Butte Magic of Ignorance
Treatment Part 1
It is a city completely out in the open, in the middle of a valley scrubbed clean of vegetation by a century of toxic smoke and toxic digging, a city holding tight to the side of a mountain and dripping like a spill into the flats below. It is a city completely out in the open and yet you don't even notice it until you're there, in the center of it. It is a city full of holes, a block of urban city next to a few acres of desert, a tract of suburb next to the rusty leftovers of heavy industrialization. It is a city built atop a Byzantine network of wormholes constructed to find and pound the precious metals out of the inside of a mountain, and it is a city with two enormous holes beside it, one restlessly inert and immense, full of water and danger, and another young hole next to it, growing like its twin once did with the huge trucks and rumbles of open pit mining.
The bus depot is a former hamburger stand not far from the freeway that suddenly takes you past this city. When you step off the bus you can't be sure whether you are in the center of a city or at its fringe: each clue seems to counteract all previous clues. Here are sturdy but empty industrial buildings built and used long ago, but here is a stretch of emptiness, of land that could be in the middle of the Mojave or Siberia. The low mountains here do not fit easily on postcards -- they speak the language of hazard more than the language of vista.
Irene looks out the window of her seat on the bus and, though this is the destination she planned, the name on her ticket, she is not sure whether she should leave or just keep sitting and hope that the next town is more inviting. The driver tosses back the word, "Butte," like a pitcher making a halfhearted attempt to pick off a runner at first base as he turns to leave the bus. Irene looks over her shoulder to inspect the view behind her back. Everything is grey and scratched through the bus windows. Perhaps it's the tint of the windows that is pressing this city with too much gloom. She takes a deep breath of bus air, stands her body halfway up to grab her suitcase from the space above her head, and walks off the bus.
On other trips she has made, by bus, in a jet, there have been people waiting for her. Waiting at the gate, waiting somewhere. There is always a crowd of faces to scan to try to find the one or two or three that turn from concentration to smile when eyes meet. People to turn the arrival into a deeper surge of emotion, an embrace, a kiss. What strikes her as her feet leave the bus and land on Butte is that there is no crowd here to meet anybody, neither she nor anybody else. Such a vacant arrival empties out the whole trip she has just made, but also allows her a moment to escape herself, to look down at the scene as if she were watching it, as if she were the one waiting at the gate instead of the one making her entrance.
But there is no one at the gate, nobody waiting with a car or to help her carry her bag. And there is no reason to stay at this bus depot, a hamburger stand with a small porch as a waiting room. She walks in the direction that seems to be forward, not sure whether it is or not.
Over her head is a pair of Walkman headphones and the voice from the radio announces a temperature of 45 degrees on a sunny afternoon in Butte. "Welcome to Wednesday in Butte, U.S.A.," the first voice on the radio says. "You mean Butte, Montana," the second voice says. "Well," the first voice says, "Sometimes I’m not sure the rest of Montana really wants us in the state, know what I mean?"
Behind her back is a mountain, yellow and streaked below but rising up to a green stubble of trees. The street she's on curves a little and soon she has come upon a corner that could be on any big street on any town's fringe in America, or at least the supermarket could be. But the supermarket's gay colors and smooth parkinglot seem to hang on the edge of something entirely different, something untamed or tamed much too much. The rock is yellow, her footsteps are firm.
The voice from the radio dissolves into her voice in her head. "Maybe I did always complain about her, maybe she didn't understand me, maybe she didn't know who I was and never tried to know. But the fact is that she is dead, my mother is dead, and if I need you any time I need you now. I know your work comes first, my work comes first too, but this is different."
"I found something, I found a box in her things. Mother never kept much, she threw away all my past, she threw away all my old clothes and all my things from school, my compositions, my watercolors. But I found a box; she must have forgotten that she had it.
"She never told me about her family. After father died she grew close to me for a few days and told me a little about his family but I know nothing about her, I never met my grandparents, I don't know who my great-grandparents were. And I've never really been curious until I opened up this box, and found what must have been things belonging to my great-grandparents.
"Some photographs, some letters, some postcards with postmarks around 1915, 1922, 1917. I haven't read the letters very carefully, I'm having trouble with the handwriting, but everything, postmarks, pictures, everything seems to be from Montana, from Butte, a city in Montana. I can't tell much from the things but there has to be information in Butte, there has to be a way for me to find out more about these people. I know you're busy but...
"After all it is Montana, and maybe the fresh air would be good for you. We could have some time together, wouldn't that be a first, and we could find out something about my family. I know that part might not interest you as much, but there must be things there we could enjoy, mountains, snow. I looked at the map and it doesn't look that far from Yellowstone Park; it's all surrounded by mountains."
She plays back the conversation in her mind but it wasn't a real conversation. She crumples up the letter she couldn't bring herself to sending, a letter she meant to send to someone whose powers of communication she isn't always very sure of.
The historic center of the city is up a hill, but in today's city that historic center sits on an edge of the city map. Near the freeway, near the bus station, the city seems to be trying to decide whether it even exists or not -- there are such stretches of desolation, of the past and present uneasily mixed, but as you ascend the hill you see the city grow more confident, its past take a stronger role.
The sidewalk, cracked, ending and beginning again from some upheaval or other, rises at a steady angle, here crossing a railroad track, here rising far above a vacant lot. The street beside it has some traffic, cars rising the steep grade uncomfortably, or on their way down just a little too fast. Directly abutting the sidewalk are dozens of cottage houses, some wearing their age with style, most looking it with less grace.
As you walk higher on the hill, the houses grow bigger for a short section, then wood siding is replaced with brick, and growing density of commercial buildings announces to Irene that she is somewhere closer to the center of this place.
The voices from the radio come to her through the headphones. They talk about the beginning of the football season and the chances of the team at Montana Tech. The radio announcer is speaking to an old timer who talks about the threat that Butte sports teams always posed over teams from other towns in Montana. The threat came from nothing more than that they were from Butte, and Butte was a city of tough folks.
For a city in Montana this one is exceptionally urban. Irene is an urban person herself, and has enough sense about her to detect something wrong with this one, or at least something different. From the dusty indecision of the streets near the freeway she has stepped into a place that was once completely certain of its big city status. But that time has gone and though the buildings she sees suggest a mighty city, the level of activity on them, or lack of activity, tells her that today it is something less than that.
Tall beautiful ornate turn of the century buildings line the street, office buildings, commercial buildings with rooms on the floors above, but much of it is silent, much of it seems unoccupied, or at least under-utilized. One set of plate glass windows after another show empty stores, some that look like they emptied out years ago, some that look like they were vacated more recently.
But among the empty spaces there still is life, and commerce. It would not be entirely truthful to say that she does not encounter anybody on the sidewalks. She will turn a corner or turn her head and see the back of someone turning into a door or around a corner. She will sense something out of the corner of her vision and turn her head only to see that the action that she turned to see had just ended, or that a car is driving off in another direction, or that a person is there but is completely motionless and sitting or standing blocks away.
Through windows below her feet she sees tablecloths on tables recently set with paper cards printed with specials of the day. The room they are in is lit with an amount of light that means business. She sees movement inside but has to walk past the windows a couple of times before she finds that the main door on the street does not go to this restaurant below -- there is another door down some steps that does.
She walks in and sees an empty counter in front of a number of tables on two different levels. In the dark back corner of the lower level is a table occupied by four men whose chairs are all turned toward the door -- they all look directly at her. Irene stands at the counter until a woman comes out a door nearby, grabs a menu, and directs Irene to a table.
The men at the table below begin talking to each other as Irene seats herself at a table on the higher level and directly below the sidewalk level windows. She looks down the enormous menu and makes her selection before the waitress has walked off.
She has nearly finished her dinner when the waitress walks up and asks her, "So you need anything else?" Irene is still listening to the radio through her headphones. She doesn’t even really hear the waitress, but looks up at her to see her talk.
Irene nods the waitress off and looks through the shoebox of family relics which she has next to her on the table. She picks out one specific photo, one of the few photos in the box. It is an old black and white faded slightly yellow image of a large house. She runs her fingers along the decorative pattern cut on the photo's edges and flips it to and back to see the house and to see the small pencil print on the back -- "Grandma's house." The music coming to her from the radio is old and scratchy, like from a record that might have been played in the house in the picture.
The waitress asks again, "Do you need anything?" Irene looks up, not really hearing her. The waitress’s lips move as the scratchy old record plays. Irene looks back down at the photo and waves her away. She takes a sip and holds the photo up near the window, trying to imagine how this house could still be somewhere out there.
The waitress asks again, "Can I help you?" and this time Irene looks directly up at her. She has pulled one side of the headphones away from one of her ears so she can really hear this time. Irene shows the waitress the photograph and flips it over to show her the description, "Grandma's house," and an address written underneath. The waitress holds the photo and reads the description and address out loud.
"Do you know where this house is?" Irene asks the waitress. The waitress nods her head no, but points over to the table below, where the four men sit. "Maybe one of them knows."
The men pass the photo from one to the next. The first three look at it, flip it over, and nod no. The fourth scrutinizes it and nods yes. "I know where this is. I’ll drive you there."
The waitress hands the photo back to Irene, who holds it a little tighter and looks at it a little harder. She wants to be there this moment but she's not sure if she should trust this guy. Irene looks at the waitress who gives her a big smile.
"Is it far?" "Not far. It's Uptown." "Can I walk there." "It's a long walk, a short ride. My car's right outside." She looks hard at him, then hard at the photograph. She puts the headphones back fully on her head and walks out the door with the man.
She rides in his car, and watches the buildings of the city thin out as the street turns into a simple path thru a brown landscape broken up by occasional scraps of a past of heavy industry. "It looks like we're leaving the city," Irene says, wondering what she has gotten herself into. "There's a lot of stuff that looks like this in the city limits," the cabdriver says.
They pull into a parking lot with a small outbuilding, a tourist shack. Next to the shack is a tunnel entrance, made to look like a mine entrance. The cab driver waves for Irene to follow him and they walk down a narrow concrete tube, with an expanding dot of white ahead of them. They walk thru the tube and out onto a wood observation platform overlooking a huge open pit mine. "This is Butte, too," the cab driver says. He points to the picture and Irene hands it to him. The cab driver holds the picture of the house up toward the west edge of the huge pit. "This is where the house is."
Irene takes the photo from him and takes one more look at it before putting it in her pocket. As she looks down she really sees for the first time all the water, like a huge lake, that fills the pit. She sees the erosion softening the hard lines of terraced open pit mining and hears a loud electronic sound echoing through the immense pit.
A radio report begins on Irene’s headphones. The report is about the legacy of open pit mining in the Berkeley Pit of Butte. The reporter talks about the chemical content of the water that has filled the Pit since mining ceased in the early 80's and the pumps that kept the pit dry were turned off. The reporter talks about the snow geese that landed in the pit to rest on their migration and how the chemicals in the water ate them from the inside to out.
Irene listens to the radio while riding back into the city. As she listens she watches the brown land once again take on the buildings of Uptown Butte.
The radio report continues about the threat that the polluted water in the pit poses to the water supply of the city, and about how attempts are currently underway to treat the water and extract minerals at the same time. As we hear the report Irene looks across the city from a point near the top of the hill, near a motel room, and looks at the city in the flats twinkle with the sunset. Her view of the city ends with the whole east end of the city, scarred with the huge old open pit mine and next to it, the new open pit mine, which the radio report mentions.
Irene stands in front of a house with the classified section of the paper in her hands. The radio still plays through the headphones that she wears. It's 9:30 a.m. in Butte, the temperature is 51 degrees and the announcer returns us to the documentary report on the Berkeley Pit that began yesterday.
Irene knocks on the door of the house and the waitress from the restaurant answers. She has a big welcoming smile and before Irene can say anything, the waitress, Emily, says "Oh, you've come about the room. Please come in."
Emily leads her into the house with a flourish as the radio report about the Pit and its history continues to play in her ears. Emily leads Irene from room to room, pointing out the living room and kitchen and a room that has"Frank" written in a childish scribble on the closed door. We see Emily’s lips move but all that we hear is the radio report that plays into Irene’s head. Emily points out all the small statues she has that occupy every room of the house. Many of them show different versions of the Virgin Mary but there are many more, of different kinds of women, some with foreign features, some funny, some serious, small dolls. Some are porcelain figures, some plastic, some painted, some salt and pepper shakers, some flat though most are statues. The tour of the house turns into a tour of the figures, each with a face, looking up, looking down, looking out, looking in, as the radio report continues and Irene, trying to keep her face from becoming as immobile as all the other faces, nods yes.
As Irene stands at the checkout desk at her motel, she turns and looks at the tourist brochures arranged in a display. She picks up one describing the World Museum of Mining in Butte and pages through it before putting her bag on her back and walking out onto the sidewalk and down the street.
Irene walks to the West End of town, down a road that ends at the entrance to the World Museum of Mining, an encampment build around the Orphan Girl Mine. She walks through a gateway and looks to her right at the towering gallows frame, the dark black steel tower rising like a tripod. We hear a voice talking about the gallows frames, and how the Anaconda Company, which oversaw mining in Butte for most of this century, tried to get people to call them headframes. We hear voices talking about the hazards of underground mining as Irene walks through displays showing the tools used. She has a headset and stops the tape. The voices stop talking and she takes a moment to lose herself in a photo of a miner, a photo snapped far underground. The miner and the long tool he uses seem to be physically joined. She presses the tape back onto play and we hear about the animals used underground, the horses and mules that lived their lives without seeing the light of the sun.
As she listens to a description of the life of a miner, how he would leave his house or room in a rooming house and walk a few blocks to the gallows frame, we see a young man in miner's clothes walk out of a house and down the street. His miner's uniform is like one in the Museum, one from nearly a century ago. He walks down a street of old houses, but we see anachronisms, like a modern car driving through in the foreground, or a modern sign on an older building.
The description continues as the miner approaches the tall black tower and walks under it to the rusted elevator apparatus. He brushes himself off and presses a button, waiting at the rusted elevator like a businessman waiting at an elevator in an office building. He pulls out a pocketwatch, checks the time, and continues waiting, looking around at the metal scrap tossed around the ground beside him. The description continues of the miner's trip down far below the surface of the earth and we see this illustrated in the photos that Irene walks past in the museum, as well as the tools, lights, uniforms, and railroad cars laid out in the museum, some in glass cases, some hanging to the wall, some sitting on the floor with identifying signs nearby.
Irene walks out in the bright sunshine as she listens to the description of the life in the city that greeted the miners as they got off work and another shift of men took the elevators back down to replace them. She walks through a reproduction of a western mining town, with period signs and small shopfronts inhabited by mannequins and antiques. She listens to the description of the prostitution on Galena Street as she walks under a bay window out of which a richly dressed mannequin looks. She listens to a description of the bars of Butte as she walks by a reproduction of one. She listens to a description of how the bars stayed open during prohibition, and how Butte was long known as a "wide open town," where any kind of alcohol or sexual pleasure was available at any time of day. Such strong dissipation was necessary in a city that depended so much on a line of work that was so risky. The men at the bars drank hard, trying to erase from their minds thoughts of the possibilities of a cave-in, of the thin timbers holding back the rock failing, of a mine disaster far below the surface of the earth, in the especially volatile rock of western Montana, so close to Yellowstone Park and the cracks in the earth's plates that allowed the kind of volcanic activity that made the earth here so rich with valuable minerals.
The tape description continues to play as Irene looks through the items in the Museum’s bookstore. She sees the bright covers of books with gallows’ frames and miners and the word "Butte" on them. She picks out a couple, as well as an audio tape she finds that is labeled "Tales of Dublin Gulch: Oral Histories of Butte’s Irish."
Back at Emily's house, Irene is sunk into a chair in the living room and paging through one of the books that she bought at the Museum. Emily is in the kitchen, preparing tea and a sandwich. She reaches into her pocket and pulls out some change, putting the pennies in a jar full of pennies on a counter. In the living room, the television is on and, as Emily walks into the living room, her eyes look straight at it. There are obvious food spots on Emily's uniform and she carries a tray into the room with a teapot, a couple cups and a sandwich. She stands over Irene and hands Irene one of the cups. She pours tea out of the teapot into Irene’s cup. Irene sees the teapot and says, "What a nice teapot." Emily says, "It’s made of geniune Butte copper." Emily sits down and looks at the TV, lifting the sandwich on the tray and eating it. She sits sideways on the couch, her feet tucked up under her.
Irene adjusts the light behind her and repositions the headphones that she continues to wear. She turns to see the door open and the young man in the miner's uniform, the same man who illustrated the accounts that she heard while touring the Mining Museum, walks in. His face has smudges of black on it and he removes the heavy miners boots, caked with mud, as he stands at the door. As he unlaces them and pull them off he looks now and then at Irene, who looks up at him over her book. After he has taken off the second boot he says something to her, something like a greeting, but all Irene hears is the radio. Irene nods at him. She is not sure whether to keep looking at him or at the book as she hears voices on the radio talk about the end of underground mining in the sixties and seventies. He walks past them to his room.
Emily lies in her bed, tossing and turning. The room is dark but suddenly through the window a bright line of light seeps in, landing on Emily's bedcovers and rising up until it shines directly in her face. She opens her eyes and makes a silent movie grimace at what she sees outside. In jerky accelerated motion she puts a robe on over her pyjamas and walks to her window. She looks out at a cartoon mountain with a cartoon statue of the Virgin Mary mounted atop it. The statue glows brightly, casting a beam of light into Emily's room that she can pass her hand through. A loud crack startles Emily, and a thin bolt of cartoon lighting zaps down from the sky, its tip striking the base of the Virgin Mary statue and causing the statue's bottom to crack. The loosened statue rocks from side to side until it is completed separated from its base. It tumbles head over heels down the cartoon mountain. Emily turns her head and watches it tumble down into a photograph of the Berkeley Pit. It tumbles down into the water, disappearing into a slit in the water's surface. We hear a loud kerplunk and a splash of water flies through Emily's window. Her eyes are tightly closed on her drenched face and then she opens them wide. She sits up on her bed; the light in her room is yellow like at sunrise. The water on her face is sweat. She breathes heavily, looking around, looking at her window, which is covered with closed curtains. She slowly lies back down in her bed and closes her eyes, only to open them again very quickly to stare at her covered window.
Emily walks down a street in uptown Butte. She's wearing her waitress uniform. Instead of looking at the sidewalk ahead of her she is looking up, concentrating on the mountain in front of her, far away and straight down the street. She concentrates on a white dot on the mountain and the more she concentrates on it the more we see that it is a statue of the Virgin Mary, like one of the figurines in her house but so big it can sit on top of a mountain and be seen far below. She looks at it with a strong determination, and the more determined she is the faster she walks.
She walks so fast and looks so far up that she walks right past the door of the restaurant where she works. She walks past its "closed" sign and past one of the men who was sitting at the table. He's standing next to the door and turns his head, watching her as she walks by.
Emily walks into the street, starting to cross to the next block, when the man calls out her name, "Emily." She comes to, looking around her at the street and turning to walk back to the man at the restaurant door. She goes past him and tries to open the door but it is locked. She holds her hand out at him, as if expecting a key but he nods his head no. He points to the "closed" sign. "This time we're closed, Emily. Really closed. And not likely to ever open again."
She has been looking at the "Closed" sign all along, but looks briefly toward him before looking down at her uniform, which still has the same food splatters that it did yesterday. "But," the man says, "you can keep the uniform, for free. After all, I won't be needing it."
She takes one more quick look at the man and walks away, back the way she came. After a few steps she turns and looks behind her, but not at the man. Instead, her gaze is up, looking at the mountain and the speck of white atop it as if to reassure herself. Then she turns and continues away.
As Emily turns the corner back near her house, Irene is leaving. Emily walks right past Irene. She doesn't even notice her. She is looking down and then up at the mountain. Irene moves her body as she passes, about to say hello, but when she sees that Emily doesn't even notice her she stops herself. She watches Emily walk up the porch and close the door. Right after the door closes behind Emily it opens and Frank walks out dressed completely in his miner's uniform. He walks down the porch and right past Irene, tipping the light on top of his miner's helmet at her as he passes. Irene watches him walk up the street before she begins her own ascent, walking up to the city center.
"My great grandmother's name was Mary Harrington. She lived in Butte." Irene is talking to a woman in a room full of volumes, records bound with red covers with gold leaf lettering. Hundreds of such books line the walls, as do maps of historic Butte. Long library tables sit in the center of the room, but nobody sits at the chairs around them. "Mary Harrington?" the woman asks, a wicked smile on her face. She bends her finger to direct Irene to follow her. Irene has one of the headphones bent behind her ear while music plays on the other side.
The woman, a curator, walks to a shelf and pulls out a volume. "Let's just pick a year at random," the curator says. She sets the book on top of a low shelf and opens it. She pages through, repeating, "Mary Harrington, Mary Harrington, Mary Harrington. Here we are, Mary Harrington."
Irene leans over, hardly able to hold back her enthusiasm. She looks over at the curator, smiling a wide smile, and smiles herself, thinking that she has found her great grandmother. She looks closely at the curator's finger, which rubs down the page from top to bottom, passing over one Mary Harrington after another, and then the page is turned and the finger passes down another full page of Mary Harringtons. She turns the page again and again, more and more Mary Harringtons, dozens, hundreds of them cover page after page. Irene, not quite believing, pages through the pages of Mary Harringtons again and again, first panicked and quickly paging, then paging slower. She gently closes the cover of the book, looks up at the curator, and smiles and shrugs her shoulders.
As Irene pages through a huge volume of yellowed period newspapers, past the ads and headlines, the photographs and drawings, she thinks, "If I cannot find my great grandmother as a specific name on paper, maybe I can find her in general. Maybe I can find out enough about the people who lived here when she did, so I can understand who she might have been. Maybe she was like everybody else, maybe she was different. I probably wouldn't be able to know much about her even if I did find her exact name on a page of paper, on a record with only the most basic information about her."
On to Part two.
