The summer sun rises over the mountains and floods my room with
light. I lie in bed and listen to the cooing of conspiring
pigeons on the roof. I reflect that I seem to be cultivating a
city life in a century-old red brick building in downtown Salmon,
Idaho, pop. 3,122.
The Brown Building, as it’s named, has an outside entrance
on Main St. that opens up to a wide carpeted staircase that
reminds me of the one that Clark Gable swept Vivien Leigh up in
Gone with the Wind. I’m on the second floor in the back
of the building.
The kitchen window looks northwest over Salmon’s rooftops
to the timber-fringed Salmon River Mountains. The bedroom window
faces northeast and takes in the snowy Beaverhead Mountains, a
line of 10,000 feet peaks that are the southern spur of the
Bitterroot Range. I enjoy these valley-wide vistas from an
apartment that reminds me of my late grandmother’s in suburban
New York in the 1960s. The only things missing are an elevator
and a good deli in the first storefront out the front door.
Instead I have the Odd Fellows Bakery there; a warm,
pastry-scented place for coffee and the newspaper.
My building is two stories and was built in 1897 by its
eponymous local entrepreneur William “Billy” Brown. I like its
venerable aspects (more later) such as the staircase and stamped
tin ceiling in the lobby. However, I don’t think I’ll stay much
longer, as the unreinforced outside brickwork is spidered with
hairline cracks from the occasional minor earthquakes of a
century in the Rockies, a mountain range — according to
geologists — still feeling its growing pains. In 1983 the Borah
Peak quake, a jolt that measured 6.9 on the Richter Scale, struck
Challis, Idaho (60 miles distant), and caused two fatalities.
Eleven business district buildings and 39 homes were severely
damaged. The pioneer era brick masonry the same as mine simply
peeled away and collapsed. So I’ll move when I am able, I’m just
not in a hurry. It seems to me that the odds of being buried in
the rubble of a major quake are akin to winning the lottery, and
I’ve never won the lottery.
Living downtown, especially in summer with the windows
open, can be noisy, and not only due to traffic. Three bars line
two blocks across Main St., and a public parking lot is next to
the Brown Building. Weekend closing times can feature drunken
brawls or loud lovers’ spats in that parking lot under my bedroom
window. Either the cops show up, or these disturbances pass as
quickly as a summer storm. It took me awhile to get used to them.
At first, I’d awaken with a start, thinking these obnoxious
revelers were actually in my room, but nowadays I mostly sleep
through it all. Determined not to throw myself into an already
volatile mix, I refrain from shouting “Shut Up!” from my window.
Thankfully, no one has been shot — yet. And when the weather
cools in the fall, I’ll shut the windows once more, and not hear
a thing.
Over the decades the space now covering four upstairs
apartments (two vacant and being “renovated” by my landlord in
faraway San Diego, if you get my drift) housed hundreds of
tenants, and offices for lawyers and dentists and Salmon city
bureaucrats. Early in the twentieth century the public library
was in residence. I never hear anything going bump in the night,
but you’d think a building that’s seen a century of life lived in
it would have a resident ghost or two. I sometimes think of that
on cold winter nights when the wind is whistling against those
old sash windows.
A Salmon old-timer told me about a secret room sealed into
the attic. I’d need an extension ladder to get up there, and it’s
dark and dangerous (I have peered up through a trap door). Beams,
rafters, rusty nails, and — it seems — decades of fossilized
pigeon poop. Not much else. The pigeons somehow get in off the
roof. Since the roof doesn’t leak, I rarely go up there either
(there’s a fire escape). Though the views are even better than
from my windows. Think West Side Story. Rather than the
hazy Manhattan skyline, substitute the white-mantled Continental
Divide in evening pink alpenglow. The pigeons scatter when a
Red-tailed Hawk flies overhead. They head for the river to roost
under the highway bridge or to the rooftops of four other ancient
ocher edifices (Odd Fellows, Shoup, McNutt, Shenon) like mine
along Main St. As for the sealed room (if I can find it), maybe
I’ll get a flashlight sometime and see if some gold miner left
his treasure up there. Or maybe I’ll find the miner himself:
skeleton, overalls and all.
But the possible rewards of treasure intrigue me. I’ll be
sure to check it out before the next earthquake.
