From the Big Hole to Bear Paw: Finalé
Centipedes in a Beer Can, Rooting for Beets, and the Death of Looking Glass
5.
Out of Wisdom, Montana, we followed the Big Hole River under a dull overcast to Butte, where the sinister hazel eye of the Berkeley Pit Superfund Site stares at you without blinking. Once an open pit copper mine, it is now an acid lake where, in 2016, nearly four thousand migrating Snow Geese died after landing to avoid a snowstorm, their guts burned out by sulphuric acid and heavy metals. The lake is so toxic that copper has been mined directly from the water. Progress can often be measured best by its casualty lists and, as the smashed coyotes from Boise to Ketchum testified, wildlife is usually reduced to the realms of the sacrificial—acceptable collateral damage in the relentless human pursuit of immortality. The ancients slaughtered sheep at the temples of Ceres in hopes of a good harvest. We sacrifice geese for DVRs, and smash deer on the highway so that trucks full of aluminum lawn chairs and soap shaped like tree frogs can be delivered to the suburbs on-time, every time.
Out of Butte then, on the road to Helena, under the watchful eye of Our Lady of the Rockies, the fourth largest statue in the United States. She is a 90’ Holy Mary dedicated to “all women, especially mothers,” a kind of brooding, insistent monolith emerging from a pile of granite that still does nothing for migrating elk trying to cross the highway. And she hasn’t yet, I suspect, been found to weep tears of blood, oil, or scented liquids.
We will know when she does because the people will come. Pilgrims will travel in mini vans and pickups—rather than donkey carts and afoot—to give offerings, to shower the inanimate with limitless faith, to drop at her feet and pray. We are a complicated species of dreamers, who murder the innocent in gas chambers and rescue children fallen into wells. We fly helicopters on Mars and still beseech the heavens at the feet of agonists made from 400 tons of ciment fondu.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Craig Rullman on Substack to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.