Wallace and the Interstate Above It

Just past eight in the morning in late November, Bank Street is still in shadow. The sun clears the south ridgeline first, then slides down the hillside past the brick fronts until it reaches the sidewalk near midmorning. Overhead the whole time, the interstate runs east and west on a concrete shelf. A semi downshifts on the grade east of town and its sound collects under the bridge deck, then comes down into the street like weather. The man sweeping the walk in front of the bar does not look up. The dog tied to a hydrant does not flick its ear. The highway has been up there for decades, and the town under it got used to the noise the way any town gets used to a river, except that this river is made of trucks and it never thaws.

Wallace sits in the narrow bottom of the Silver Valley, where the mountains press in close enough to crowd the streets. It is the county seat of Shoshone County, a compact downtown of brick buildings three and four stories tall, many of them from the same short stretch of years. A driver taking the Wallace exit drops off the freeway into the streets and loses sight of it for a block or two. A driver staying on I-90 sees the whole town at once, arranged below the windshield like a diorama of itself.

Silver and brick

The town began as a mining camp on the river at the bottom of the canyon. Prospectors worked their way up the valley in the 1880s, following silver and lead ore so rich that the district beneath these mountains became one of the country's great producers. The railroad came through to haul the ore out; the depot went up a few streets from the hotels, and the town built itself banks, a courthouse, saloons, and a jail. Some of the mines tunneled a mile underground, and the men coming off shift walked the same streets where the assayers weighed the day's silver.

The valley's labor history was not gentle. Strikes and lockouts came in the 1890s, and the state sent troops into the district more than once. There was dynamite in the ground long before there was a highway over it, and the town that came out of those years had a particular kind of citizen: stubborn, used to being relied on, not easily moved by a government map.

In the summer of 1910, a fire of a scale the country had never seen came over the mountains. The lightning of that August started hundreds of fires across the northern Rockies, and the wind folded them into one. It is remembered as the Big Burn, and when it came down the canyon it overran Wallace, burning the wood-built town street by street. The rebuilding that followed was in brick, so much of it in the years right after the fire that the downtown still reads as a single piece of architecture. Those brick buildings would matter later.

The fight over the routing

The interstate system, as first drawn, has no provision for a small town in a steep canyon. It wants long cuts, balanced grades, and a straight line where one can be had. When the routing for I-90 reached Shoshone County, that straight line ran directly through the middle of the brick district. The plan would have removed a substantial part of the downtown, and with it the tax base the town lived on.

The town refused. Business owners organized. Lawyers were hired. The downtown went onto the National Register of Historic Places, a listing that gave the town a voice in any federal project touching it, and Wallace used that voice the way a stubborn property owner uses a strong deed. Public hearings went on for years. The highway department, for its part, was trying to finish an interstate across a state, and the last unbuilt stretch lay in this canyon. Both sides had reasons that made sense, and neither side gave in, which is the condition of all long fights.

The result, reached through lawsuits and compromises and meetings nobody remembers fondly, was a routing no one had started with. The freeway would come through the canyon on the south side, raised onto a structure against the hillside, and pass above the town instead of through it. Wallace would keep its streets. I-90 would keep its four lanes. The traffic would run at the level of the third-floor windows, and the town below would be visible to every driver as something the road had to step over.

Living under the span

On Bank Street, the interstate is a presence overhead, the deck passing above the roofline with its piers set between buildings and its shadow falling across the street. In a rainstorm the deck drains pour off in curtains. In deep winter, truck exhaust settles on the snow and stains it gray. The noise is a low, constant wash: louder at five in the evening, thinner after midnight, never gone. Residents do not hear it. Visitors cannot stop hearing it, which is the same difference that separates all towns from the ones people come to see.

They stay because their families are here, because they grew up with the mountains, because a house in this canyon costs less than one an hour away. The storefronts that stay open are the ones a county seat needs, a courthouse, the bars, the county offices, a few businesses that have outlasted every change the valley has seen. In winter the plows work the streets at four in the morning. The houses climb the hillsides on streets that become switchbacks and then gravel, and on a cold evening the wood smoke comes down the canyon and lies over the town until the sun burns it off.

Winter is long in Wallace. In the deep months the sun clears the south ridge for only a few hours a day, and the street stays blue and cold; when the light finally comes back over the rooftops in spring, it is an event. People measure time by the snowpack in the high country, by the runs of fish in the river, by the empty and full tables at the bars. The interstate above is part of the local weather now, like the river at the bottom of the street. Nobody thanks it. Nobody resents it. It carries the trucks that would otherwise be on the street, and it brings the strangers who stop.

Strangers stop to photograph a town the interstate had to step over. They photograph the manhole cover set into the pavement at the center of an intersection downtown, which declares the spot the Center of the Universe. They find the famous two-story outhouse at the back of a downtown building and stand in front of it, satisfied. They walk the streets and read the dates on the buildings, most of them from the years just after the Big Burn, and they get back on the freeway and tell people there is a town in Idaho that drivers go over, not through.

At night the trucks thin out, and the canyon gets quiet enough to hear the river at the bottom of the street, running the same way it ran before the miners, before the fire, before the bridge. The town lies below the highway the way it lies below the mountainsides: a thing that is still here because it held on. The brick fronts stand in a row along the street, warm-lit in the evening, and above them the interstate threads its four lanes east toward Montana. Every so often a horn sounds up there, brief and far away. Then the snow starts again, and the plows go by, and the town under the bridge does what it has always done: it stays.

Photos: SounderBruce (CC BY-SA 4.0)