Street view at 11 am.
WWallace, Idaho is one of those towns you drive into and behold through your window, thinking, “my but what a pretty town!” It is buffeted on all sides by the Bitterroot mountains and on the north by I-90, a swooping concrete structure overhead that thins to a ribbon in the distance.
We wanted to stay at The Stargazer Motel, with its starburst neon sign and rooms advertised at $34.50. That’s a price you don’t see often in Brooklyn, not even for a decent acai-goji berry-whey protein smoothie. Kate went inside to procure our lodging, but alas! there was no room at the inn for that price. The lady at the front desk snapped at her, “Just you? (sneering)…or you got someone with you?” Well, everyone likes to bemoan the absence of good customer service nowadays. I tell you, go to The Stargazer–for there is the enemy, and she is Mavis.
In 1883 Colonel W.R. Wallace bought 80 acres of swampy land and started the Hecla Mine. By 1885, his wife Lucy had arrived and named the town Wallace. It quickly became known for its rich silver deposits and semi-legal brothels. Today, Wallace remains a productive mining town, but the working girls are gone. Everyone, in fact, is gone. The antique stores, library, gift shops, pizza parlors, and dollar stores are closed. We stayed at the Brooks Hotel, efficiency rooms with their tiny television sets suspended from the ceiling, angled toward the bed like sentinels from the 1950’s. Absent is the thin-wall din from adjacent rooms, absent is any sound of life at all. Whatever happened to Wallace, Idaho?
The internet provides a few clues. Like any single-industry town, Wallace is wholly dependent on its mining. When veins “dry up” and are not replaced by new ones, miners leave town, taking with them the stores, brothels and other services that support them. The story of Wallace has been one of ebb and flow, people either carried along on streams of molten silver, or washed ashore. It is the only town which, in its entirety, is on the National Historic Register. There exists a determined pride, betrayed by signs like “Center of the Universe” on the corner of 6th and Bank Street, which serves to underscore–not offset–the eerie sense of defeat that seems to rise from the streets like steam. I have felt this defeat before, in towns like Gary, Indiana. I have seen a whole town sad before.
The local supermarket’s motto is “We Honestly Care!” and in a tourist pamphlet I picked up in the hotel we are exhorted to stay for lunch, because Wallace is “Better than Expected!” It made us laugh, but we wondered: What did people expect? More sleuthing online yielded the following nugget:
When the final occupants of the Oasis Rooms left in January 1988 (the last recorded date in the “hotel” registry), they seemed to have left in a hurry. Clothing, makeup, toiletries, food and personal items were all left behind. An accurate and tastefully-presented twenty-minute tour of the upper rooms explains the mystery of the ladies’ hasty departure and gives a glimpse into the town’s bawdy past with details that range from poignant to hilarious….”
Kate and I did not take the Oasis tour, though we do regret missing out on all the touching hilarity that a hundred years of surviving among miners has contributed, no doubt, to the national lexicon. I thought of all those soot-covered miners, the women in their dresses, the saloon floor stained with sweat and alcohol, and the greedy excitement that like a fever infected everyone. I imagined what it must have been like to live in a place with a male to female ratio of 200:1. Reportedly, in 1975 there were five active brothels on Main Street alone.
As we headed out of town I said a prayer for Wallace, Idaho–for its aging miners and hotel lodgers bleary-eyed in the sun.
But I did not look back.
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