The walk across and under the
Reserve Street bridge isn’t written up in any Missoula hiking guides, Chamber
of Commerce pamphlets, Office of Tourism Brochures or in the flood of “Come
Visit-and-Fly-Fish-Montana” magazine articles. If it were, there’d likely be a
warning about the putrid stench of the Dailey’s rendering plant, where bacon is
processed (“Premium Meats Since 1893”) and how, if the breeze is drifting towards
you, as it was towards me that day (gusts of wind
up to 100 miles-per-hour, and 60-degrees, in February, in western Montana!), it
won’t take long before you feel nauseous. Or maybe it’s the sights under the
bridge that made me nauseous. . . and queasy, and uneasy, and guilty, and a bit
ashamed, and fortunate.
I walked on the sidewalk south
across the bridge, away from the giant American Flag behind me, flying above
the old Perkins restaurant (soon to be yet another brew pub), serving as a
welcoming gateway of sorts to the homogenistic stretch of anywhere-in-America
mega super stores -- Walmart, Home Depot, Lowe’s, CostCo, Best Buy, Target,
Barnes and Noble -- built on the former ranchlands where I used to hunt.
Beyond the railing to my left, about
50 yards below, was the Clark Fork River, flowing rapidly underneath me and west
from the direction of downtown. The tallest of the buildings -- the historic
Wilma theatre, the First Interstate Bank, the recently-opened Residence Inn by
Marriot where the Mercantile used to be -- are all visible in the distance from the
bridge, as are the tall, snow-capped mountains above the University and
framing Hellgate Canyon beyond. I was both surprised and concerned to see no
ice. None. In February!
Just a dozen feet away, across
the rusty railing to my right, between sidewalk and traffic, were hundreds of
people sitting in a seemingly endless line of cars and trucks and SUVs, bumper
to bumper, for as far as I could see, with nothing better to do as they crawled
along, so it seemed, than watch me walk across a bridge. I felt a bit
self-conscious, wondering – dressed as I was in dirty tan cargo pants, torn
grey flannel shirt, old green wind parka and worn baseball-style cap adorned
with the Marine Corps Eagle, Globe and Anchor -- if any or all of these people
behind their steering wheels and in passenger seats wondered if I was one of them,
a citizen of the camps below, and then I wondered if and why it would even matter
what they wondered?
On the northeast side of the
bridge, in a dead dull golden field of invasive knapweed, close to Dailey’s
meats, is a large billboard with a photo of an inviting, modest-looking home
for sale by Christies International Real Estate, “On Foothills Drive in
Florence, $699,900.” Across the street,
on the southwest corner of Reserve and Mullan, a man wearing a black hoodie and
red MAGA hat waved a bright red, white and blue banner: “TRUMP 2020, No More
Bullshit.”
When I reached the south side of
the bridge, I hopped over the metal railing to my left and, while carefully and
clumsily walking and sliding down a steep, muddy hillside littered with garbage
and shopping carts, down towards the little town of camps, I met two Missoula
police officers who were on their way up. One of them, who introduced herself
as Detective Brueckner, told me they had recovered a body from one of the tents
earlier in the day. “He likely died in his sleep,” she said. “Apparently, he
died a while ago.”
The bottom of the hill leveled
out onto a flat, rocky floodplain, near a small grove of cottonwoods, about
100-yards or so from river’s edge, with mostly calf-high grasses and weeds in
between, and round, fist-to-bowling-ball size rocks, exposed and polished by
hundreds of years of spring flood currents, with an occasional dead or dying cottonwood
here and there, some already fallen to the ground, where plastic shopping bags
and other garbage and woody debris from previous flooding accumulated on the
windward and upriver sides. Separated by maybe 50-300 yards, on either side of
the bridge, were a series of small camps, close to a dozen, constructed of
cheap tents, tarps, pallets and cardboard boxes. A small town of sorts, mostly
out of sight and out of mind, with a fluctuating population of 10-20 people. On
this day, on this particular walk, I only saw a handful of residents, but more
may have been sleeping or resting in their shelters, or off doing their best to
gather food, water or money. I saw a lot of blackened fire rings, built from
river rock, and wondered if it was mostly a nocturnal town. I made a mental
note to visit sometime after dark. Maybe.
I felt intrusive walking from
camp to camp, skirting close to the edges, like an American tourist visiting a
poverty-stricken third-world county, feeling fortunate for my own circumstances
while pondering the plight of those who call this place home; Mental illness?
Addiction? Bad choices? All of that and other things? It’s complicated, I know,
but I couldn’t help but think about the mostly-celebrated groundbreaking currently
underway a few miles upriver, near the heart of downtown, for yet another new
$100 million hotel and events center being built by a millionaire who has been
granted millions by the City Council in Tax Increment Funding because, well,
it’s good for the economy.
Scattered everywhere were shopping
carts and shopping bags from Target and Walmart and Albertsons; empty Pepsi and
Coke cans; Nacho and Cheeto bags and an old, empty box of It’s It ice cream
cakes. I saw a large, stuffed-animal black bear in a fire ring with its head
ripped off, and a used syringe laying on the dirt nearby. Somebody nailed a “Beware of Dog” sign on one
of the cottonwoods, but I neither saw nor heard any canines to beware of. In
one of the camps, I found two wet, moldy paperbacks sitting on a log: “How to
Practice: The Way to a Meaningful Life,” by the Dali Lama, and “The Leader’s
Handbook: A Guide to Inspiring Your People and Managing the Daily Workflow,” by
Peter R. Scholtes. I stepped in a hole and took a fall, spooking some magpies from
their nearby perch of dead cottonwood branches and noticed fresh deer tracks in
the mud in front of me.
Years ago, before the camps
started popping up in 2000, I sometimes came here in the spring to photograph
bald eagles, during that time of year when the river rapidly rises, filling up
with freshly melted snow from the Mountains of western Montana and rushing it west
towards the Columbia and Pacific. I
remember once wading through frigid, knee-deep water where some of these camps
now sit, seemingly high and dry and safe during most of the year. Last May the
river rose right into the tents and carboard shelters, washing most everything,
and even a few people, into the river. Local news reported that the folks
living here “lost everything,” which might not seem like much, but was indeed everything
to them. People expressed understandable
concern about the garbage washed away and floating towards Idaho. Every now and
then I’ll read about bodies recovered from the river.
On the night of July 31, 2014, a
fight broke out between three of the men living in these camps. One of the men,
38, was viciously beaten and shot to death, then dumped in the river. His body
was found a week later, and several weeks after that they caught the killer,
who was 28, down in Louisiana. He’s serving a 40-year sentence.
Word quickly spread that this
place is dangerous. Or can be. I didn’t sense any danger while walking around
there, not in the middle of a warm, windy February day. I imagine the incident
serves as a metaphor of sorts to the danger residents of this camp may pose
towards themselves – a danger of self-destruction, the danger of being caught
in a devastating cultural, economic and social whirlpool, swirling and swirling
ever downward, into the depths of mental illness and addiction and unpaid bills
and stigmas and judgements and bad choices and circumstance and -- who knows
what else?-- struggling to keep afloat, or perhaps giving up, or maybe enjoying
the ride in an “I don’t give a shit” sort of way, all fed and fueled and
powered by numerous complex factors I can’t and won’t pretend to fully
understand. Many or most or maybe all of these factors, no doubt, are out of
their control, though I was recently called a “dumb liberal piece of shit” for
thinking so. I will say this: I’ve ventured to the precipice of that vortex. If
not for a remarkable, loving ex-wife and a wonderful, caring physician at the
Veteran’s Administration I’m not sure how far down I’d have fallen. I know I
wouldn’t be walking around these camps as an outsider with the luxury of contemplating
such things.
A guy named Joseph approached me
from one of the camps, a good-looking young man, perhaps 30, wearing a yellow North
Face hoodie, blue jeans and gray tennis shoes. He asked me what I was up to,
requested I not take photos of any people living there, and told me that his
friend, a seemingly shy quieter man standing nearby, said I looked just like
his pastor. “Same build, same walk, same look,” he said.
“He must be a handsome pastor,” I
replied.
They both laughed.
I assured him I respected others
enough to not take photos of them without permission, and was just checking
things out, and would likely write about my visit. He didn’t seem to mind. In
fact, he gave me his phone number and asked me to give him a call if I wanted
to chat more. He was a life-long Montanan, he said, who “fell on hard times.”
He recently moved to these camps from another along the Yellowstone River near
Bozeman (“now THAT crazy river floods!” he said), and he hoped to help organize
this camp a bit better, clean it up, make it more acceptable and livable.
“I’m a religious man,” he said.
“I believe in the Ten Commandments. Do unto others. Thou shall not steal. Thou
shall not kill. All of that. Unfortunately, not everyone lives by that, but we all
need to.”
I looked above, atop the massive
concrete structure nearby, where lines of congested traffic slowly moved north, and south, to and from the big box stores, the economic heartbeat of America,
beating faster and faster and faster.
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