On a rainy day in summer, Butte, Montana, and nearby Anaconda are rich with shades of green and rust. Mining rigs from its copper boom remain scattered around town, alongside monuments to the victims of mining disasters. More permanent is the Berkeley Pit, a toxic lake in an abandoned pit mine. Driving out of western Montana through the mountains on Highway 43 in this weather brought me through fog obscuring the road and the pines, but the clouds gave way to wind when I reached southern Idaho, still populated by ghosts from the Second World War, including a prison for German POWS and a Japanese internment camp. There are only a few remaining buildings from the internment camp recently preserved, a haunting and increasingly familiar testament to the scapegoating and indefinite detention of thousands of families. The remains are not as physically toxic as the Berkeley Pit, but the landscape is just as still and silent as the lake’s surface.
More to come. See Part One, in northern Idaho, here.