David T. Hanson Colstrip, Montana

David T. Hanson COLSTRIP, MONTANA

EXCERPTS

SELECTED BOOKS

Fairfield, IA: Taverner Press (distributed by D.A.P)

The mining started long ago, and hasn't stopped.

I drove on, heading for Colstrip through the blue dusk and into the night. Every now and again, I descended one of the hills into a little velvet basin of pines and grass where the lone light of a ranch burned, but mostly there was only darkness until I reached the town, which was much more beautiful than I had imagined it would be. The power plant blinked, pulsed, and glowed like a brain hard at work, or a dream illuminated in the night. It sat right in the heart of Colstrip—beautiful yet ominous, like an electric toad, black as obsidian and laced with rows of light. It could have been the set for a Batman movie. A toxic citadel.

The four smokestacks of the plant are gargantuan by any scale other than that of the surrounding landscape, which dwarfs them, but there is no way that they could be sufficiently high to disperse all their poisons far afield, out into the hearts and minds of unsuspecting distant neighbors, and the effects were obvious. The atmosphere right next to the stacks was humid and deeply sulfurous.

I remembered that people in Houston and Luling used to tell those who complained about the air that it smelled like money, and I realized with no small degree of disorientation that the humidity in Colstrip was from all the desert water pumped from underground, or from distant rivers, and used to attend to the cooling of the giant plant and the cleansing and ferrying away of toxins.

—from Rick Bass’s essay