“That to which you are blind, will bite you in the behind.” That’s the motto I commend to the climate change deniers. A few people are feeling teeth marks right now. It’s not JUST climate change but also deniers of the past in many of its aspects.
My two outbuildings, a double-garage that is half-shop and a little “hired man” bunkhouse, were trucked thirty miles to this town lot after the rebuilding of Swift Dam, so they’ve been here about thirty years, the last ten with me in residence. They were built to be temporary and show it. I was in Browning when this flood hit and have told the story on other posts.
“Swift Dam (National ID # MT00581) is a dam in Pondera County, Montana, on the southern end of the Blackfeet Indian Reservation.
“The original dam at this location was originally constructed around 1910, with a height of 157 feet. This structure gave way on June 10, 1964, after heavy rains caused flooding on Birch Creek. The dam collapsed and sent a 30-foot wall of water down the creekbed. The nearby dam at Lower Two Medicine Lake also failed, and at least 28 people were killed.
"The current concrete-arch structure was completed in 1967, with a height of 205 feet, and a length at its crest of 573 feet. The reservoir is also contained by a secondary earthen dike (National ID # MT00580) with a height of 53 feet and a length of 457 feet, also completed in 1967. The dams and reservoir are owned and operated by the local Pondera Canal & Reservoir Company."
This past Sunday the Great Falls Tribune (April 21, 2013) front page story was about this same Company. ponderacanalcompany.com/ If you go there, you will find the bare outlines of the founding story. The names are local names (Stokes, Wheeler, Christiaens, Connelly) and so is the name of the family who has brought this system to crisis, Gene and Cheryl Curry. The originators of the company were the Conrad brothers, young survivors of the Civil War who came to this area to get rich and did, earlier with open range cattle. I’ve posted about the flood, about the Conrads, and about some of the history of the Town of Valier. I’ve even posted about the Foley Report, which itemizes the many ways that the US Government was supposed to be developing irrigation on the Blackfeet Reservation but didn’t. Ivan Doig has written a novel about the building of the dam (“The Whistling Season”) and Sid Gustafson is writing about the actual flood in a novel called “Swift Dam.” Both men have local roots.
Bob Scriver (my deceased ex) used to say “people will do whatever they can do.” So the Conrads built Swift Dam without asking permission, didn’t bother with the rights of the Blackfeet, made their money, sold to Cargill and got out. They are now an international, bi-coastal, sophisticated family -- not because of the money, but because the money let them find elegant and educated wives. Think “Downton Abbey.”
A clerk at Curry’s, the only grocery store left in Valier, is a retired ditch rider from the Canal Company. I asked whether he started his career on horseback, but he’s not THAT old. He said the real change came with the big “circle” irrigating systems, huge wheeled industrial-scale pumps and sprays that are far beyond a ditch that a guy goes along on a 4-wheel all-terrain vehicle with a shovel and some plastic tarp dams. But he’s only half-right. The real change came when enough Blackfeet had gone to college for the tribe to read its treaty rights and to pencil out the profits from circle pump irrigation. The first reservation irrigation canals had been dug with horse teams and “scrapers” -- sometimes even by married couples with hand shovels trying to get water to their garden patches. Since then they had slumped, been invaded by brush, and the proper paperwork was lost. One of my own favorite sayings is “to get something done, first you have to think of it.” They did. Suddenly they saw that their half of the water rights in Birch Creek were literally going south.
The Curry family is known as aggressive and political. Sometimes they just fired up the heavy machinery and took the water they wanted, and other times they went to court. If the original Conrads had been involved, there might have been a shooting war, but now it just means nasty dynamics among people whose best chance for survival is to get along. Of course, the lawyers are doing well.
What we’re really talking about is the remnants of the great North American glaciers of ten thousand years ago that built this land, carrying in soil and gravel from far to the north, building up unimaginable amounts of ice in the Rocky Mountains, and then melting so quickly that it dug waterways, including Birch Creek which is the boundary between the Blackfeet Reservation and Pondera County. That’s the real canal and irrigation system. Every year the farmers watch the snowpack levels, hoping they will provide enough renewed run-off to fill Lake Francis and water the fields. Every year, regardless of rainfall or snowfall, the glaciers that have been the backup systems since the Blackfeet were dog people are a little smaller, a little higher, a little thinner. The huge aquifer under Montana that holds whatever glacier melt sank underground gets a little more depleted every year.
The only way to renew it is to bring back the continental glaciers. That will probably happen eventually, but there may not be any humans here to witness it. We are creatures of the earth’s surface and have developed to fit it, but that means that since the crust shrugs and shrinks and splits on a scale far beyond our control, that we occasionally come to grievous harm. Sometimes its fast, like an earthquake or volcanic eruption, but other time it’s a slow change like this one we’ve brought on ourselves with our emissions and irrigations.
We humans keep trying to find strategies: we divvy up the territory into districts, we issue shares to companies and describe rights, we delve into history and tell stories about who did what, we try to exclude some of the parties involved -- but always the driving force is control, profit, like a consuming fire generating black-hearted smoke. People think they can move to Valier and find a calm, safe place to live next to a pretty little lake. Illusion. Always the illusions.
I had the idea that my little bunkhouse would be a fun place for company to sleep. They find it too primitive by half. I thought I might develop a kind of studio in the big building, but the roof is caving. Always the plans. Always the potential.
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