A Half Century of Progress? (Note the same mountains in the background)
When the ancients wrote of the Garden of Eden, they may well have used California’s Santa Clara Valley as their model. “And out of the ground made the Lord God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food ….” Genesis 2:9. Or so it seemed until an enigma called Silicon Valley took root.
The valley, named after the Spanish Mission Santa Clara, was long known as the Valley of Heart’s Delight for its high concentration of orchards, flowering trees, and plants. Until the 1960s, the Santa Clara Valley, with 39 canneries, was one of the largest fruit-producing and packing regions in the world. That all ended as a new class of urban developers descended like locusts to root the trees and trample the land like a herd of Monterey Wild Boar in a cabbage patch.
Bulldozers uprooted orchards and vineyards. Cookie-cutter housing tracts popped up in their wake. Strip malls, shopping centers, factories, and office buildings sprang up where quaint homesteads and villages once stood. Ever-widening streets and new freeways couldn’t keep up with the demands of ballooning traffic.
Fresh out of the Navy, I hit the Bay Area in 1960, driving a 1958 Chevy Bel Air with payments due and about $200 in my pocket. Nine years later, I had a wife, two kids, a house in the suburbs with a 30-year mortgage, a 1969 Ford Country Squire station wagon with fake wood trim, and a 1963 Austin Healey 3000 sports car. I worked as a scientific computer programmer in the Information Sciences Department of Fairchild Semiconductor International, Inc.—the seat of the new silicon technology. Some would say that I had made it. I was not so sure.
Sitting in my Austin Healey with the top down, awaiting a turn to get on the new 280 freeway, I watched the river of traffic flow by. The smell of horse manure caught my attention as a pickup truck towing a horse trailer rattled down the highway. I was transported back to my youth, growing up on a ranch in Eastern Oregon. The old saying—you can take the boy out of the country, but you can’t take the country out of the boy—invaded my mind as I joined the throng of indistinguishable commuters on their way to work.
What should I do? Conventional wisdom told me “Stay where you are.” My gut told me “It’s time to move on.”
I compiled a list of every small-town business and institution in the area west of the Rockies I could locate that used a computer. I mailed an unsolicited job resume to each of them. That effort did not involve a lot of resumes at that time in history, but it did result in a job offer from Boise Cascade Corporation in Boise, Idaho.
In the autumn of 1969, amidst much wailing and gnashing of teeth by my in-laws over the tearing away of their only daughter and two grandsons, we watched as the moving van pulled away from our driveway on its way to Idaho. My wife, two sons, and I followed shortly thereafter—on our way to new beginnings. Our lives would be forever changed. My sports car would soon be transformed into a pickup truck. Hard work and clean air would be our future. Silicon Valley would be our past.
The Back to the Land movement of the seventies was just beginning. I don’t know if I was a part of that movement, or if I was simply returning to my roots. But I guess I lived it. How could a country boy know for sure?
A lot of the social interaction in the novel War No More takes place in and around the Hotel Pend Oreille. The model for the hotel is the historic Hotel Charbonneau, now a National Historic Place.
The Hotel Charbonneau was originally constructed in 1912 by Charles and Dora Charbonneau (architects PJ Young and Charles Charbonneau). During the first half of the 20th century, Priest River and the Hotel Charbonneau, which is located one block away from where the train station used to be, was a popular stopping-off point for people traveling to nearby Spokane, Coeur d’Alene, Sandpoint, and Priest Lake. In 1920, Dora Charbonneau added a brick addition onto the south side of the hotel to accommodate more guests. After the brick addition was built, the Hotel Charbonneau boasted 27 guest rooms with more than half of them having their own private bathrooms; an extravagant luxury at that time.
The Charbonneau operated as a hotel/boarding house until the late 1980s, when it was abandoned and risked being condemned. In 1991, the Priest River Restoration and Revitalization Committee (PRRRC), a local non-profit group composed entirely of volunteers, took control of the Hotel Charbonneau and saved it from complete deterioration. Among the PRRRC’s accomplishments was having the Hotel Charbonneau added to the National Register of Historic Places (11/19/1991), which protects the historic structure for future generations.
You can see the Hotel Charbonneau in the 1914 photo above on the left. The photo was taken before the brick addition was built. https://hotelcharbonneau.com/history.html
The following pictorial shows the hotel and surroundings as they exist today. War No More is available on Amazon https://www.amazon.com/War-No-More-Robert-LaRue-ebook/dp/B0GC9MKK7N free on Kindle Unlimited or $3.99 to buy, $14.99 for the paperback. Check it out. (Photos by the author.)
Hotel Charbonneau (Fictional Hotel Pend Oreille in War No More) as it appears today.
Abandoned filling station (Seaton’s Garage in the novel).
National Register of Historic Places placard at the entrance of the hotel.
The railroad tracks still run by, but the depot is long gone.
But they still saw logs at the mill across the river.
Airmen on the line suffered a terrible toll during Operation Rolling Thunder, a codename for an American bombing campaign during the Vietnam War. Originally slated as an eight-week campaign in spring 1965, it lasted until October 1968. While Lyndon Johnson and Robert McNamara played war and handpicked targets from the armchair comfort of the White House, an estimated 900 aircraft went down as U.S. forces delivered 643,000 tons of destruction.
One of those downed aircraft was piloted by my friend Al Stafford. I first met Al when we were stationed at NAS Whidbey Island, Washington, in the late 1950s. Whidbey Island was a rather isolated duty station in those days, so the Officers Club served as the primary social outlet for young bachelor officers. There was an old upright piano collecting dust in one corner. Al could play a few chords. Not long after his arrival, he had a bunch of us gathering around the piano, singing old pilots’ favorites like “Torque me into the Runway” and songs remembered from college, such as “The Whiffenpoof Song.” We sang, sipped stingers, and smoked Pall Mall cigarettes into the night. We called ourselves the Sit, Sippin, and Singin Society. For some of us, that camaraderie would last a lifetime.
Al, Jim Turner, Chris Phelps, and I rented a house off base and formed what Naval Aviators call a Snake Ranch—a party pad occupied by bachelor officers. The house had an unfinished basement that we converted into a makeshift bar. For a time, the four of us presided over a version of Party Central until new assignments broke up the party, and we all moved on.
The next time I saw Al was ten years later on television. It was 29 January 1969. I was sitting comfortably in my suburban living room in San Jose, California, idly watching the evening news on NBC, when they showed a clip of two emaciated Vietnam POWs hanging a Merry Christmas sign on a wall. I did a double-take when I realized one was my old Sit, Sippin, and Singin Society buddy, Al Stafford. The other was Dick Stratton, whom I remembered from Chase Field in Texas. Until then, I had largely avoided all the controversy surrounding the war. I had put the military behind me and decided to let Johnson, McNamara, and the generals run the war. Suddenly, the war was right there in my living room. I was struck with a new understanding of why pundits were calling the Vietnam War “the living room war.”
What I didn’t understand at the time was the relentless torture the two men had undergone before agreeing to pose for the North Vietnamese propaganda photos. Nor did I notice Al’s right hand with the middle finger raised, expressing his true feelings about the occasion. However, Al told me later that US Military Intelligence took note, and his subtle message helped set policy at the time.
For most of America, the enormity of the Vietnam POW experience would not be realized until the victims could tell their stories after Operation Homecoming in 1973. While the conflict continued, the Johnson administration kept such information classified. I wrote letters to the Navy Department and State Department, asking how to contact POWs, and was referred to the Red Cross. So much for country boy naivety.
Al was flying an A-4 Skyhawk off the USS Oriskany when he was shot down over Hanoi in 1967. His replacement pilot was a fellow named John McCain, who was shot down a few months later.
In 1990, Al collaborated with author Geoffrey Norman and published a book called “Bouncing Back: How a heroic band of POWs survived Vietnam.” In it, he relates an interesting anecdotal insight into the Stafford-McCain relationship.
The Al Stafford I knew was a bit of a renegade. Incarceration did little to change that. He delighted in pushing his captors’ patience to the limit. Not surprisingly, he was rewarded with more than his fair share of time in solitaire. He was enduring an extended stay in an isolation cell called the Corncrib at the prison called the Plantation when he first encountered John McCain. The following excerpt from Bouncing Back describes that encounter.
“Then, one morning as he [Stafford] stood at the door, watching through the cracks, he saw a POW on crutches being led slowly across the yard by a guard. The man had shockingly white hair, almost as though he had suffered some traumatic fright. Stafford knew that the man had to be John McCain. Nobody else in the Navy had hair like that.
“…As Stafford watched, McCain detoured out of his assigned path and hobbled a painful fifteen or twenty feet on his crutches before the guard could stop him. By then, he was standing directly in front of Stafford’s cell.
“Hey, Al, baby,” he said cheerfully as though they were meeting on the street somewhere. “You hang in there, now. Don’t let the bastards grind you down.”
The Vietnam POWs networked in many ingenious ways. One method was to hide notes for each other in secret stashes. Al found one such note from McCain when he was allowed an infrequent bath. It explained that he [McCain] had been Stafford’s replacement in VA-163 on the Oriskany, and that, like Stafford, he had been shot down, captured, and through the all too familiar interrogation routines the POWs endured, including the torture chamber they called the Green Knobby Room at the Hanoi Hilton. McCain noted that he had also been moved to their present location, the prison they called the Plantation, and ended with these words: “Listen, Al, since I seem to be following you around, I would appreciate it if you didn’t do anything stupid and get us both in real trouble.” John McCain had his share of detractors in later political life, but they didn’t know him when he flew wing during trying circumstances.
Al and I reestablished contact a few years after his release in 1973 and kept in touch, more so with the advent of the internet. In 1999, I received an Email in which he stated that there was an upcoming POW reunion in Wenatchee, Washington. He planned to attend and make it a nationwide road trip from his home in Pensacola, Florida. He planned several stops before he got to my place in Hauser Lake, Idaho, followed by a stop in Spokane to visit fellow POW Jim Shively. From there, he planned to proceed to the reunion and then travel to San Diego to see his daughter before returning home via the southern route. He made the trip, and he and I had a grand reunion of our own.
In 2003, I received a notice from Al’s wife, Sharon, that he had flown west on 28 December 2003 at age 68. They held a memorial service for him at the Naval Aviation Museum in Pensacola. He is missed but not forgotten.
Tucked away deep in the mountains of North Idaho, a grove of ancient cedars silently watches the passage of time. When Wyatt, wife Sadie, and brother Jim Earp arrived at Eagle City in 1884, it was a bustling tent city—a gold rush town. The enterprising brothers purchased a round circus tent, 45 feet high and 50 feet in diameter, for $2,250 and opened a dance hall. Later, they opened the White Elephant Saloon. An advertisement in the Coeur d’Alene weekly called it “The largest and finest Saloon in the Coeur d’Alenes.” However, the Coeur d’Alene gold rush was short-lived, and today there is little to show that Eagle City ever existed. The site bears mute testimony to the temporary nature of man’s footprint with the passage of time.
Exit Interstate 90 at Kingston, Idaho, and follow the Coeur D’Alene River for a little more than 20 miles across Prichard Creek. Turn right toward Murray for about 3.5 miles and cross Eagle Creek. Turn left, and you have arrived at Eagle City. From Eagle City, follow Eagle Creek and then West Eagle Creek for 5 or 6 miles to a Forest Service sign announcing, “Settlers Grove Botanical Area.”
The road ends in a large parking area with permanent restrooms. Park your vehicle and step back in time under the lintel of the grove’s open gate.
Settlers Grove, at 182 acres, is one of the last large stands of Western Redcedars in Idaho. While these trees are called cedars, they are actually a part of the cypress family. Mature trees stand well over 200 feet tall, and in Settlers Grove range up to 7 feet in diameter. The oldest trees in the grove are estimated to be 700 to 1,000 years old. Western Redcedars are primarily found in the coastal forests of the Northwest. However, a disjunct inland population exists along the southern British Columbia-Alberta border and in northern Idaho and western Montana.
The trail through the grove is well-maintained and easy walking. The treetop canopy filters sunlight into a dreamlike array of lights and shadows.
The creek winds along the trail and under bridges with an ever-changing pattern of bright refractions.
Sound becomes muted yet distinct: a bird’s chirp, a child’s voice, the babble of running water. The mind wanders, and time takes on a new dimension.
When Columbus proved the world was round, and Conquistadors first set foot on the golden shores of the New World, some of the trees standing in Settlers Grove had already lived 200 years or more.
When Lewis and Clark led the Corps of Discovery Expedition over the mountains a little south of the grove, these same trees had aged to 500 years.
During the building of the oldest manmade structure in Idaho, the Cataldo Mission, just downriver from the grove, the same trees had been alive for 550 years.
By the time of the Coeur d’Alene gold rush in the 1880’s, the trees were 580 years old.
The 130 or so years span from then until now represent little more than a single century out of seven to these ancient giants. Yet it covers our whole regional history.
The trees have not gone unscathed. Uprooted trunks, broken-off stumps, and lightning scars lend stark evidence to the forces of nature the grove has endured.
Centuries of winter’s cold, summer’s heat, firestorms, ice storms, droughts, and floods have left their mark. Why did some fall and others still stand tall? The mystery remains the “secret of the grove.”
