Finding stillness in the whirl
The West is filled with motion and reflection.
The striking image on this month’s cover commemorates the December day in 1985 when a Sikorsky Skycrane helicopter carried the final piece of an enormous steel statue to its final destination on a ridge above Butte, Montana. Conceived and built by a local electrician whose wife had recently recovered from a serious illness, Our Lady of the Rockies was dedicated to “women everywhere, especially mothers.”
Since her piecemeal flight to the Continental Divide, the Lady has stood still, but, as HCN contributor Leah Sottile writes in this issue, the people of Butte have carried on. As the city and its stories change, the meanings of the Lady multiply.
Throughout this issue, you’ll find stories about people and places in motion. Rural Alaskans are seeking to maintain a much-needed road on the frozen surface of the Kuskokwim River; Black Americans are moving to Phoenix, Arizona, in historic numbers, some driven West by worsening storms on the Atlantic Coast. Community activists are working to protect Southern California neighborhoods from advancing oil development; volunteer researchers are tracking bobcats, bears, foxes and other mammals, gathering data on their responses to climate change. Meanwhile, HCN Contributing Editor Jonathan Thompson draws lessons from the public-transit heyday of a century ago, when many rural Westerners could walk to a local depot and catch a train to San Francisco or New York. And the whitebark pine, known for its slow growth and epic lifespan, struggles to hang on in a habitat that’s changing far too quickly.
Within this whirl of movement, you’ll also encounter moments of reflection, ever more precious in our own unsettled lives. Perhaps you find those moments, as poet Vickie Vértiz writes, while “Walking to the corner store / To the arroyo to see the willows.” Or perhaps, like poet Robert Wrigley, you find them in a gnarly grove of still-vital whitebark pine, where “The soul will kneel awhile, / thank you, the soul shall bask in chickadee balm.”
Wherever you find your chickadee balm, we wish you an abundance of it.
We welcome reader letters. Michelle Nijhuis is acting editor-in-chief at High Country News. Email her at [email protected] or submit a letter to the editor. See our letters to the editor policy.
