Contact High Tracing: Part II
The recession lines of Glacial Lake Missoula as seen from the UM Campus.
Contact High Tracing -
Part II: How To Fill A Valley
When the river still flooded
it remembered genealogies
of channels, oxbows, swales, and dunes,
the falls glaciers fed before dams
arrived with ditches and grains.
-David Axelrod, “Memory-Hoard”
In the beginning, water flooded the valleys of the northern Rockies. In the last Ice Age, glaciers near the present day Montana-Idaho border blocked what is now called the Clark Fork of the Columbia River. The ice dam created the 3,000-square-mile Glacial Lake Missoula, one of several glacial lakes formed in the epoch and existed in cycles for centuries: the glaciers inched across watersheds, the dammed valleys filled with water, the glaciers receded (or collapsed), and great floods ensued—the kinds that form channeled scablands and otherwise drive off inhabitants. I’m told the lakes were likely silt-filled, making life within impossible and life along its shores less abundant. I met an anthropologist who has helped identify signs of human habitations in other corners of Montana that predate the Clovis peoples by thousands of years, but he said Missoula didn’t see regular human visitors until the glaciers receded for good (for now) and the rivers ran free again (for the time being).
The first people to settle in the region—the Bitterroot Salish—mostly left trails and rock cairns in the valleys surrounding Missoula and took fish from the rivers and creeks. I met the anthropologist on one such trail above the confluence of two such trout streams. He was part of a group organized by the retired reporter and local historian Kim Briggeman, who turned out to be a neighbor of mine. The route Briggeman had mapped matched the overlap of the ancient Road to the Buffalo—used by tribes to reach bison herds on the plains to the east—and the Mullan Road—a wagon trail carved through the northern Rockies by way of Missoula beginning in 1859.
I’d joined the group primarily to see if any of the dozen-or-so amateur historians had any information that could help me verify the story about cops burning drugs in Missoula teepee burners. And even though no one knew a thing about Gary’s legend, I had by then determined that I pursued more than a story about drugs or contact highs or air quality. I wanted to know how we fill up valleys—with smoke and water, but mostly with people and the stories they tell.
The group, and Briggeman especially, taught me much about my new home as we left Marshall Canyon Road to follow what appeared to be a game trail through private property. I stayed near the back of the herd, chatting with a volunteer from the Historic Museum at Fort Missoula named Steve—who will be played by his doppelgänger Mark Duplass in the film adaptation of this story. A slightly aged Duplass, that is, as I was at least 20 years younger than the average hiker. When asked if he’d ever heard the story about the cops incinerating narcotics in teepee burners, Steve responded as most have: with a faraway look and a slight chuckle, in a way mimicking how Missoulians are said to have acted when the drugs burned. “No, don’t think I’ve heard that one,” Steve said once he’d returned to Earth. “But come by the museum some time and I’ll let you go inside the teepee burner on the grounds.”
It seemed Steve was chasing his obsession with fire lookouts, and one in particular that had since been moved, demolished, or burned. While he and Kim Briggeman traded intel, I hung back to chat with essayist and translator Jodi Varon and her husband, the poet David Axelrod. Like my wife, they’d moved back to Missoula during the pandemic and shared our alarm at how quickly western Montana was growing. When the couple first lived in Missoula, David said, there were still enough lumbermills in town that each morning the air smelled of fresh cut pine. They knew as well as anyone that this meant the air quality was worse then, too, but nostalgia is as strong a drug as any.
Atop a rise overlooking the river, Briggeman pointed across to the golf course where three apple trees rose amongst the rough. Named for the German-born, world-renowned Shakespearean actor Daniel Bandmann, the history of this river bend is emblematic of western Montana’s immigration travails. Bandmann planted a vast orchard on the land he’d bought and began charging tolls for crossing the bridge that came with the property and fees to camp on the land. Briggeman told us about the night a band of Salish approached Bandmann’s cabin as if to dare him to make them pay to stay on the land they’d inhabited since time immemorial. Briggeman said Bandmann donned a stage costume and proceeded to perform Shakespeare in various languages for his guests, which must have worked because the group soon dispersed.
As the hikers ambled on, David leaned close to me. “I always imagined Bandmann performed Lear that night,” he said before continuing in his best stage-worthy voice. “‘When we are born, we cry that we are come to this great stage of fools.’”
The tour continued, with Briggeman, Steve, the anthropologist, and others sharing tidbits they’d gathered over time: a Salish burial ground rumored to be near where we lived; laws banning shooting gophers out of the back of the trolley that eventually ran from Missoula to the mill in Bonner. Though nothing I learned that day brought me any closer to knowing if Gary’s story held even an ounce of truth, I returned home feeling full, closer to the land and community I was beginning to call home. Those I asked agreed—the western Montana sky is dense with histories and legends. Not even smoke could obscure that fact.
The lightning tonight catches every fine particle in the valley’s air. The effect is incandescent: the haze from gathered smoke and exhaust, just visible in daylight, is illuminated and cast in an orange glow. From where we live, on the edge of where the hillside slopes up into Mount Jumbo’s eastern flank, the flames that build in East Missoula shine on its smoke plume drifting up the valley. It’s unlikely lightning caused the fire—more likely the wind swept up the canyon and toppled a tree onto a powerline—though that matters none to the folks closest to the blaze. As the storm continues, builds, I scan the hillsides, mountains slopes, and ridgelines, too scared to wonder if hope counts for anything in fire season.
The power is out now, so I check on my daughter, whose sprawled body indicates she has slept through the torrent just fine. I try to remember how it felt those years ago when we first moved here, when the valleys were new and I’d yet to consider the stories they might contain. I think about the winter storm that left most of Texas without power, how it had been our breaking point, how we’d decided to finally leave like we’d talked about for years. The call came the same day our power returned and I nearly didn’t answer because of the area code: 406, Montana. While our daughter built an imaginary power generator-water filter out of Duplos, I spoke to Judy Blunt, then the head of the Creative Writing MFA program at the University of Montana. She wanted to know if I’d consider moving to Missoula. “The winters here can make that storm you just went through look like a dusting,” Judy warned.
“Are your lights on?” I said. I might as well have said yes then.
The morning we finished packing the Uhaul, it was eighty degrees in Austin by seven AM with approximately six hundred percent humidity. With every shirt I’d sweat through, I’d imagine the cool mountain air of western Montana. The first week or so fit my expectations. Chilly mornings gave way to immaculate afternoons, the kind where the line between comfortably warm and pleasantly cool is as close as a tree’s shade. We had a Uhaul to unpack, lives to rearrange. Still, we spent long stretches outdoors, soaking up as much sun as possible before it retreated behind Mount Jumbo, letting dusk take over for two or more hours until twilight finally came around ten o’clock.
Then the heat arrived. June 29 was the first day the high temperature in Missoula would be above that back in Austin (which was, of course, basking in the wettest, mildest summer in recent memory). The trend would continue, stretching past the outer limits of my phone’s weather app. That did not keep me from checking, though, each time as if to test whether I’d been mistaken, to attempt to ward off the creeping worry that we’d made a mistake moving our small family across the country.
By Independence Day we caught our first glimpse of the way the valley held smoke, glittery explosions illuminating the north face of Mount Sentinel, revealing a blanket of smoke stretched above East Missoula. Sometimes we’d turn to watch Jumbo light up and half expect to see a wildfire building on its slope.
The first wildfire smoke settled into the valleys of western Montana on July 13—about a month earlier than the historic norm—carried on transit winds from massive conflagrations in California and Oregon. Windows, which absent air conditioning had been left open overnight to cool our sun-baked house, were shut. Outside, a haze permeated. Sentinel’s prominent ridgeline became a faint outline to the south. We searched on our phones for answers: At what point is it unsafe to exercise outside? At what point is it unsafe to be outside? What about toddlers? Searches gave way to doom scrolling, any useful information gleaned about the smoke overtaken by a flood of news about the Delta surge, dousing any hopes of a “Hot Vax Summer.” As much as we wanted to be out exploring and trying to make new friends, staying home felt like the safest option.
Missoula, as the largest U.S. city entirely encircled by the Rocky Mountains, is situated at the confluence of three rivers and their respective watersheds. Air typically gets colder as the elevation increases, but valleys can reverse this trend by trapping cooler air below a cap of warm air, creating a temperature inversion. While the effect is typically most noticeable in the winter, summers see inversions too, the haze from wildfires replacing automobile exhaust and smoke from wood-burning stoves. Usually, in the summer anyway, the inversion breaks as heat or wind penetrates the atmospheric dome, which allows the smoke and other particulates to escape into transit winds to be carried off to Butte, Bozeman, Billings, and beyond. More often than not, though, incoming winds will bring more smoke to fill the valleys. Eventually, I didn’t care where the smoke was coming from. It was everywhere and it belonged to all of us.
Gary came toward the end of that first summer and perplexed us with his tale about the incinerated drugs that he alleged turned the entire valley, essentially, into a hotbox. As eager as I was to find out if anything Gary told us was true, I couldn’t help but wonder if he completely missed the point. Why should anyone care whether folks unwittingly got contact highs when worsening fire seasons were reversing the improvements we’d made in Missoula since the Clean Air Act began to clear the air?
It wasn’t until after we’d endured weeks of heat and smoke that my wife checked the air quality back in Austin, which by then had finally settled back into the hellish summer heat we’d fled. That day, when Mount Sentinel was clear and further up the valley Bonner Mountain was not quite obscured, the air quality in Austin was just as bad. But the geography of Austin is such that winds might shift the air quality throughout the day, whereas the valleys each create conditions that are more likely to trap fine particles.
Eventually, fire season ended and I fell in love with Montana anew during my first fall here. That summer, when smoke filled the valleys making us, too, feel trapped, nearly broke me. Was there anywhere safe left to settle? We’re in an age of climate chaos, and the only way to build resilience is through knowledge. I came to view airsheds, each with their own meteorological characteristics, as the philosophical inverse of watersheds, existing around and above us as we do our best to live our lives in a new home in an ancient mountain valley.
