Uncouth but honest, that was the only compliment the nuns granted us ragamuffins of hard-rock mining.
I was born in 1954, but my childhood could well have taken place a hundred
years earlier. All of my grandparents came from “the old country” - two from
Italy and two from an Irish mining outpost in England. They only bought things they couldn’t grow, build, or bake themselves.
Perched around heaps sulfuric waste rock, our neighborhoods were wasted too in the maws of an open pit, gouged from existence even on a map. That lack of a physical space, where memories wait to be re-traced, has framed my whole life.
I got a Kodak Brownie camera for Christmas when I was seven and snapped my first photo, my younger sister with her new Chatty Cathy doll, in our backyard. Looking at this
image many years later, it was the surrounding hazard that grabbed my attention as if
seeing it for the first time.
Sheer chance spared us from a spontaneous hard rock burial. Dynamite blasts, timed to changing work shifts, injected our everyday lives with hailing dust and boulders. Being broken was too common to notice. After all, we did live on the edge of an ore dump. So what did we expect? In 1983, it all was declared a
Superfund site. One of the first and so it remains.
Butte's devout Catholic base didn't need encouragement to proliferate. Unrestrained kid gangs tested themselves over landscapes of gaping ravines, crumbling shafts, and acidic mine creeks. Being "Butte Tough" bred a childhood pride in simply staying alive. And for most, it meant belonging to a lauded cult that poisoned the reality of risk with alcohol.
Montana's nickname, "The Treasure State" first appeared in 1895 to promote its standing as top precious metal producer in the United States. That fact was due exclusively to Butte - The
Richest Hill on Earth - which not only sustained the Montana State treasury
but supplied more than half the copper that electrified America. The Anaconda Copper Mining Company (ACM) dominated Butte and the entire state. The ACM owned
nearly all of the state's essential services such as newspapers, utilities,
transportation, property and even the legislature. Essentially, it owned
Montana.
My parents were first generation Euro-Americans whose parents emigrated in hope of finding the proverbial “better life”. Despite entering the workforce as children, both of my parents were the first in their families to graduate from high school. Yet, a "real life" of grinding labor reduced them to a point where all they had left to give was a lesson in how not to live.
Since my paternal grandfather died of consumption soon after my father was born, Dad (John Patrick "Jack") was essentially raised by his grandmother until he was old enough to get a paid job. At fourteen, he started at the ACM on the underground night shift so he could still attend high school. As a talented athlete he won a football scholarship from Notre Dame that he couldn't accept. His sister was born with spina bifida and their widowed mother needed some relief from being the sole family support as a
cleaning lady in Catholic schools. When his sister died suddenly in her early twenties my father was all that his mother had left in the
world and she determined to keep him with her however possible.
The second youngest of eight children, my mother started washing dishes on
the night shift at a local restaurant when she was
twelve. Gemma (re-named Jennie in the school system) was a
talented artist but lacked support to pursue it. Her destiny after graduating from high school was an arranged marriage to an older friend of the family
who, by her own account, was a stereotypical Italian male. She feared harsh consequences if his expectations weren't met.
After a protracted illness, he died, leaving her with two young children one
of whom was actually his sister's child from a then scandalous relationship. Fractured families were a way of life.
Our "working-class" culture rewarded a high tolerance for hardship with the mistaken satisfaction that is was our birthright to endure it. Having
work was something to be grateful for, no matter what kind of work it was. No
wonder then that so many of us appeared to those outside of Butte as
ready-made masochists.
I entered the world already uncomfortable in it. My two teen-age
half-siblings from my mother's first marriage were not pleased with my
arrival. I suffered rounds of colic, severe enough for hospitalization,
that fueled recurring family stories about my constant crying as a baby and my
mother's futile attempts to calm me with long car rides. My
father, though, ignored the whole subject. Since his own sister died young from a birth defect, his silence may have come from shame.
Among the many fears that haunted the Butte Irish, attracting bad luck by acknowledging reality was probably the most pervasive.
A variety of farm animals shared our neighborhood. We raised chickens in a decomposing shed outside our back door. Preparing for Winter and the holidays, most households held a seasonal slaughter every Fall. Until then, Dad treated the birds - chickens, turkeys. and ducks - more like pets than livestock. Aside from his love for football, he had no taste for brutality. He was not a hunter or gun-lover. And his reaction to killing chickens was the first time I saw someone unafraid to contradict cultural norms. For a 1950's copper miner, he had an uncommonly secure sense of self. He was playful. When he'd fall asleep after finishing his evening, my sister and I would give him "hair do's" complete with rollers. Then he'd wake up and laugh.
On slaughter weekend, my father hauled an ax and chopping block from the shed as the hens nervously ran to him expecting a shower of grain from his hand. Instead he'd grab their legs as a handle onto the block and a swift mechanical chop. Then ma rushed to pluck feathers from the carcass while my sister and I carried heads to the garbage can.
Every year we'd see a demonstration of the phrase, “running around like a chicken with its head cut off.” Our startled amusement always became an anxious silence until the body was exhausted. At that point my father would turn his back on the project and tell my mother to call one of her relatives to finish up. He'd had his fill of ghost fowl.
In 1955, a year after I was born, profit motivated the ACM's rapid transition from underground to open pit mining. By 1962, in just seven years, the Berkeley Pit had devoured my entire childhood environment. The ACM owned the land beneath every house so everyone had to move. Life was immersed in disruption. Within months a tight-knit, self-reliant, and mostly blood-related community was totally dismantled and scattered. The earth it once occupied became a pulverized acidic sludge. No more hikes to gather raspberries or slide down snow in a sloping meadow. All geographic surface was gone.
Our state of sudden shock played out in our behavior. Death is an expected hazard of underground mining. Butte's Granite Mountain/Speculator Mine Fire in 1917, still the most poignant tragedy in hard rock mining history, killed 168 men. But being underground also bred a pride of purpose that extended to everyday life on the surface. Open pit mining brought to an abrupt end.
Now at dinner when Dad recounted his workday, it included stories of retrieving dead miners who "accidentally" fell down a mine shaft and/or were crushed by machinery. Faced with an imminent obsolescence, a seemingly accidental death would at least assure an insurance check to the families left behind. There were only eight kids in my Catholic grade school class. After the mines started closing, two of my classmates lost fathers in these "accidental" deaths.
My father’s drinking escalated beyond its life-long everyday pattern. As an accomplished alcoholic, his habit was not cheap. My parents argued constantly about money. When his paycheck was garnered for liquor debts, my mother dove headlong into futile attempts to control his drinking. Many years after the fact, I know they were both doing the best they could. At the time, though, for me it felt like living in a trap.
Every afternoon after school, Ma directed us into our faded green Buick Special to retrieve my father from the Stewart copper mine. We’d arrive just as the afternoon shift whistle blew. Then we'd spend another thirty minutes with my mother waiting “on pins and needles” until we saw dad cross the mine yard on his way to the showers.
When the wait clocked into an hour without seeing him cross the yard, we knew he'd left early for his favorite bar. Usually, though, we’d go directly from the mine yard to our grandmother's house where Dad would down a quart of beer and secretly finish off the pint of whiskey she’d hidden for him in the bathroom. Our father's mother wasn’t a cruel person, but her life had been hard and she resented us for taking her son. Widowed at a young age, she worked for less than a living wage as a cleaning woman in local Catholic schools while her two small children were raised by her own worn-out mother. She never had the privilege of seeing life from a gentler point of view.
From grandma's house, we’d head down the hill to my father’s favorite haunt, the Atlas bar. The Atlas had a tarnished Art Deco exterior that was out of tune with its current clientele. But its cramped black interior did resemble a mine tunnel when packed with patrons after a shift change. This was where my father felt most at home. Without us, it probably would have been his home.
No matter the season or time of day, we never knew how long we’d be parked outside the Atlas. Waiting became an ingrained habit that became a belief that my time didn't matter. "That's ok," I'd say many years later. "I can wait."
After an hour, especially during winter, ma would start blasting the car horn which, of course, did nothing but underline her frustration. Confirming, yet again, that the horn was useless, she’d then send me in to get him.
During the horn-blowing segment, one of my father’s friends usually stumbled over to the car just to chat. One of the oldest cronies, Jimmy Harrington, had a brogue so heavy we hardly understood him. Just nodding in agreement at appropriate intervals. One below freezing night in January, he told us we had the patience of a Saint and would be richly rewarded in the after life for our acceptance of Hell on Earth. It wasn’t clear what this would be worth on Judgment Day, but it did feel good that someone noticed this was a lot to ask of a child.
When I was in first grade my father crashed an Anaconda Company truck into a telephone pole while driving drunk between worksites. His head went through the windshield. Injuries were severe. While my mother was at the hospital with him on the first night, my sister and I stayed with her relatives who assured us we'd be better of if he died. Their opinion of him was never a whispered mystery and tainted us by association.
Yet, my parents did obviously enjoy each other. Dad was witty, attractive, and fun-loving. By her own admission, my mother was glad for the welcome contrast to her controlling first husband. And he didn't have the mean temperament of a typical alcoholic which Ma often acknowledged with gratitude. In fact, even my mother's sister, Blanche, enjoyed my father and happily joined us on nearly every family vacation.
In the Italian community at large, it was not acceptable
for an Italian woman to marry a non-Italian man, though the reverse was
practically celebrated. It was a "conquest" of sorts for an Italian man
to marry a non-Italian, often referred to as a "white" woman among the older
generations. For females though, it meant exclusion from cultural
norms of inclusion and financial security.
Perhaps as a result of her own shame, my mother paid attention to some surface appearances. She taught us how to set a formal dinner table, dressed us in clothing she tailored precisely by hand, and never allowed us to use the word, “ain’t”. In contrast to the perfect white picket fence fantasies of 1950's Americana, though, our family life was the dark shadow side of a bright new future.
The forced relocation due to the Berkeley Pit, brought us to the edge of a neighborhood where Butte's power brokers were beginning to gather. We were definitely outsiders and, for the first time, I understood why those nuns called us "uncouth". An obvious cultural marker was around alcohol. People with money and education did something called "social drinking" in their "living rooms". Rather than battering arguments, they enjoyed cocktails and conversation. These people seemed above alcoholism, making it a truly lower class affliction. In my grade school mind, economic class determined the difference between those who sipped spirits at 5pm "socials" and those who swilled from jugs in the gutter.
Meanwhile, 1960's mass media began to blanket even our simple outsider lives. "Photo journal" magazines like LIFE and LOOK focused our collective attention on what we were told to care about. Television screens embedded a national "test pattern" identity into our thoughts. We watched Ozzie and Harriet, Leave It to Beaver, and Father Knows Best flicker the model American lifestyle flickered into being. the same one I saw in the families at my new school. People who appeared to have rational, comfortable, conflict-free lives. Totally unlike the one I knew.
At this same time, I caught on to the reality that "growing up to be anything you wanted to be" was not expected or even accepted for females. Yet because of the high rate of alcoholism among working class men, women didn't wait for their "man" to build, fix or take risks. I witnessed enough sparks of courage to grow a desire to know the world at large. But I had no adult or even close friend with guidance to offer. From a young age, I knew I'd have to navigate life on my own. So I looked for guidance from books and media and direct experience whenever possible.
At its zenith, "Richest Hill on Earth" Butte was set to become a major American city with crowds of laboring men in need of very entertaining distraction. Of Butte's once plentiful "Movie Palaces", four were still operating by the time I joined hordes of other kids at Saturday matinees. For the start, I was captivated by their timeless, limitless quality. Movies are imagination brought to life. Portals into space, time, and minds. My first sign to escape.
Throughout my grade school years, Butte had only one television channel which limited programming to news and a few variety shows before ending its broadcast day with static snow at 10pm. So it was a surprise when a BBC program called, "The Avengers" started to showing up on Saturday nights. Its British spies were the distilled essence of couth, especially Emma Peel. She was truly classy, calm, and confident. The life coaching I craved.
The personal relationships that impressed me most as a child were partnerships around work. I saw plenty of examples, especially among the Italians, where marriage was simply a practical arrangement.
I had no experience of or desire for a commercially defined version of “romantic” love.
In third grade, the tree of knowledge of Good and Evil rooted itself in
our classroom in the shape of a Webster’s Dictionary and the Encyclopedia
Britannica. Virgin, conception, intercourse,
masturbation, one word led to another and sometimes with surprising
results. Take ejaculation, for example. As a ten-year-old girl in a
Catholic grade school, I had been ejaculating fervently for the past five
years, redeeming souls from purgatory – Mother of Mercy, Pray for Us -- or
so it seemed until I saw that Britannica defined it as the usual result of
sexual intercourse. A connection sparked. I had discovered one of the
basic unwritten principles of Catholic moral teaching, “Do what you will,
just be careful what you call it.”
The word sex was never uttered in a Catholic grade school. Occasionally,
the phrase “wait until marriage” came up during religion class but never
with any explanation of what we were waiting to do. The closet we ever got
to a description of any sexual act was a vague reference to the Holy Ghost
“coming down upon” the Virgin Mary to beget Christ. Having the Holy Ghost
come down upon you by surprise was a common nightmare among us young
Catholic girls, especially since it seemed you wouldn’t even know it had
happened until months later when a baby arrived.
In Catholic high school, sex was a minefield of adolescent urges,
traversed through ignorant speculation. The Rhythm Method, the only church
sanctioned contraception, was not a simple dance even for adults. For
fumbling, over-eager teenagers lacking any understanding of the
reproductive system, it was a fertility rite.
At the beginning of my sophomore year I sat behind a swaggering guy with a
sizeable rubber ring embossing his back pocket. He regularly bragged that
“he might not touch bottom, but he sure could raise hell with the sides”.
By Christmas, he was a married man.
----------------
Keggers - I didn't drink. Besides the everyday lesson about
consequences from my father, I didn't like the feeling. I was much
more drawn to marijuana. Although the very first intoxicant I tried
at age 13 was LSD.
The TARs - Teen Age Republicans
Before high school I never met anyone who wasn’t a Catholic Democrat so I
didn’t know what to expect when I found myself in the company of
classmates from Butte’s Republican minority. How we first related to each
other was through marijuana. They smoked. I smoked. We all smoked. It
wasn’t until one of them said, “Maybe the Young Republicans of Butte
should actually have a meeting” that I even realized the kind of company I
was keeping.
The mission of the Young Republicans of Butte was to get their parents to
supply dues money that could be used to buy drugs. It was a very
successful mission. Parents of the Young Republicans wanted to do
everything they could to support their budding party faithful and money
was no obstacle. In fact, dues collection often exceeded expectations.
Lucky for me, my Young Republican friends weren’t nearly as politically
polarized as their parents, so I was made an honorary member.
Not wanting to disturb the flow of funds, we took great care to be out of
sight when we met. In warmer months it was easy to hide in nearby woods,
but in Winter we relied on roads less traveled to preserve our privacy.
Sealing ourselves in the rusty remains of a brown Dodge Dart, nine of us
usually lent it just enough weight to plow through the waist deep drifts
covering all local routes to closed mountain campgrounds, our typical pot
party destinations.
One frosty night in February 1970, the Young Republicans of Butte spent a
sizeable sum of dues money on a large quantity of quality Sensimilla, then
immediately headed out to the closest campground. With intervals of
pushing and digging and gunning the engine, it took an hour to navigate
the six miles of rutted dirt road. By the time we settled in a spot behind
a stand of large pine trees, the temperature had fallen from a tolerable
zero to well below. We cranked the windows tight, blasted the heat before
killing the engine. Two pipes and a joint simultaneously circled between
the front and back seat. Oily smoke poured from our lips. We took this as
a sign that the product was rich in resins and celebrated our good fortune
by lighting another round.
Flashbacks
My most vivid adolescent memory is of my father lying in an alcoholic
stupor on his mother’s maroon mohair couch while I stood over him,
sixteen-years-old, screaming how much I hated him.
I screamed because I wanted him to finally hear me, to finally know how
much I wanted him to stop drinking, to finally flatten the maze of
addiction that frustrated all my attempts to get his attention. I vowed,
on a daily basis, to escape the hell he created and find the hidden secret
of a happy life. Then twenty years later I found myself standing over
someone who had passed out on a dirty wooden floor, limp from a mixture of
bourbon and cocaine. We had lived together in a shapeless relationship
that fed on my self-respect. But this time I had no desire to scream.
There was too little honest feeling between us to deserve any hint of
passion. Yet here I was again, pulling on the arm of a drunk who didn’t
even know I was there. And in a flash I saw that I had come full circle.
Lessons I Learned from LSD
At the age of 13, LSD was the first "illicit" drug, including alcohol,
that I tried. I was living with my parents in Butte, Montana and was
not prepared for the effect to last beyond a few hours. By the time
I got home around around 10pm on a Saturday night, the drug was just
beginning to hit. I quickly said hello to my mother then went to my
basement bedroom to see what would happen next. Though I don't
remember exact details of my experience, I did emerge from the eight plus
hours of the trip with a discovery of a "presence of mind" that could
observe my mental activity with interest and relatively little fear that I
was experiencing a permanent and undesirable mind alteration. Maybe
the simplest way to explain it, now from a distance of more than 40
years, is that I was able to detach my "self" from my senses.
It has helped me appreciate and apply "detachment". Of course, not
in every situation, but with that seed of exposure, I know that the mind
does not have to be a trap. I discovered the quiet center in myself
that observes but does not have to engage.
The other lesson was in recognizing the prevalence of patterns, the
regularity of ebb and flow in every day activity. The first time I
saw it was in 1972 at a concert in Bozeman, Montana. A group
of us took LSD before attending a Gordon Lightfoot concert. We were
seating on an upper level of Montana State University fieldhouse and
during intermission I could see there were waves of common activity that
moved through the stands, such as whole sections of people standing to
stretch then sitting down again, without any outside coordination. I
commented on this observation to my friends and they saw it too.
Then about a year later, I was at a small donut shop in Leavenworth Kansas
with a few other friends. It was late in the evening. We had
taken LSD and were looking for a quiet place to land for a few
hours. In the time we were there, a regular cycle of customers kept
the place either populated with a line or near empty with only our group
present. I might have noticed this without LSD, but I am certain is
was much more obvious with it's help.
I glimpsed the pervasive cycle of change.
What Can You Do but What You Can Do?
A few months before I graduated from high school my father had a
debilitating stroke that abruptly ended his longest bout of sobriety. Six
months earlier, he hit a bottom so deep that even he was shaken by it. If
he didn’t quit drinking, it would soon kill him and he knew it.
His three months in the Montana state alcohol treatment center, or the
Spin-Dry as I’ve since heard it called, began with a severe case of the
DT’s. The nurses told my mother it had been a long time since they’d seen
someone that far gone. It was a miracle he survived.
I was eighteen when he came home from the treatment center. I had never
before seen him sober, so when we talked in the kitchen and I knew I had
his full attention, it felt like we were meeting each other for the first
time. It felt like we could finally reach into each other and exchange the
insights that deepen in meaning from one generation to the next. I really
liked this handsome man with Irish charm and a talent for finding the
subtle wit in any phrase. In fact, I loved him.
One evening a few weeks after he’d returned home, my mother went to her
monthly women’s club across town and my younger sister was out with her
friends. As I was about to leave the house myself, my father said he had a
headache and was tired. He went to lie down. I went out for a while but
felt anxious so returned home after a few hours.
The light was on in the bedroom. I called to him from the door. He started
to reply, but his words were too slurred to understand. I went further
into the room to better hear what he was saying. As I arrived next to him,
he was trying to get up out of bed and just barely got to a standing
position when his legs collapsed beneath him. At first I thought, “you
asshole, you’re drunk again,” but then his whole body crumbled onto the
floor and a trickle of blood ran from the edge of his mouth.
I called the hospital and they sent an ambulance. The ambulance nurse said
he’d probably had a stroke and that it could be a very long time before he
was truly back on his feet. I never saw the new sober thoughtful version
of my father again.
He was in intensive care during my high school graduation. I didn’t really
miss having him there because he hadn’t attended any of my previous
milestones. Dad was just never in any shape to show up.
He didn’t improve much over the summer. The nurse was right. Recovering
from a stroke can be a very long process. He spent the next twelve years
until his death in some degree of debilitation, recovering a bit of what
he’d lost, then loosing even more with another broken vessel. The most
disheartening thing, though, was his personality. Through all the drunken
years, the one thing my mother always said with gratitude was that he was
not a mean drunk. But he was a damn mean stroke victim. I felt cheated out
of knowing what he could have been.
As that summer ended and I was about to leave for my first year of
college, my mother pressured me a bit to stay in Butte to help her get him
functioning again. But I knew that if I stayed I would never leave. I
dealt with the disappointment of loosing my only chance to know him by
being very angry with him. I wasn’t about to sacrifice my life for a man
who wouldn’t even climb down from a barstool for me.
Fear of a similar fate led me to exit strategies mostly relying on education and, above all, avoiding pregnancy. Beyond that, I had no “vision for my future”. I’d hoped to escape my upbringing through education but had no clear idea of where I wanted it to take me.
Guilt, though, is an insidious thing. When mixed with freedom, it can
slyly persuade you to mete out your own punishment in the guise of a good
time. My Freshman year at Montana State in Bozeman didn’t go well
academically. All I knew was that I had made it out of Butte. With my
first glimpse of limitless possibility, I lost all perspective on why I
was even attending college.
As my grades plummeted, I spent more and more time on mountain tops.
Skiing became an escape from the very place I prayed to someday reach. But
I didn’t loose my sense of purpose entirely. I wanted an education.
After flailing through my first year of college at in the School of
Architecture at Montana State, I wanted to make a clean break from all of
Montana. As my only affordable out-of-state option, Saint Mary
College in Leavenworth was my last best choice.
I transferred there after a stark awakening in the school of
Architecture at Montana State University. Reverence for shelter and
interior space has been with me for as long as I can remember but
nothing prepared me for the ego strength required to pursue
architecture as a profession. Just being a woman in a technical field
came up as an obstacle during the Dean’s opening remarks. Of the
more than two hundred Freshmen entering the MSU School of Architecture
that Fall, only five of us were female. Whether by accident or
by design, we all sat next to each other in the first row where the
Dean, a silver-headed demigod of the geodesic dome movement, could
address us directly. “By the way,” he said grinning for our benefit,
“the School of Architecture has never graduated a woman and probably
never will”. As someone struggling to maintain the personal will
(and finances) to attend college, this was a landslide beneath my
tenuous determination. Downhill skiing became my distraction
from self-doubt until downhill grades snapped me back to
attention.
Reverence for shelter and interior space has been with me for as long as I can remember but nothing prepared me for the ego strength required to pursue architecture as a profession. Just being a woman in a technical field came up as an obstacle during the Dean’s opening remarks. Of the more than two hundred Freshmen entering the MSU School of Architecture that Fall, only five of us were female. Whether by accident or by design, we all sat next to each other in the first row where the Dean, a silver-headed demigod of the geodesic dome movement, could address us directly. “By the way,” he said grinning for our benefit, “the School of Architecture has never graduated a woman and probably never will”. As someone struggling to maintain the personal will (and finances) to attend college, this was a landslide beneath my tenuous determination. Downhill skiing became my distraction from self-doubt until downhill grades snapped me back to attention.
The Sisters of Charity of Leavenworth taught in all the Catholic schools I attended as a child. Saint Mary College (SMC) was the official Motherhouse of their order so every year we saw the latest version of the Saint Mary Story, its college recruitment film. No matter how dire my academic performance became, I knew Saint Mary’s would welcome me no matter what. In fact, they even gave me a few small scholarships. I thought I was headed for an environment focused on education in the flatlands of Kansas.
In Butte’s Catholic schools, I was taught by the Sisters of Charity of
Leavenworth. Every year beginning in first grade, a young male marketing
representative, hired by the Sisters of Charity, would stop by to show us
girls the latest version of a narrated slide show called “The Saint Mary
Story”. Saint Mary was a Catholic women’s college owned by the Sisters.
One viewing of the Saint Mary Story placed a guaranteed admission stamp on
your application. I had seen twelve years of Saint Mary Stories by then.
My transfer from Montana State to Saint Mary College was processed over
the phone.
While at home for the summer before leaving for Saint Mary, I worked night
shifts at my cousin’s sandwich shop in uptown Butte. At the end of July,
just as the sun was beginning to set around 9:30, two police cars and an
ambulance wailed up the hill past the shop. Casualties in Butte were
common, so my co-workers didn’t take much notice of the sirens, but my
stomach twisted into a knot. As we finished cleaning and closing up for
the night, one of my cousins came up to the door. She was agitated. A few
hours earlier, my younger sister, Jackie, had been seriously injured in a
freakish bicycle accident. The ambulance sirens were for her.
She was riding down from the top of Main Street near Anaconda Road, a
straight, steep descent about five miles long. The gateway to a legacy of
spent mineshafts. In Butte, where recreation was married to risk, it was a
given that this hill should be ridden for all the speed it was worth.
At fifteen-years-old my sister was out riding with her friends on a summer
evening. She had traded bikes with one of them for the ride down the hill.
Its brakes were too worn to work effectively at any speed. About half-way
down the hill, the Anaconda Mining Company was repairing an ore train
tunnel. The Company had torn open the road above, leaving a deep,
unprotected crevice that even someone in car would not have expected. By
the time she tried to stop, she was so close to the open hole that the
brakes wouldn’t have been much help even if they were working well. She
squeezed the handlebar levers so tightly that her hands were swollen shut
from the bruising for days afterward. The front tire hit the sloped
embankment of the dig and launched her over a hundred feet into the air
then down into the open tunnel. Her back took the full force of the
landing with most of its length being crushed against the steel rails of
the track.
My cousin told me that Jackie was in Saint James, the only hospital in
Butte, but was going to be transferred overnight to Saint Pat’s in
Missoula about 100 miles away. She said she’d take me there in the
morning. Then she drove me to my mother’s empty house. When we arrived she
handed me a brown paper bag. Inside were Jackie’s clothes, saturated and
stiff with dry blood. “No one could loose this much blood and not be in
pretty bad shape,” I said. My cousin’s tired eyes agreed.
Dumbfounded by the turn my sister’s life had taken, I spent the night
alone and awake with this old Butte motto revolving in my head, “You sure
as hell, never know.”
