Lasso the Wind: Away to the New West

by Timothy Egan

  CHAPTER 10

  Light

  Paradise Valley, Montana

  On the longest day or the year I want sunlight that follows me to bed and mountains without winter. The Going-to-the-Sun road would get me there, surely. It starts on the western floor of Glacier National Park, cuts into granite, ducks under waterfalls, and rises into the nosebleed section of the Rockies. It tops out at one of the few places left in the world where bears still eat people, semi regularly. When the road was finished in 1933, after seventeen years of construction, Indians in headdresses and Civilian Conservation Corps workers with whiskey flasks crowded together and sang “America.” Glacier is north, perhaps too far for today, even by the standards of no-speed-limit Montana. What else goes straight up? Here’s the Beartooth Highway on the map, crawling up to the heavens. I’m in Big Timber, breakfasting at the Road Kill Cafe. The cook is playing songs on the juke that make me think of the old joke about what you get when you play a country and western tune backwards: your wife comes home, your pickup truck works, and you stay sober all day.

  The coil over the Absaroka-Beartooth Mountains winds to just under eleven thousand feet, then gradually drops into the northeast entrance of Yellowstone. Longest day, highest road—a plan for the summer solstice. I will try to loop through the north end of the park and end up just outside the boundary in Paradise Valley, looking for Montana without tears. If Butte is the black hole of Montana, Paradise is the other side, one of the places in the West where you go to find light. Homeward bound, Captain Clark passed through the northern end of Paradise on the way to reunite with Lewis in 1806; as travel-weary as he was, Clark was spellbound by the bison herds shouldering along the Yellowstone. Teddy Roosevelt went there to jawbone about lumber barons and pound the bully pulpit for national parks. Even Maureen Dowd, the writer of American nuance who has managed to go through life without ever once sleeping outside in a tent, came to Paradise and found herself wondering—briefly—about the feeding habits of Yellowstone cutthroat.

  Out of Big Timber, the morning is fine and the road straight. I push the car into a lather. I’ve got Eric Clapton on the tape deck, the Absaroka Range just to the south guarding Yellowstone, and the Crazy Mountains to the north, wherein dwell Crow Indian spirits. In the Big Empty of eastern Montana, you can drive for hours and not see another car. On the mountain side it is a bit more crowded. Still, ninety miles an hour seems to be the status quo on the interstate. I lose myself in the motion, the strobe lights of scenery flashing by, farms with rolls of hay, formations of clouds coming and going without pattern or purpose, waiting for the thermal lift of the afternoon to join a thunderstorm. You often meet people who say they are visiting Montana for one reason: to drive. In a day, you can pass through four seasons. The cafes are usually homey, and sometimes Gothic; the food is honest fuel.

  My mobile daydream is broken by a big flashing blue light on my tail and a trooper representing the state of Montana out to greet me.

  “Where’s the fire?” he asks.

  For as long as I’ve been driving in Montana, there has never been a daytime speed limit on the open roads. Even when the federal government forced everyone to drive fifty-five, Montana went It’s own way and refused to put up the double nickels. When the feds threatened to withhold Montana’s highway funds, the state came up with a weaselly law that made it a minor indiscretion to drive beyond fifty-five, punishable by a $5 fine, paid in cash to the trooper on the spot. It was not a speed limit, they insisted; going too fast was a fuel-conservation violation. Truckers and type-A drivers soon learned that you could make your way across Montana at a good clip with a stack of fivers on the seat. When stopped by a trooper, you just rolled down the window and handed the officer one of the fives, end of exchange. Now, the fuel-conservation law is gone, and Montana still has no formal daytime speed limit on highways. What they have is a law that requires you to drive in a “reasonable and prudent” manner.

  “You drive this fast in Washington State?” the trooper asks me, after looking at my license.

  “No, sir. We have speed limits in Washington State.”

  “So do we. Reasonable and prudent.”

  We sit in his car and have a long, civil discussion about reasonable and prudent. I ask: reasonable and prudent to whom? To a sixteen-year-old, this is a far different thing than it is to a ninety-year-old. He says it applies to the road and the weather conditions, not the age of the driver. Then we talk about politics for a while. He’s mad that Montana has only one congressman now, and “that idiot for a senator,” his words, describing the farm auctioneer Conrad Burns, voted among the dumbest legislators in Washington. He likes Pat Williams, who’s from Butte, and is sorry as hell that Pat stepped down, giving the lone congressional seat to anybody who can run television ads round-the-clock in Billings, Helena, and Great Falls. A lobbyist is the latest to do that, and holds the seat. I ask about the Grizzlies, who stumbled somewhat after winning the small college football championship for the University of Montana in 1995. We are just at the edge of the Seattle Mariners radio zone, where it blurs into Colorado Rockies territory. The trooper, who lives in Milltown, is an Ms fan. But he spends most of his free time working on his house and watching osprey snatch fish from the Clark Fork.

  This is going much better than my last encounter with a Montana trooper, when I got a taste of summary roadside justice. I’d been pulled over in the Bitterroot Valley by an officer who claimed I had passed another car illegally. He hadn’t seen it, but he was told by someone that I had broken the law. Not so, I claimed. “That’ll be thirty-five dollars,” he said, pronouncing me guilty on the spot. I protested. He said, “You have the money or not?” I reached into my wallet: twenty-eight dollars was all I had. “Then I guess you’ll be spending the night in the Ravalli County jail,” said the trooper. I asked him if we could find a cash machine. He tailed me to the nearest bank, which was closed, It’s ATM broken. “I’ll take the twenty-eight dollars,” the officer said, “and let it go at that.” There’s a reason, I guess, that state troopers of Montana still wear the patch of the old vigilantes, the 3–7–77 that was pinned on victims, the dimensions of a grave three feet wide, seven feet long, and seventy-seven inches deep.

  This time, after thirty-five minutes of visiting, the trooper takes his book out and writes me a ticket for ninety dollars. He’s smiling all the while, and I don’t hold it against him. “We just don’t have much of a tax base here in Montana,” he says.

  I EAT lunch in Red Lodge. Grilled cheese sandwich, huge pickle, potato soup, coffee, a slice of berry pie—and change back from a five-dollar bill. Already, I don’t mind contributing to the tax base of Montana. Outside of town I saw a billboard with these words: Whoa, Dude. There Is A Speed Limit. Red Lodge is a version of Butte before it fell completely into the clutches of the Copper Kings. It was a coal-mining camp, grimy and cold, with all the ethnic stew that boiled up in Butte. But it freed itself of coal’s dominance and survived, looking to the giants of the Beartooth Range for sustenance instead of underground. Even with a few boutiques and espresso stands, the old town front still wears overalls. Italians, Finns, Indians, Irish—they have their neighborhoods in Red Lodge. Skiers come to town when they need some vertical relief late in the year, after everything else has closed.

  The Beartooth Highway is the road where car radiators go to die. Guy in the gas station tells me that it’s so cold up in the higher reaches of the road that radiators will freeze in the midst of a boilover. Now, that can’t be true? The road is open only about four months a year. Some winters, thirty-five feet of snow falls on the Bearteeth. My ears pop on the way up and my head is lighter. Listening to the Pretenders, I can’t hear the engine strain. The road switches back and forth, steeper than the grade on some Rocky Mountain summit trails, edging up along the contour lines. The walls along the road are granite. Snow is about two feet deep along the side, at first. Near the top, the snow is ten feet deep. I can tell because there are marker poles planted al
ong the road, showing the depth. At the Beartooth Plateau, the road is essentially a tunnel without a top, boring through the snow. I find a little turn carved in the snow, next to exposed rock, and park.

  Top of the world. A summit plateau at the edge of the Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness, which holds much of the water supply for the northern Rockies. Wyoming and the caldera of Yellowstone one way, Montana and the plains the other way. The Absarokas have hundreds of lakes, sharp granite summits, twenty-nine mountains above twelve thousand feet. Froze-to-Death Plateau looks intriguing, as does Phantom Glacier. Most of it is tundra, above the timberline, sprouting wildflowers as it gorges on daylight. There is no bigger expanse of land in the lower forty-eight states at this high an elevation; it is the roof of the West, pressed against the sky. Wilderness, it says on the map. And that is a formal term, not an adjective. The law behind it says wilderness is “an area where the earth and It’s community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.” The sun is blinding. But it is also the day of the big turn from spring to summer, so I need some green, some color, water that is moving rather than frozen.

  I take my time shifting downslope, fleeing winter, into the first stands of high alpine spruce, then the lodgepole pine, signature trees of the Yellowstone area. Lakes and tarns, half-freed from the lock of Rocky Mountain cold, appear. The huckleberry bushes are leafing out. A few lupines and columbines have blossomed, splashes of lavender and blue against the green of the mountainside. Down, down, winding along the impossible road, into Wyoming, the cowboy state, license plates with a bronc getting busted. Highest mean elevation of any state in the nation, above six thousand feet. A certain amount of ambivalence about Yellowstone still exists in Wyoming. Goddamn nature park and waffle-stomper playground. In Wyoming, people second-guess and tut-tut the Park Service the way pundits in Washington blather on about congressional follies and White House blunders every Sunday. The big fire of 1988, well, of course it was the fault of the Park Service, with that horseshit let-burn policy of theirs. Wolves in the park? What the hell were they thinking? We got sheep and cattle to raise around here, you computer-geek biologist bureaucrats. And What’s with this plan to restrict snowmobiles in winter? Got to make a living in the cold months in West Yellowstone, Gardiner, and Cooke City.

  I’m in Cooke City now, northeast gateway to Yellowstone, a little onetime mining town that used to be called Shoofly—a better name. Cooke City, home to ninety people in the winter, three hundred in summer, was given several chances to die and never took it up. Snowmobiles are stacked and parked for the season. In winter, they invade in such numbers that park rangers get dizzy and nauseous at the entrance gates. Two thousand snowmobiles equals 1.2 million cars in exhaust output, giving Yellowstone the highest carbon monoxide levels in the country during the winter. And Senator Conrad Burns is going to make damn sure that the carbon monoxide level stays that way, the daily paper from Cody says. The air is so bad during the snowmobile flock-ins that park rangers in West Yellowstone pump in their own air to the entrance booths.

  I hear piano music, non-honky-tonk variety. A woman in Smokey’s green is reading under a tree and sipping a Coke. Windows are open in the damp upper rooms of sagging lodges. Every door has a rack of antlers overhead. A few people walk the wooden boardwalk, no place to go. Just a few feet above town the blackened trees from the big fire form a line. Most people thought Cooke City would go in a poof, the old wood fire-hazard. But they watered down the roofs and fought the blaze in hand-to-flame combat. It was dark, suffocatingly smoky, and broiling hot. The yellow-shirts brought in reinforcements, and air power as well The fire hopscotched away, moving up the mountains towards the Beartooths.

  More recently, Cooke City has appeared in datelines around the world. Above town, the stories go, is a time bomb. A Canadian-owned mining company has staked a claim to federal land in an alpine bowl. They want to bore deep into the ground, haul out a mountainside of ore, leach it with cyanide to bring the gold out, then store the waste for eternity in a huge tailings pond—their own little version of The Pit. Only a layer of plastic would keep the mine poisons—in a lake ten stories deep and the length of a dozen football fields—from leaking down into groundwater and ultimately into Yellowstone, land of a thousand small earthquakes a year. The Canadian company, of course, would pay no royalties for a venture on American public land that could imperil the worlds first national park. They call the project the New World Mine, but it’s very much an Old World giveaway.

  One summer President Bill Clinton, following the divining rod of a poll taken by advisor Dick Morris, came to Yellowstone during his vacation. Americans, Morris told the president, wanted to see a chunky-looking guy with pasty legs hanging around campgrounds and eating burgers, just like they do during their holiday. Dutifully, two years in a row, Clinton went to the Grand Tetons, just south of the park. Most of the time, he had a pained look on his face, riding horses, getting sprayed by cold water on the Snake River, swatting deerflies. He was puffy and sunburned. Clintons idea of green is Astroturf, the kind he used to have in the back of his pickup truck in Arkansas. In the Rocky Mountains, he looked like all he wanted to do was play golf, and damn that Dick Morris for using my vacation for a five-point bounce in the polls. Chelsea Clinton and her mother went to see the wolves in Yellowstone; they heard a howl and were enchanted. The president thought golf, golf, golf, burgers, golf, and to hell with Dick Morris. He was in Homer Simpson mode. When he arrived in Yellowstone the second summer, Clinton heard the usual woeful story of the Canadian-owned mine that threatened the American crown jewel.

  “How can the logical mind approve this?” said the park’s feisty and politically savvy superintendent, Mike Finley. After all the reporters had been alerted that something was afoot, the president declared his intention to stop the mine, to swap some land in Montana in place of the alpine bowl above Yellowstone. The Canadian mine company, owned by a subsidiary of the Seagram liquor dynasty, could go carve up the earth and leach it with cyanide on some other piece of American public land, less scenic, less known to participants of poll surveys. Sighs of relief went out from coast to coast. Even some newspapers in Wyoming, where they eat Democrats for camp appetizers and hang Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt in effigy as a civics lesson for the kids, applauded Clinton. So, for the time, it appeared that the bomb above Yellowstone was defused. And Clinton, safely re-elected, could stay out of the mountains.

  IT IS so cold along Soda Butte Creek I can’t tie the little nymph onto the end of my fly line. I’m inside the park, walking along the edge of the creek. The water is high, bloated with snowmelt, but there are a few pools and riffles where trout are sure to be feeding. It’s early afternoon. I’ve gone from breakfast at dawn in Big Timber, a ticket on Interstate 90, lunch in Red Lodge, a heart-stopping haul over the Beartooth Plateau, in and out of Cooke City to safety in Yellowstone. I’m still looking for that first-day-of-summer warmth. The elevation here is just below eight thousand feet. When I wade into the stream, my head feels as if it took a shot of novocaine from a foot-long needle. With the nymph finally attached to my line, I work the stream for a while. My casts aren’t very good. I can’t see the stinking lure, which is supposed to be a subsurface bug, struggling to live. I prefer dry-fly fishing on lazier water. Casting for an hour, I get one strike and that’s it. Skunked. And now it’s starting to snow. Not just flurries, but a regular whiteout. Those lazy, crazy days of summer in the northern Rockies. I get under a tree, seeking protection. The storm drops an inch of snow on the ground in twenty minutes, then moves on, leaving the land smothered and sunlit. I hear the crunch of wood, loud snapping sounds. It startles me. Just ten yards away is a moose, with nostrils as big as my fists, chomping away on the side of a large tree. He is eating twigs, bark-skinned branches, leaves—the whole fibrous woody feast. Yellowstone, they call it the American Serengeti.

  WHAT THEY used to call Yellowstone was a liar’s landscape. The stories the mountain men
brought back East were otherworldly and unbelievable. You boys have been without human contact for too long, the rational listener would respond, accustomed to an earth where rivers did not flow backwards, or boil at a constant temperature of 210 degrees. The French were the first to spread tales. They lived with the Mandans, the tribe of destiny, so integral to the success of Lewis and Clark’s expedition, but wiped out by disease as a consequence of a decade of multicultural socializing. The French came up with the name Roche Jaune, which first surfaced in 1795. The land was the color of gold, yes, but not the substance. So Napoleon saw all the Missouri River drainage as expendable. Americans wonder why the French seem crabby and charge people extra just to sit down in their cafes; consider the historic giveaway. The majority of the American West, most of it unmapped at the time, was sold to the United States for $15 million.

  Lewis and Clark missed Yellowstone. They followed the Missouri to It’s source, then picked up the first trickles of the Pacific drainage and rode the water to the ocean. On the way back, Clark deviated down to the Yellowstone River, where it picks up at the north head of Paradise Valley. But the most unusual land formations of the continent were never seen. A veteran of the Corps of Discovery, John Colter, was not interested in going East and dining off his memoirs, as most members of Lewis and Clark’s expedition did. At least not yet. He said goodbye to his transcontinental traveling mates and backtracked up the Yellowstone River. For the next five years, he walked over fields of cacti and blistering earth, through snowdrifts of twenty feet and muddy bogs. In the winter of 1807–08, with just thirty pounds on his back and snowshoes on his feet, Colter slogged through Yellowstone and Jackson Hole, a thousand-mile journey, he claimed. When he at last returned he told of hot springs and geysers, waterfalls and wildlife, wedding cakes of sulfur-smelling crystal, and a lake at the base of a broad, sunken volcano. His critics called it “Colter’s Hell,” and him a liar. He may have fudged the part about tramping through all of Yellowstone in winter with a mere thirty pounds on his back, but the other stuff was true. And much later, the wordsmith Rudyard Kipling, teller of fantastic tales, could not improve on what Colter had said of Yellowstone. “It’s a howling wilderness of three thousand square miles, full of all imaginable freaks of fiery nature,” Kipling wrote.