Natal Stream
From my skewed perception of time, occasionally failing fine motor skills, and bizarre behavior bordering on catatonia last week, you’d think I’d suffered a small stroke on Monday, June 13.
I went to bed the night before thinking I’d be most occupied the next day by having a dislodged IUD taken out and a new one inserted. I wouldn’t say having to get that done on relatively short notice is a walk in the park, but it certainly took a backseat in the realm of pressing concerns when I woke up Monday morning to a video of a familiar steel truss bridge about 17 miles north of my hometown taking an epic plunge into the Yellowstone River. On some intuitive level, I knew that had to be just the tip of the iceberg.
Less than a week prior, I had asked my mom about a photo of an ice jam where the river leaves Yellowstone Lake at Fishing Bridge. The lake isn’t the 671-mile river’s source, but it’s the body of water that it moves through about 35 miles northwest of Younts Peak—the highest point in the Teton Wilderness and the start of this iconic waterway’s long, undammed journey to the Missouri.
In my conversation with my mom, she didn’t think the ice jam alone was any reason to believe the region was in for anything more than garden variety runoff. But we all know now that an ice jam from a thawing Yellowstone Lake wasn’t the only elemental force at play going into the second weekend of June. Unusual high-country snowpack for June and an atmospheric river traveling east (after drenching the Puget Sound area where I currently live less than a week prior) combined to create an unprecedented flooding event in the Upper Yellowstone Basin and southern Montana. At least five rivers across the region set all-time streamflow records. One was the Yellowstone and the other four (Gardner, Lamar, Clark’s Fork, and Stillwater) are its tributaries. The flooding broke several stream gauges overnight between Sunday and Monday and did a number on infrastructure like bridges, roads, and homes. Among the casualties was the north entrance road between Gardiner and Mammoth, which lost whole sections to the Gardner River and will not reopen this year (if you haven’t yet seen the aerial view of that road filmed from a park helicopter on June 13, it’s worth checking out to see the extent of the damage).
Since it’s become something of a national news story, a few people have come out of the woodwork asking me how friends and family back in Gardiner are doing. Once I’ve ran through the basics for them—all my people are safe but, yes, the economic fallout for Yellowstone gateway communities is going to be very real and concerning for months and years to come—at least one person has said something to the effect of, “This must be devastating for you.”
Devastation is probably an appropriate word for what folks directly impacted by the flooding are feeling right now. I imagine that people who’ve been displaced because they’ve lost housing, property, job security, or are otherwise uncertain about how they’re going to keep businesses afloat and pay their bills in the foreseeable future are oscillating daily (maybe hourly) between numbing shock and devastation right now. For those most affected, that’s an appropriate way to feel. As somebody who doesn’t fit that description, this situation back home has left me feeling a dizzying array of things, but not devastation. I feel like I can’t responsibly be devastated when my livelihood and ability to take care of myself are comparatively unimpacted at the moment.
Relative to peers and neighbors in the area I currently live in, I struggle. What I lack in material possessions and solvency I patently do not make up for in generational wealth. I do not come from propertied people and I suspect I’ll be living more or less paycheck to paycheck until the day I die. All that being the case, my version of a pathetic situation suddenly seems so secure compared to that of folks back in gateway communities like Gardiner.
My low level of functioning last week owes not to devastation, but I think to the dissonance in some of the feelings that I’ve been simmering with through what feels more like a fever dream limbo than any kind of linear span of days. It’s that dissonance coupled with the predictable erasure and lack of nuance in some of the commentary that this unprecedented event has incited that I’m struggling with.
What I wish more people would understand is that “unprecedented” doesn’t mean spontaneous or unforeseeable—particularly with awe-inspiring landscapes that were formed by cataclysmic natural events like floods, fires, landslides, earthquakes, and volcanic eruptions. I feel like I even have to isolate the word unprecedented and make sure that we all know that its use is almost always relative to a version of recorded history largely controlled by white folks of European ancestry. In most instances, when we say unprecedented, we mean it with an asterisk. However, this tweet from a Salish and Crow ethnobotanist is a big reason that I feel like it’s actually not dicey to use the u-word in this case:
Deeper down in the replies, Rose says, “Our elders are confused [because] this is not the usual pattern of events that [N]ative peoples have observed for 1,000 years.” That feels like important context for how we talk about this.
Is a 1,000- or even a 500-year flood unprecedented in the sense that there’s no frame of reference for the extremes we’re living through in Indigenous wisdom and memory, passed down through centuries? Based on what Rose said, yeah. Yeah, it’s unprecedented. But is this completely unexpected? No. Not to anybody who hasn’t had their head in the sand. Not to anybody whose love of a landscape is grounded in the knowledge of the awesome, ancient forces that are legible throughout its surface, soil, waters, and—in the case of Yellowstone—its geothermal bowels. Not to anybody who’s been heeding the projections of scientists for years now that we can expect more extreme weather events, more often.
My experience is that being able to claim that you truly love a landscape means knowing and accepting the hazards and existential threats that come with living in its midst. Even if there weren’t a supervolcano in the mix, where I grew up is pretty damn volatile. Even so, it is also probably the only place I’ll ever get to love in any sort of complete, unconditional way. I could spend the rest of my life trying to learn the natural history of another bioregion, the names of its flowers and birds and trees and fauna, who inhabited it before white Europeans came, how the American plague of dispossession and extraction altered it—I could do all of that and I still don’t think I’ll ever know and love any place as well as the nearly intact temperate-zone ecosystem that we call Greater Yellowstone. It’s why I call the Yellowstone River my natal stream. I’m convinced I live under the influence of some outmoded relic of our semiaquatic pre-human ancestors that will always make me feel this bizarre geomagnetic connection to the body of water I was born and raised among. I have no ancestral claim to it—just familiarity and reverence.
As a white occupier on this continent, I think there will always be limits to that familiarity and reverence, but I hope the same limits don’t apply to learning. And when I say learning, I mean learning in an active, lifelong way—more like a relationship than a transaction. My learning relationship with Greater Yellowstone, much like everyone I grew up with, started with living all of my pre-adult life among the beings of that nearly intact ecosystem and absorbing bits of cultural memory and apocryphal stories from some of its human inhabitants. It’s continued with unlearning some of the defining narratives of public land I was fed growing up, learning some of the real defining narratives (e.g. theft and genocide), and realizing that I’m aware of the vastness and contours and features of that region in a way that I never will be anywhere else. While a lot of the names I have for those features are settler names that memorialize insufferable white dudes or common names that are colored by definite cultural bias, they’re names nonetheless, and they do confer an agency and animacy to the living world. In more recent years, this learning relationship has spawned a desperate hope for a chance to return to and live in that area again someday—even as it seems more economically and practically out of reach for the likes of me.
Maybe you’ve surmised this already, but as far as existential threats go, I don’t really take issue with the ones that are primarily natural. Even as human activity has destabilized our environmental systems and processes such that natural forces are operating with an unnatural charge these days, it’s easier for me to come by a healthy acceptance of climate extremes. The forces behind them are much older than any of us and they’re part of our lease agreement for being tenants on this little blue dot. What I find hard to accept are the existential threats that are categorically manmade, like threats imposed by arbitrary or outdated policies and economic systems.
Make no mistake: combined, the number of natural and manmade existential threats we have to endure daily is absurd. Just in the past few years, the list has ballooned to the point that I lose track of many things I should be reasonably terrified of on a given day. The threat of people with uteruses in the U.S. losing bodily autonomy is a great example of an existential threat that we could eliminate if the people with power and resources had the political or ethical will to do so. Even if there is a long history of using law as a tool to control female bodies, there’s nothing natural or preordained about it. There’s also nothing natural or preordained about the modern feudal system that capitalism has created through wealth inequality. There’s also nothing natural or preordained about antiquated laws that allow people to access and own the means to use lethal force with little restriction. My devastation owes to the body count of threats like those and the unnecessary violence and harm humans invite upon ourselves and other beings every fucking day. When I’m devastated, it’s almost always because the call is coming from inside the house when it doesn’t have to be. These threats aren’t part of our lease agreement with this little blue dot—we’ve created them.
As far as natural threats go, add this planet’s sixth mass extinction event (and all the extreme activity like flooding that we’ll see throughout it) and a still-smoldering global pandemic to this crazy obstacle course we’re all navigating. I don’t know why somebody wouldn’t opt to reduce the threats we can control when there are so many big ones that are largely out of our hands at this point. When I list off all the manmade and natural existential threats in succession like this, it starts to feel like we’re all in some apocalyptic video game that’s stuck on the highest degree of difficulty while all the modern robber barons are standing by watching in some isolated control room because they’re perversely aroused by our struggles and this is all like porn to them. I can’t be alone in that feeling and I would hope it inspires some solidarity against the people who have the wealth and power to reduce harm and remove some of the imposed hardships, but choose not to. They’re the ones we need to be worried about. When I feel genuine devastation, I hold them responsible.
It’s valid if working people who were already struggling with the untenable cost of living in the Mountain West these days are devastated by any freshly added layer of precarity. But flooding because of high, fast-moving water isn’t the underlying cause of this new gilded age we’re living in. I think my understanding of the true causes is why I feel a lot of complicated things that aren’t devastation in the wake of the unprecedented flooding we just witnessed.
I feel amazed and strangely relieved. I’m amazed at the incomprehensibly awesome power of water at high volume and speed that we all got to see. I’m frankly amazed that there have still been no recorded fatalities save for damaged vegetation and probably some drowned calves headed for the Gulf of Mexico right now. I’m amazed, especially, that the park managed to evacuate all visitors without incident, backcountry parties included. That feels like a downright miracle when we consider the range of dangerous situations park visitors get into on a normal day without unprecedented flooding.
I’m relieved that after so many record-shattering months of summer visitation to Yellowstone, sections of that fragile landscape are going to get a break from the crush of human visitors. And while the near-term feels really bleak for gateway communities, I’m kind of relieved that they have a moment to reflect and assess what their true carrying capacity might be when they’re not being overrun to the point of burnout with intense staffing and housing shortages for yet another summer.
I feel clarity. I’ve understood for a while now that tourism, recreation, and real estate are the dominant extractive industries now in western states and have taken the place of natural resource extraction. While I’d like to believe there is a version of those three drivers that isn’t so consumer-centric and depleting, that is not the case right now. That means it’s unsustainable by design and it was only a matter of time before an event (like last Monday’s flooding) would trigger the inevitable bust in the boom or bust cycles that characterize all extractive industries. They all hinge on the rationing and use of resources that aren’t necessarily stable or replenishable. I’m no wiz in this department, but I suspect that the only way forward with tourism and recreation in the West has to involve more moderate and much more educated use of our most important extant ecosystems. This high-volume, heavily motorized, drive-by system we’ve been using is just allowing our most precious landscapes and waterways to be codependently, shallowly loved to death.
I feel both triggered and validated. If any of you out there were following the mysterious four-day absence of Montana’s governor while all this was going down, you probably learned along with all of his constituents that he was vacationing in Tuscany while houses, roads, and bridges were getting washed out by the historic flooding. While it was pretty cathartic to see the crook get pilloried by national media, Ted Cruz-style, for his absence during a historic crisis, I do have to agree with this point that Montana Free Press Founder and Editor-in-Chief John S. Adams made in the independent news outlet’s Friday newsletter: The biggest problem with Gianforte’s absence wasn’t necessarily that he was off on vacation while the better part of southern Montana was reeling. The real clusterfuck was that, as Adams wrote, “For four days the governor’s office refused to disclose Gianforte’s whereabouts or say when he would return to the state.”
Adams concludes the intro to that June 17 MT Lowdown newsletter with this:
Entire communities face uncertainty over how they’ll rebuild and recover. They deserved better than to face it under another cloud of uncertainty about the whereabouts of their governor.
I thought this was brilliantly put. If there’s a single piece of this perfect storm that I credit most for my compromised level of cognitive functioning last week, it may well have been the sodding abdication of leadership from a multi-millionaire who’s personally financed his political career. Perhaps this wouldn’t be so upsetting if it didn’t feel like such a familiar subplot nowadays. It also feels like such an uncanny echo of an event that loomed large in the lives of my ancestors.
During the lockout at the Homestead Steel Works in 1892 that crushed what was then the largest trade union in America, notably out of the country while Pinkertons and the Pennsylvania state National Guard descended upon 3,800 striking steelworkers (my third great-grandfather Peter McAllister among them) was the guy who owned the damn place. Now, far be it from me to be an Andrew Carnegie apologist (wherever he is in his afterlife, I hope he’s miserable), but even as he was away fly fishing in Scotland, he was located by a newspaper reporter by July 8—just two days after armed conflict broke out in Homestead. I repeat: two days. And that was over a hundred years ago.
Somehow, one of the wealthiest people who’s ever lived could be troubled to send a couple telegrams at least feigning interest in the situation at Homestead and was tracked down by a member of the press in two days. Four days of silence from any official source on Gianforte’s whereabouts in the 21st century makes Carnegie look responsive by comparison.
While a lockout 130 years ago and a historic flooding event last week are different in several ways, the number of lives and livelihoods hanging in the balance in both scenarios is strangely comparable. About 4,000 people are employed by the park service and concessionaire at the height of the summer season in Yellowstone, and as was the case with the steel works in Homestead for more than a century, thousands of other lives and livelihoods rely on the park’s operations to attract business in gateway communities.
On some epigenetic level, I think I must have some kind of intergenerational post-traumatic response to the specific crisis scenario subplot where the wealthy person who’s ostensibly in charge somehow manages to be very far away when all hell breaks loose. It’s upsetting, but also validating in that I guess not much has changed in the robber baron playbook. And yes, I think Gianforte is probably one of those rich folks who gets off while watching us struggle through this apocalyptic video game from the comfort of an isolated control room.
I feel unmoored. I seriously wonder if some abstract, primal part of me came undone while my natal stream was raging. Monday through Thursday felt like one big, patchy day. Even from a solid 800 miles away, focusing was a struggle. I think the most concrete productive thing I can say I did last week (besides getting my IUD replaced, effectively keeping my uterus hostile to semen as a matter of principle) was fixing a weird display issue in my Chrome browser. Friday was the first morning since the flooding I woke up without one of those tension headaches that I know to associate with early pandemic doomscrolling. At least for me, there’s a specific kind of headache and insomnia that’s basically a hangover from all the screen time spent clambering for some handle on an incomprehensible situation. It was challenging to not just neglect my day job to sit vigil with the stream gauge observations and community message boards open all day until water receded enough to see the extent of impact.
I feel curious. I’m one of those weirdos waiting in the wings who’s prepared to go all-in if I ever have the opportunity to return to my home area in some meaningful, symbiotic way as a year-round resident. It’s seemed less and less possible by the year as permanent residential housing has all but vanished from Gardiner and it’s kind of started its own ghost-town trajectory with surging housing costs, fewer businesses (all of them contending with the same staffing shortages we’re seeing nationally), a small number of wealthy people controlling lots of commercial and residential property in town, and hemorrhaging school enrollment. I’m sure that’s not even an exhaustive list of Gardiner’s challenges these days, but they’re the red flags that jump out at me as somebody who reads kind of obsessively (borderline masochistically) about the patterns of rural gentrification.
What I wonder is if a summer season or more without a north entrance to Yellowstone will weed out some of the opportunists who’ve relied on heavy summer visitation. Will the fair-weather folks who’ve been around to make a quick buck start disinvesting and never look back? I don’t know. I suspect it’ll be some years before we do.
I honestly feel some excitement. I’ve already heard it said about the Yellowstone that “that river will never be the same.” I think it’s okay if that’s a source of grief for people, but at the same time, I find it thrilling to think we all get to meet a river on its own terms for the first time in our lifetimes. It feels like we’re being granted once-a-century access to a body of water that has reformed itself. I’m looking forward to getting acquainted, over time, with this iteration of my natal stream and holding the old one in my memory.
Supposedly, there’s also expected to be a net benefit for aquatic ecosystems in the wake of these high streamflows. As evidenced by the discovery of invasive smallmouth bass in the Yellowstone as far upstream as its confluence with the Gardner River earlier this year, the overburdened rivers of southern Montana have been due for a cooldown. According to hydrologists, this event will support adequate flows and cooler temperatures going into the hottest months of the year. Let’s hope so.
I feel kinship. The way things have been going over the last few years, it’s started to feel like the first 18 years of my life were a hallucination. It is so hard for working people to afford housing and eke out a living in Montana these days as the median income has risen hardly at all over the same period that housing costs have doubled. It’s hard for me to believe that a single parent of two like my mom was able to keep my sister and me housed and fed in Gardiner. Fast forward ten years, and I don’t think she could’ve.
It’s hard for me to believe that my high school graduating class had just under 30 kids in it 11 years ago and this year’s had, I think, nine. For the past few years, it has felt like we’ve jumped to some different corner of the multiverse where only folks with a safety net, generational wealth, and a primary residence elsewhere have the ability to set up shop in and around places like my hometown. Last Monday was oddly grounding in that I felt like my connection to Gardiner had some depth for the first time in a while.
My pre-adult life felt less like a dream—I knew every landmark in the videos and photos of a surging Yellowstone River. I recognized names I read in on-the-ground reporting and faces I saw in interviews for the first time in recent memory (even in national coverage). At first, I was surprised by the sudden surge of kinship I felt with the version of Gardiner I was seeing represented for a change. But on further reflection, it makes sense because the version of Gardiner I was seeing represented was centered on two things: a community that has been put through the wringer over the last few years and the storied river the town straddles.
This month’s feature image: Yellowstone River at the golden hour on a calmer June day in 2013 in Hayden Valley, 54 miles northwest of the river’s source. This section of the park’s south loop is known best (at least to me) for its daytime bison jams during rut and comparatively calm and photogenic evenings.
Some Ways to Support Recovery
If you feel inclined to help those most impacted by the flood, Park County Community Foundation has wrangled a big chunk of seed funding for their Southwest Montana Flood Relief Fund to help with immediate needs, cleanup, and rebuilding efforts. They are also going to help distribute funds for some crowdfunding campaigns like this one for the households displaced from the NPS housing you may have seen in the now-infamous video of a multi-unit residence going into the Yellowstone River.
Yellowstone Community Fund in Gardiner is a nonprofit that has provided support to federal workers during government shutdowns as well as substantial aid to individuals and businesses affected by the July 2020 fire in Gardiner. They will now be providing direct aid to residents and businesses impacted by the flooding of the Gardner and Yellowstone Rivers. It looks like they have begun accepting applications for aid as of Monday, June 20 and they are accepting donations. Please chip in if you are able!
Stafford Animal Shelter in Livingston could also use any direct support you can spare, as they had to evacuate about 30 animals from their facility the evening of June 13 as waist-height water overtook their building.
Last but not least, when Gardiner reopens to non-local traffic, make plans to visit and patronize the businesses there even though you won’t be able to enter the park from the north gate anytime soon. Give it some time—some off-message elected officials have stoked some confusion about the accessibility of Gardiner right now, but as of Monday, June 20, they’re still under a boil order and Highway 89 coming in is still open to local traffic and services only.
I can’t believe I’m actually encouraging visitation to the area after the crush of traffic it saw in late-season 2020 and all of the 2021 season, but I’m dead serious. Stay over if you can—hotels are going to have room for you. If you’re due for a retreat or even a sloppy mid- or quarter-life bender with your ride-or-dies this summer and any place will do, do me a solid and make that place Gardiner. It’s an interim solution and no substitute for a statewide economic recovery plan, but you’ll be helping my hometown tread water and catch its breath for whatever’s next. And if your outing coincides with any of my own visits out there this summer, at least one of your beers is on me—that’s a promise.
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