blog: ON RIVERS AND RANCHING
In the Shadow of the Lady of the Rockies
By Bryce Andrews, 6-30-08
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A night storm: I am driving home from Butte on I-90. Speeding down the grade to Anaconda I watch lightning bolts striking to the northeast. Some of them are probably falling on the ranch. The wind is strong enough to jog the steering wheel in my hands and with the windows down and stereo off I can hear thunder.
I drove to Butte earlier this evening. The sun was just starting the think of setting and this storm was creeping into the valley. The scattered cumuli of day were overhead, but to the west above Mount Powell the sky darkened like a bruise. The dark clouds spread.
Racing the storm front, I passed Racetrack, Galen, Warm Springs, Anaconda, Ramsay and Rocker. By the time I started climbing the final hill to Butte, I had edged far enough ahead to drive in sunshine. Evening sun always makes things glow, but never so much as when it is shaped by thunderheads. Something happens above those clouds, and the escaping light seems purer and more concentrated, as though distilled.
That thunderstorm light changed things: It saturated a double-wide, a feed yard, a weigh station, a truck stop, a billboard. Everything leading up to Butte was beautiful. I topped the hill and saw the sun splashing on the jagged, gray line of peaks that tower over the city. Smack in the middle of the horizon line was the Lady of the Rockies. At 87 feet tall, she’s one big madonna. Her palms are perennially turned out and the concrete folds of her robes are kept resplendent with white paint. Tonight she was glowing, and it seemed she might reach down and embrace the condemned houses, the fighting bars, the cars on blocks, and all the rest of Butte.
Driving home in the dark, I think about the Lady of the Rockies. At first it seems strange that anyone—especially in a city as worn out and beaten down as Butte—would build and maintain a gargantuan statue of the Virgin Mary.
It always seems like the Lady is aimed slightly toward the Berkeley pit and its bellyful of acid mine waste slurry. I her orientation feels purposeful, like she was built for the Pit. Maybe it takes an 87 foot idol to cast a benediction on a place so massive and benighted. 
I suppose it makes sense that residents of Butte would invoke the Virgin Mary. Bright white and open-armed, the Lady promises absolution. That means a lot in a place that has been eviscerated by mining, where what was once called the ‘richest hill on earth’ is just a big hole full of toxic water.
They dug up Butte for copper, and refined what they got in Anaconda. As I drive, I look west into the dark toward where the old smokestack is still standing. It is the tallest man-made thing in the valley, and probably wide enough to drop the Lady of the Rockies down without nicking the bricks. Viewed on a clear day from the ranch, the Anaconda stack looks like a dark exclamation point. Its inside is caked with lead and arsenic from years of burning. Dismantling the thing threatens to release all that pollution, so the Anaconda stack will stand a while longer.
The Dry Cottonwood Creek Ranch is downhill and downstream from all this, and we’ve got our own mementos from the copper boom. Earlier today I walked the fence between an irrigated meadow and the river. Wood posts rot down here and willows entwine with the wires. In some places the fence is slack and broken, and a wall of young willows keeps the cattle off of our hay. I hiked with pliers in one hand and a bucket of staples in the other. The grass was high and lush, and as the fence bent towards the river the willows grew higher.
I could hear the river and my curiosity got the better of me. Following the sound, I pushed through a tangled thicket. The noise of water grew louder and with every step the vegetation got thicker and more robust. I parted a screen of willows with my gloved hands, and found myself in a clearing some thirty feet wide. The ground was bare, white and sterile. At intervals it was punctuated by dead willow saplings. A low-growing grass encroached further than anything else into the dead zone, but it grew pale and thin as though its roots found nothing worthwhile.
I walked across, shoved through brush, and found myself in another clearing. This one was serpentine, and it angled toward the river. I followed it. Dried up saplings crackled under my boots. The clearing ended at a cut bank, and when I leaned over the edge I could see the Clark Fork’s high spring flow bearing off poisoned dirt by handfuls.
Driving home in the dark, I thought about slickens on the ranch, the stack at Anaconda, the pit below Butte and the whitewashed Lady presiding over it all. I wondered how to patch such big gashes in the natural world. As I passed Warm Springs with lightning ahead and crosswinds shaking the car, I knew only that it would require more than monuments.
“On Rivers and Ranching” is a blog by a ranch hand working on the Clark Fork Coalition’s Cottonwood Creek Ranch to unite conservation and ranching practices in the middle of the nation’s largest Superfund complex—the upper Clark Fork River. Click here for more.
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