REPORTER’S NOTEBOOK
By: Carl Reader
Maybe it’s a little crazy to talk about the differences in air between here and Montana, but it’s one of the first things I noticed when I returned home from the Treasure State after a year and a half.
The air in the east is softer, fuller, and it seems to touch your face gently with every breeze. In Montana, the air is thinner and just doesn’t have the same feel.
Montana people are rugged, Montanans like to say to each other. It might just be because of the air. It’s wafer-thin, dry, rough and has some strange things in it so you might say it’s sandpaper to the soul. It might just be that what a state has in its air makes it what it is, whether it’s Montana or New Jersey.
The first thing friends say when I tell them I’ve been in Montana is "Isn’t it beautiful?"
Sure, it is. Mountain and streams. Prairies. Gently rolling golden hills in autumn and big game. The odd thing is, I found many Montanans never truly appreciated it. The Bitterroot Valley, which is in western Montana, is where I lived. It was listed by one magazine as one of the 10 most environmentally endangered places in the nation.
It definitely became that when the wild fires of 2000 struck.
The Bitterroot Valley bore the brunt of those fires. To the west is Idaho and the Bitterroot-Selway Wilderness, the biggest wild area in the continental United States. To the east are the Sapphire Mountains, also a huge wilderness. In the summer of 2000, things were so dry the slightest spark set off fire to the west, east, north and south. Lightning generally set off the fires although, supposedly, some kids camping set off the wild fire just east of town.
Eventually, eight million acres burned.
When a fire started, it set up a huge column of smoke, similar to those shots of atom bombs on TV. Since there is a down draft caused by air traveling up and over the mountains, the smoke didn’t go up and go away. It came down again and lingered over Hamilton, the town where I lived, and the rest of the valley. At first, authorities told people not to do any exercise outside. Then they said don’t go outside at all. The smoke was so thick people wore scarves over their faces or masks.
It lasted two months.
Soon bumper stickers appeared saying, "Environmentalists, see what you’ve done now." Many people blamed environmentalists for the fires. My Realtor said to me, "Maybe the forests should be clear-cut. Then they wouldn’t burn."
It reminds me of what I said to my veterinarian once when he said to me my dog wouldn’t get testicular cancer if he was fixed. I told my vet, "Yeah, and if we cut off the dog’s head, he wouldn’t get brain cancer."
Strange, new places have strange, new air and strange, new ideas. That’s just the way it is.
The first night in Montana, the old rented house I was staying in gave me carbon monoxide poisoning. The furnace was condemned the next day. Nobody had checked to see if it was all right before we moved in.
"You were lucky you weren’t paralyzed or worse," the repairman said to me.
Very strange air indeed.
It’s legal to burn trash in Montana. March 1, burning season begins. Many people save up their trash over the winter rather than pay the $17 a month it costs to cart it away. March 1, they begin to burn. Again, columns of smoke rise up over the mountains, bend and come back to settle over the town.
There are, of course, many people who care about the environment in Montana, but those who don’t care do so with a vengeance. It’s almost a religious experience to hate environmentalists for some, and it wasn’t unusual to hear some of those folks brag about how they screwed over environmentalists by this action or that. It gets personal.
The root of all this appears to be the actions of the Clinton administration to limit logging and mining, two very big industries in the state. Many Montanans who worked in those industries and lost their jobs say Clinton was waging a "War on the West," and there was great hatred of him.
"Enviros," as environmentalists out west were called, were fair game, and I do mean game, as in deer or elk. One rancher pulled out his rifle and threatened to kill national forest workers who were attempting to build a fire-break on his land at the height of the fires. He told them to leave or else. Nothing happened to his guy; no legal action or sheriff at his door.
"Ah, everybody knows him," my neighbor explained. "They know he’s really a good guy. It’s like if you did something stupid and threatened somebody. Everybody would say ‘Carl’s a good guy. He didn’t mean it.’ "
The expression I heard was "Shoot, shovel and shut up."
Ah, the wild west. The air really is different there, and until you experience it first-hand as a resident, you don’t really know how different it is. I tell my more conservative friends they’d be looked upon as nothing more than a Jane Fonda in Montana. In the east, the environment is a big issue, but in the west, many view environmentalists as not much more than mangy dogs.
So sometimes it’s good to take a nice gulp of the thick air of home and wonder in amazement at the differences geography inflicts on people.
Carl Reader is a Packet Group staff writer and a former sports editor for the Hopewell Valley News.