Seeking miracles in the minerals
Immigrants find comfort and community at Soap Lake

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By Tyrone Beason
Seattle Times staff reporter

PHOTOGRAPHS BY ALAN BERNER / THE SEATTLE TIMES Igor Rybakov, left, and Alex Naydenov slathered themselves in mud from Soap Lake. Many believe the pungent black stuff promotes good health and cures ailments.

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SOAP LAKE, Grant County — Some nonbelievers may roll their eyes at the mention of Soap Lake's reputed healing powers, a gift of geology that left an embarrassment of minerals in its saline waters and underlying black mud.

But don't count Valentin Naidenov, his family and dozens of other immigrants from the former Soviet Union who flock to this oasis south of Grand Coulee Dam each summer, among them.

A day spent caked in the tarlike, viscous mud is said to calm everything from rheumatoid arthritis to psoriasis, while fortifying nerves and strengthening bones.

And on any day of the week during the summer high season, the Slavic cadences of Russian and Ukrainian can be heard on Soap Lake's two ash-colored beaches, where grandmas in headscarves unselfconsciously slather mud on their knees and elbows near teens playing volleyball in Bermuda shorts.

"This side of the beach is like, 85 percent Russian," Naidenov said as he stood on the western beach in Soap Lake, which is separated from the eastern beach by a small outcropping. He started visiting Soap Lake in 1991.

Soap Lake, its alkalinity making it the consistency of a baby-oil-infused bath, its mud the odor of rotten eggs, has always been a haven for people willing to travel great distances to experience its legendary health effects.

	Nadia Nechanu's husband, Pavel, and granddaughter Irina Baga apply mud to help Nechanu's skin condition and swollen joints.

In the early 20th century, Soap Lake boasted the Siloam Sanatorium, where "miracle" cures were enthusiastically hyped in the Wenatchee Daily World. The headline in a June 1917 edition on display at the Soap Lake visitors' center reads: "Cured! That's the story told by thousands all over the West. Soap Lake did it!"

There are legends about Native Americans sending their sick to bathe in the Great Spirits' "smokiam," or healing waters; cowboys hitching up here in pioneer days; and turn-of-the-century "scenesters" restoring themselves at local health spas. The 21st century is bringing Eastern European immigrants with their own spiritual attachment to the lake.

"Years ago it was empty," Naidenov recalled. "But it has become more and more popular."

Town boosters have worked so hard to revive Soap Lake with a proposed giant lava lamp for the city's main street that the Russians and Ukrainians and Kazakhs who started coming here in the 1990s have slipped in without much fanfare.

They are part of the Fourth Wave of immigrants from cities such as Kiev, the capital of Ukraine, who came to the United States after the fall of the Soviet Union, reshaping whole neighborhoods in Edmonds, Bellevue, Kent and Federal Way. Now they are reshaping Soap Lake, a sleepy town of about 1,700 people and 100 hotel rooms that has been a spa resort for more than a century.

Naidenov, a Russian building engineer who lives in Kent, just bought a house near the lake so his family would have its own place to sleep after making the nearly 200-mile trek to Eastern Washington.

Naidenov, who worked as a miner in Russia, says swimming in the lake helps relieve his backaches. For him, the healing power of Soap Lake occupies a reassuring slot beside cold science, personal experience and faith.

"There's nothing like this lake," Naidenov insisted. "It's a miracle from God."

	ALAN BERNER / THE SEATTLE TIMES Galena Boychska, left, enjoys Soap Lake with Anna and Nikolai Makrov of Moses Lake. "This water is ibuprofen," says Anna Makrov, who also calls the lake a miracle from God.

The last ice age, which flooded the rich volcanic soil in the Lower Grand Coulee basin more than 10,000 years ago, is equally responsible.

The two-mile lake contains a primordial soup of salt, baking soda, potassium, sulfate, nitrogen, fluoride, calcium, iron, copper, lithium and titanium, all at such singular levels that scientists have studied the lakebed to better understand what soil must be like on other planets.

It's a cocktail from the heavens, if not heaven.

"I'm not surprised at all that you would have this move toward Soap Lake once you had a suggestion that there was something special about the mud and the water," said Eugene Lemcio, a New Testament professor at Seattle Pacific University and co-chairman of the Ukrainian Studies Endowment at the University of Washington.

He estimated that 30,000 Ukrainians live in Washington state, mostly west of the Cascades but also in more central cities such as Moses Lake. The Russian consulate estimates that 40,000 Russian-speaking people live in Washington state.

Lemcio said natural medicines, such as herbs and minerals, are widely accepted in places like Ukraine. And it's common, he said, for the more pious immigrants to explain that God led them out of the former Soviet Union to the United States, where they can finally practice their religion without fear.

Perhaps God — but certainly a yearning for community in healing — led many of them to Soap Lake.

Swimming is believing

Vladimir Yakimov of Kent brought his 75-year-old father, Leonid, to Soap Lake for a respite from the South End hospital where he convalesces.

	Vladimir Yakimov of Kent swims in Soap Lake and also smears its mud on his arthritic shoulder. A former Soviet soldier, Yakimov brought his ailing 75-year-old father to the lake.

Leonid, a diabetic with high blood pressure and stomach cancer, rested under a blue and white umbrella, his pant legs rolled up to reveal swollen feet and ankles plastered in mud and wrapped tightly with plastic shopping bags. His swollen right hand soaked in a tub of lake water.

The younger Yakimov, a soldier in the former Soviet Union who sported a straw cowboy hat even when he swam, had smeared mud on his right shoulder to treat his arthritis.

He said he knows people who drink the lake water to soothe stomach problems, even treat cancer. Yakimov is a churchgoing man, as are many of the immigrants who come to Soap Lake. His faith in the water and the mud at Soap Lake is very much tied to his faith in God.

"Every day I go to church," he said. "Every day I pray to Jesus."

When asked which is better for his ailments — prayer or Soap Lake — Yakimov blurted, "The same! Jesus and the water help."

Sergiy Pakhnyuk, who moved from Kiev to Bellingham five months ago, said he and his uncle, Nikolay, were on a five-day vacation. Nikolay was caked in the ash-toned mud from face to waist. His legs were covered too. He wore a big straw hat to block the sun.

Pakhnyuk said he uses the lake's rich mud to alleviate pain and swelling in his elbows and knees.

The healing will kick in eventually, he promised. "Maybe next week, or next month, it will be better," he said, laughing. "Or next year!"

	Some Soap Lake visitors maximize their experience by burying themselves in mud topped with beach sand. They later rinse off in the lake.

Nikolay, the uncle, slathered a black clump of mud across his chest. "Same day is good," he said. The mud is more potent when it's applied fresh from the bottom of the lake.

Igor Rybakov, a dark-haired 17-year-old from Wenatchee, relaxed on the sand with two other teens and relayed a story about a friend of his grandmother's who took vacations to the lake over a two-year period.

"My grandmother's friend, she couldn't walk," he said. "After coming here every day, she got up and walked."

Stories like this abound at Soap Lake.

One of Rybakov's beach mates, Larisa Naydenova, 16, of Moses Lake, acknowledged there are plenty of skeptics.

"A lot of people don't believe in this," she said. "They think, 'I'll just take a pill' " for what ails them. Naydenova said she applied some mud to a skin rash she recently had and the condition cleared up right away.

Anna Makrov of Moses Lake, who drove over with her husband Nikolai earlier in the day, praised the lake's effects on inflammation: "This water is ibuprofen," she said, smiling.

Nikolai said swimming in the lake has relieved pain in his 65-year-old Kazakh muscles and bones. But the trick, he explained, is to soak in the water repeatedly, not just once or twice.

"A quiet, nice life"

The alkaline waters of Soap Lake don't support much life. No fish inhabit the lake and hardly a shrub grows near it.

	Members of the Baga family from Kent let the mud dry as they rest on a floating platform in Soap Lake.

But the Russians, Ukrainians and Kazakhs who come here more than compensate, bringing a sense of community, liveliness and perhaps lasting change to a town praying for better days.

Wading into the bath-warm lake, Naidenov plunged his palms into it and started scrubbing his hair to demonstrate why this body of water surrounded by golden brown cliffs is called "Soap" Lake. The high concentration of sodium bicarbonate creates a lather not unlike shampoo.

Naidenov said he has found a second home in Soap Lake, not just a summer house.

"This is the future — not Seattle," he said. "To live a quiet, nice life. It's here."

As the orange sun dipped below the canyon, smoldering forest fires in the distance produced an otherworldly yellow-gray haze over the remaining bathers.

The following day, the noon sun quickly pushed the temperature past 90, but the lake was still pleasantly warm.

Alex Baga of Kent had brought his Ukrainian family to the lake. More than a dozen siblings and cousins swam out to a platform in the lake, dove down to gather clumps of black mud from the bottom and piled it next them, before slicking themselves in it. After a while, they'd take a dip, clean off and reapply.

At the water's edge, the family matriarch, Nadia Nechanu, sat in her wheelchair as her husband, Pavel, and her teenage granddaughter, Irina Baga, patted mud onto her arms, shoulders, legs and upper back.

The mud provided comfort for her skin condition and swollen joints.

Her doting loved ones took care of the rest.

Tyrone Beason: 206-464-2251 or tbeason@seattletimes.com

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company
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