Montana Day

Saturday night we spent the night in Butte Montana, with the son of the friends of Mr. and Mrs. Hydrology. Oh connections! How cool. They’d called him the night before for us, explaining our trip, and Mr. Butte said sure, they’d host us. 

Driving into Butte, across the wideness of Montana: there are large flat places with little grass, and then looming hills of bedrock, scattered and wearied trees. It is very, erm, spacious here. We rumble across a cattle grate on the exit into the town. Mr. India commented, “How do people live here, without farming….just cattle. Whole day you do cattle ranching. And on top of that you go through all this winter.”  It’s April but snow still rested in divots.

Mr. Butte gave us a tour of the town, leaning into the cold wind, admiring the expansive red brick buildings, the wide empty streets, the views of the mountains looking down main street. I felt a little bit Turn of the Century. At that time, Butte was the largest city west of the Mississippi river, booming due to the copper mining. A head frame—a tall frame structure above a mining pit—was all decorated with red glowy lights, a prideful tribute to the town’s industrious past.

We visited a little distillery, wooden barrels stacked in the window, a huge polished wooden bar like it was out of a museum. The place was packed and a plaid man jammed away on a guitar. “There ARE people here!” Anurag said with pleased surprise.

Mr. Butte said he liked living here, “I really like winter” he said, all incomprehensible to me. The coldest it got last year was 35 below and then the next weekend it warmed up to 15 degrees, and everyone was out in basically tee-shirts. It’s all about the T delta, I suppose.

We’re driving in Montana as I write this from the passenger’s seat. Anurag has never been across the country, and he is giving a running commentary all curiosity and interest, with his hydrology background: “Good”, he says approvingly, “there is a river going there.” And then: “Oh! There is some water there. What is that water doing there, all alone.” And then some hypotheses about the height of the water table and availability and such.

“I wish I had the magical power to track waters of the earth. To see through the soil and see where they originate,” he said. I decided my magical power would be to be able to play any pipe organ in the world, with any combination of complex pipes and manuals.

Montana is very big.