Untimely Book Reviews: Smelters, Screech Owls, and Sunrises in the Saddle
Happy National Book Lovers Day to those who observe. Celebrate with our inaugural UBR
Becoming a writer doesn’t happen without first becoming a reader. I kept a flashlight hidden by my bed for years as a child. I’m not sure whether I was a bad sleeper or just an extremely devoted bookworm. Once the lights were off, the flashlight clicked on. I would read until 4 a.m. sometimes, drunk on the majesty of worlds beyond my own.
These days, I don’t need the flashlight. I simply turn a bedside lamp on and off. Though I know better, I try not to get pulled into a tornadic I can’t put it down whirlwind before sleeping. But sometimes, the late-night childhood habit sneaks in. The clock ticks on toward morning, and I go elsewhere.
Indulgence and a great book go hand-in-hand. Reviews of these books tend to be pertinent to the timing of the book’s publication, but we wanted to make space for the books that find us in an untimely fashion. The name of our new column speaks for itself. We hope you enjoy it.
— Nicole
Brad Tyer’s Wry & Dynamic Opportunity, Montana
Reviewed by: Nicole Qualtieri
“Nobody’s ever rebuilt a 120-mile river before. Nobody knows what it’s supposed to look like. The goal is a naturally functioning river. How do you design one of those?”
— Brad Tyer, Opportunity, Montana
It’s wild that an exposé about environmental injustice, irresponsible resource extraction, and total abandonment of a community can somehow be funny and informatively disarming. But I can assure you of the following: Brad Tyer’s exceptional book Opportunity, Montana is just that.
As the crow flies, I live exactly 4.44 miles from Opportunity, Montana. I drive by it multiple times a week to restock groceries, get gas, and supply my rural life. Currently, it rests in the kelly green shade of cottonwood canopy. Horses and cattle graze the grasses of small farms that make up the neighborhood. A large herd of elk ever stalks its supposedly remediated edges. Just yesterday, a cow elk lay hot and dead on the highway berm of Opportunity, her legs stick-straight with vehicle-induced rigor mortis.
Opportunity is a strange place with a name stricken with obvious irony. Adjacent to the normalcy of the collection of hobby farms is a 4,000-acre plot where mining tailings compiled over the past two centuries lay in a state of pseudo-dormancy. Atlantic Richfield Company owns the site. We call it ARCO in my neck of the woods.
Those mining tailings — and the many acres of fields — hold toxins of the mightiest caliber. In turn, this book holds a story that connects decades of extraction to what’s left in the aftermath.
I picked it up as a holdover between books at the Anaconda Public Library, expecting to learn a bit about this place I call home. I learned more than a bit. In just a few pages, I locked into Tyer’s engaging and thorough prose. It required detailed legwork to build an enlightened understanding of just how massive the extractive history of my locale reigns over the landscape, even today. The book itself is ambitious, and Tyer delivers.
What I love about Opportunity, Montana is the spectrum it builds for toxicity across planes of existence. Throughout the book, Tyer excavates memoir from a relationship with his distant and often-withholding father. In the meanwhile, Missoula’s Clark Fork undergoes significant remediation. What cleans up must move elsewhere, and the effort further sullies its smaller, working-class upstream neighbors.
The Clark Fork remediation occurs because of a complex drama of big players, small actors, and a past that will forever inform multiple landscapes. Dynamics between the government, ARCO, contractors, the city of Missoula, and the Anaconda community provide constant tension. Search for ARCO and you’ll see the tension is ongoing, non-stop, and as much a part of my town as the smelter that it still owns.
Tyer offers many images of this past that are dug-in, to say the least. When the decisions of many are placed upon future generations to remedy, it’s easy for those now financially responsible to shrug off the completion of remediation work as “not our fault” while letting down a community that exists as a remnant of industry.
Much like the emotional baggage we carry from family drama and trauma, the tailings of wrongdoing never vanish. We might bury them, move them around internally, or place them in a holding field where they are dealt with but permanently toxic. This is what happens between the Clark Fork remediation and Opportunity, as in Tyers relationship with his father. What seems initially disparate in Opportunity, Montana isn’t that at all. It is, like I said, an ambitious excavation, but it’s one of the best that I’ve read in years.
As a bibliophile, I love the act of falling in love with a book. Time bent as I flipped the pages. My stomach turned with the injustice of this place that I call home. Anger often set white-hot in that stomach knot.
But Tyer would bring me back with a quip of memoir, a sprinkle of wit, or a morbidly humorous remark. The balance made the book enjoyable beyond the disheartening depth of subject, which is a depth that stretches far below my feet to the views out each window and the roads I travel daily.
Book: Opportunity, Montana: Big Copper, Bad Water, and the Burial of an American Landscape
Author: Brad Tyer
Type: Historical Non-fiction, Exposé, Memoir
Published: 2013
Frances Hamerstrom’s Playful Memoir My Double Life
Reviewed by: Gabriela Zaldumbide
“When I was a small child I longed one day to become so famous that I did not have to hide how odd I was — how unlike other people. Few people really held my attention. It was birds and mammals, reptiles and insects that filled my dreams and eternally whetted my curiosity.”
— Frances Hamerstrom, My Double Life
Some people are born with an invisible, inexplicable fascination with animals. I’m one of them. “Mom” was my first word, and “neigh neigh” was my second. Bird identification books piqued my interest at age 5. If my mom couldn’t find me, she knew I was watching deer feed, birds flit, or a raccoon scramble into a gutter. I always returned home with crusty hair and dirty hands when I got hungry. To no one’s surprise, I studied wildlife ecology in college.
Frances Hamerstrom, author of My Double Life: Memoirs of a Naturalist, was one of those people, too. Her memoir makes that abundantly clear. It features a collection of stories from her childhood in the Northeast and central Wisconsin explorations chasing prairie chickens.
A fellow writer aware of my bird and reading obsessions lent his copy of the book to me. He didn’t know I’m a sucker for memoirs; this one was incredibly fun to read. What a delight to enjoy Hamerstrom’s pleasant prose on the 30-year anniversary of its publication, too!
If you’re a fan of Mardy Murie’s stories, you’ll love reading about Fran’s one-of-a-kind experiences in My Double Life. Like Mardy, Fran was outdoorsy before it was cool. Her confidence, intelligence, and love for the natural world steered her towards success in both her career and personal life. She writes about both in this memoir.
In true “wildlifer” fashion, Fran’s parents deeply questioned her career choice. She was born into a wealthy Boston family in 1907. During her early years, Fran self-described as a governess, debutante, and fashion model. Her parents groomed her to be a perfect wife for an international ambassador. Instead, she gave her parents the finger and moved to the Midwest. There, she became one of the first female wildlife biologists.
Truly a hardcore lady and a bird nerd of the highest degree, she braved Wisconsin winters in the 1930s with no running water or reliable heat to study prairie chickens. She writes about melting snow for water after her well froze. Days later, the neighbor boys showed up and taught her to light a fire around the pipe. She had no spare rags to use as fuel, so she rummaged through her closet looking for clothes to burn. Deep in a wooden box, she found her beloved scarlet gown from her days as a socialite. She knew — as a practicing wildlife biologist — she’d never wear it again. The neighbors drenched it in kerosene and lit it on fire. Her husband, Frederick, almost cried as he watched it go up in flames. But it worked; the well thawed.
She and Frederick moved houses to be closer to their prairie chicken traps. The first night they moved in, her graduate school advisor Aldo Leopold crashed at the new place. He helped Fran dig their outhouse, mentioning how the glacial lakebed under their house formed smooth, round sand. When Fran and Fred mixed mortar to rebuild the walls and chimney, the mortar disintegrated. Fran went to the lumber yard to scold the man who sold her faulty concrete, and he politely told her to get sharp sand in the hills for mortar mixing.
She used her last few dollars to buy new concrete instead of potatoes. Then, she drove a few miles away to collect what the lumber man called ‘angled sand’. The night she finished rebuilding the chimney, she lay on the roof and called in a screech owl using a trick her ornithologist friend taught her. It landed right next to her.
Thankfully, for the reader’s sake, Fran wrote extensively about her life. She published 12 books in total, including:
Mice in the Freezer, Owls on the Porch: The Lives of Naturalists Frederick and Frances Hamerstrom. That title though!
Is She Coming Too? Memoirs of a Lady Hunter. I have not read this, but I would love to once I have a couple hundred spare dollars to purchase this rare book.
Wild Food Cookbook: From the Fields and Forests of the Great Lakes States. The original cover depicts her feeding her husband a spoonful of something delicious. Adorbs.
She didn’t just publish books. Over 150 articles of scientific literature list her as an author. Her dedication to learning about the natural world earned her The Wildlife Society Award. Twice.
Anyone who appreciates nature or rural living can take a page out of her works. I sure did; it’s comforting to know there are other weirdos like me, and that there always have been.
Fran passed away in 1998 at age 90. Hopefully, before she left this world, she realized she’d become famous enough to let her oddness shine. Between the lines, it’s easy to pick up on how comfortable she felt in her own skin and the power of her unbending desire to follow her dreams. The 30-year-old pages of My Double Life dare to inspire anyone willing to turn them.
Book: My Double Life: Memoirs of a Naturalist
Author: Frances Hamerstrom
Type: Memoir
Published: 1994
Larry McMurtry’s Pulitzer Classic: Lonesome Dove
Reviewed by: Katie Hill
“‘How far do you reckon it is to Montany, Call?’
Call looked north across the dusty flats, as if estimating in his mind’s eye the great rise of the plains, stretching even farther than hearsay, away and beyond the talk of men. Jake that morning had mentioned the Milk River, a stream he had never heard of. He knew the country he knew, and had never been lost in it, but the country he knew stopped at the Arkansas River. He had known men to speak of the Yellowstone as if it were the boundary of the world; even Kit Carson, whom he’d met twice, had not talked of what lay north of it.”
— Larry McMurtry, Lonesome Dove
Texas to Montana, Montana to Texas. Two states, opposite poles of the country, similar in size to the naked eye until you do the math and realize one is 56% the acreage of the other. They behave like siblings. One is hot and sassy with prickly pear cactus and harsh desert. The other remains calm, cool, and collected with ancient mountains and waters and enough snow to dampen the senses.
At its most watered down, Lonesome Dove is a book about a northbound cattle drive and all the tangential souls sucked into its orbit and rocked by its wake — cowboys, Native Americans, lawmen, women of the night. Larry McMurtry calls it a love story, but I’m not sure I agree. Truthfully, there’s not much love in this book at all, unless a love for odyssey counts. Any traces of human warmth feel painful and evasive in how short-lived they are. But that’s probably what makes this book so beloved by everyone who takes the ride; they feel absolved by McMurtry’s 858-page reminder that nothing good lasts forever. The human condition rides a fast mare.
Here’s a little more fat to chew on. An entertaining, varied cast of ex-Texas Rangers decide to run thousands of stolen cattle from the quiet town of Lonesome Dove up to Montana Territory before winter sets in. Through a masterful use of the third-person omniscient point of view, McMurtry lets you into the brains and beating hearts of every character. He shows the dusty slog from every angle. In true 1985 fashion, the narrative centers mostly on white men, with one tokenized Black guy thrown in the mix. It casts conventionally attractive women as salves for tortured souls and conventionally unattractive ones as nightmares without any real agency. Don’t read it for rosy portrayals of Indigenous peoples, either. But if you can overlook the cringe long enough, you just might reach the north bank of the Yellowstone.
This book hits home for pretty literal reasons. I’ve driven from Montana to Texas, Texas back to Montana, and Montana to Texas again. In eight months, I’ll make the northbound journey once more. So far, my adult life has been defined by a series of movements between these two states. I slept on the beaches of the Texas Gulf Coast then drove by a hill of sugar beets on the Montana-North Dakota border five nights and 1,743 miles later. If you have any passion for either of these places — or any of the land in between — you’ll find that McMurtry pays due homage to all of it.
Books have a way of trickling through my family. When my sister, cousin, and I were kids, we did family book clubs during our annual lake vacation in New Hampshire. Our book-sharing has since evolved to more closely resemble a game of telephone. The cascade starts with one family member and, three years later, everyone has read the book. That’s how we got through Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer and Still Life by Sarah Winman.
Many times, I’m proud to say, the cascade began with me. But the family book chain for Lonesome Dove actually originated outside our small network of blood relatives. My sister’s boyfriend started this one. It was a gutsy move, and he probably didn’t realize what he was getting himself into when he bestowed a dog-eared copy on Ainsley shortly after they first met. Years later, I feel like the last person on Earth (or, at least, in my immediate family) to read this book, which only makes my review more untimely than it already is.
So for those of you who are familiar with the Pulitzer winner, let’s call this a mutual celebration. If you are unfamiliar, consider this a swift, booted kick in the ass to get familiar. Your deeper appreciation for a life in motion depends on it.
Book: Lonesome Dove
Author: Larry McMurtry
Type: Fiction
Published: 1985
Want more from The Westrn? We publish two long reads each month, plus a variety of recurring columns and other short-form writing. All stories are free for the first two weeks before moving into an archive that paying readers can access anytime. Thanks for being here, we’re glad to have you! — Nicole, Katie, Kestrel, and Gabby