Ancient Places Read Free Page B

breathed cool air. Noticeably caved in around the edges, this fissure looked as if it once might have been large enough for a person to walk inside. Craning forward, one of the ladies remarked that the subterranean air felt more than refreshing: it felt cold. A closer look revealed that ice rimed a few of the stones deeper inside.
    The women, none of whom had ever been to this place, muttered with excitement. This must be one of the ice caves that they had been hearing about all their lives, but had never seen. Their Spokane ancestors, like many Plateau people, had stored fish and roots in caverns like these.
    Newly arrived homesteaders trying to scratch out a living here in the early twentieth century used these cavities in exactly the same way. During the dog days of July 1929, a local newspaper ran a story headlined:
    SPOKANE NATURAL WONDER
    GIVES FREE ICE ON HOTTEST DAYS
    OUTSIDE OF CAVES BAKES WHILE INSIDE IS ICEBOX
    I had brought along a photocopy of the article for reference, and we studied the two grainy pictures that accompanied it. In the first, Mr. and Mrs. Edward Peterson posed in front of a narrow cave entrance, the opening of which looked like a tidier version of the vent beside which we were standing. The couple gazed at a thermometer that registered forty-five degrees, even as the rest of Spokane reported ninety-seven. Mrs. Peterson was quoted as saying that the cave extended about six feet into the hillside, and that she kept fruit inside it year-round.
    By this time, the young explorers in the group had begun to work their way uphill along a pathway between the moss-covered talus slope and a windrow of loose basalt. The rest of us followed to an open area, where we gathered around a circular depression that was stuffed full with rotting lumber and rounds of old firewood. More cold air drifted from its depths.
    This rubble-filled pit must be the old well described in the 1929 newspaper article, we decided. We compared the setting to the second photo, in which Edward Peterson squatted beside a rectangular cellar entrance. We soon spotted a handrail post and part of a step from Peterson’s neatly framed stairway among the debris. In the photo, Peterson had just ascended from the depths of the pit, where he had plucked a piece of ice from therock floor to share with Patsy, his German shepherd. There were always several hundred pounds of ice on the bottom of the eight-foot well, Peterson explained. Ever since his parents homesteaded the place in 1899, the family had stored meat down there.
    The newspaper reporter expressed bafflement at the source of the Petersons’ ice before wrapping up his article with the revelation that “Tule mats, well preserved, have been taken from this well.” That fact did not surprise the Spokane women, whose elders had told them how they would line their storage pits with tule mats, then arrange twined bags filled with salmon or roots betweenlayers of sage leaves to discourage probing animals. In multifamily caches, distinct designs woven into each bag made for easy identification. Leaning over the edge of the pit, the women wondered whether any more of their ancestors’ tule mats or storage bags might still be down there, hidden in the darkness among the rocks—still perfectly flexible in the moist air, still carrying an odor of dried fish that no passage of time could extinguish.
    At some point in the 1950s, residents in the neighborhood grew concerned about children playing among the dangerous rocks. They collapsed the cave openings and filled Peterson’s well with waste wood, but judging from the air that was caressing our faces, its bottom must still be covered with ice.
    As we enjoyed our respite, one of the ladies recalled a cave that her uncle had told her about, somewhere near Kettle Falls. When he was about five years old, he had gone with his parents to the great salmon fishery there, a few years before the construction of Grand Coulee Dam. While everyone else was