On a chilly October afternoon a group of us met at Milltown State Park in western Montana. We stood above the Clark Fork River where we could see the Blackfoot River flow in from the north, and together they make their way westward, eventually spilling into the Columbia and flowing into the Pacific. Historically the park is a passageway, has always been a passageway not only for rivers but for the Salish and other Northwestern tribes moving out to the plains to hunt bison, or for various waves of settlers moving always farther West.
Now, there is a steady hum of traffic from I-90 with additional cars coming down Highway 200 to meet the Interstate. The tiny towns of Bonner and Milltown are below, with East Missoula only a little farther West and Missoula past the bend in the river and Hellgate Canyon a few miles away.
It is impossible to recreate a pristine sense of what it must have been like pre-automobile and train, but the place is serving the same function as it always has, and so as we began our journey through this landscape, we talked about accepting all sensory detail, traffic noise alongside bird call and wind in the trees, as part of what characterizes this location.
This was another of the Humanities Montana programs offered in conjunction with State Parks. The park ranger, Mike Kustudia, and two Americorp employees joined in the hike. We began by gathering in a circle and reading a short passage from N. Scott Momaday: “There are certain villages and towns, mountains and plains that, having seen them, walked in them, lived in them even for a day, we keep forever in the mind’s eye. They become indispensable to our well-being; they define us, and we say: I am who I am because I have been there, or there” (from the essay,“Sacred and Ancestral Ground”). This quotation appeals to me because it removes the stigma of being new to a place; it places the emphasis on engagement rather than duration, and it is in the nature of the park system to welcome new visitors.
We hiked through the forest along a deer path, past a huge elderberry whose purplish berries seemed almost floral in the crisp fall air, and arrived at an overlook with its placards about wildlife, geology, the people who traditionally moved through this landscape, and Copper Baron William A. Clark, who owned a large ranch below where we stood. It was Clark’s idea to build a dam there so that he could float logs down the Clark Fork to the mill. Of course he had a hand in the mill, as he had a hand in Montana politics and anything else that might serve his purposes.
While the dam may have seemed like a good idea at the time, it was unfortunate that a massive flood happened soon after its creation, bringing loads of toxins down the Blackfoot from the mine above and depositing it in the reservoir behind the dam. Arsenic poisoned both the surface and groundwater and, unfortunately, the people who drank it. Late in the twentieth century, the area became a Superfund site, and so restoration work eventually happened and the park now exists on reclaimed land.
At this point in our journey, Mike Kustudia talked us through the history, and we asked questions until we felt familiar with the story of this place. We read Heather Cahoon’s poems from basalt magazine and Victor Charlo’s “Agnes," honoring an elder from his Salish tribe. The last lines were especially poignant: “Why did I learn how to write? Why did I want to? / Is it worth the loss of your world going away?” We also read Paul Zarzyski’s “Graveyard Shift at Bonner Mill,” which pays homage to the many workers who lived in tiny row houses below, to Richard Hugo, and to the “Milltown Bar, [where] Hugo’s poems [are] preserved / there forever under glass.”
After a period of writing and reflecting, we continued on, down a trail through forest switchbacks to the river bottom. At one point we stopped to watch and listen to the birds beside us. They were in the tops of pine trees rooted far below, so we were eye level with their lively exchanges and flitting movements.
Where the trail meets the floodplain, we stopped at Tunnel 16 ½ on the old Milwaukee Road. For the moment this tunnel is blocked off, but it is destined to open and thus provide continuous connection from Missoula along the Kim Williams Nature Trail into Milltown State Park. And then we moved into the confluence area, the river bottom where the reservoir used to be, and talked about the 300-year old tree stumps, like ghostly sculptures, from trees cut down when Clark built the dam in 1908. Lush grasses line the river, one of them tinted a subtle red. Mike told us that particular grass is fond of heavy metals, in this case arsenic that has not disappeared from the area despite all cleanup efforts.
We gathered in a circle two more times, once at a point where the Salish camped before journeying toward the plains. We spent time reading what we wrote earlier, reflecting on the landscape or our favorite moments during the hike. This was the end of the park, and it was time to return.
Some of us rode up to the overlook parking lot and some of us hiked. When we arrived, we stood in a circle once more. We had spent a little over three hours together in 40-degree weather enjoying a landscape that some of us knew intimately and some of us had only encountered for the first time. I read Richard Hugo’s “Making Certain It Goes On,” a poem set on the Blackfoot featuring a drunk fisherman, the mill and the old dam. At the end of the poem, the speaker and the “you” he addresses, presumable the reader, imagine a statue honoring the fisherman after his death and signaling abundance: “this community / going strong another hundred years.” The poem, like the reading from Momaday, is inclusive, though Hugo's work characteristically implies hardship as well as the possibility of escaping it.
We stood quietly. We spoke our thanks to each other for the day, for the poems and how they helped to shape our time together. No one wanted to be the first to step out of the circle.
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