up, it wasn't quiet in Kellogg. Prosperity is noisy. Trains clanged in and out of Kellogg at all hours, straining under the weight of ore, their arrival and departure announced with a horn sound like a ferry boat, the rails squealing as the trains stopped and started. The Lead Smelter, Zinc Plant, and mine mill operated twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Going down West McKinley Avenue in Kellogg, to where City Hall and the police station have now moved, the silence is almost eerie. I used to ride my bicycle out there and listen to the mine mill dynamos pound pound pound like the heart beat of a whale and that sound echoed throughout town, depending on the wind.

Walking through town now is eerily quiet, too. Miners with money drink. When Kellogg was booming, the sounds of juke box music, some live music, underground card games, laughter, arguments, clinking glasses, beer bottles being popped open, and back slapping comraderie poured out of the bars. Pay day was Friday. Fridays were festive. Bars had beer busts. The Sunshine Inn had a Friday night Fish Feed. Card games thrived.

No wonder I long for quiet. The first day I went to work in the Zinc Plant, the din shocked me. Men beating zinc-covered cathodes with chisels to strip the zinc. Fork lifts honking, dragging their forks along the cement floor, picking up pallettes of zinc. Men pounding crooked cathodes with mallets to straighten them out. Men yelling conversations. Huge firey furnaces whooshed with heat, ravenously eating the zinc the strippers had stripped and stacked.

I know that Kellogg was economically much better off when it was a noisy town. I relish how quiet it is now, maybe selfishly. And maybe it's selfish when the Deke goes away to teach the ukulele that I relish the quiet of being home alone. The fact is: I enjoy being home alone. I like people. But, in small doses.

Cancer Ward

Scott has had cancer surgery. He had a testicle removed. He woke up from surgery and Ed talked to him on the phone. "Hey, Scott, look out the hospital window. " Scott does. "Is there a Corvette out there?" Scott: "No." Ed: "Shit. I thought there would be. You always said you'd give your left nut to have a Corvette."

The ice was broken. Now Ed and Scott could talk about cancer.

Bruce has melanoma. Scott just had cancer surgery. They arrived with Ed in Portland for our first Thanksgiving weekend blowout. We arrived at our Marriott suite. Someone had to sleep upstairs. I said, "Scott, you and Bruce can have the cancer ward upstairs." The ice was broken. We could talk about their cancer.

Cancer is prevalent in the Silver Valley. My father died of it. My mother is in remission. My mother taught at Silver King school, located about a quarter of a mile right below the Zinc Plant. Almost all the teachers she worked with at Silver King have died of cancer. Dolly, Alene, Sylvia, Betty, we rattled them off one night. I expect to develop cancer. When I was nearly killed working to help overhaul a flash roaster at the Zinc Plant, what nearly killed me was inhalation of sulfur dioxide and zinc/cadmium/lead and other mineral dust. I listen to my upper chest rattle, the way it has for over thirty years now and I listen to my chronic cough and clearing of my throat and I can't help but think a cancer will grow in there some time.

It's serious business for those of us who have lived or do live in the Silver Valley. The mining of ore and the smelting of it meant economic stability for a relatively short period of time. Looked at even in relation to the short life of the USA (230 years old this past July 4th), the times of stable employment in the Silver Valley didn't last long. Sixty, seventy years tops. The impact of that short period of time, however, is much more long lasting. Health concerns remain.

This all came to mind over the weekend when the news broke that sportscaster Steve Lyons had been fired by Fox Sports. On air, Lyons joked, after fellow broadcaster Lou Piniella constructed a wallet metaphor, that his own wallet was missing, suggesting that Piniella had stolen it. Fox fired Lyons' for making statements that were "racially insensitive" and "inappropriate."

If Lyons joking was "inappropriate"(rather than wrong) , then those comments must also be appropriate if said in a different setting. In what setting would his comments have been appropriate? The baseball clubhouse, a place familiar to both Lyons and Piniella? The hotel lobby? The water cooler?

And, under these restriction upon speech, would Ed have been fired had he joked on the television airwaves about Scott and his Corvette? Would his joke have been oncologically insensitive? Testicularly inappropriate?

In the Silver Valley, everyone joked about everyone else's ethnic background or their disabilities. My father was blind in one eye. Dad's friends blamed everything he did wrong from missing a putt on the golf course to not having sex to his blind eye. His nicknames were Cyclops, Rooster Cogburn, and you fat, one-eyed son of a bitch. Called fat, my dad would retort, "You laugh now, pup. But at midnight this big old gut turns into cock."

Joking about cancer, about Italians with Italians, about Bulgarians with Bulgarians, about blindness, about religious convictions (he wouldn't say "shit" if he had a mouthful), made the Silver Valley a place, for me, of free speech.

I understand hateful speech exists. I understand that racial slurs and attacks are violent and aggressive and dangerous. I also understand that not that long ago, when a cancer patient underwent radiation treatment, the radiation irradiated the cancer, but often burned healthy tissue, too. I think we are at a stage of trying to erradicate offensive speech that is similar to the old radiation therapies. We are unable to pinpoint the cancer. We are not always accurate. We discourage and erradicate joking around and healthy teasing because we cannot distinguish between speech that is racially inflected and fun and that which is harmful. So we erradicate it all. As with cancer therapies, when it comes to speech, we have to be asking ourselves just what is the cancer and what is the cure? Could the cure be causing more longlasting damage than the cancer it sets out to eliminate?

PS (Added on October 17th. Piniella comes to Steve Lyons defense:

http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/playoffs2006/news/story?id=2630050