Field notes: Butte, Montana
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I’m in Butte, Montana, for a writing residency at Dear Butte, high up on a mountain overlooking the town and the valley. It’s a beautiful town, still cold in April, spreading down a hill across a flat between snow-capped mountains. Butte, a mile high and a mile deep, as they say, is an old mining town, and the architecture of extraction is still everywhere - signposts to the mines owned by the state’s old-time Copper Kings. They show the cost of what it meant to be, as it was once called, “the richest hill on earth” - on each sign, a note of the people who died beneath our feet, 79 here, 43 there, 60 there, thousands of feet into the earth, where abandoned shafts still crisscross into the depths. In 1914, tensions between workers and the Copper Kings exploded into riots and strikes, which are well remembered here.
I walked today around the Berkeley Pit, a copper mine. To look at it, it sucks you in. The ground opens up, slopes into it. The snowy, taupe and dark green alpine spring is turned up into a bright red canyon, slotted and pitted, whorling in on itself, a sort of strangely beautiful and perverse body horror, the face of the earth sheared off and reformed into an uncanny version of itself. The Pit has eaten whole neighborhoods; it ate a flock of geese, which landed on the toxic pool of water at the bottom and died. The water has risen over the years; someone here told me the company hoped Butte would just pick up and move, and some did, but many didn’t, many people brokenheartedly and fullheartedly love this place and don’t want to leave.
Some people I met spoke of the Pit as a kind of strange protector, a poisonous friend. The insane wealth that has spiked cost of living in most of Montana hasn’t done much to Butte, mostly, they speculate, because millionaires don’t like to see extraction laid so bare. The artistic community runs deep because of that, with new affordable artist housing in the works, galleries, documentary projects, a community radio station, music most nights, secondhand bookstores. I spend part of the time here writing, but a lot of time just walking around and looking and listening and absorbing myself into the sloped streets and the big wide open sky.
Some things I wrote
Politicians are committed to building a federal prison on a strip mine in Letcher County, Kentucky, despite nearly two decades of local, regional, and national opposition. I talked to people formerly incarcerated in Appalachia’s burgeoning gulag archipelago about the toll rural prisons take on communities and prisoners alike. Inquest
United Auto Workers is following up on its promise to organize the South, starting with my neighbors at Volkswagen in Chattanooga, Tennessee; their union win is a victory for not only workers, but the future of renewable industry in the South. The New Republic
A landmark federal rule on silica dust, which contributes to deadly, progressive black lung disease could save coal miners’ lives. But it has some key weaknesses - namely, it relies on coal companies to monitor themselves. Grist
A surreal trip through the Great American Solar Eclipse and all that it carried. Atmos
What I’m reading
Tenth of December, by George Saunders - a truly wild collection of short stories about class and capitalism.
This archival Virginia Quarterly Review piece will tell you everything about the Berkeley Pit and then some.
In Georgia, Emory University administration officials orchestrated a brutal police crackdown on peacefully protesting students - from the Guardian.
Various homesteading horror story reddit threads for a new play I’ve been writing while I’m here
Who I’m hanging out with
some Walkerville, MT old-timers at the Pissers Palace dive bar. Maryanne bought me a beer. An old man whose name I can’t remember told me he likes Butte cause it’s tough but unfortunately no one gets into bar fights anymore. He wants to travel the country in an RV when he retires. I told him about the haunted lakes of the South. Not sure why. I just like talking to people about that kind of thing.