The River under the River

April 4, 2005

The River Under the River

My last job for salary was for the City of Portland, Bureau of Buildings, Site Development Team. There were five geological and soils engineers, one landscape architect crazed by bicycle crashes (head injuries) and myself. When I moved back to Montana, the engineers wanted to come with me, but their wives wouldn’t let them. I mean, the wives were invited as well, but they said they couldn’t survive in a Montana small town because there would be no culture there. The engineers looked very sad. I asked them who picked out these wives anyway -- their mothers?

One of my best tools (I bought it myself -- the engineers didn’t know about it until I showed it to them) was “Dictionary of Geological Terms” prepared by the American Geological Institute. Anchor Books, Doubleday. Copyright 1957, 1960, 1962, 1976, 1984. ISBN 0-385-18101-9. The book is paperback and prepared “as a service of the American Geological Institute of geoscience societies united to provide information to the science community and the public.” Very much a part of the culture.

In fact, geology has had a HUGE impact on our culture, since it is one of the major narrations that explains the existence of the planet and was one of the forces that pried the fingers of European institutional religion off the way we act in the world. When religious “experts” had to resort to explaining the presence of fossils in the tops of mountains as God teasing us by making little seashells and tucking them in here and there, they were pretty much through.

This dictionary has wonderful tropes captured in words, often constructed or converted from other languages. (That’s culture.) One of my favorites is the word that means the river that runs under the rivers, parallel to it. Thalweg: from German meaning “valley way.” Not all the water is on the surface. Some of the water travels through the land underneath, especially if it’s gravel, but even on rock, water travels through the cracks. This is one of the keys to the prairie. Under the shale that sealed over the bed of the ancient inland sea on top of the ground remained another ancient inland sea, traveling through and trapped in limestone, which is nothing but the tiny shelly skeletons of sea creatures who died and sank. Tapping this underground water made irrigation possible.

These underground water ways rise and fall. Its level is called “the water horizon.” In my Saturday newspaper was a fixit article about a house built on a slab with heating vents in the ground under the slab. One morning the family heard sloshing in the vents and found them full of water -- the water horizon (they were in a valley) had risen until it had almost surfaced on the earth horizon. In the houses of this village of Valier, most people have sump pumps in their crawl spaces or basements because the water horizon, using ancient gravel moraines, can travel through the ground from the Rockies thirty miles away or from the little lake the irrigators made next to town.

My theological seminary in Hyde Park, Chicago, was also next to Lake Michigan. An underground stream/spring is directly under the massive buildiing, but the clever engineer -- who knew it would gradually destroy the building if it were resisted -- simply made a little concrete canal through the basement. The water comes in one side of the building, travels through, and exits on the other side. Water pressure, like culture, cannot be suppressed, but can be channeled.

The long gradual slant of the ancient seabed from the height of Glacier Park to the southeast corner of Montana means that all the snow water from the Rockies travels down and across to South Dakota. Some of it oozes along through the limestone under the state (popping up at Giant Springs, which is a leak in the cover) and some of it runs in streams that run more or less left to right on a map of Montana. Some of it probably gets shot into the air at Yellowstone.

The most southern stream on the Blackft reservation is Birch Creek which has Swift Dam at its head. In the 1964 flood the dam (and two others on the reservation) broke under the pressure of too much water and killed many people. While the dam was rebuilt, two temporary structures were thrown up alongside the site. One was a little shack for a watchman to live in and the other was a kind of garage-shop for working on equipment. Both of those structures are now in my backyard. They are not improving, but they are convenient. In this country wood is scarce and it paid to haul these frail buildings down out of the mountains.

When we used to fetch the grandkids from the airport in Great Falls when they came for the summer and they got impatient on the drive back to Browning (“Are we THERE yet?”), we taught them to count the creeks we crossed. First is Birch (which is the southern boundary), then the second stream is Badger Creek and the third one is Two Medicine. The farthest north is Milk River, which curves up into Canada and then comes back down, traveling east, to follow the High-Line just south of the border -- not because it wants to, but because of man-made interference (The only females involved, I’m guessing, were horses.) through flumes and canals which are now about to collapse. The thing about engineering is that you have to take into account the maintenance.

The three streams (Birch, Badger, and Two Medicine) flow through long valleys, broad enough for tipi villages to camp among the cottonwood groves that provided firewood and grassy meadows that invited grazing. These valleys were the secret of winter survival and the keeping of horses. They were not coulees enlarged over long stretches of time by erosion, but rather valleys formed by the melting of the glaciers that once covered the shoulders of the Rockies and pushed down from the north. The ice melted in huge amounts over thousands of years, repeatedly until ten thousand years ago, far more than the 1964 flood. The water pushed slush, loose rock, sediments and boulders as though in front of a bulldozer, all heading down to the southeast until the Missouri River intercepted them and carried the water to the Mississippi and down to the Gulf of Mexico. The whole inland sea became a draining system that was also -- in reverse -- a highway for humans to ascend.

This “highway” had a great deal to do with the fate of the people who lived in Montana already and also those who came later. One didn’t have to walk to Blackft country once the steamboats were traveling up and down between New Orleans and Fort Benton, where they were stopped by the Great Falls. Brother Van, an inspired Methodist missionary not unlike Pope John-Paul in some ways, came to Fort Benton on a steamboat, stepped off into the gumbo, and struggled across the street to a plank sidewalk in front of a saloon. He estimated that by then each foot weighed fifty pounds. He went straight inside where the men were carousing and began to preach and organize hymn singing. I’ve always wondered whether he took the time to scrape the gumbo off his boots or whether he just began his mission in his sock feet. I’m betting on the latter.