Leading A Life ... In Lead, South Dakota - Part 2

As I mentioned in the last column, I was able to return to my old home in Lead, South Dakota.  Lead hasn't been a thriving community since at least 2001, when they started the process of shutting down the Homestake Gold Mine, but what I was on this visit stunned me.

Here is a town that, in the 1930s, was one of the few areas in the country that didn't suffer through the Great Depression.  Because Homestake supplied most of the gold used by the government to back its currency, there were more jobs than people and everyone in Lead had plenty.  Homes were well taken care of.  Roads were better than those in most metropolitan areas.  The community's pride was evident.

Today, the town has definitely fallen on desperate times.  The impact of the Homestake closure is clear.  When we lived there, my late husband was a house painter and most of the homes he had painted in town had not been touched since he did the paint job, which was over 10 years ago.  Many of the homes stand vacant; the owners who had paid their homes off before the mine closed simply locked the door and walked away when they couldn't sell after the shutdown.  Those who owed money on their homes were foreclosed upon.  Regardless the reason, the number of vacant homes in Lead is startling.

The biggest blight on the landscape was seeing what happened to Homestake over the last ten years since I last was in Lead.  In years past, the mountainside next to the road leading from Lead into Deadwood was stacked with the buildings that made up the refinery; they were fixtures in town.  Now, the refinery has been torn down and the promised park has never come to fruition.  So the mountainside stands bare, save for some of the concrete still remaining from the refinery.  Very sad.

It's not that the town is completely falling in on itself, although that happened in the 1980s, when the center of town caved into the mine, leaving a huge gaping hole right where Main Street used to be.  The area is now called the Open Cut; the town is building a visitor's center to try and attract someone to come visit the town.  There are actually really well-maintained homes for sale at extremely reasonable prices.  When you consider the average listing price of a home in Austin, Texas is $340,000, finding a 3-bedroom, 2-bath house in Lead for $105,000 is a steal.

So why don't people want to move there?  It's simple - the weather and work.  If you're a Yankee, used to snow in the winter, unless you're from the mountains in Colorado or Vermont, you really can't appreciate the amount of snow the area gets.  The first weekend of October 2013 saw over three feet of snow and that snow stuck around and was built upon over the next six months.

Living in the mountains in winter is touchy at best.  Four-wheel-drive vehicles are a necessity, especially if you live at the top of one of the hills in town.  If you stayed home every time it snowed, you wouldn't leave your home from October until the end of April, so you learn to deal with it.  My husband, a Texan, learned the hard way, needing to be towed out of several sticky situations he slid into the first six months we lived there.

Work is the other big challenge.  Most people who have made a success of living in Lead work for themselves, most in the construction field, although there are those, like me, who work on the internet, so it doesn't matter where you live.  With construction, though, the weather plays a significant factor again - you need to work like crazy from May until October so you can have enough money to survive from October to May.  The family we stayed with on our visit sustains themselves on the money the husband earns as a roofer for six months of the year, working a zillion hours until it's impossible to climb on another roof for fear of sliding off.

Yet, the place, for all its foibles, is beautiful.  I've never lived anywhere as beautiful, regardless the season.  And quiet.  In most areas of the country, there is the constant noise of traffic.  In Lead, it's just quiet.  It's the rare place you can go to just be still, something most of us never get to experience.  It leads to a calmness and tranquility hard to find these days.

If you get a chance to visit Lead and Deadwood, I would heartily recommend it.  I'm so happy I got a chance to go back, to visit the home I shared with my lovely husband and daughter.  While I could never go back there permanently, it remains one of the best experiences of my life and I'm so grateful for the opportunity to spend five years in, what we lovingly called, Mayberry.

Leading A Life ... In Lead, South Dakota - Part 1

Thomas Wolfe said, "You can't go home again."  To a certain extent, he was right.  As humans, we change.  We grow.  The experiences life throws at us cause fundamental changes in who and what we are, on how we perceive life.

The place we came from changes, as well.  Entropy, the idea that everything, from the time of its creation, slowly declines from there, is at work both on the places and people we encounter, rendering ever visit totally new.  Sometimes, the changes are imperceptible, at least from the outside, but on closer look, they can become a yawning chasm between what we remember and what actually is.

So it was that I returned to Lead, South Dakota a few weeks ago.  My husband, daughter and I lived in Lead for five years, between 1999 and 2004.  We moved there from Denver, where we were living when Columbine happened.  We had already planned on moving out of Denver when Columbine occurred, but that definitely sealed the deal; my daughter was in seventh grade at a school not too far from Columbine. 

We wanted to get away from the rat race Denver had become.  It was a big city, with all the big city problems.  We wanted to go somewhere where the air was clean and fresh, somewhere time had forgotten, and we certainly found it in Lead.  Lead is the sister city of Deadwood, South Dakota; you might remember Deadwood from the show on HBO. As bad as things seemed in the HBO show, the reality was ten times worse, in terms of the living conditions and the sheer rankness of the area.  

At the time we moved there, Lead, located at the northern edge of the Black Hills of South Dakota, along the border with Wyoming, up 6000 feet, had always been a mining town.  They have mined gold there from the time gold was first found in the 1800s until it was closed in 2002, about a year and a half before we left.  The Homestake Mine was there, reaching 8000 feet down toward the earth's core.  Frequently, we would be sitting at the dining table and the house would rattle, as the men in the mine were blasting to dislodge one more bit of rock.

It was a bustling little town, with homes built wherever a miner had pitched a tent.  When the miner got married, the tent was replaced by a one-room house.  As children came along, another room or two were added, then a bathroom, when indoor plumbing came to town, and then maybe a kitchen, giving the homes in town the feel of having been scabbed onto, which, of course, they were.

In 1910, Lead was the second-largest city in South Dakota.  It was one of the few towns in the United States that wasn't impacted by the Great Depression.  There was so much gold coming out of the Homestake Mine, no one went hungry.  Business thrived.  Everyone was prosperous, so much so that when Deadwood fell on hard times, Lead bailed them out.  The more Lead thrived, the more Deadwood sank into poverty, with little to support its businesses, other than tourism, and there wasn't much of that.  Deadwood was the poor step-sister to Lead.

Then things changed.  Deadwood, after yet another devastating fire, so common in the Black Hills National Forest, was almost destroyed in the late 1980s, so the "great experiment" was launched, bringing another kind of gold into the Black Hills - gambling.  Deadwood had always been known as a lawless frontier town, with the likes of Wild Bill Hickok and Calamity Jane wandering around town, so why not take advantage of it?  Why not play it up?  So Deadwood became one of the few places in the country where gambling was allowed, outside a Reservation.

As Deadwood came back to life, life in Lead started undergoing significant change in the other direction.  First, the middle of town collapsed into the mine, leading to the Open Cut, a large, open pit in the middle of town, where the mine is open to the air.  Everything had to be rebuilt around it and, in many cases, was never rebuilt.  Then, in 2002, Homestake Mine closed, ringing the death knell for this once-thriving city.

We were living in Lead when the mine closed.  It was heartbreaking.  Generations of families living in the homes in Lead were leaving in droves, chasing the next mine or going back to school to learn a new way of life.  Homes were abandoned, when no buyers could be found - who wants to live in a town where there is no industry and the closest large city (in relative terms) is on the other side of any number of mountain passes?

Regardless of the change, I loved living in Lead.  Because the area was so insulated, you knew everyone in town; there were about 3000 people living between Lead and Deadwood at the time.  Life was difficult, especially in the winter, which started at the end of September and sometimes wouldn't leave until the end of April.  But there was nothing like sitting by the wood stove, a raging fire keeping the house warm (except my daughter's room), as the snow piled up outside.  I was sad to leave it but we had no choice ... my husband was dying and he needed to be where it was warmer, so we moved to Texas.

This was my first visit back in 10 years and boy, how things have changed.

Coming up:  Part 2:  Leading A Life ... In Lead, South Dakota