Free Stolen Life by Rudy Wiebe Page B

mines “playing out” as to mechanization.… The miners were digging farther and farther into the ground for lower-grade ore.… To avoid turning Butte into another western ghost town, a profitable method of mining had to be used. With low-grade ore that meant strip mining, but in Butte the ore lay immediately below the city.
    [So] in 1955, the Berkeley Pit began to consume Butte.… By the time it was abandoned in 1982, the pit contained 2,500 miles of road.

    “Our Pink House on Madison was a good house,” Clarence tells me as we drive to look for the different places where the Johnson family once lived. An overnight spring snowfall has transformed all the contours of this strange, half-dead but lively city into a white, almost shocking, beauty. “But we had to move, the pit was digging closer.”
    “Wasn’t the noise bad, round-the-clock shifts? The lights all the time?”
    He thinks about that, and answers like the worker he was most of his life, “Yeah … it was cheap, really well built.”
    In 1995 the Berkeley Pit, like much of the rest of Butte, has become a tourist attraction behind high wire fences; and of course the pit’s Visitors’ Center is not open in March. Clarence and I stare between wires down the low tunnel through the railroad embankment to where the tiny arch of light opens onto that immense excavation which we cannot see; an exhumation of wealth and greed clawed 1,800 feet into the earth, too enormous ever to refill. Above the embankment the gigantic staircase of the pit’s northeast wall, veined by snow, is carved to the top of the mountain.
    I imagine streets, houses, people displaced, consumed, disappearing into that hole. The pictures I have seen, and the distant view I will soon have from the street leading up to the town of Walkerville above the pit, reveal an irregular, Stygian black lake: when the mine stopped pumping, rain and groundwater began to gather in the bottom of abandoned excavation. That gathering continues unstoppably, and it is now the deepest body of water in Montana, an incomprehensible reservoir of acidic solution rising slowly, steadily, year by year, until it will eventually find its particular level. If it doesn’t overflow. And the Pink House where Vonnie’s first memories emerge is suspended somewhere in the invisible air over that black lake, an infected space for memory only. But as indelible as poison to her.
    At 943 Wyoming, the site of the Johnsons’ thirteen-room “White House,” is a vacant lot, its debris softly mounded under the winter’s snow. “The best house we ever had,” Clarence says sadly. “Big, wonderful house, big rooms with chandeliers and fourteen-foot ceilings. The mortgage was only seventy a month, but I couldn’t keep it up when I had my back operation and the miners went on strike. Two thousand miners lost their jobs after striking nine months in ’68.Stupid strike really; they closed the last shafts then. By then I’d lost it. It just stood empty for years, then it burned down.”
    He stares along the dip of the street spotted with occasional houses and warehouse buildings between long gaps white in the grey mountain light. “Lots of places burn down here. All the time. They’re empty, they’re vandalized, they burn.”
    South Jackson Street is scraped into the side of a hill, and the house at 410, the Johnsons’ next home, a kind of duplex fitted into the slope below, has been torn down. Space, dropping away. Every house Yvonne lived in in Butte is now nothing but space.

    Yvonne: I remember the evening in late October we moved out of our lovely White House it rained, thundered and stormed. From Jackson you could see the streets cut around the sloping hills long and shining wet, all strangely yellow, with metal posts gleaming as if they were fluorescent. Cars and trucks passed swishing, the water flowed up over the sidewalk after them, and I was afraid, but oddly I felt safe as well. The heavy rainstorm comforted me.