The Toxic Train

By Bryce Andrews, 8-04-08

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	The old smoke stack from the smelter in Anaconda, Montana.

At first, all I can see is the high, flickering light through the night sky, but I know the shape and clatter of what comes behind it. Two of these trains pass each day on the tracks. I watch them from the door of my rented house—an eastbound one at sunset and a westbound one after night falls.

The early train is loaded with toxic dirt from the now-dry reservoir of the Milltown Dam. Its suspension groans under the weight. But this train, the empty train, clatters as it passes.

I look up and the stars are spread out overhead in a glittering net. A few small clouds are visible, like whitecaps on midnight water. The air is clearer than it has been in a week, scrubbed clean of the forest fire smoke that has been plaguing the valley.

The train arrives on a peaking wave of sound, its engine a hulking shadow behind a tiny, lit window with a silhouetted man inside. I wave, but he is looking down the track, bending forward in the glow of instruments to toggle whatever switch engages the glorious two-tone horn. His mind is already at the next crossing.

I think he loves his machine, and probably clenches his gut when he throttles up as if he were yoked to pull alongside the massive diesel-electric engines. He has been joined the machine in a strange partnership: little motions of his fingers drive tons of steel. The fire between his neurons is linked to the fire in pistons. If he keeps at it long enough, his dexterity will haul dirt enough to make a mountain.

I have melded similarly with other machines: not long ago I was piling big, square bales with a red Case tractor. During the first couple of loads, I was tense and nervous. Tremors in my hands caused the bucket to shake and rattle. As I worked, though, my hands learned the feel of the gearshift and how to negotiate quirks of aging hydraulic hoses.

Soon I began to feel as if it were my own arm reaching out—my hand grasping and lifting each bale. The tractor seemed so thoroughly grafted to me that I would wince when I bumped over a rock or brought the bucket down with a shutter on the ground. Sometimes I even said “ouch!”

It’s a seductive and dangerous symbiosis. In the tractor I can stretch out a hydraulic arm and toss sixteen-hundred-pound bales around like they were cinderblocks. If I stepped out of the cab, I couldn’t even roll one over without the machine. So long as I stay at the controls, my efforts are magnified.

My first impulse is to judge this magnification harshly. After all, it erodes our connection to the natural world. And it sometimes proves enthralling enough to focus us more on what is possible than what is right. I feel this way when I look down into the Berkeley Pit, or across the dusty wastelands near Anaconda.

But this train runs on a different track. It pulls bad dirt upstream each day, removing waste from the river, and speeds through the night on its return trip toward Milltown for another load. It magnifies the movements and intentions of its operator incredibly, which is just enough to fix something as massive as a river.

After the engine come the cars, darker even than the night. They are low, open-topped earth-movers. Their black paint might once have been shiny, but the accumulated dust of hundreds of trips up and down this track has dulled it. When the last car passes, its noise diminishes quickly. I stand under the clear stars listening to dogs bark in faraway yards. I hear the whistle blowing as the engine passes Deer Lodge.

Week 10

"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. [End of article]