WALLACE, Idaho — The tragic devastation of those tornado storms through Moore, Okla., and its surroundings is a reminder that our our unpredictable winters and summers are a fairly mellow alternative, much as we curse the cold and snow in the winter and the heat in the summer.
If I could adjust one thing about our local climate, it might be that we could add spring to our other three seasons.
Last decent spring I remember here was in May of 1980. Not a false spring — a real, friendly three or four weeks summoning us ever so gently to the joys of summer.
Then the volcano blew. If the Silver Valley has had one nasty weather episode, this baby was it.
It was a Sunday afternoon, May 18, 1980. The day had started off beautifully. Blue skies, green lights. A recent transplant to Wallace, I'd been on the phone in the morning, talking to one of my editor-mentors at the Seattle P-I, Maggie Hawthorne, about what shenanigans I might invoke to get my old job back there, which I'd stupidly quit, in the face of Affirmative Action, which effectively banned the Seattle newspapers from hiring or re-hiring Causasian males.
Maggie mentioned that Seattle had shaken with a huge boom that morning, and everybody assumed it was Mount St. Helens, which had been rattling for several months. Oh well, I thought: Their problem.
Except it wasn't their problem, but quickly became ours.
It looked like the biggest thundercloud known to mankind as it loomed over the western horizon, and we sat out on the porch, anticipating a lightning show. (Not that in Wallace there is such a thing as a horizon.) Then the cloud began showering us with snowflake-shaped crap. Grey, gritty, quite light, and gobs of it. It fell all that afternoon and all the next night.
I thought the Russians had bombed Fairchild Air Force Base, and that this was the fallout we were all taught by those Civil Defense films to beware of. Since you couldn't run from it, I figured, the best thing was to go out and play in it — let it kill you quickly.
So we went out into the front yard, balled this falling ash into snowballs, and, giggling with the sardonic laughter of the doomed, threw our ash-balls at each other. Might as well punch out having fun.
There was nothing on the 6 o'clock network news about this event. It was like it never happened, although it obviously had. (It seems storms and tragedies only happen on the East Coast unless there is some gun-control argument to be invoked.)
By Monday morning our then-competent Shoshone County Board of Commissioners had determined that while this stuff was hugely annoying, it was not shorting out power lines and was not a threat to the public health or the water supply. It was just a pain in the arse.
So the people of the Coeur d'Alene Mining District started shoveling. In earnest. I remember the late John Posnick, owner of the Silver Corner, remarking, shovel in hand, “The newness of this stuff has worn off pretty quick.”
All summer, a trip on I-90 across Cataldo Flats was best made at 5 miles per hour, lest the dust be disturbed and your visibility obliterated.
The mines, rightfully fearful of what this airborne grit might do to their ventilation fans and compressor and hoist motors, shut down operations, dismissed their crews and sent the men to report to their local city or county authorities, preferably shovel in hand, to help, if they wanted to stay on the payroll for the week.
Business owners, their employees, and gofers, degenerates and even a few errant newspaper reporters joined the miners, grabbed shovels and chipped in. A T-shirt erupted in Wallace: “I shoveled my ash off.”
Helped by Bunker Hill, Hecla, Asarco, and several thousand mining grunts, we were ash-free in our communities within a week. The mines went back to work and our lives returned more or less to normal, although the ash would continue to fall from our trees for years and the freeway was not fun for awhile.
Three weeks after the Silver Valley cleaned up all of its volcanic ash, the Coeur d'Alene City Council convened a special meeting to spend tax money on a machine that would clean up the volcanish ash still lying there, untouched by the government or even volunteers, who were expecting government help.
I think Mount St. Helens taught us the difference between a community of miners and a community of idiots.
