NATE SCHWEBER WRITES HOME

The Blackfoot and the Hudson: From Polluted to Pristine?

By Nate Schweber, 6-13-05

Oy Gevalt it’s hot in New York City. This kind of heat will turn your brain into a blister, make your dog tell you to kill someone and transform you into another deranged maniac in the kingdom of deranged maniacs. I sit here near the bank of the Hudson River, my laptop computer providing me a reprieve from the microwave-like atmosphere of my air-conditioning-less apartment, and one fantasy keeps going through my head. I want to jump in that water and freaking cool off.

I won’t, of course. Just like you I’ve heard the tales of that water eating through human flesh like battery acid. Actually, I’m less worried about that than I am my macabre ideas of what’s in those dark depths: corpses of mobsters with their feet in cement, wrecked cars with families frozen, screaming, gasping, drowned rats, dead and mutant fish.

Growing up in Montana I spent my summer days as one of countless farmer-tanned, water-sandal wearing, inner-tube brandishing dingbats in the Clark Fork, Blackfoot and Bitterroot rivers and even Rattlesnake Creek. Naiveté dies like a bug splattered on a windshield, and I was gobsmacked upon moving to New York City to learn that the Hudson River nearby is too polluted to swim. Coming from Soul City, Montana, I just assumed that you could just swim in the river that runs through your town.

THE River That Runs Through It, the Blackfoot, was in the news for two reasons last week and though the percentage chance of Jimmy Hoffa being at the bottom of some jade-colored trout hole is quite low (though technically not zero), it does have some things in common with the mighty Hudson.

On Saturday the people at the Clark Fork Coalition (they do the Lord’s work, you know) kicked off a campaign to prod the Forest Service into ordering the cleanup of the upper Blackfoot. They gave Farmers Market patrons facts about toxic mine tailings to go along with all those pastries. Emboldened perhaps by the Environmental Protection Agency’s blessing to eighty-six the Milltown Dam, the coalition is calling for the removal of the 450-foot Mike Horse Dam near the top of the 132-mile Blackfoot River.

Mike Horse Dam, star of the book Wounding the West by David Stiller published in 2000, has in its murky depths all the poisons of the Milltown Dam, and it’s about as unstable. According to a Forest Service report issued at the beginning of the year, the 64-year-old dam, named after a horse belonging to Joseph Hartmiller, who discovered minerals there in 1898, has a 7-foot wide leak. Not to mention when the skies open up, the waters of the upper Blackfoot and Anaconda Creek flood their banks and create a lovely little poisonous rinse. Oh yeah, the Forest Service discovered recently that the same rains that would cause the dam to break would also wash out the road emergency workers drive to the dam. Sounds like a recipe for, oh what’s that word… got it! Disaster.

Disaster struck in June 1975, three years before I was born, when the Mike Horse Dam, which is like a boostier holding back an 800,000 cubic yard bosom of mining waste, broke. Lead, copper, cadmium and zinc spilled into the river. The water ran orange, like carrot juice, and for miles everything that swam turned its creamy, white belly to the sun and died.

As an 11-year-old bitten by the fishing bug I remember an elderly angler telling me not to bother wetting line in the Blackfoot. That year, 1989, a study by UM Geologist Johnnie Moore concluded that three quarters of the fish in the river were dead, compared to pre-1975 populations. In 1992 when Robert Redford came to make a movie of Norman Maclean’s book A River Runs Through It -- the story that made the Blackfoot River and Missoula famous -- he was forced to film on the Gallatin and Yellowstone Rivers because the Blackfoot was in such bad shape. Later that year the Blackfoot made the conservation group American Rivers’ list of the nation’s top 10 most endangered rivers, and it was listed as “threatened� five of the next six years. Congrats, Montana, you’ve got rivers that are every bit as king-hell screwed up as East Coast rivers like the Hudson.

It took years to restore healthy trout populations to the Blackfoot, and what’s to stop that pesky dam from breaking again? You guessed it, Jocko. Nothing but promises from Asarco, the financially-plagued mining company that owns the Mike Horse Dam. In 1993 Gov. Marc Racicot, adhering to the same Republican, anti-government supervision, let-the-free-market-dictate-corporate-behavior ethos that brought you power deregulation, signed a bill which kept the Mike Horse Dam from being listed as a Superfund. That would’ve brought with it a mandatory cleanup deadline. Instead, Asarco agreed to “voluntarily� clean the site. Few non-Republicans were surprised when in 2000, despite spending $8.5 million on cleanup, Asarco asked for, and was granted by the state Board of Environmental Review, an extra 10 years to bring down toxic levels of zinc and other contaminants.

In the same newspaper with the story about the Mike Horse Dam was a piece by the indispensable Sherry Devlin about the Montana Fish Wildlife and Parks Commission approving a plan to re-introduce trumpeter swans to the Blackfoot Valley. Montana will import 10 to 20 of the swans, the largest species of waterfowl in North America, from the Wyoming Wetlands Society until there are at least seven breeding pairs that call the Blackfoot Valley home.

Does anybody else sense a sand castle being built in the Blackfoot? Trumpeter swans, which were hunted to near-extinction in the early 20th century, are coming back. The grassroots group Blackfoot Challenge restored 32 miles of river, 51 miles of riparian areas, 2,100 acres of wetlands, 2,300 acres of native grasslands and secured 54,000 acres of conservation easements. Other groups have spent millions on Blackfoot River restorations.

I shudder to think of the teeth gnashing and fist clenching that will ensue if all that work is wiped out by the Mike Horse Dam busting.

To take it to the Nth degree, I can’t imagine the EPA, which will spend more than $100 million taking out the Milltown Dam, would be tickled if the Mike Horse Dam broke, toxic tailings washed into the Clark Fork, and every fish between Lincoln and the Columbia River was snuffed out anyway.

I started out saying there are parallels between Montana’s Blackfoot and New York’s Hudson, and the fact that they’re both unconscionably polluted isn’t the only one. On a personal note, the last two rivers I swam in were the Blackfoot and the Hudson respectively.

Yeah, that’s right. I swam the Hudson. And I've still got my skin.

Last September I swam a mile across the tea-colored, silty-tasting Hudson from Beacon, NY to Newburgh, NY, which is about 70 miles upstream from New York City. An environmental group, Friends of the Hudson, organized the swim to tout how the river has improved since the EPA cracked down on factories pumping Polychlorinated Biphenyl (PCBs) into the water. I did the swim because it coincided with a warning from the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection that the Passaic River, which runs through the city of Paterson which I covered for a daily newspaper, was so polluted with factory tailings and raw sewage that anybody who drank, swam, or even touched the water would fall ill.

I wanted to make the point that no matter how hideously polluted the river, cleanup efforts work. And because I was in such crummy river-swimming shape -- having last swam in the Blackfoot before I moved to New York in 2001 -- I drank enough of the Hudson to kill me if it really was still toxic.

The Forest Service has a chance to literally fix the Blackfoot River’s problem at it’s source. Join me in writing them to say that the Mike Horse dam has got to go. Explain that in addition to cleaning the Blackfoot River in perpetuity, if we dig up that dam we can find out if Jimmy Hoffa is under there after all.

E-mail: comments-northern-helena-lincoln@fs.fed.us

Editor's Note: This is the second dispatch in what will be a regular series from Nate Schweber, a Missoula icon and now New Yorker (oh, and dear friend of mangaging editor Courtney Lowery). Nate has agreed to regularly grace us with a few words about his hometown. We fully enjoy him so we hope you will too. Keep checking www.newwest.net/missoula for more of "Nate Schweber Writes Home.

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