The Journey to the West (4)

Another dreary Sunday. It is cold, snowed a bit, and there seems to be little news of note. Sort of par for Sunday here in the U.S. And, as everything that happens elsewhere in the world is of little interest to our MSM, aside from an occasional earthquake or tidal wave, we no longer expect to hear about it. So on Sundays I amuse myself with "remembrances of things past," and continue to sketch out the general framework of my life. The beauty of doing this on Morialekafa is that it is easy and convenient and no one has to read it unless they wish. So here is the fourth installment:

Safely home from our summer trip, and preparing to enter the fifth grade, I spent the rest of the summer doing what ten and eleven year old boys did in those days: played cowboys and Indians, detectives, Robin Hood, kick-the-can, hide-and-seek, marbles, and whatever took our fancy. I became more and more aware of our small mining town and its place in the world and my life. Mining was by far the most important industry, although there was some timber as well. The silver, lead, and zinc mines for years had poured their waste directly into the river than ran through town. We referred to this as the “Lead Creek,” although it was actually the upper portion of the Coeur d’Alene River. Ugly gray milky water ran over boulders and assorted detritus of all kinds: old bicycles, bottles, tin cans, discarded refrigerators or other appliances, parts of old cars, whatever it was people no longer wanted. As the river was already so polluted no one seemed to care what went into it, including unwanted puppies and kittens. It was foul. No living creatures could survive in it and we did not play in or around it.

The town was built in a narrow canyon with many of the houses built on the side of a steep mountain on the south side. On the other side of the Lead Creek, between it and the mountain, ran the railroad tracks. The mountain on that side rose steeply from the tracks. There were no houses there, merely some scrubby pines and a lot of rock. There was little level space in our town and it was taken up by the business district and most of the better homes. One could walk to anyplace within the city limits in a relatively short time. Concentrated in the roughly four block business district were two small movie theatres, a bakery, two butcher shops, a candy store and fountain, a furniture store, a couple of novelty stores, a J.C. Penny’s, a hardware store, a newspaper, a couple of jewelry stores, a men’s store, and a stationery store that also sold books, along with two small grocery store and a pool hall. Most everything one could desire. I almost forgot to mention the numerous bars and four whorehouses. Actually, within the immediate environs there were something like thirty-two bars in all. The town was the county seat with a relatively small population, except on weekends, when the miners and lumberjacks came in from the surrounding hills for a good time. A few of the bars also featured gambling tables, mostly blackjack, poker, and pan. Only rarely could one find a crap game. The gambling and whoring was illegal, of course, but ours was in those days a boom town and money flowed freely, mostly in the form of silver dollars. I think I was probably ten or twelve years old before I ever saw a dollar bill. There was barely enough ground for a football field, bare of grass, and hard as cement. Our teams took pride in playing on such a field. The High School was next to the football field and across from the Elementary School. I could walk the four blocks from home to school and did so regularly, going home each day for lunch. There was also a Catholic School, but it was further away and built in a purely residential area. Most of us had no idea what went on there, except that it was run by nuns who had a reputation for severity. I think they lived on the third floor of the building. Children from the two schools did not mix. We also had two hospitals, one a Catholic one, built on a slope away from the business district, and another smaller secular one located at the very end of one of the main streets. Only the Catholic hospital provided any kind of surgery. I had my tonsils out there. I remember it well as in those days they used ether as an anaesthetic. You had to count from 100 backwards and always were sick afterwards. I thought it was a weird place, quiet, with nuns moving silently and slowly around the corridors and crucifixes hanging from the walls. Thinking of it now, "surreal" comes to mind.

There was only one road through town, going east to Missoula or kind of southwest to Spokane, but both places seemed far away over narrow twisting roads and we did not often venture to either place in our 1932 black Hudson sedan that looked like it should belong to gangsters in Chicago or New York. My father had traveled to Spokane with my uncle Parm (more on Parm later), a farmer in Post Falls, Idaho, bought the Hudson new, and learned to drive it while returning to Post Falls. He never became a very accomplished driver, which didn’t matter much as we seldom went more than a few miles from home. The highway between our town and Coeur d’Alene was a very narrow two lane construction that wound rather crazily along the mountainside above Coeur d’Alene Lake. The trip took hours and I inevitably became car sick. But as my mother’s family lived in Post Falls, we sometimes made the trip. It was somewhat colorful as we always passed a Regina Stand and had a root beer, then another place that had a chained bear that drank soda pop, and still another place built in the shape of a giant trout. Post Falls, in those days, could not have had more than perhaps 50 to 100 residents at most, nowadays there are thousands. From the time I was five or six I spent part of every summer on my Grandparents farm near Post Falls. When they died the farm was continued by uncle Parm.