Lately I’ve been getting pop-up ads touting Butte, Montana, as an attractive tourist destination. Just goes to show how much things have changed since I first visited there back in 1971. At the time, I was roaming the Intermountain West in my 1966 Volkswagen minivan, filing on-the-road features for KUTV News in Salt Lake City—on-the-road features more in the style of Jack Kerouac than, say, Charles Kuralt.
I found Butte to be most fascinating, even though I never filed a story from there. Why? Well, because television features are supposed to be uplifting—not depressing. And everywhere I looked in Butte, I witnessed not just mental depression, but the Great Depression.
For instance, one morning I found myself sitting alone on a viewing stand overlooking a copper mine known as the Berkeley Pit. Presently, I was approached by a crusty miner, still wearing his grimy work overalls and a hard hat. Wordlessly, he opened his lunch pail and retrieved a chunk of galena ore he’d evidently high graded from his night shift.
“Thirty bucks,” he whispered.
I passed on the offer, and now I’m sorry that I did, because the price of copper has since risen dramatically. Meantime, mining operations on “the world’s richest hill” have ceased and the Berkeley Pit has become a lake holding fifty billion gallons of acidic, metal-laden water so toxic that when snow geese land there, they immediately die.
Even as the EPA works to remedy the situation, the Montana State Office of Tourism and Business Development is busily rebranding superfund sites as tourist attractions—take, for example, the 585-foot-tall brick Anaconda smokestack that once spewed arsenic, lead, and other metals into the air prior to the smelter’s closing in 1980. Today it’s billed as the Anaconda Smokestack State Park, and I presume your kiddies won’t have to don hazmat suits in order to play there or at the nearby Benny Goodman Skateboard Park, also known as “the snake pit.”
Benny Goodman? What is the connection between the King of Swing and swing sets, slippery slides and snake pits, I wonder? I’ve yet to figure it out, but if ever I do, I’m sure there’s a good story there.
Another memory indelibly lodged in my hippocampus involves the time I was propositioned by an elderly prostitute in a Butte coffee shop. I remember it was a Sunday morning; I had just settled into a booth with a newspaper, cup of coffee, and plate of bacon and eggs when this strange woman, all dressed in black, took a seat directly across from me. Wordlessly, she reached into her purse and pulled out a hotel room key, which she pushed to my side of the table.
“Leggat Fire-Proof Hotel,” read the words on the tag. I don’t remember the room number.
Pretty much everyone in the place was now staring at us, wondering—as I was—what was happening and what might happen next. What happened was, after staring at one another for what seemed like forever, I slid the key back across the table and beat a hasty retreat. I hurried on down the road to Boulder, where I was immediately pulled over for speeding by the local police chief. Upon learning that I was a roving reporter, he graciously tore up the ticket, then invited me to his home to meet his wife and kids—including a handicapped son who was a huge fan of Butte’s most famous native son, Evel Knievel.
When not pulling over vehicles bearing out-of-state license plates, the chief was a board member of the Boulder Chamber of Commerce. It was through him that I was allowed to film inside the town’s foremost tourist attraction—the Free Enterprise Radon Health Mine.
Radon Health Mine? Yes, indeed. According to former mining engineer Wade V. Lewis, radon gas isn’t something to be afraid of. Ingesting it said to ease the pain of arthritis, lupus, asthma, sinusitis, migraine, eczema, hay fever, psoriasis and even diabetes.
“Radiation is good for you,” echoed Anne Coulter to Bill O’Reilly on Fox News. And who can doubt the veracity of anything one hears on Fox News?
That said, the Montana Office of Tourism and Business Development hasn’t yet adopted Coulter’s slogan; instead, they’re going with “Butte elevated.” As opposed to “health excavated.”
