Friday morning at 7am, downtown Seattle smelled of industry: diesel smoke and creosote, mixed with a salt breeze off Elliot Bay reminding me deeply of a railyard. I recall waking up at 4am every day as a private luxury rail butler,  in rail yards all across the country, from Atlanta to New Orleans and Billings through every Northern Yard til Chicago. At that early hour everything is crisp,  in that industrial environment everything permeates….creating a scent like no other. Its always been to me the smell of money, the smell of progress and strength; I love it’s wild,unforgiving savor; whether your sidetracked for Hor D Oeuvre’s and cocktails in the Wind River Wilderness (Wyoming) or sitting in the yard serving a seven course dinner for 20 @ Portland, or D.C. for that matter, that smell never changes;  its the smell of labor and love and somehow to me, its organic.

Before all of that, I spent a number of years deep underground in a hard rock Silver mine straddled just below the Montana/Idaho border and its the same thing with the scent of that place: wild and unforgiving, yet warm and authentic. We would sit in the shack every morning before dawn and wait for the skip to take us a mile and half underground and in those moments I never forgot the sharpness of surly miners next to me with a chaw tucked under the gum, a coffee in hand and a room full of lunchbuckets that all smelled of the same thing: blasting powder and precious metals. The door would open, admitting a winter blast and amidst the good natured cursing at the latecomer, the alpine air gripped your lungs as you hunkered against it….stirring the air and mixing deeper into the smell of real labor..the smell of this great Country.

This is silver/ore miner ######### whom I shared both shifts and cigarettes with for a number of years, taken by my dear friend Sadie Lortz.

Even then as a young buck I knew it was something special, to me: something rare. Ive never met a finer bunch of boys than the outfit over at Lucky Friday Mine in Mullan, Idaho. For all the times I should’ve never survived down there, they took me in and taught me just about everything I know about how to live your life not just with grit alone, but also with care. I always figured that those are the days that saved my life, those are the years where I came up, some of you Ive known since those days and you can bear witness to that. I watched alot of young thunderheads go through that joint when I was there, and none of them came out well, the mines have a way of sorting out the idiots; some days I hated that hole more than anything I’d ever known but I always hung in there and I never once took for granted my status as “the kid”; every day I was lucky to learn from the likes of the the lifers down there. I will stop now before I wax reminiscent and start talking stories.

Nowadays, once in a while come Winter I wake up late in the night in my motorhome to the rumble of front end loaders clearing out the thoroughfare in the motorhome ski lots;  so I shrug into my coat and stumble outside to stand in the wild mountain air that smells that special way only at those late hours, blended with the diesel exhaust of the loaders pushing snow and it takes me back, I lean against my rig in the darkness and smile at the goodness of life, then slip quietly back to bed…happy to have lived this far, happier still that I’ve known that smell the way its meant to be known and that it will forever swirl quietly around my beating heart.