Just got back from a trip to Vermont. A buddy of mine needed a hand driving out to get his kids for the summer, and he’s too cheap to buy airfare.
So another friend and I both said okay. The idiots we are, we’d split driving with him.
This was no sight-seeing tour, unless you count sage brush and the Great Plains at 80 mph. We covered 6,023 miles in just under 123 hours, a little more than an hour shy of five days.
After a full day working at the office on June 20, I finally got out of Sweet Home at about 8 p.m., but I’d forgotten a blanket and pillow, so I had to swing by my folks’ house near Salem and bum them. I hooked up with Lee, the cheapskate (He already says he’s going to sue for libel), and Jeff, one of the two saints on this trip, at about 9 p.m.
By the time we all said goodbye to the womenfolk and loaded everything into Lee’s mini-van it was a quarter after 10. Lee mumbled something about driving first and got us to Multnomah Falls. I took over from there, but they informed me that I’d be doing none of my 23-hour shifts behind the wheel on this trip.
The drive was uneventful and monotonous through the Tri-Cities, Wash., Eastern Washington and Idaho.
We avoided Smelterville, Idaho, except to shiver in passing. Lee and I stopped there a couple of years ago. What we found wasn’t pretty. The town was bizarre. Pulling off the freeway, the road into town is gravel, and the pavement, when it starts, is cracked down the middle with the two slabs shoved upward.
In town, every rig we saw — That really means just one pickup — had a gun hanging in the rear window. Wait, that part could be Sweet Home.
We wandered into a grocery store there, and it was a scene from the Stepford Wives or the Children of the Damned or something. I forget my freaky science fiction flicks. A butcher was working over some unidentifiable piece of meat, could’ve been human — Who knows? His hair was perfect, like Ward Cleaver in some macabre parody of real life, as he whacked away at the piece of meat.
As we stepped back outside, five young men were shambling down the street with sticks or maybe rifles in their hands. Their eyes were vacant, chilling. It doesn’t matter that they were too far up the road for us to actually see their eyes. That’s a minor detail. We quickly got into my car and got out of town as fast as my little excuse for a vehicle and the broken roadway would let us.
While unnerving, Smelterville’s story is apparently a sad one, like many of the towns along I-90 in Idaho’s panhandle, the Silver Valley. My mom, who once lived in that French sounding town at the Idaho border on Interstate 90, explained that the towns in that area were all mining towns.
She wasn’t sure exactly what wrecked the industry there. My guess would be some kind of tree nuzzler or bush bunny environmentalist. Anyway, the mining industry went bad and the economy went down the drain sometime in the early 1980s, much the way Sweet Home’s logging industry was struck in the early ‘90s.
This town looks like it, a town that’s still struggling. Of course, Norman Bates may not really live there, and what we saw of this town of a couple thousand may have just been a small part.
Quite the opposite picture is painted down the road in Wallace, a town of about 900. The town looks like an HO scale model from the freeway. You can just picture the model trains buzzing around it as you pass by. Wallace took its mining history and did with it what so many in Sweet Home talk about with logging, celebrating and sharing that history with visitors.
An update to a Wallace website talked about the improvements it was making to its streetscape, the same kind of writing that often appears in these pages when volunteer groups get busy in Sweet Home. In fact, we’ve seen it quite a bit recently with the work done in the median strip.
The sidewalks are studded with old mining carts. The look of the town hangs together, each building complimenting the next. When Lee and I stopped there two years ago, the town was bustling. People, families, on the sidewalks downtown, shopping, playing and laughing. The town seemed vibrant and alive, like it had made the best of its changing economic environment and capitalizing on its past.
All that reminds a lot of Sweet Home. Looking at these two towns, Sweet Home volunteers are probably on the right track in terms of surviving and recovering from assaults against its main industry. Although abounding in good ideas already, Sweet Home might look at Wallace the way that many have already looked toward Sisters to find out what might work in terms of economic recovery.
This time, we passed both cities by, and I was asleep about the instant we hit the Montana border.
Next week: Beloved Montana; it’s incredible freeways and speed limits; and depending on space, maybe sleeping in moving vehicles.