Awash In Hope -- Decades Ago Soap Lake Attracted Believers Who Thought Its Soft, Salty Waters Were Therapeutic. Can The Town Now Lure Crowds Of Aging Boomers?

AUTUMN IN Soap Lake arrives abruptly after Labor Day, signaled by empty beaches and "VACANCY" signs at the local motels. On a bright, midweek day in September, the silence is interrupted only by the odd hay truck, rumbling down Highway 17 and barely slowing down through town, where the innkeepers grimly contemplate the prospect of another long winter.

This isn't right, says Gordon Tift as he hobbles through the town's lakefront park. Soap Lake deserves better. He has spent much of his 80 years along these sudsy shores, waiting for lightning to strike.

Then, just a few weeks ago, it did.

"I woke up in the middle of the night, sat straight up and had this . . . well, sort of a vision," Tift says, wide-eyed with excitement.

"Think Stonehenge. Five statues, solid rock, maybe 25 or 30 feet tall, right here in the city park and looking out across the lake . . .

"Only they're a rock band! The rhythm-guitar player is over here, the lead guitar there next to the female vocalist, the keyboard player and drummer back there. They're solid basalt, held together with rebar and epoxy, looking out over the lake. The biggest rock band in the world, right here! People would come from all over."

And so it goes down at the bottom end of the Lower Grand Coulee, where a peculiar strain of hope springs eternal from the alkaline depths of Soap Lake.

IN MOST RESPECTS, Soap Lake resembles scores of other small towns in Eastern Washington. There is one major intersection, a drive-in where you order your burger and fries by phone from Naugahyde booths, a block-long main street with a smattering of bars and junk stores, a nasty squabble between the mayor and the City Council, and lots of clapboard houses with "FOR SALE" signs posted in front.

But there is one important difference. Soap Lake has no grain elevator, no pulp mill, no fruit warehouses. Its biggest employer is the local school district. And its solitary industry is its lake, two miles long and filled with mineral water that turns to soapsuds when the wind blows down the coulee.

"We have no tax base," says Tift. "We have a bunch of retired people like me, and some people on welfare and a few people who work hard trying to keep their businesses alive."

Sad, but true, says Suzanne Lonn, a retired schoolteacher and part-time director of the local Chamber of Commerce. "What we have is our water."

From the earliest days, it was about those waters, soft and slippery to the touch, salty to the tongue and - if you believe the believers - therapeutic to body and soul.

Soap Lake is the southernmost of a chain of small to middlin' potholes at the bottom of a 20-mile-long basalt canyon, or "coulee," that once contained the Columbia River. Fed by groundwater from the surrounding basalt, the lake has no outlet. It is a geological dead end for minerals such as sodium, carbonate, bicarbonate, sulphate - 16 minerals in all - that leach from the surrounding rock.

This tweaks the curiosity of scientists. University of Washington zoologist W.T. Edmondson and various students have been sampling its waters for nearly 50 years, bringing back a rogue's gallery of mostly microscopic creatures - segmented worms, drifting plankton and tiny, red, shrimp-like copepods that occasionally tint the waters.

One species peculiar to Soap Lake - Hexarthra polyondona soaplakeiensis - is far too small to be seen by the naked eye, which is probably a good thing, because one glimpse at its blob-like body and creepy squid-like tentacles would turn tourists to stone.

But those chilly, mineral-rich waters are of particular interest to spa-lovers from around the globe. For nearly a century, they have come here to soak in it, drink it, sunbathe on its beaches and coat their bodies with its mud. They do this in hopes of curing, or at least soothing, the symptoms of arthritis or psoriasis or eczema or a dozen other chronic ailments. And they believe those therapeutic values are concentrated in the black mud scooped from the bottom.

This is nothing new. Stone artifacts and Native American tradition indicate that the local Indians were true believers, building lake-shore huts where the "healing waters" were poured over hot rocks. But they, too, were mostly short-timers; they had to make a living somewhere else.

Early explorers found the water of some interest, but were distinctly unimpressed by the surrounding country. "It's a vast, sandy plain, and even the most hopeful and sanguine can see no future for it," reported an Army engineer in 1878. Late in the century, ranchers bathed their stock in the lake to fend off parasites and saddle sores, and they are credited with giving the lake its prosaic name.

COMMERCIALLY SPEAKING, Soap Lake arrived with the railroad in Ephrata, just four miles south. Suddenly those alkaline waters became the essence of a health spa. The first sanitarium, the Lombardy, was built on the lake shore in 1905. Then came the larger Siloam, so-named for Jerusalem's life-giving pool. It was three stories, with 45 guest rooms and a grand dining room that was converted to a dance floor at night.

Within a decade, the southern lake shore had become the "Palm Springs of The North," with four hotels, rooming houses, excursion boats, restaurants and businesses renting tents, boats and bathing suits. The city installed a dual water system, one set of pipes carrying fresh water, the other mineral water from the lake.

"It was impossible to walk down the street on summer nights because of the crowds of socializers promenading the sidewalks," wrote local historian Bennye Fiege. "Eventually the town would boast an open-air dance hall right on the beach. Big-name bands were brought from Spokane."

For years, the town's name was in dispute. Maps labeled the resort as "Sanitarium Lake." But developers of the Siloam hoped to call it "Siloam." Alas, the neighbors confused Jerusalem's pool with Salome, the dancer who took the rap for the beheading of John the Baptist. Neither name stuck. "Soap" did.

And for all the bands and dance halls, it was still about the water. Business picked up after World War I, when thousands of American soldiers came home from the trenches suffering from buerger's disease, a frightening ailment that rots the skin. Victims discovered that the waters of Soap Lake arrested the disease.

That's how Gordon Tift got here. His stepfather had contracted buerger's in the trenches and moved to Soap Lake to deal with it. "People came out here by the trainload," he recalls. "They were sick, missing limbs, and their only relief was aspirin, prayer and Soap Lake. They'd soak in the lake and drink the water and they'd feel better. It's simple as that. The doctors may pooh-pooh it, but I know what I've seen with my own eyes."

Soap Lake's heyday was painfully brief. The grand Siloam burned to the ground in the early 1920s, followed by the Thomas Hotel and the Lakeview Sanitarium. Hopes rose again in the 1930s, when the government launched construction of Grand Coulee Dam. But the economic benefits flowed largely to Coulee City or to the farming center at Ephrata; Soap Lake remained a backwater.

"Every few years, somebody checks into town, looks around and decides: `I'm gonna put this place on the map,' " says one longtime resident. "Couple years later, they give up and move on."

During the 1940s and '50s, the lake itself became a problem. The same life-giving irrigation that greened the nearby desert was seeping through the aquifer and draining into the lake, raising its level and diluting its famous water. A 1936 analysis showed 13,836 parts per million of sodium; by the late 1940s, the sodium content had been reduced by more than half, with comparable drops in 10 other minerals, including carbonate, bicarbonate, sulphide and chloride.

Meanwhile, there was evidence of a declining interest in the mineral water itself. Americans were less interested in natural cures and spas, preferring antibiotics such as penicillin. Soap Lake was dying of a deadly combination of fresh water and modern medicine.

But the lake, and its town, persist. The groundwater problem was solved by federal engineers, who dug wells at the south end that intercept most of that fresh water and pump it into a nearby canal. Many locals believe the dilution continues, that the lake is gradually turning to fresh water, but the sudsy buildup on windy days suggests that its soapiness endures.

THE TOWN'S character and endurance are embodied largely by two local characters. One of these is Marina Romary, innkeeper extraordinaire, Greek matriarch and self-styled Curator of the Western Myth.

Romary was born in Soap Lake, daughter of Greek immigrants who arrived in 1915 and ran a lake-shore hotel and tavern. In the 1960s, Marina Romary took over Don's Restaurant, which some insist is the finest eatery between Bellevue and Spokane.

"From the time I was a kid, I always wanted to create something special right here in Soap Lake," she says as she holds court in her corner at Don's.

She created it across the street - the Notares Inn, a complex of rustic cabins constructed of huge spruce logs - enough virgin timber to make a Sierra Clubber cry. Each of its 23 warm rooms has its own unique floor plan and theme. There is the John Wayne Room, with arrows in the walls, a rope swing and a loft; the Charlie Russell Room, for the Western artist, decorated with Russell prints, petrified wood and agates; the Outlaw Room, with prison bars and wanted posters; and so forth.

Next door is the Soap Lake Businessman's Club, the state's last members-only "bottle club," a throwback to post-Prohibition blue laws. Romary decorated the club in the same Western motif, then lured the perfect headliner to its stage. Bonnie Guitar, the country crooner whose 1950s hit "Dark Moon" made her a celebrity, found true happiness performing a permanent gig at the south end of Soap Lake. The singer retired recently after 12 years on that stage, having helped turn it into a regional institution.

Romary's multifaceted business continues to draw loyal fans from across the state, breathing new life into an old resort. Recently, a Seattle-area couple has renovated a handsome river-rock building next door to Marina's place, and opened the equally charming Inn at Soap Lake. There are a couple of other clean motels in town, plus a larger resort on the north end of the lake, catering mostly to Winnebagos.

"Soap Lake can now offer comfortable rooms and good food year-round," Romary says. "You start with that, but we still need something more - a real resort-quality spa."

IF ROMARY IS SOAP LAKE'S first citizen, its second was the ultimate eccentric - Sam Israel. The late Jewish immigrant spent a lifetime leveraging a cobbler's skills into a vast real-estate empire that spans much of the state. He already owned buildings in downtown Seattle when he discovered Soap Lake, whose dramatic landscape reminded him of his native Isle of Rhodes. He started buying land and in 1961 moved to a ranch on a hill overlooking the lake.

In time, Israel became a legend, driving around town in a war-surplus Jeep, living in a gloomy one-room shack instead of the never-completed ranch house next door, his vast acreage littered with rusting vehicles and stacks of seemingly useless stuff bought from government surplus sales.

By the time he died three years ago at age 95, Israel owned 17,000 acres of Eastern Washington - wheat fields, scab land, the entire western shore of Soap Lake and more than one-third of the land in the town itself.

Today, Israel's legacy is a huge question mark. On one hand, all those acres of mostly dormant land contribute to the local sense of despair, but they also pose a rare opportunity.

The latter is what excites Charles Wilson, a Bellevue consultant who has been assessing that property for Samis Land Company, which now controls Israel's real-estate empire. Wilson has combed through records, explored hundreds of parcels and conjured up a vision: Washington state's first, highfalutin destination resort, sprawling along the sudsy shores of, yup, Soap Lake.

OK, even some locals are skeptical. The guy suffers from an overdose of mineral water, buerger's disease of the brain.

Yet, holding forth with Marina Romary at a corner table at Don's, Wilson is persuasive.

Washington state is flanked by world-class resorts like Sun Valley and Whistler Mountain, he says. But none in our own state. A successful destination resort requires lots of land within three hours' drive of a major market. It needs a "contemplative environment," with plenty of sunshine, and a variety of amenities such as golf, skiing, water sports. It needs a sense of place, plus all the requisite sewers and electricity and water. "And," Wilson adds, "it should have differentness."

Sites west of the Cascades are too wet, too gray and too seasonal, he says. Soap Lake, however, has a desert climate - 7 inches of rain per year (about the same as Phoenix) and 300 days of sun. It has hot summers, cold winters and mild temperatures in the shoulder seasons. It is just three hours' drive from Seattle, with an Ephrata airport capable of handling big jets. It is not ski country, but the coulee topography begs for a unique, world-class golf course. It has a real town, with real people, real history and that all-important infrastructure.

"And you want differentness? WOW!" Wilson exclaims. "This could be one of the world's great spas! Glass atriums with heated mineral water, steam baths, people sunbathing in February."

Equally important, the developer does not need to assemble any land. Sam Israel has taken care of that.

He sees Soap Lake as a mecca for aging boomers, groping for something to soothe their arthritis or psoriasis.

"You build a destination resort for tomorrow's market, not today's," he says."People are getting older. The market is changing."

So maybe Wilson is just another city slicker who drives into Soap Lake and thinks he hears voices: "Build it and they will come."

But Wilson is in the development business, and he works for an outfit that owns half the lake and a third of the town. Samis has made no decisions, but they're listening.

A FEW DAYS LATER, Darrell Sanders of Olympia helps his 70-year-old wife, Marguerite, into her wheelchair and wheels her gently out of their room at the Notares Inn, down the walkway and onto the same empty beach where Gordon Tift envisions the world's biggest rock band. At the edge of Soap Lake, he helps her to her feet, then escorts her out into the shallows.

Marguerite suffers terribly from arthritis and psoriasis, he says. They saw an ad for Soap Lake in a magazine about psoriasis and decided it was worth a try.

"The doctor wasn't for it or against it; he just told us to come on over and enjoy the sunshine," Sanders says. "Her arthritis is no better, but I swear her skin is clearing up for the first time in four or five years . . ."

As ever, it's about that water. Magic or medicine, nature or psychosemantics. Who cares? It feels good.

Ross Anderson is a reporter for The Seattle Times. Harley Soltes is Pacific Magazine's photographer.