If I still lived in my hometown of Wallace, I would feel like an exhibit in the zoo. The tourists with their cameras clicking, the kids with their runny noses and snotty attitudes, and the once proud locals hawking their pasts like street vendors at a dirty street carnival is not the way that I choose to remember the town that I loved and grew up in.
The people who made Wallace what it was, a great mining camp, were real people with real lives and real families. The blood that spilled deep in the earth was not Hollywood ketchup, The tears that the families shed for their lost father and husband who the unforgiving mountain of gems periodically sacrificed to the gods were real tears of sorrow. The muck was real, the pain was real, The broken limbs were real, and the sweat was real.
How about the rewards? How real were they? The kind of reward for the pain, the tears, the broken limbs, the shattered dreams. and the muck cannot be defined by the measure used by corporate America and the ever growing sense of entitlement of today. No, the rewards are probably not understood by the tourists who gawk at the old buildings, the rotting frames of the old mines that dot the hillsides , rising up from the sides of mountains like ghost ships in the oceans.
The rewards were modest pay, the satisfaction of pushing mind and body to the maximum limits, and most of all, the joys of living the life style that only those who lived there can understand. The tourists will get their pictures, their souvenirs, and their vacation memories, but they will never truly get what it was really like, what it felt like, and even what it really looked like.
Those things can never, never, be purchased in a tourist shop.
5 comments:
This was a wonderful pos, beautifully written!
Thank you, Donna.
Beautifully written, Glenn! Tourists will never know how much the mining industry touched every single family.
My g-grandparents were mining cooks & packed in during the winter months. Leaving the little ones in boarding school.
Mom's high school sweetheart died of gangrene after a mining accident crushed his leg.
Dad's 3 older brothers quit school to work the mines. Dad graduated WHS with honors, later became the Burke Miner's Union President at age 26. At 44, became Mayor of Wallace.
The rewards? A perfect little town to safely raise the kids...on Cedar Street and memories you cannot purchase.
Donna, my Grandfather died well before I was born from dust on his lungs, and two of my uncles died from mining. My dad worked at the Star for year, and before that he worked in Missouri mines staring when he was 14 years old.
We lived and breathed Wallace and our life on Cedar Street.
My dad was offered a great job in Los Angeles when I was in the 2nd grade. We even packed up and ready to move when my parents changed their minds, and so my path was set. I have often wondered if I would have been very different had I grown up in LA. I am thankful that my parents remained in Wallace.
Donna, thanks for commenting. Your comments are welcome anytime.
PS, I meant to say that my dad worked at the Star for years. not a year.
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