Footsteps In Time The Maple Flooring From Stevens School Rings Ith Echoes Of The Past
Five years ago, I was a stranger in town. My husband, 2-year-old son and I had moved from Salt Lake City to Spokane because my husband had taken a job here. I was miserable. Salt Lake had been my home for 10 years. We had family there. Our friendships were deep, the connections strong. The move left us 750 miles from a place we had thought we would always call home. My husband was excited about his new job and happy to be in Spokane. I was about as enthusiastic as you would be at the amputation of a major limb.
We bought a wonderful house but for the first two years couldn’t afford any furniture so our footsteps echoed when we walked down the halls. It was hard to invite prospective friends over because there wasn’t any place for them to sit. The winters were longer and grayer and wetter than any I had ever known in my life. Our house felt like a cross between a cave and a tomb. I felt disconnected from Spokane and any place I had ever known.
Gradually, those feelings dissipated. We bought some furniture, rugs and paintings so our house felt warm and comfortable. We made friends. Our 2-year-old grew into a 7-year-old and was joined by a brother and a sister. We eventually found ourselves short one bedroom and crammed into a breakfast nook that no longer held our family. We were desperate for a playroom. About a year ago, we decided it was time to remodel.
Remodeling an old house is a strange journey. Your image of the end product is a fluid thing, in constant flux. The tides of your imagination are controlled by a conflicting mix of daydreams and financial reality. These gradually merge and at their confluence is a plan different from what you had imagined when you began.
One of my dreams was of a maple floor for our new kitchen and family room. Financial restrictions made compromise inevitable. Then, one morning, I saw in the paper that the old Stevens School was being torn down. I called. For two months I bird-dogged the demolition company and finally arranged to buy the last 1,450 square feet of the downstairs hallway. I rented a truck, hired the teenage son of a friend to help me and drove to the school in a gray, drizzling rain. I found the owner of the demolition company, confirmed the terms of the sale, and went inside.
I stood in a long, broad hallway surrounded by echoes. I looked up at the cavernous ceilings half expecting to see stalactites but glimpsed only cobwebs, peeling paint and dirt. It was cold and dimly lit. I heard the heavy steps and deep voices of men. I heard the squeak of nails pried from boards several lifetimes old. I listened to the creak of crowbar and the clattering of dry wood. I breathed dust collected from nearly a century. As the demolition crew began loading the flooring into the truck, I panicked. I had never seen so much wood in my life. To divert my sudden anxiety, I decided to look around.
The original part of the old school was beautiful. Its bricks were a light, pinkish brown color, dull and soft to the eye. They were slightly irregular and rested on a stone foundation whose gray basalt faces glowed with pink highlights, even in the rain. The windows were tall, closely spaced and decorated with arches. Inside, the classrooms were large, light and airy. The tall windows accented the height of the ceilings.
Emptiness engulfed me. Stevens School was unmistakably a place someone had left. The flooring had been taken from the joists and removed. The fixtures in the bathroom had been removed and the window blinds sat in a pile as tall as my shoulders in what remained of the front hall. Like a visitor reading headstones in a graveyard, I wondered what the school had been like when it was alive.
Stevens School was built in 1908 for $31,874. It was named for Isaac Stevens, the first territorial governor of Washington, and stood on the site of an earlier two-room school built in the early 1800s.
A grand and enduring mother, Stevens School was the heart of its East Sinto neighborhood. Until 1968, it housed students from the first through the eighth grades. For several years in the 1920s, Stevens School was the site of an educational experiment. Teachers noticed that girls between the ages of 12 and 15 learned best when they were segregated from their male counterparts, so Stevens became an all girls school for a while.
Because the neighborhood held a large immigrant population, Stevens was the site of English classes for both adults and children as early as 1915. It offered weekend dances, night classes for adults, special classes for disadvantaged students, a youth satellite program and child care. It was, for a time, even the site of a baby immunization clinic.
Before the demolition company began its work this spring, school administrators held a wake for what they affectionately called “the lady.” More than 300 students and teachers from 1921 on, attended. They saw old friends, shared memories and thanked the school for all it had given them. The class of 1954 even came en masse to pay their respects, then went to have pizza together afterward.
As I wandered through the bare classrooms, I saw shadows of the former occupants. The chalkboards - green boards on top, slate boards beneath - still bore admonitions worthy of a lifetime: “Be considerate; keep hands and objects to self; no stealing, swearing or teasing; be to class on time.”
A record of personalities and emotions had also been left behind. A note scrawled on the wall in red paint read “We want to stay in this building.” It was surrounded by a swarm of small purple hand prints. Farther down the hall, an enormous red heart had been painted on the wall. The word “We” was written on one side of the heart; the words “this school” were painted on the other.
I drifted upstairs. I stood alone in the empty hallway and closed my eyes. I listened and waited. I strained my ears and stretched my imagination. Finally, I could hear them. The footsteps of generations of children clattering, running, jumping and dancing with barely contained exuberance. Suddenly, the voices I heard echoing were no longer the deep voices of grown men, but the high, cheerful voices of children - teasing, bragging, taunting, whispering secrets. Ghostly steps and ghostly voices joined in a roar of remembrance, honoring the place that had once been a central feature of their lives.
I opened my eyes and turned to follow them. They ran through the men loading the truck. The men did not stop in their work. The children clamored down the hall, crowded out the front door and tumbled down the steps. From there, they evaporated like mist in the sun. Some returned to their graves, some to the feebleness of old age. Others moved back to their desks or stoves or work benches. The last - the youngest ones - simply slipped over to the new school next door.
The men finished loading the truck. I peeked inside. The 24-foot-long bed was piled waist-high with maple boards of all lengths. They were dirty and cluttered with nails. Many were broken and all were caked with wax and grime. I felt overwhelmed, but could see that the boards were dry and straight. Many were over 8 feet long and quite a few were longer than that. The wood was still thick, and under the wax it was a rich, golden color impossible to find in even the best grades of new maple. I paid for the wood and drove away.
I spent the rest of the day unloading the truck and stacking the flooring in the storage area above our contractor’s shop. Untangling the boards in the truck was a rough game of pick-up-sticks and it seemed forever before I made a dent in the load. About an hour into the job, tired and discouraged, I glimpsed a spot of red in the tangle of brown boards. I stooped down and retrieved a small red paper heart.
Smudged, only a little crumpled, with a straight crease down the middle, the heart was no more than 3 inches long. It stood out on the floor of the truck like a bottle with a message might stand out on a deserted beach. A gift from the ghosts. A reminder that the boards still bore their footprints, that this floor was more than salvage, more than beautiful wood at a good price. These boards had been part of people’s lives, part of a community. These boards were pieces of Spokane’s history.
This summer, our family gently coaxed the nails from more than 1,000 square feet of maple flooring. We cleaned it, sorted it by lengths, and bundled it. Sometime this fall, we will watch with eagerness as the flooring sub-contractor lays the boards, sands them and applies a clear, hard finish. We will cover them with rugs and lovingly arrange chairs, tables and toys on top of them. My husband and I will watch as the footprints of our young children and their friends mix with those of the children who have gone before. We will sit quietly, listen to their voices, and know that we are home.