skip to main |
skip to sidebar
Thanks to the bookshelf review I undertook for this post, I'm now rereading Mary Renault's The King Must Die. It's the story of the mythical hero Theseus, King of Athens. One of Theseus' early adventures (before he gets to Crete and deals with the Minotaur, the book's centerpiece) takes place in Eleusis, a kingdom ruled by women. The women are like despotic rulers throughout time: contemptuous and dismissive of those not like them. In Eleusis, men are considered childish, weak-minded, and utterly unfit for the worlds of business, government, religion and everything else the society deems important.
Women rule in Eleusis because the society is an antiquated one, still wedded to cultural dictates developed in response to the ancient notion that women and the gods create life. Although the Eleusians in Theseus' time know the role earthly men play in conception, Eleusian culture has not evolved to take that into account and elevate men above second-class status. Everyone seems OK with this except, of course, our hero.
As events spin out, Theseus ultimately finds himself in position to modernize (it's killing me, but I'm not going to put that word in quotation marks) Eleusis. The following passage made my hair stand on end:
Later that day, I appointed my chief men, from those who had been resolute in defying the women. Some of these would have had me put down women from every office in the land. Though I tended myself to extremes as young men do, yet I did not like this; it would bring them all together to work women's magic in the dark. One or two, who had pleased my eye, I should have been glad to see about me. Only I had not forgotten Medea, who had fooled a man as wise as my father was. And there were the old grandmothers, who had run a household for fifty years, and had more sense than many a warrior with his mind only on his standing; but besides their magic, they had too many kindred and would have managed the men. So I thought again about what I had seen in Eleusis of women's rule, and chose from those sour ones who took their pleasure in putting the others down. And these did more than the men to keep their sisters from rising up again. A few years later, the women of Eleusis came begging me to appoint men in their stead. Thus I was able to make a favor of it.
I recognize that Mary Renault wrote those words in the 20th century, but they haunt me anyway. There were written records in the times the book depicts; I presume she relied on them for political and cultural realities just as she did to paint the book's remarkable depiction of the time's religious rites and its architectural, scenic and other physical realities.
Obviously, the passage says a great deal about the nature of power and how and why institutions as well as individuals promote on the bases of sexism, opportunism, tokenism, protectionism and atavistic fear, rather than solely on the basis of merit. But does it also illustrate something fundamental in the nature of women? Or does the passage simply confirm that in times of oppression and discrimination, when power is scarce for one gender or the other, some of those with power will do anything to hang onto it?
Most career women have at some point in their careers run across a successful woman who's reached an elevated position and acts as if she believes there's some honor and glory in remaining alone there. Instead of trying to help other women succeed, she revels in her exclusive status. This sort of queen-bee behavior does as much to mask opportunity and hold women back as do sexist men or the pressures of the status quo. It horrifies me to think it might have been going on since ancient times.
Either way, I'm feeling galvanized. I'm determined to do something right this minute to help another woman succeed. I hope you will, too.
We've had visitors here for the last few days and on Saturday, a perfect day for being outside in the desert sun without roasting (as are most October days), our guests decided they wanted to see some Vegas glories of the natural versus man-made variety. Not being either shoppers or out-of-towners who are obliged to clog up the Strip on weekends in order to see it at all, we were delighted (and a bit relieved) by this choice. Our definition of hospitality includes letting guests decide on plans, then chauffeuring them, keeping them company, and otherwise doing what we can to make sure they have a wonderful time. This policy occasionally leads us down dubious paths activity-wise, but not this time.
Valley of Fire, Nevada's oldest state park, is within an hour of Las Vegas. Its name comes from its eye-popping red sandstone formations. These fantastical shapes and sinuous layers were created 150 million years ago by enormous shifting sand dunes, then sculpted by both the uplifting and faulting of the entire region (which occurred in pulses from about 80 million years ago until about 35 million years ago) and by erosion, geology's most dogged player. The park also features layers of limestone, shale and other gorgeous and geologically fascinating rocks, chipmunks as bold as game-show hosts, lizards, jackrabbits, coyote, birds, and the usual array of desert plants.
It's amazing how distinct and colorful these plants now appear to us. When we first moved here, our eyes accustomed to the splashy colors of Midwestern foliage, all the desert flora looked similarly scrubby and more or less beige. Familiarity has transformed subtle beauty into vivid beauty, as splashy in its own way as the rich rainbow of humid climate colors or the gaudiness of the Strip. Here as elsewhere, I guess, perspective is everything.
Most on-air football commentary is bubble-headed. Lowering the volume so you don't really have to listen to it usually suffices; in extreme cases, there's always the mute button.
The Sunday night announcing team (formerly the Monday night team, but times change) was about as good as it gets. This isn't saying much. In fact, it isn't saying anything other than that the commentary did not customarily have to be reduced to gentle white noise or muted altogether. Al Michaels, while utterly dorky, knows the game pretty well and has some ability to watch the proceedings as opposed to blathering inarticulately about unrelated matters (a distressing habit shared by too many of his colleagues). John Madden was enthusiastic and, if occasionally incoherent, also incredibly knowledgeable and never mean-spirited. Cris Collinsworth, who has taken Madden's place, has been bland so far, but he may settle in and be as good as he was in his previous broadcasting gig.
Tonight, however, both Al and Cris achieved new lows. In a blast of vulgarity, Cris crowed, carefully enunciating each word, "The Pittsburgh Steelers are kicking their stinkin' butts!" Nice. Really elegant commentary.
Worse - far worse, if you ask me - was Al's casual, gratuitous and highly offensive sexism. As he went into raptures like a teenager with a crush over Mike Tomlin (the Steelers' coach, for you readers who aren't football fanatics), Al gushed that the day before the opener against Tennessee, Tomlin had spent four hours attending his kids' teacher conferences. "Of course," Al enthused, "it's easy to tell the wife to go do that. But [Tomlin] was there."
My husband and I turned to each other, aghast. "Tell the wife to go do that??" The wife?? Leaving aside the dismissive nomenclature, let's count the offensive implications of Al's statement: (1) wives are subordinates who exist to be ordered about; (2) attending school conferences is women's work; (3) fathers who choose to attend their own children's conferences are doing something exceptional, noteworthy; (4) there's no way Mrs. Tomlin might have a career that would preclude her being dispatched to handle this child-related matter; and (5) it's perfectly OK to express sexist sentiments such as these to the Sunday night football audience because, of course, we're all guys and all guys are sexist pigs, right?
I think Al owes the actual Sunday night football audience an apology. I think NBC does, too. This kind of throwaway sexism is outrageous. Its time has long been past. Even dorky football guys in their 60s should know it no longer flies, whatever their personal opinions may be. It's indisputably harmful - to the women, the men and the children it presumptively shackles in stupid, confining, restrictive, gender-limited boxes. For shame!
Inspired by an invigorating literary conversation on Twitter with my friends @Amalari and @Angpang, I decided to compile a list of my favorite books in the categories of fiction and biography, the two categories I love best.
The list below is not even close to complete nor did I go about compiling it in any scientific way. I merely went to most of my bookcases and wrote down the titles of books that have swept me away - from my own work, my own world, and my own sense of time and responsibilities. These are the books that made me glad I was an adult and could stay up all night reading without parental interference or the need for a flashlight under the covers. In a few cases, they're books I did read with said flashlight when I was young enough to be told to get to sleep by said parents.
Because of the "swept away" criterion, I have not included books I think are very, very good, but which fall more in the eat-your-vegetables category of reading than in the tear-through-a-box-of-Belgian-chocolates category. (Don't get me wrong. I love vegetables. That's just a different list.) Mrs. Dalloway, for example, is a fine book, but for sheer delight and irresistible forward motion, it cannot compare to Michael Cunningham's extraordinary The Hours. (If you've only seen the dumbed-down movie in which the central plot complexity is given away in a very early frame, you've missed quite a treat. The book requires you to be smart as it magnetically pulls you in and along; the movie requires only that you be awake.)
Just so you know, it's killing me a little not to include mysteries, which I adore. Agatha Christie, P.D. James, Ngaio Marsh, Josephine Tey, Sara Paretsky, P.G. Wodehouse, Dorothy Sayers, Dick Francis, Elizabeth George, Elizabeth Peters, Deborah Crombie, Patricia Cornwell, Anne Perry, Sue Grafton, Nevada Barr - and many others whose names I'm sure will come to me the instant I hit "Publish Post" - have afforded me hours adding up to years of pleasure, puzzlement and revelation. But that's also a list for another day.
Finally, I didn't have time to go to all my bookcases this afternoon. Even if I had, there would still be omissions. I loan and give books to people all the time, so my collection doesn't begin to include all the books I once owned, let alone the ones I've borrowed from other people, loved, and returned.
For all these reasons, the list below is only the beginning. I doubt I'll ever manage to compile a truly complete list of my favorites, but I promise to get closer in subsequent posts. Will you add your favorites by commenting on this post, either with the names of your additions or with a link to your own list on your own blog?
Biographies (I think the first four are superb, the others very good):
Savage Beauty, by Nancy Milford (about Edna St. Vincent Millay)
Henry James, by Leon Edel
John Adams, by David McCullough
Emerson: The Mind on Fire, by Robert Richardson (about Ralph Waldo)
Frida, by Hayden Herrera (about Frida Kahlo)
The Lonely Empress, by Joan Haslip (about Elisabeth of Austria)
Eleanor of Acquitaine, by Alison Weir
Fiction (in no particular order, because I follow no shelving system. I rely on my memory when I'm looking for a book; the occasional frustration caused by memory lapses is more than outweighed by the adventure of running into something unexpected or forgotten):
Iain Pears, The Dream of Scipio
David Liss, A Conspiracy of Paper
Robert Girardi, Madeleine's Ghost
Gloria Naylor, Bailey's Cafe
Reynolds Price, Kate Vaiden
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Love in the Time of Cholera, Chronicle of a Death Foretold
Graham Greene, Our Man in Havana, The End of the Affair, The Quiet American
Aldous Huxley, After Many a Summer Dies the Swan
Susan Fromberg Schaeffer, Time in its Flight
Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front
Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre
Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady
John Updike, Rabbit, Run
Gregory Maguire, Wicked
Jane Smiley, A Thousand Acres
Orhan Pamuk, Snow
Arturo Perez-Reverte, The Seville Communion
George MacDonald Fraser, Flashman
Yann Martel, The Life of Pi
Jhumpa Lahiri, Interpreter of Maladies (short stories, which normally irritate me slightly, but these are a marvel)
Alice McDermott, Charming Billy
Joan Chase, During the Reign of the Queen of Persia
Joseph Heller, Catch-22
Anne Tyler, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, Ladder of Years, The Accidental Tourist, Breathing Lessons (all her books are highly readable; these are my favorites)
John Irving, A Prayer for Own Meany, The Cider House Rules, The World According to Garp (ditto the Anne Tyler comment)
Zadie Smith, White Teeth
Kent Haruf, Plainsong
William Faulkner, Light in August, The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying (my all-time favorite writer; these are the best of the best, but all his books are glorious)
Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things
Wally Lamb, She's Come Undone
Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
Michael Cunningham, The Hours
Pat Conroy, The Great Santini, The Prince of Tides, The Water is Wide, The Lords of Discipline
Theodore Dreiser, An American Tragedy
Anthony Trollope, The Barsetshire Novels
Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird (in my opinion, THE Great American Novel)
Mary Renault, The King Must Die
Dorothy Allison, Bastard out of Carolina
Ignazio Silone, Bread and Wine
Steven Millhauser, Martin Dressler
Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native
Julia Glass, Three Junes
Michael Malone, Handling Sin
Paul Theroux, The Mosquito Coast
J. D. Salinger, Nine Stories (the sine qua non of short stories)
Tom Wolfe, A Man in Full
Michel Faber, The Crimson Petal and the White
Evelyn Waugh, Decline and Fall
John Fowles, The Magus
Madeleine L'Engle, A Wrinkle in Time
Louisa May Alcott, Little Men, Jo's Boys
Mona Simpson, Anywhere But Here
Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale
Jane Mendelsohn, I Was Amelia Earhart
Gold strikes and the towns that spring up around them evidently follow a rather sorry pattern most of the time. Gold is discovered, usually in a "meet-cute" story worthy of a romantic comedy. Thousands or tens of thousands of people flock to the area and a boom town is born. Lawlessness, vigilantism and high hopes abound; non-gold-claim-related infrastructure is entirely absent. Then the gold runs out, and so does the town's raison d'être. The once prosperous boom town becomes a ghost town, nothing more than a name on a map and, sometimes, a few rickety buildings.
Bannack was the town that boomed in response to the first of Montana's three major gold strikes. It was the first territorial capital when the Montana Territory was carved out of the Idaho Territory in 1864, but it held that honor very briefly and was a ghost town by mid-1865.
Why? Bannack's easily accessible gold was exhausted and word of a new strike had spread. A group of prospectors on their way to the Yellowstone River encountered an unfriendly bunch of Crow tribesmen and had to beat a hasty retreat. Legend has it that on the retreat, one Bill Fairweather made a joke about finding something that would fund the purchase of some tobacco, stuck his pick in the ground near Alder Creek, and came up with something that funded a very large amount of tobacco and a whole lot more.
Fairweather and his buddies couldn't keep their find a secret, and Virginia City sprang to life a mile or so south of the gold field. Within a few weeks, it boasted 10,000 residents (many of them refugees from Bannack and most of them arguing about individual gold claims) and it was in short order named the new territorial capital. Like Bannack and most of the rest of Montana, Virginia City was ruled by a Vigilance committee that operated on both sides of the law. Also like Bannack, within a year or so it too was a ghost town, its population having lit out for Helena in response to the Last Chance Gulch strike.
Bannack is now a state park, preserved but unrestored. Virginia City was reborn as a tourist destination in the 1950s, thanks to the efforts of a couple who bought the town in the 40s and funded its restoration. While it is no longer home to 10,000 as it was in 1865, Virginia City is far from deserted. Some 130 people and, according to local lore, more mean-tempered and obstreperous ghosts than in any other city in Montana call it home.
Click on the picture below to get some fun info about Bob Gohn's grandfather. Bob is the owner of Bob's Place (above) where we bought surprisingly sophisticated sandwiches for lunch. With their pesto, fresh tomatoes, delectable cold cuts and superb focaccia, the sandwiches were anything but authentic Old West, but we weren't complaining.
Borders, like time, have always seemed a little silly to me. They're merely constructs, real only because we agree to consider them so. At the Waterton-Glacier International Peace Park, established in 1932, Canada and the United States decided to agree otherwise for one segment of the line on the map dividing them. Marked only by a couple of white markers, one on the ground, one high atop a ridge, and a swath cut in the forest at the 49th Parallel, that segment is the longest undefended border in the world.
The peace and trust signified by the decision to ignore the border seem utterly at home in serene Upper Waterton Lake (pictured above) and the rest of this magnificent park. There's a super-abundance of beauty here: craggy peaks; gentle slopes; sheer drops; deep chasms carpeted in green and taupe; thick forests; glittering waterfalls; vast pristine lakes hundreds of feet deep, most of them astonishingly clear, others tinted turquoise by suspended glacial silt; even the engineering marvel that is the Going-to-the-Sun Road.
I've written about these beauties before and barely scratched the surface. It's tempting to go over that territory again or to mention cool facts I left out the first time, such as Triple Divide Peak. The Continental Divide winds its way through the Northern Rockies; at Triple Divide Peak, not two, but three watersheds intersect. Depending on exactly where it falls on the Peak, a raindrop will ultimately end up in the Hudson Bay, the Pacific Ocean or the Gulf of Mexico. An area only as big as the span of a hand determines which direction the drop will travel.
Instead, though, I'm going to write about glaciers, my absolute favorite geological phenomenon and the reason Waterton-Glacier looks the way it does. Its topography is a textbook illustration of the effects of glaciation - if the textbook were the educational equivalent of an illuminated manuscript.
Glaciers cover about five million square miles of Earth's surface, four million over Antarctica, 750,000 over Greenland and the other quarter-million scattered around the rest of the world. Glacial ice is the largest reservoir of fresh water on the planet, and is second only to the oceans as the largest reservoir of total water. As such, glaciers are crucial to both world water resources and variations in sea level.
And they are fast disappearing. In Glacier NP, for example, there were 150 at the end of the cooling trend known as the Little Ice Age (1550-1850). By the middle of the 20th century, there were 50; in 2005, there were 27. If global warming continues at current levels, all the glaciers in the park will be gone by 2030.
That will be very sad, not only for aesthetic, fresh water or sea level reasons, but also because glaciers are an extraordinary phenomenon and the sculptors of some of the most striking landscapes on Earth. Glacial ice comes in second to streams as an agent of erosion, but what a glorious second.
Glaciers are the beautiful ice-blue result of climates cold enough to permit snow and ice to survive year-round. When over time the amount of snow that falls is greater than the amount that melts, a remarkable transformation takes place. Delicate snowflakes are converted by a process called sublimation into vapor that instantly recrystallizes into a granular ice called firn or névé. The sand-sized crystals then bump into each other and melt at their points of contact. The resulting water flows into the spaces between the grains and instantly refreezes, creating a mass of glacial ice.
Once the mass reaches a thickness of 150 feet, the weight of the top ice causes the bottom ice to become plastic and flow. Remember, in geology "plastic" means neither a liquid nor a solid. The rocks in the asthenosphere portion of the mantle are likewise plastic and for the same reason: the weight of the overlying rocks in the lithosphere. Plastic flow occurs because the ice (or, in the case of the asthenosphere, the rock) is composed of layers of molecules stacked on top of one another with relatively weak bonds between the layers. When the stress caused by the weight of a higher layer exceeds the strength of the bonds between the layers, the top layer moves faster than the layer below. Voilà! Plasticity.
I understand plastic flow and I can explain it, but it seems magical to me anyway and it's one of the big reasons I love glaciers. Another is the way they operate. As glaciers advance (which means grow in size), they erode the rock under them spectacularly. They're very workmanlike about this, despite the dramatic results. Glaciers physically remove chunks from the underlying bedrock and pull them up into the ice. (This process, called quarrying or plucking, is accomplished by the very same eons-long freeze-thaw process that carved Bryce Canyon's eye-popping rock formations.) The rocks so taken up in the ice abrade the bedrock over which the glacier moves, effectively turning the flowing ice into a colossal piece of sandpaper that scours, polishes and stripes the surface below.
Glaciers come in two varieties: the stodgy-seeming continental (like Antarctica and Greenland) and the flamboyant alpine (like the rest). What they do is identical: form, advance, retreat, and erode the landscape. How they do it and what it looks like when they're done are very different.
Continental glaciers form only in polar regions and they sit on huge horizontal surfaces. Constantly falling snow causes the ice to collapse under its own weight, which moves the whole mass. The movement is very slow, only 15 feet or so per year. When they eventually retreat, continental glaciers leave landscapes that look like Canada east of the Rockies or the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York. This topography may seem boring, but it is, in fact, the result of ultra-dramatic glacial activity. Advancing continental glaciers actually increase the relief of the bedrock over which they move. But when they retreat (think "melt"), they deposit gigantic loads of glacial till (the stuff they've quarried along the way over eons). The till piles up and piles up, and eventually it reaches and buries the high-relief peaks, turning the landscape into flat or very gently rolling plains dotted with depressions where water collects into lakes.
Alpine glaciers are the showboats, much flashier in terms of how they move and the landscape they leave behind. They form in the headwaters of V-shaped mountain stream valleys. First, the growing mass of ice digs a bowl into the mountainside called a cirque. Eventually, the ice overflows its cirque and goes careening down the mountain (well, geologically speaking - the rate of movement is typically a foot or so a day). The glacier spills into the stream valley below and transforms the existing V-shape into the tranquil, soothing U-shape characteristic of glacially created valleys.
Alpine glaciers indulge in a bunch of other acrobatics as well. They can form in adjacent valleys on two sides of a mountain and eventually sculpt knife-sharp ridges (aretes). They can tunnel through ridges and create high mountain passes (cols). They can get together and gang up on all sides of a mountain peak to create a horn (think of the Matterhorn or the Grand Tetons).
The forces of gravity that caused alpine glaciers to spill down mountainsides in the first place are still at work when these glaciers retreat. They deposit their quarried loads in moraines below and sometimes astride the cirques, filling up valleys (remember Jackson Hole?), but leaving the highest ground craggy, the cirque basins filled with glacier remnants or cold clearwater lakes (called tarns), and the slopes down which they flowed polished, striped and spectacular. The sculpting effected by alpine glaciers is superimposed on topography already carved by streams, and the combination is what we have to thank for scenery as incredible as the Northern Rockies and the Alps.
Although they, too, are in retreat, the Mendenhall Glacier in the Juneau icefield and especially the Hubbard Glacier in Alaska's Yakutat Bay retain miens of power. It is possible to look at them and see as well as comprehend the gargantuan work they've done and still do.
By contrast, the glaciers in Waterton-Glacier NP are small, outwardly inert, sad even. They seem to be clinging by their metaphorical fingernails to their cirque basins and mountainsides as if for dear life. If you know nothing about how glaciers work, you might find them pathetic. Armed with knowledge, however, you have to be impressed. With their dazzling handiwork spread out around and below them, Glacier's glaciers are like proud great-grandparents at the head of the table - aware that their work is done and content in the realization that they did a superlative job.
We saw a veritable wildlife jamboree on this visit: a black bear; a perfectly posed ring of bighorn sheep; a more independent, but equally picturesque, lone bighorn; a deer wandering through the Logan Pass parking lot looking for all the world like a prospective car buyer checking out the inventory; three mountain goats, including the baby pictured below; a stag that sauntered up to a hedge, sat, stretched his elegant neck, posed thusly for 15 minutes, then rose and sauntered off, his shift apparently over; and another black bear.
I'm not really a fan of those historical tours you can take in almost every city and town. For one thing, they're typically conducted in modes of transportation either so cute it makes your teeth ache (e.g., locomotives like the kiddie trains at amusement parks, double-decker buses, trolley cars, and so forth, all of them inevitably red) or so uncomfortable you soon believe it would be altogether better simply to throw yourself through the window (e.g., noisy diesel buses with cramped, high-backed seats molded to allow only one totally disagreeable sitting position).
For another thing, these tours are always conducted/driven by an enthusiastic, big-personality jokester, the kind of person who asks where everyone is from and instructs the crowd to give Bill the ticket guy a round of applause because he's the one who washed the windows so everyone would have a nice clear view - this on an open-air vehicle that has no windows. Ha-ha. Being an extrovert and a public speaker myself, I feel bad if I leave these people hanging, so I end up playing along and feeling instead both imposed upon and like a chump. It's exhausting, really.
But my husband loves the tours and, with rare exceptions, he's been right about their value, despite the drawbacks. They're a great way to get the lay of the land and a sense of the local scenery and history. The tour in Helena, MT, was not an exception. It took place in a tricked-out locomotive that pulled three open-air cars (the whole thing cherry-red, of course), and it was conducted by an exceptionally chipper woman named Liz who looked about 25, but told us she was the mother of three daughters, two of them teenagers, and the wife of a man who often "feels he's swimming in an estrogen ocean." She also mentioned her father, her brothers and that she's planning a run next year for the Montana state senate.
Liz managed to tell us a great deal about Helena, too, as she trundled her super-cute tour vehicle around town. I owe her - and the Helena Chamber of Commerce website, which disagrees with her on a few matters - a debt of gratitude for the tidbits I've woven into the tale below.
The last of the three huge gold strikes in Montana's history was discovered by four prospectors known for unclear reasons as the Four Georgians. Apparently, only one of them was from Georgia, but all of them had decided to go home empty-handed if they didn't strike gold in the gulch along the Last Chance Creek. The gold they found there in 1864 began one of the largest gold rushes in the West.
The town site of Helena was first surveyed in 1865, but most of the streets - then and now - meandered as had the miners, following the curves of Last Chance Creek and circumventing miners' claims. Even then, naming things Last Chance one thing or another must have been irresistible. It certainly is today. My favorite was the (I suspect inadvertently) sinister Last Chance Splash Swimming Pool & Water Park.
By 1888, fifty millionaires lived in Helena, more per capita than in any other city on earth. As millionaires are wont to do, these flush late 19th century versions built grand mansions, cathedrals and public buildings, and stooped as low as necessary to make sure that their Helena, which had become the capital of the Montana Territory in 1875, was also designated the state capital when Montana joined the Union in 1889. Arms were twisted, votes were purchased, and it's said that more votes were cast for Helena as the new state's capital than there were residents in the Territory.
The public buildings include two standouts. The Greek Renaissance-style State Capitol, surmounted by a copper dome (left unpolished and, as a result, richly patinated thanks to oxidation) was, according to Liz, upon its completion in 1902 the first state capitol in the U.S. to have electric lights. Helena also boasts, really rather randomly, the St. Helena Cathedral, which was modeled after the famous cathedral in Cologne, Germany, and the Votive Church of Vienna. The first funeral to be held in the Cathedral, not too long after its completion, was that of the man who commissioned and paid for it, a heartbroken long-time widower who raised a daughter on his own only to see her "make some bad choices" and die of pneumonia (in the G-rated version anyway) at 19. Both the Capitol dome and the 230-foot spires of the Cathedral pop into your line of sight from all sorts of vantage points throughout Helena's hilly, easy-to-get-around 14 square miles, and they are as picturesque as they are unexpected.Among the mansions gold built are the original Governor's Mansion, a lovely Queen Anne on a beautiful lot. It housed 10 Montana governors until the new residence (quite hideous by comparison) was built in the 1950s. Oddly enough, neither the original nor the current Governor's Mansion is in the Mansion District, but that District is nevertheless rife with a large variety of other architecturally swanky homes, many featuring turrets, portes-cochères, wraparound porches, carriage houses, children's playhouses, lead-lined bathrooms, and other manifestations of the whims of their well-heeled owners.
During our two weeks in Helena, we lived in a "little mansion" complete with gorgeous woodwork, stained glass windows, fireplaces we never got to use, internet access, modern kitchen and bathrooms (thankfully), and a bewildering multiplicity of irons and cordless telephones. We discovered extraordinarily fresh vegetables, one first-rate and two very good restaurants, superb Gorgonzola salad dressing, and the best donuts we have had since we were children. Our days were punctuated by trips to the Y to swim (me), to Mt. Helena to hike (not me), and to all sorts of locations to eat and explore. The temperatures were warmer than we'd hoped, but we did get to see one humdinger of a thunderstorm and the sun shone until nearly 10 pm every evening.
The Capitol and the Cathedral:
The original Governor's Mansion and a selection of homes in the Mansion District, all photographed too late in the afternoon on an extremely sunny day (sorry):
Sprinkled around the Mansion District are ornate hitching posts, which serve as further reminders of both the area's Old West origins and the crazy things on which people will spend money. Click on the picture below to see the full magnitude of one resplendent hitching post as well as the original late 19th century brick sidewalk behind it.
The "Guardian of the Gulch," another Helena icon, is a fire watch tower built in 1886. It's the most recent of a series of observation buildings and lookout stands to have stood on Tower Hill overlooking the Downtown District. For some inscrutable reason, it was made of wood even though all of its predecessors...you guessed it...burned down.
Wildlife is everywhere in Montana, including in Helena. We encountered these deer nibbling on lawn foliage a few blocks from the original Governor's Mansion.
Before the formation of the Rocky Mountains, the area that is now Montana was a gigantic inland sea, its bedrock at least 2.5 billion years old and its seabed thickly blanketed by seashells (a.k.a. the calcium carbonate that hardens into limestone). Three hundred million years ago, the Precambrian rocks of the Ancestral Rockies pushed their way up through that seabed. For the next hundred million years or so, these Ancestral Rockies eroded; the debris resulting from their erosion eventually solidified into new layers of sedimentary rock.
Fifty to 70 million years ago, the current Rockies began their rise, thanks to a colossal collision. When the Canadian Shield and Pacific tectonic plates smacked into each other, the lithosphere buckled and crunched, and molten rock from the mantle underneath pushed upward through the layers of sedimentary rock left behind by the Ancestral Rockies. (Click here if you missed Post 5 and would like definitions of these terms.)
The dinosaurs then wandering about would have felt all this buckling and pushing as earthquakes. Maybe it's a coincidence, maybe it's not, but the dinosaurs became extinct just as the granite from the mantle finally burst through the overlaying sandstone about 55-60 million years ago.
The evidence of this geology is everywhere in modern Montana, by area the fourth largest of the United States, by population the fourth smallest. Fewer than a million people live in this whole enormous state, so there's plenty of undisturbed room to take in both the spectacular vistas and the extraordinary sky. (I've written about the Montana sky before; "Big Sky Country" is a richly deserved nickname.)
On July 19, 1805, the Lewis and Clark expedition found itself on a remarkable stretch of the Missouri River about 20 miles north of what is now the city of Helena. Limestone cliffs (which Meriwether Lewis incorrectly thought were granite because it was raining and the wet stone looked black) rose up 1200 feet on both sides of the river. At each bend in the waterway, the looming stone walls looked as if they would block passage altogether, but then the river would curve and each time the walls opened like gates. Observing this, Lewis wrote in his journal, "I shall call this place Gates of the Mountains."
Lewis also wrote, "The river appears to have forced its way through this immense body of solid rock." This imagery, while apt, was again based on a mistake. (Lewis was no geologist.) In fact, the river predates the uplift of the cliffs around it. The Hilger Fault has been raising the northern end of the Big Belt Mountains and lowering the Helena valley for million of years. This forced (and continues to force) the Missouri to erode downward into the hard rock and carve the canyon that cuts across the mountains.
In the 204 years and 10 days since Lewis and Clark originally beheld it, the view has remained essentially unchanged. Limestone cliffs 1200 feet tall still manifest the extraordinary pressures of their formation in sensuous twists and curves and the effects of weathering in jutting ridges, domes and outcroppings. Areas of ancient Precambrian rock still alternate with the limestone. Cave openings abound. Ospreys, eagles, and falcons dot the sky. Bighorn sheep, mountain goats, otters, deer, squirrels and all manner of other wild animals roam the cliffs and flats. Pines grow thickly and reach for the sun.
And the silty waters of the Missouri continue to flow, powerfully placid.
The pictographs in the cave pictured below were painted by Native Americans long before Lewis and Clark showed up here in 1805. The youngest of the pictographs dates to 400 years ago, the oldest to 1400 years ago.
Among the fascinating rock formations in this Missouri River passage are three famous "faces." Can you find the Canyon Monster in the first photo below, the Stony Elephant (eyes and trunk) in the second, and the Eye of the Rhino (profile) in the third? (Click on the pictures if you want to make them larger.)
Cave openings and a bald eagle in flight.
The settlement of Southwest Montana is a story of mining - the excitement, the rush, the plundering, and the decline of chasing after gold and copper.
The first official U.S. visit to the territory was Lewis and Clark's 1805 expedition. In 1806, John Colter, a member of the expedition, struck out on his own, determined to make a fortune as a trapper and trader. When he returned to St. Louis four years later, he was a very rich man. Having likely been the first non-Native American to see what is now Yellowstone Park, he was also raving about boiling springs and smoke billowing from the ground. The people in St. Louis thought he was insane, but they were evidently willing to overlook insanity in the face of wealth. Companies (including John Jacob Astor's) and hundreds of freelancers lit out for the wilderness. These trappers brought back more than half a million beaver pelts annually for 30 years. By the 1840s, beavers were all but extinct in the Rockies and the Montana Territory was reliably to be found on the white man's maps.
For the next 20 years or so, people pretty much went through Montana on their way further west. But everything changed when prospectors struck gold in 1862, 1863 and 1864.
The last strike was at Last Chance Gulch in what is now Helena. This was a rich strike: in today's dollars, $3.6 billion in gold was mined from 1864-1884. To this day, the main drag of Helena's cute downtown is called Last Chance Gulch. (How great an address is 1200 Last Chance Gulch? North of downtown, it's the YMCA where I go to swim while we're here.)
Mines, railroads, ranches and lawlessness flourished in the Montana Territory from 1862 until nearly the turn of the century. But a brutal winter in 1887 dealt a harsh blow to ranchers and began the decline of the Old West. The U.S. Congress ended silver subsidies in 1893, which ruined the market and caused the collapse of silver mines throughout the Rockies. The same thing happened to the gold market in 1933.
The story of copper mining continued into the 1970s, but it, too, ends badly - a rise and fall nowhere better illustrated than in Anaconda.
We visited Anaconda, a city of 10,000 people about 50 miles northwest of Butte, on one of our side trips from Helena. In the 1880s, the Butte area became the world's largest copper producer. Over 19 billion pounds of ore were unearthed by hard-rock miners over the following decades; the copper was then extracted by smelters and shipped all over the world.
Anaconda was founded in 1883 when legendary "copper king" Marcus Daly built a copper smelter and reduction works there as part of his ongoing battle for domination of the Butte-area copper industry. From 1892-1903, the Anaconda Copper Company was the largest copper mine in the world; over its lifetime, it produced $300 billion worth of the metal. In 1899, the company was merged into Rockefeller's Standard Oil Company, in a brazen sleight-of-financial-hand deal that made a few people exceedingly rich and led, among other things, to the eventual enactment of U.S. antitrust laws.
Anaconda Copper was shut down in 1980, a casualty of the decrease in worldwide demand for copper, decline in ore grades, and rising mining costs. (The takeover in 1971 by Socialist President Allende of Anaconda's huge Chuquicamata mine in Chile didn't help much either.)
All that remains of the operation now is the Anaconda Smelter Stack, one of the tallest freestanding brick structures in the world. At 585 feet, the stack is taller than the Washington Monument; it now looms sadly over the landscape from its position atop a hill next to what appears to be a slag heap. I'm not sure exactly what to make of the fact that this giant phallic symbol is the sole remnant of years of fabulous wealth, back-breaking work, financial chicanery, environmental devastation, and worldwide domination.
Befitting its wealth and status, Anaconda was once an opulent city. By 1898, it boasted mansions (small by East Coast and Midwestern standards, but grand indeed in the Old West), fancy churches, and other grandiose buildings, including the Hearst Free Library (George Hearst, William Randolph's father, was one of Daly's investors) and the Washoe Theater (978 seats, Art Deco, and rated by the Smithsonian as one of the most beautiful interiors in the United States). Like the Anaconda Smelter Stack, this all looks sad today, run-down and/or abandoned as it is.
On Highway 1, the road to and from Anaconda, you pass the towns of Wisdom and Opportunity. I wonder if the same person named both and, if so, whether he meant the two names to be taken optimistically (the southbound Wisdom, then Opportunity) or pessimistically (the northbound Wisdom after Opportunity).
