LOVE IT OR HATE IT, HARD TO LEAVE TOWN

When this was Scriver Museum of Montana Wildlife, 

I had a room in the gable nearest.

“Brown Town,” Browning, Montana, is the capital of the Blackfeet Reservation and roughly in the middle of the very large (50 miles on each side) reservation that is partly in the Rocky Mountain foothills (Glacier National Park was ripped out of the West side) and partly stretched out to the oil and grain plains where Cut Bank did a little pushback in order to dominate the only part of Glacier County that’s not rez, because they wanted to be the county seat.  There are three resort towns in the foothills (East Glacier, St. Mary’s, and Babb), one town in Pondera County (Heart Butte), one not-quite-town (Starr School), and a lot of “population centers” where the housing projects have created clusters.  

The town was the third of a series of Indian Agencies, beginning in Fort Benton and hopscotching north as local whites wanted the good grazing land and the tribe was reduced to maybe 500 people by then.  So Choteau was the agency, then “Old Agency,” which fell back to being a population cluster, and finally Browning.  Government Square was laid out to be a parade ground for cavalry horseback exercises because in those days all Indians were supervised by the Department of War and the agents were military.
  

"I bless you, my friend!"

Unfortunately, the military man who chose the location of Browning was inspired by the beauty of the wildflowers, which was created by Willow Creek feeding a swamp.  If there’s a lot of rainfall and runoff, the swamp comes back despite a webwork of drainage lines under the town.  It’s old broken tile and no one kept maps.  Luckily, the schools and the hospital are located on ridges at either edge of Browning.  If the location were a saddle, the school would be on the swell, and the hospital would be on the cantle.  By now the population has so expanded that there is a lot of housing outside the “saddle.”

The quality of the well water was so poor that it could only be used for the vital dialysis center after a lot of work to clean it up.  (Diabetes, which requires dialysis in the last stages, is rampant on the rez.)  Management of local water is a major problem in every small town along the top half of Montana.  Snow pack is low, there’s not enough water for the population, the infrastructure is worn out, the state and federal regulators keep imposing new requirements, and the population’s average income is sinking as the town businesses leave.  At the same time, frakking has introduced a new need for huge amounts of water which are then too contaminated and salty for re-cycling.  This is a long-standing and universal problem.
  

The tipi burner at the Industrial Park.  Now gone.

In the beginning Browning had a hard time figuring out how it fit into the big picture of the reservation as a reserved (set aside) part of the state.  Like Washington, D.C., and the Vatican, it was unclear whether it WAS the state or was NOT the state.  When I came in 1961, it was considered an “island of jurisdiction”.  The earlier chaos introduced by returning and traumatized veterans from WWII and the Korean War meant that the “white” people in town had organized their own law enforcement parallel to the Tribe, which was finally no longer part of the War Department but rather the Interior Department, like trees.

If you go to my other blog, awkwardly but accurately called “Early Browning News”, at  http://browningnewspapers.blogspot.com  you’ll find notes that I took from Browning newspapers between 1806 and 1968.  It’s my understanding that Blackfeet Community College has a complete set of the Glacier Reporter, but I found at the Montana Historical Society a few newspapers that were earlier.  I commend to you the years Milo Fields was owner/editor because he was quite frank.

Main Street looking at Glacier National Park

In those days the town was not just an island of jurisdiction, thought to belong to the state of Montana,  it was white.  When I say “white,” I must note that some of the “whites” were enrolled full-bloods who were mostly culturally “white.”  They were considered dependable, honorable, and stable, which meant good business traits.  Think Masonic.  The government people were white.  The agent was white.  For a little while the feds insisted that the agent be Methodist, but that turned out to be a source of mischief, given the strength of the Catholics.  The Indian people were “oligarchies,” meaning that elite self-protective families had power.  (This is always true in tribes.)

There was another phenomenon that is now true in Valier as well.  The people with the political power, connections in Washington,DC, and deep pockets suitable for capitalism, are not ON the reservation but surround the reservation and have other interests than the rez.  They are ranchers, oil and timber interests, and -- in the case of Cut Bank -- legal manipulators.  When the government reform of Indian preference swept all the government whites (mostly educated) out of their jobs, the division between rez and Cut Bank was driven deeper.  The small business people who were white and -- anyway  -- aging, with children who had emigrated, sold if they could but mostly just ran the inventory down as low as possible and left.  The BIA and Tribe rushed in to fill the vacuum, but competed more than they cooperated.

Along the way some responsibilities of the two aspects of social infrastructure became so burdensome that they were handed over to the state, in much the same way that the public schools, family law, and some other functions became delegated or sub-contracted.  "Serious crime" had always been handled by Feds.  This complicated many situations.  When the Post-Colonial wave of thought demanded sovereignty, these complexities were not considered.  They could not be financed by the tribe alone.  Anyway, the oligarchical families tried to swallow the Tribal Council.

Before the Catholic School was built, 

this was the view from my tiny first apartment.

The water tower was taken down only days ago.

Outside intervention has been too idealistic and inexperienced (or cynical) to be entirely helpful.  Some education efforts have been VERY successful (BCC, Piegan Institute, Siyeh)/ The world scene turned to the recovery of indigenous languages, the rising respect for tradition, and the rather darker influence of AIM.  The other dark thread has been drugs, which travel the same paths as early whiskey.

Now comes a new gunslinger, Derek Kline, a newly graduated and qualified white man from Vermont Law School, Vermontlaw.edu, which is a private law school specializing in Environmental Law and proud of its “warriors” for virtue in the Post-Colonial Bio-Ethics context.  Lawyer/gunslingers are a “type” on reservations and have been from the very earliest days when designing the governmental documents and framing-up organizational structure.  Sometime look up Felix S. Cohen.  http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/?GCOI=80140100532980

In the Sixties I attended the meetings in which a governmental gunslinger (literally, since he was a cop) named Saurez closed down the town’s law and order system, replacing it with tribe and BIA.  Bob Scriver was the City Magistrate and one of the Justices of the Peace, so I had an inside view.  This government guy (FBI as there was no Homeland Security yet) assured us that this reform would be an end to the murders, abuse of women and children, and drunkenness.  Half a century has passed.  There are a lot of new buildings.  People have a lot of training.  Otherwise . . .

Indian Days

The whole world, now viewable via satellite, is struggling with these issues.  It’s not just here, not just us.  We’re looking for new guidelines, and pressing harder against the old ones.  Population growth means scarcity challenges, the gradual blurring-away of the blood quantum system, and hard questions about education that plague us.  The government would like to collapse reservations and tribes.  Attempts have failed.  Once it was suggested that the Blackfeet Reservation and Glacier County simply be conflated.  Something needs to change in the post-colonization world.  

Incidentally, Valier talks about stepping away from town status, since so much of the property has already been ceded to the county because of taxes.  There is said to be a few lots in Valier that are technically rez, since the tribal owner put them back into trust status.  How much of the property on the rez has been taken OUT of trust, but then lost to off-rez loans?  How much is now owned by Hutterite colonies?  Might they like to buy a town?  One with a royally screwed-up infrastructure snarl?

Approaching from East Glacier

THE OTHER GENE ROBINSONS

Eugene Harold Robinson

"Eugene Harold Robinson (born March 12, 1954) is an American newspaper columnist and the former assistant managing editor of The Washington Post. His columns are syndicated by The Washington Post Writers Group, and he is a member of the National Association of Black Journalists. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 2009.

"Robinson is a board member of the IWMF (International Women's Media Foundation)." 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/people/eugene-robinson

Booknotes.org  interviewed this Eugene Robinson in relationship to the publication of his book, “Coal to Cream: A Black Man’s Journey Beyond Color to an Affirmation of Race.”  The title comes from his grandparents: a very dark man and a very light woman.  He is formally addressed as “Mr.” but the transcript rather curiously put in every stutter, every misspeak, every stopandstart, of what he says. 

This Robinson grew up in an academically centered all-black community, so was only vaguely aware of color-based discrimination until he was assigned to South America as a journalist for the Washington Post.  In Argentina where he lived and Brazil where he often traveled, he became aware of how skin-color interacted with status and class assignment, splintering “black” into a lot of sub-categories, whereas in America, if you were a little bit dark, you were considered black.  This forced unity gradually became a political entity with some real power.  The book is how that happened and the people involved.

http://www.booknotes.org/Watch/153355-1/Eugene+Robinson.aspx

Rev. Eugene Robinson

The white Eugene Robinson is MORE controversial.  He is a gay man, a recovering alcoholic, married to another man for twenty years (he had been previously married to a woman and had two children with her), ordained and consecrated as a bishop, though he had to wear a bulletproof vest under his liturgical vestments at the ceremony.  The event split congregation, the American denomination, and world-wide Anglican networks, which roughly follow the British Empire.  He has resigned by now after seven years of turmoil.

He wrote two books:  “In the Eye of the Storm: Swept to the Center by God,” and  “God Believes in Love: Straight Talk About Gay Marriage.”  Basically he is defending the right of an individual to have a relationship with both "God" and social respectability while committing to an unconventional marriage that the group disapproves.  He has been a highest level religious leader, but in a small context (New Hampshire) that stood by him personally.  This is a definitively Protestant stance, which means that the Roman Catholic church and the “high” Anglican denomination find him disruptive enough to label him evil.  

What I’m seeing in these two men is a much more global tension between the individual seeking a personal stance and the category, which in terms of the black community is crucial to the preservation of power.  Since I’m currently feeling very anti-institutional and since the institutions themselves have fossilized and eroded, it seems an important issue, even a central issue to everything else, generating a host of questionnaires and theories of change.  Add in the other two Gene Robinsons, and we’ve got two more versions, one noisily (literally) counterculture and the other quietly but supportively conventional, though progressive. 

Entering Valier

Like most things in life, one must seek balance if not harmony, but how do you do that?  As a flaming liberal thinker whose lifestyle is even more conservative than this Belgian-diaspora irrigation community I live in, but who is affiliated over fifty years with the violently splintered Blackfeet rez community just to the north, and who is merely tolerant of the Southern Baptist congregation at my elbow (If only they were Progressive Baptists!), I am rather urgently pressed to work on this.

All the feminists and enviros will urge me to look to the land: identify with the larger East Slope community but it is also split -- not splintered, but cleaved between those who (religiously) think the point of human life is prosperity and those who think humans must respect their participation in the planetary interwovenness.  Prosperity is individual (unless you’re a Hutterite) and interwovenness is the ultimate in community, without limits unless you consider the planetary troposphere as the boundary.  And we must do that or suffocate ourselves.  ALL of us.

Browning, MT

This week the Eloise Cobell Trust Fund settlement checks are going out to individuals, whose financial fortunes have been separated from each other by the US Government through the Dawes Act and the imposition of the rules of property developed in Britain and spread through their pre-empted empire.  At the same time the Blackfeet Tribe is trying to consolidate and “clean house” as a community in the interest of keeping at home the profits of a new wave of oil discovery (among other things, like fighting poverty).  The next couple of years will be fascinating to watch.  It is important to realize that there are more players than the tribe at this poker table, this bone game, but that the tribe’s players are new, just elected.  The government, the corporations, the underground culture of booze and drugs, and now new categories, local academics, and check-receiving diaspora Blackfeet are all keeping time with their sticks.

At the same time, the issue presented by the land -- water produced by the Rocky Mountains -- is an uncomfortable but real unifying force.  There is a famous experiment in which two summer camps of boys were encouraged to be rivals, to strive hard against each other in competition and make that opposition central to their lives.  It worked, all too easily.  But the two camps were dependent on the same water system.  The experimenters deliberately interdicted the water in a way that could only be repaired by the cooperation of the two camps.  The boys worked together -- carrying rocks, digging, planning, joining pipes.  By the time the water was running again, the boys were a single community, connected by many small friendships.

There are two water systems originating in the East Slope: one runs north/south in a rain and snow run-off belt;  the other is man-made and runs along the boundary between Canada and the US which happens to be high land due to volcanic activity, but not high enough to draw much water.  The pipe and diversion systems run parallel to the east-west railroad which prompted settlement dependent on that water.  Now the system is aging out.

The water coming off the Rockies is regulated by water law, a water master, a water court.  The trouble is that the humans have mostly ignored it and now the differences in development between the rez and the rest must be reconciled.  It will hurt, but there are guidelines.  The water along the High-Line is dependent on non-governmental sources and one-time funds.  The two communities created by water use face different problems.

It seems to me that the same split is between human-dependent systems and land-dependent systems throughout the world.  As much as we are in tension between individual and community, we are also in tension between places that are easy to live in and places that are pretty damn tough.  But the binary is on a sliding scale.  In summer and fall the East Slope and even the High Line are wonderful windswept spaces of light and grass.  In winter you might as well be at the North Pole.  

The easier the environment, the more the emphasis can be pushed toward the self-sufficient individual.  The tougher it is, the more people must unify to address survival.  Tough social conditions produce one kind of “Gene Robinson” and clearly supportive institutions help another sort of “Gene Robinson.”   It’s the transitions and reconciliations that are turbulent.

VALIER: A SMALL BOAT IN CHOPPY WATER

Valier is a town that the last census shows is 509 people, 234 households, and 138 families.  Many of the families are interrelated and date back to 1913, when a Belgian priest, cooperating with the Great Northern Railroad and the Conrad Brothers irrigation project, came as a village group for the economic advantage of all concerned.  Before that the land had been the Conrad Brothers’ Block Hanging 7 ranch, capitalizing on open range, first sheep, then cattle. 

About a fifth of the population is under 18 and still at home.  Another fifth are 18 to 24 and fewer than a fifth between 25 and 44.  Almost a third are 45 to 64 and a little more than a fifth are over 65.  I doubt that the transient workers who bunk in Valier were counted by anyone, though the popular idea (no count available) is that rentals are impossible to find and that we’re missing out on a boom.  I see empty houses, but they aren’t necessarily fancy.
  

The school claims that it can’t find teachers because there is no housing for them.  They mean no housing that teachers would accept, because they expect what they would find near a city.  The move throughout Montana is to school-owned teacher housing, like that in Heart Butte.  At the same time the once-usual arrangement for a minister to live in a church-owned home has fallen out of favor because taking advantage of the housing bubble by accruing equity was one way for a minister to improve his or her fortunes.  This is no longer true, but most churches have sold their parsonages.  Anyway, these days small town ministers find they can only be supported by a cooperating group of congregations in various towns, so how would they know where the parsonage should be?  Would it be seen as an advantage or a burden to the hosting town’s congregation?  Ministers are now much less invested in providing a force for good in the whole community -- there just isn’t enough time or gas money.  No priest or pastor lives in Valier.  (I am retired.)

But the biggest problem of all these high prairie shrinking towns is infrastructure, most crucially the water system, the basic stems of which were installed as long as a hundred years ago when the technology for sewer lines was basically asphalt-saturated cardboard.  Legally required standards for sewage lagoons are rising and remedies are expensive.  Towns must send elaborate samples for testing and if they do not, or if the samples show below standard results, there are penalties.  

e. coli

Valier’s lagoon, which was recently expanded in hopes of a growing population, has been failing the tests.  The diagnosis was that the water was freezing (temps go to sub-zero), so the “bugs” weren’t digesting microbes.  The solution suggested is floating covers ballasted with tubes of sand and buoyant with forced aeration.  The state has given the town an exemption from penalties based on the intention to do this.  Of course, it will have to be paid for.  The present Mayor and town council have been pretty resourceful about getting grants and loans, but ag-acculturated people here are wary both about any debt and about any government body.

In fact, this is dry land farming country where some farmers have no wells, so must truck water from the city source.  They pay city rates for the water but there is no cost to the town for trucking it home to their cisterns.  The first sound I hear on waking is heavy trucks with water tanks going up my street to a hydrant.  The town’s wells have been low in recent years, so -- after some difficulty -- another well and a new water tower were added at considerable cost.  This was in part a response to an engineering firm that made a pitch for the necessity.  The clinching argument was that if the school were to catch on fire there was not enough water in the system to put it out. (A few years ago some local high school girls pushed a dumpster against the school wall and set it ablaze.) The new Mayor Elect claimed that the construction of the water tower was so deficient that it would fall over, but he was merely a citizen then.  (Of course, he will continue to be merely a citizen until January 1, 2014.)

The rising town fees, combined with the contentious national atmosphere, have put our teakettles a-boil.  To the rescue came the Mayor Elect, whose platform was to throw the criminals and exploiters out, though he had no proof that anyone was either committing crimes or taking advantage.  (IMHO, if he was saying this he is vulnerable to lawsuits for libel, but the idea plays well.)  When this man first came to Valier from Conrad, his idea of how to solve the water shortage was to refuse to sell water to any ranch, farm, ag business or rural housing.  No more trucking water.  He never grasped the economic dimension.  Of course, none of those people vote in city elections.  In an atmosphere where people are urged to plant xeriscaped yards and watering lawns must be rationed, he has built an elaborate garden with automatic sprinklers around his new house.

The basis of a successful economy in Valier is profitable farming and ranching.  Because of the dependence on irrigation, the foundational business in town is the Pondera Canal Company, which built, owns and maintains Lake Frances, the canals it feeds, and Swift Dam, which is the source of the water.  Swift Dam is on the Blackfeet reservation but in Pondera County, not Glacier.  Now you know why Heart Butte is on the rez but in Pondera County -- it is so that Swift Dam will be in Pondera County because of the Pondera Canal Company.

This structure gave way on June 10, 1964, after heavy rains caused flooding on Birch Creek. The dam collapsed, sending a 30-foot wall of water down the creekbed, killing dozens.  (Several people have become interested in this story.)  Swift Dam was never properly authorized when built by the Conrad Brothers, who were notorious for their cavalier attitude towards regulations, particularly on the reservation.  The rumor at the time the dam broke was that it because of poor maintenance, but I never heard about lawsuits for the many deaths and damage.  The Curry family, which owns several Valier businesses -- including the sole gas station -- but lives outside the city limits, has sued the Canal company in Water Court.  http://courts.mt.gov/content/water/wc2006-01  I don’t think there’s a decision yet. 

Ice Fishing Shacks on Frozen Lake Francis

Migratory Birds on Lake Frances in Fall

Water use rights are granted by “first use” and upstream location.  Irrigation of the reservation land contiguous with Pondera County has never been allotted according to the law because no one on the rez side was using it.  Now, however, with advent of pivot post irrigation, it is wanted and needed on that side.  This is such a hot issue that it could easily end up triggering violence.  Clearly, when all is sorted out, the Pondera Canal Company probably will be entitled to much less water, which means that some farming will be much less profitable and some will go bankrupt. 

Valier's water comes from wells, not the lake.  Valier is a small boat in this storm surge and the victims, as usual, will be the people quietly living here in a Fifties sort of illusion, hoping the fees don’t go up too much, working so hard and long that they have no time or energy to show up for town meetings, and constantly suspecting that all the corrupt political things they see on television are absolutely true and coming closer.  Many are aging or have health issues.

The Town Hall and Office.  

These trees have been removed because they were undermining the building,

 but it caused a firestorm of public protest.

The council will have decisions to make that involve more and bigger issues than ever before.  Delicate negotiations and a head for legal matters will be vital.  Luckily, the mayor has no vote and no power to do more than implement as directed by the council.  A town is a co-operative, with every voting member being responsible for outcomes, even legal liability.  Whatever the penalties, we will all pay them.  Yet the first reflex of most people is to pull back, gossip in an ineffective effort to find out what’s going on, and accuse individuals when it all goes wrong.  They obsess about what they understand: dust, potholes and chickens.  The rest is just too hard.

RUMORS AND STRUGGLES

In a little town like Valier there are only 400 + citizens but fairly substantial amounts of money to manage.  Crime, though forecast, has not materialized.  The most common violence is someone crashing into a deer on the highway.  This sometimes deceptive peacefulness is partly due to the lack of bars so that belligerents go to the nearby towns that DO have a high incidence of public violence.  (We have an occasional incident of domestic violence.)  Anyway, most people are busy making a living and are from sturdy Belgian stock that mind their own business. And yet dealing with troublemakers and obstructionists at town council meetings is a constant problem.

Maintaining self-government in a small town in a time of anxiety and polarization has become difficult everywhere, esp. since the towns of the Montana High-Line were built-out about a hundred years ago when the open range was fenced off.  Infrastructure is in dire need of renewal.  Even the trees planted then are about aged out, whether cottonwoods or elms.  Since this is true of most of the small towns across Montana, the state is hard-pressed to help out, but they do offer grants and loans.  At the same time, technology has changed, standards have changed, organizational structures probably need to change, and the demographics of the state skew to the elderly.  The bottom line in all this is paperwork -- a LOT of paperwork.  

Valier has been through several phases since 1999 when I moved back here.  At that time we had a patriarchal mayor who had been unchallenged for a long time until he too finally aged out on the job, leaving a lot of undone and difficult issues in a semi-collapsed town.  Velda Loch stepped in as the next mayor.  She is a skillful woman with a lot of connections, a “people-person,” who worked with state and federal grant agencies to catch up.  However health issues forced her back off.

The next mayor was a newcomer, Mackenzie Grey, with quite a different style since she was from the urban Northwest.  A computer adept, she was able to navigate the mounds of technicalities necessary to secure grants.  About the same time a man arrived from the same area, but with much less grasp of what was essential or useful.  His contribution was that he had run a sprinkler business and so realized that a hydrant used for major truckloads of ag herbicide and pesticide mixing had no backflow valve on it, and in fact the same water line also fed into the schools.  Under the right conditions, the entire school population could be poisoned.  This was immediately rectified and the county stepped in to stop the storage of the toxins in town.  However, the trucks still use the hydrant.  As it turned out, this citizen also lacked a mental “backflow device” and has returned to address the council again and again with misunderstandings, technicalities, confusions and accusations, evidently hoping to match his first success.  I’m watching “Deadwood” in the evenings and often hear the echo.

The town employees, often caught in the middle, began to be stirred up.  The cry of “throw incumbents out,” which seems to some to be the sovereign remedy for everything in some minds, found voters.  The town councilmen, after the election, were newly chosen major business owners determined to get a grip on the situation.  They squeezed hard but results were not what they expected.  The situation exploded.  Lawyers appeared.  Councilmen realized they could be sued and disappeared.  A new council was formed -- with difficulty.  No one wanted to walk into such a storm.  Except Mr. Know-It-All with his charts and databases and accusations.

Engineering projects were his meat and he pored over spreadsheets and maps to find new shortfalls, diversions, and failures to take his investment advice.  In fact, some of the engineers did fell short and there was conflict with the mayor.  The sewage lagoon “bugs” failed to perform, the wells were getting perilously low and their walls were caving in, the sewer “lining” turned out to be troublesome, and so on.   We were told we needed a new watertower.   At the same time some citizens wanted the town more “civilized,” meaning no chickens or horses and constant spraying of dandelions and mosquitoes.  “Green” meant to them only square lawns of a specific height.  They were not interested in any other issues except the streets.  They demand urban-quality streets with curbs.  People who think they can move here to find peace and quiet are sadly mistaken.  Instead the movement was for vigilantes to patrol the streets at night and for ladies to take shooting lessons.  Too much television all the way around.

A possible oil boom hasn’t materialized.  No one pays any attention to the wind farm just a couple of miles out of town, nor the grain elevator that looks to be closed down in favor of a much larger operation in Conrad.  There IS a bit of excitement about the Pondera Canal Company water rights, which were not historically allocated according to the law and treaties.  When the water is re-allocated, the PCC will take a loss that -- combined with drought and the failure of snowpack to form -- will put some people out of business.  All of this is almost too scary to think about except in the brash, swaggering terms of old guys who feel they’ve seen it all.

Since I’ve been watching “Deadwood” but not liking it, I was relieved that Keith Carradine says it’s NOT a Western.  Indeed, David Milch (the originator) made his bones writing about Manhattan cops, though he was collaborating with Steve Bochco who was not so literarily pretentious and knew his territory personally.  In fact, “Deadwood” was supposed to have been about ancient Rome, but another series (cleverly called “Rome”)  bumped it over to South Dakota.  Clearly, Swearingin (who was an actual historical person) is an alter-ego for Milch, who even looks a little like him.  Swearingen’s character is as amoral as Milch’s, a movie director intent on control and profit through sensationalism, thinly disguised by undergrad philosophy and a lot of pseudo-Shakespearean language.  He claims deep research and historical accuracy -- but all concerned emphasize that there is really no way to KNOW how things were.  The story, like every story is a mirror of the storyteller.  And just so is Valier a mirror of its citizens, actual not-yet-historical people struggling to sort out what to do and interacting -- sometimes with considerable skill and success and other times making each other miserable.  Sometimes we could use a better script, and sometimes it is the fault of the actors.  No one seems to be directing and why should they?

Coincidentally, someone sent me evidence of a town problem that the council never could resolve but that time solved for them: a paranoid schizophrenic holed up in a collapsing old warehouse with an uncountable number of feral cats who posted about black box cars on the elevator spur that were equipped with iron shackles and chains for use in a FEMA emergency.  He often noted black helicopters rising from the depths of Lake Francis alongside the town.  He aged out.  Time presents problems, but it removes them as well.  Even broken treaties.

NOTES ON THE '64 FLOOD

CLIMATE

There are no mountains that go east/west on the North American continent, so arctic air can easily travel down the continent.  In fact, the Rocky Mountains guide it along the east side of the range.   At the same time, wet air comes in from the Pacific Ocean and piles up on the west side of the range where it must drop moisture in order to be light enough to cross the mountains.  When it does, if it meets cold air, it almost explodes snow.  This snow is “money in the bank” for growing things, because it melts down the east side until late into the summer.  In fact, the “savings account” becomes glaciers.  But prairie summer rain moisture, after the spring monsoons, stays in the rivers and streams and quickly runs off.

These waterways are highways or at least guide paths for travel, even when they are too shallow for boats.  They also become “long towns,” that is, settlements along the edges where it is cool and there is forage.  Even in winter that’s where the trees and shelter are.  BUT the rivers on the rez run at the bottom of deep coulees with steep sides, originally dug by catastrophic floods when the major North American glaciers melted.  The entire coulee bottoms are fertile and relatively flat because they are flood plains.  The only trouble with flood plains is during the flood, but that problem was solved for the nomadic peoples living in portable shelters -- they just went up top for a while.

DAMS

Euro culture and Meso-American culture learned to impound water behind dams, an engineered version of snow-pack glaciers, so that the water could be piped up to the dry land in order to raise bigger crops.  Sometimes the dams could also impound energy to drive turbines.  The early dams on the Blackfeet rez included Swift at the headwaters of Birch Creek, Two Medicine above East Glacier, and Sherburne in the St. Mary’s Valley.  Irrigation was the Big Promise for the reservation but as the Foley Report showed, it was never properly developed.  The Conrad brothers, who built Swift Dam without much attention to permits and other legalities, were the first to exploit a system of canals that really worked.  Lake Francis is part of their system and also supports boating and fishing.    All three dams were earthen, built by piling up dirt.  They had provision for emergency water release but in 1964 they didn’t work either due to lack of maintenance or because no one was there to operate the mechanism.

The first failure was in the St. Mary system and undermined the highway built along the flood plain, so that a man in a pickup was swept in and drowned.  That system drains north and is problematic now, not because of floods but because it would take water into Canada if it were not diverted back into the United States where it is a crucial water supply for people living along the “Hi-line” of what was originally the Northern Pacific Railroad.  That diversion system is beginning to fail and repair will be costly, but the alternative is to close down farms and towns.

Most of the boundaries of the Blackfeet reservation are determined by rivers, which was more convenient in the days of founding than any surveyed line.  The 49^th parallel legal boundary of the United States is the main reason the St. Marys Valley is in the United States.  Nevertheless, the boundary between Glacier National Park and the rez is the water course through the valley, including the chain of lakes.

Gradually rising water is not so damaging as “walls” of water, which kill people and animals because of their suddenness.  Witnesses to the water that came all at once down Birch Creek said it was preceded by a wall of air made visible by the dust it raised.  One person said a cow had been swept up in that preceding wind-wall and was being tossed along, tail over hoof, dead and thumping on the ground.

No one expected dams to break or even rainstorms at the level they reached that June.  School had just gotten out and the old people and children had moved to the homestead allotments at the bottom of the coulees.  There was little or no television in those days and even the radio wouldn’t transmit to many of those relatively remote places.  The alarm had to be spread by people physically going to knock on doors.  All the roads that went out across the rez were unpaved gravel -- some not even gravel.  Much of the soil along the east slope is gumbo, which is caleche, a particular kind of soil derived from volcanic emissions in the Pacific Northwest.  It is famously sticky mud when wet -- impassable except on horseback and even horses must stay on the grass or they will soon have twenty-pound feet.

ECONOMICS

Between Valier and Browning are three bridges on each of the three rivers that went wild. All were destroyed.   Browning was so isolated that grocery supplies had to come in by helicopter.  There was no way out in each of the four directions except by fording water.  The government was overwhelmed.  Once the water went back down, locals began using their farm machinery to rebuild fords and provisional bridges, but paperwork meant work was slow.  Marias Pass was a wreck, including the railroad.  From the east the train could come no closer than Shelby.  Summer tourist trade, a major source of income for the area, was stopped entirely.

The tribe now saw the wisdom of paved roads, even though the flood, hitting perpendicular, had upended paving and thrown it off the engineered right of way, one of the more spectacular sights.  So the “inside road” was paved -- going out of Browning through the railroad depot and along roughly the route of the ancient Old North Trail until it reached Heart Butte, a tiny hamlet which had been devastated by the flood.  Then the roads along Two Medicine, Badger and Birch were paved.  This meant that people who lived in the “long towns” could get to work and school in population centers.  The growing tribal population meant pressure for more housing and when it became clear that clustered housing didn’t work very well because it concentrated dysfunction, new housing was built on allotments along the rivers.  Possibly they ignored the US flood plain housing restrictions.

Once there were roads, the dynamics of Heart Butte changed drastically.  People could get in and out to jobs and work and clustered housing projects were built there.  A new school and a clinic were added.  But law enforcement has never caught up.

To get people back into shelter, the tribal and federal authorities built cheap quick-fix houses intended to be temporary, but they have never gone unoccupied.  Some people moved back into their old log cabins as soon as they were habitable.  (Local standards.)  The pull of habit and convenience was strong.  The contrast between the response on the rez side versus the state and private resources on the state side led to much bitterness among whites.  

WATER RIGHTS

The right of the Blackfeet Tribe to their share of the boundary river of Birch Creek has never been exercised.  The canals that would have to be built were either not built or built in nonfunctional ways.   In the flood some caved out. The motivation to farm as compared to ranching was weak.  But over the years things changed.  The biggest innovation was pivot sprinklers, massive pipe and wheel systems that could water a giant field without any canal -- just pumps.  At the same time education and ambition on the rez were increasing and this time the “haves” versus the “have nots” went the other way.  No one is thinking of garden plots now: they are raising alfalfa.

The dubious history of Swift Dam on the rez and Two Medicine Dam or Sherburne Dam “sort of” on the rez but technically perhaps in Glacier Park, which are not state lands, must now be sorted out through a history-based first-use law that has not been enforced.  Almost certainly it will be necessary to diminish the amount of water used by the Pondera Canal Company.  This will probably be enough of a loss (combined with diminishing annual rainfall) to put some people out of business.  It will also challenge the tribal effort to preserve sovereignty as against federal supervision and intervention.

The climate of the planet is changing, which means that the glaciers are shrinking out of existence.  Rainfall patterns are changing to later in the season so that they are not stored as snow.  They are far more turbulent, which means that they fill the streams and run off faster, making living along flood plains more risky.

DRAMA

Most of the attention to the ’64 flood has been paid to the drama of it all: the deaths, the suffering, the heroism, and what it revealed about individuals, like the priest who was caught in a tree because he was trying to save his private herd of cows.  No one knew he HAD a private herd!  We thought he had taken a vow of poverty!  Bill Grissom, the white Indian agent, threw himself whole-heartedly into rescue and rebuilding.  Jerry Black, the smart aleck radio announcer, stayed by the mic around the clock to guide what was happening, crucial at a time when there was little or no communication gear.

Stories were exaggerated, so that Ramona Wellman desperately wading out of her home with a child by each wrist -- one of which slipped away, luckily caught by the man coming along behind her -- became a “Sophie’s choice” tale about floating on a roof and having to choose whether to save her boy or her girl.  Some bodies were never found.  

Everyone wanted to find a villain.  All the wickedness was far upstream by the time the flood hit.  Trickle-down consequences continue today though much rez land no longer belongs to tribal members and therefore is technically subject to state law, and though there is Indian preference for government jobs so that few whites remain in the towns.  Three towns are tourist-based and much of the economy depends upon fire fighting crews, which are sometimes used for other emergencies now.  Many people have radios and television via cable or satellite, but coverage is still not universal, even for cell phones.  The radio is only intermittently local, mostly being fed from satellites.  Weather reporting is much improved.  Law enforcement is both better and worse -- the FBI having withdrawn to Denver.  People are far better educated and own computers.

Yet no North Korea long-range missile could do the damage that still could be caused by another weather event that spring of ’64.

Myself in the winter of 1963-64

WATER WARS IN PONDERA COUNTY

“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.  

A TIEBOLT IS NOT A REBAR STUB!

Last night the Town Council met to hear the engineer’s response to Tom’s accusation that the foundation of the new water tower was built with half the reinforcement it should have had, as shown by photos of the poured concrete with two ends of rebar sticking out instead of four, which are stipulated by the Montana standards for water towers.  All council members were present.  Onlookers included only two citizens with a roll-off site proposal, the deputy sheriff present to make his report, myself, and Kory Kovatch, who was on the previous council for many years and has a familial love of the town.  The energetic Tom was missing.  So were the two male town employees, one of whom is the water master.

The response was direct:  Tom’s photos had showed the ends of TIEBOLTS, threaded for bolting down the feet of the tower.  The REBAR reinforcement in the legs is a complex cage of metal, some of it encircling rather than vertical, not the long bars from top to bottom described by Tom.   The reinforcement can’t be seen once the cement is poured.  Also, the requirements of the set of standards in our contract are for two tie-bolts on each of the four corner platforms plus four in the one under the central steel foundation pillar.  In short, Tom’s alarm was totally misinformed.  In philosophical terms, it was a category error:  he didn’t know a tiebolt from a rebar stub.  And neither did we.

The question that was not asked nor answered at the meeting was:  “has the foundation construction up to this point been inspected on-site and did a qualified inspector look at the steel reinforcements and sign off on it before the concrete was poured?  What about strength tests on the cement?”   Also, what oversight by what agencies is involved in plans examination and execution for water towers?  

What was the source of this idea on Tom’s part?  Now I’m quoting from the photocopied “bullet list” Engineer’s Report to the Town Council that was handed out last night.

August 4.  The iron work design, calculations and drawing for the tank foundation was submitted.  The engineering company found the “seismic site class and acceleration coefficients” were incorrect.  

August 24.   New corrected plans were submitted and accepted.  

December 2.  Design drawings submitted by the subcontractor for the tank superstructure.

December 16.  The engineers rejected the tank design drawings based on eleven issues, including “non-compliance with AWWA D-100 Section 4.4.1.1 -- requiring a minimum of 4 anchor bolts.”  Since then the subcontractor and the engineer have resolved the anchor bolt issue.  (No word on the other ten issues.)  Plan reviews often lead to corrections -- that’s why they are reviewed.

The town was sent copies of this transmittal about anchor bolts.  At some point another engineering firm acquired a copy that had a scribbled note on the front -- “PROBLEM” and “Possible C/O by Contractor” which they sent back to the water tank engineering firm. on Jan 28.  The mayor remarked that she had had a copy which somehow disappeared from her desk.

The rest of the report is about the coming schedule of work.  No word about progress on the water meters before that was stopped by weather.  It’s twenty below zero today, but the engineer (a young and vigorous man) claimed that he loved to drive up this way and would be staying at the Stone School Inn Bed and Breakfast, which is more like a resort hotel than usual small town traveler motels.  

The same people on the council who were swearing vengeance and claiming that they would have blood (can you tell I’m exaggerating) were now “so relieved” and telling the engineer how wonderful he was.  In truth, I didn’t mention the name of the engineering firm and the subcontractor (who ARE named in the report to the town) because I couldn’t remember their names.  (I’m old.)  But it was a good thing because their livelihood depends upon their reputation.  

Much more seriously, if this accusation had proven to be true there would be major cost issues, and most seriously of all -- and the reason all the engineers I worked with at the City of Portland (who were plans examiners and site inspectors) had stomach problems -- is that the failure or even potential failure of something like a water tank would mean their licenses would be revoked and their livelihood removed.  Often the Portland engineers talked among themselves about plans examiners and engineers who missed things like the load limits in a bridge over a dance floor where onlookers could stand to watch, because it never occurred to them that so many people would ever crowd onto it, collapsing it, killing both watchers and dancers.  Plans examiners do exacting, boring, detail-ridden, contingency-dependent work day after day and yet mistakes can be catastrophic.

Why would someone play games with incendiary information like this watertower accusation or even keep up a constant stream of criticism, demands for information, accusations that the town council is mismanaging, and so on.  Is it a borderline personality problem that causes a person to lose his boundaries?  Is it the times, a kind of Tea Party mind-set?  Or is it a scam?  Is it significant that he and the mayor are both from the Pacific Northwest and were very cozy until recently?

Some would say I was irresponsible to blog about this small town kafuffle, that it should be suppressed as the town council suggested last week.  I think it would be irresponsible not to tell the whole story.  I think it is irresponsible that citizens do not show up at meetings.  I think it was irresponsible that the engineering company has not kept in closer touch with clients.  But none of this was illegal.

But I’m on the side of transparency and more happy to have too much information than not enough.  This does not shut down my private speculations on what happened, what WILL happen, and why.  In fact, it’s the why that interests me most.  I’ve said from the beginning of my self-assigned monitoring (which originally began because the newspaper doesn’t attend) that I would eventually get a book out of my notes.  Now it’s beginning to look like a good BBC-type mystery.  I’ll need a body, of course, maybe in that concrete support pillar which is knocked apart to check the suspected rebar problem.  I’ll take suggestions on who the victim ought to be.

The engineer said his special concentration was small town projects and showed that he understood his clients by distributing candy at the end.  However, when I said I had diabetes, he heard me.