"OPPORTUNITY, MONTANA" by Brad Tyer

“Opportunity, Montana” by Brad Tyer showed up on a list of “best” books about small towns, but it turns out not to be that at all.  The sub-title is the real story:  “Big Copper, Bad Water, and the Burial of an American Landscape.”  It’s the same carpet-bagger environmentalist account of the relationship between Butte and Missoula, the two towns that in my opinion are the LEAST like Montana towns.  The short version is that Butte, that rough and brawling big pit of minesmen and extractors, dumped all their poisonous left-overs downriver onto the humanities university town, which managed to make a LOT of money for William Clark, first by digging up the metal, then by getting the contract to haul it all back upstream and dump it on nearby “Opportunity” where it will gradually seep downstream into Missoula again.

Tyer’s website is http://www.bradtyer.com/Brad_Tyer_Portfolio/Front_Page.html

Mixed with this scandalous but hardly unusual or unknown display of opportunism are two other threads:  Tyer’s love of canoeing rivercourses and his attempt to love his overbearing and right wing father whose style seems quite like that of William Clark.  The father made his living by treating sewage.  “Shit Creek” is often mentioned in this book, though it’s mostly description and metaphor rather than geography.  The photo of Tyler on the dust jacket shows a man in front of a storm with a bunched-up, determined face.  A professional journalist, he has now gone back to Texas where he came from.  Group him with Rick Bass (also from Texas) and Richard Manning who writes this kind of book.  Manning’s wife, Tracy Stone-Manning also an environmentalist, was interviewed for this book.

So if I’m highly resistant to both Butte and Missoula for opposite reasons, annoyed by both their pride of being so rough and their pride of being so smooth, then why did I bother to read this book?  To be a good citizen in a little town like Valier, one needs to take an interest in both old sewer systems and new treatment lagoons.  Valier’s sewage lagoon just passed its water quality test without violations for the second month in a row.  We’ve had an aeration problem which will cost big bucks to remediate.  It takes a whole day once a month to work through the protocols for collection of samples to send the state for testing.  The penalties are severe and the standards keep rising.  It means money.  The other reason I pay attention is that I worked for the City of Portland Bureau of Buildings where my consciousness was raised to the point where I never see a settlement without wondering where things come in, where things go out, and what the ground is like.  Sustainability in small towns is often just a matter of pride rather than practicality.  People move here thinking it will be cheap.  Little do they know.

There is a tendency in America -- from the very beginning and probably even among Indian tribes in the old days -- to seek salvation by place.  “Somewhere a place for us,” the lovers sing.  Over and over the romantics imagine grand Montana, arrive, and are disillusioned.  The trope is Montana horizons painted on the sides of the screeching Chicago El cars.  Newcomers are good for Montana, since they bring money and skills -- unless they are moguls of extractive industries and their methods are ruthless.   It’s still possible to raid the land.  Heightened consciousness about grasslands to the east of the Rockies will take a while longer since soil erosion and drought are a little more subtle than hard-rock mining with dynamite.  The importation of muscle from Europe is not so necessary, so the ferment of politics is also a little slower.  But it’s there.  Brian Schweitzer, our former governor, is working on it.  Unclear which side he’s on.  Richard Manning’s book, Grassland, sketches it out.  Manning has no website, but he’s on YouTube  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0xvyRd-uVqM

There’s also this parallel idea about “salvation by book.”  It’s not the same as writing “the Great American Novel,” but something more like progressive era pride in muck-raking -- in this case literal.  Tyer helps us with short lyric passages on the land or in the water.  Even so, there are sometimes moments when one just wants to roll up in a ball and deny the whole thing.

Also, there is an abiding notion of “salvation by future generations” which, of course, is followed by a desire to control because what’s salvation if it’s on some kind of foreign terms?  Or even a denial, like those of us now looking at the destruction of the Berkeley Pit and a landscape of “slickens”, poisonous sediments from mining, and cursing the memory of William Clark.  What good was the money?  Clark’s last heir was a reclusive old woman living in a hospital while her inherited mansions went empty and her fortunes were managed by lawyers, the chief beneficiaries.  At least Tyer, not inheriting any money, was sharpened by the conflict with his father into a willingness to look closely at ugliness and power.  His results will help us all if we can uncurl and think about it.

“Salvation” -- secular as well as religious -- is often defined by perpetuity, the idea that we can have things the same forever if we can just get control.  But now the idea has changed to participation, the evidence being that we exist as part of a complex, interacting whole.  We are not significant units of life that ought to be eternally preserved, but rather small forces that can influence everything to which we are connected.  Tyer doesn’t suggest what we ought to do.  It doesn’t seem as though anyone really knows.  Nor does he seem to grasp the idea that the earth cannot be destroyed -- just changed enough to eliminate humans.  It already makes us very uncomfortable.

Just the same, the evidence gathered into this dossier needs to be recorded and included by the rest of us: a salvation by book, place and generations as we all work forward in our persistent way.  In time the accumulation of the evidence may open the way we need to go before it is too late -- not for the planet, but for ourselves.