MUSINGS ON THE BIG SKY
From several
hundred miles away, Montana is a place of contradictions: occupied
by people who deeply love the land and the rivers that run through
it, except when they are voting by a lop-sided majority to turn
those rivers into toxic, metal-laden sewers.
Now
comes John B. Wright with 10 essays to explain Montana – and when
he can’t explain it, to admit frankly that he also is puzzled.
Wright follows the advice of historian Walter Prescott Webb, who
said that “the West should not be looked at from the outside, but
from the inside, from the center.” That has often been a
prescription for parochialism, or its first cousin, xenophobia, but
in the hands of Wright, who has lived in Montana for about 25
years, it is the right approach.
He loves the
state, but he also embraces its critics, especially when they’re
clever, as Esquire magazine was when it branded Montana “the most
dubious state in the nation.”
He spends one
essay disabusing us of our notions about Montana by taking apart
its myths of low-cost living, a pristine landscape, and an economy
based on timber and mining. But the heart of the book is his essay
on the Bitterroot Valley: its theft from the Native Americans, the
curse they may have put on the valley and on those who stole it
from them, the manufactured boom in fruit-growing in the early 20th
century, the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed inn the land-developers
built to impress upscale suckers, the bust that wiped out the
short-lived industry, and finally today’s boom, which is based on
an even thinner promotional line than the one the would-be
orchardists swallowed.
While Wright doesn’t look
away from the fraudulent selling and scraping of the Treasure
State, he is hopeful. He describes most Montanans as “eventual
conservationists,” however much they may waffle today, and he
writes that the painstaking job of putting water back into rivers
and placing conservation easements on the land are the only
sensible, decent, long-term steps available to the state. What
choice is there, he asks, when all of Montana is up for
grabs?
* Ed Marston
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Musings on the Big Sky.
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