For nearly all of my 6 years of primary education, I attended Silver King School. It was located in a small gulch just east of Smelterville, Idaho. A creek flowed along beside the school and adjacent to the playground area. Sounds like an idyllic setting. However any image you have conjured of a trout filled, crystal clear, mountain stream flowing down the valley is premature. Upstream from the schoolhouse was plant that refined zinc. All of the waste created by that refinery was washed downstream to us. Zinc is a heavy metal, and though our bodies require a minimal amount of zinc for maximum performance, we do not require, nor can we tolerate the amounts that oozed from that creek. When I think of this water, lyrics from an old Chris Rhea song come immediately to mind:
“I'm standing by a river but the water doesn't flow
It boils with every poison you can think of.”
The water was a color that I am certain God never intended H2O to be. It was a grayish/green opalescent liquid. We did not routinely wade into the toxic waste, but from time to time one of our playground kickballs would sail over the chain-link fence and one of us would fetch it. There was one kid that had some kind of seizures and every so often we would find him walking down the stream. Someone would go retrieve him too. This creek feeds the Coeurd'Alene River which, in turn, issues into scenic Lake Coeure'Alene, where we swam, fished, and water skied.
Had that been the only environmental issue we faced, this writing would not have the impact on the reader that I had hoped for. The school was also in the shadow of huge smokestacks (first one, then a second was built) which belched the exhaust from the huge lead and silver refinery that was on a hillside just a few hundred yards east of the school.
We were so accustomed to the “smelter smoke” that we hardly even noticed except on the days it was particularly pungent. This was long before there was an EPA. The focus of the government in those days was mutually assured destruction of the Russians and not air quality. The air we breathed on a daily basis was more toxic than any Los Angeles has ever experienced. If there were air quality warnings in 1960, we would never been allowed outside at all. The combination of the water and the air would have made Erin Brockovich throw up her hands and run for cover. The hillsides had been choked and were devoid of any vegetation. What did our lungs look like?
Our playground contained equipment that would be banned today. Corroded from the very air that we inhaled and corrupted from exposure to too many Idaho winters, we survived playing on it. A tetherball hung from a pole. We would beat the crap out of it but I don’t think we ever completed a game. It seemed the only rule was you couldn’t grab the rope. I do not even know if that was a legitimate game or just something we had in Idaho. It was featured in Napoleon Dynamite, a film that was a pretty accurate portrayal of Idaho life.
Inside that schoolhouse, we received a quality education. Outside we were subjected to toxins, but inside we were exposed to music, art, and literature. Though I can’t recite what I had for lunch yesterday, I can recall from memory several poems that I learned nearly 50 years ago. Any aptitude I possessed for creative writing was nurtured inside that building. Though most of our parents, who were employed by the very company that was poisoning us, had not completed high school, many of us went on to earn advanced degrees. The foundation that I received at Silver King Elementary School prepared me for the future. Thank you Mrs.Woolum.
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