a New New Deal

Stuff has been happening at a breakneck pace. It’s already two weeks into hunting season and I’ve been out exactly once. I just bought tickets for the Banff Mountain Film Festival’s annual World Tour stop at the UM Theatre. Halloween is gone and Thanksgiving is looming. Snow is an almost permanent feature in the sweeping panorama that now greets us every time we turn our eyes west.

We have moved into our new home on Summerdale Road. Stress that had been building throughout the cumbersome process of purchasing the foreclosed home from Fannie Mae culminated in a mad dash snatch and grab mission to Lincoln County for the tractor. It was done in classic Pintok fashion. In, out, down to Corvallis, and back to Missoula in less than 24 hours. The high cost of renting a trailer meant that I had little time to spare.

Fortunate for a trailering rookie like me, all went remarkably well, meaning no major catastrophes, unlike the infinitely less dangerous undertaking of picking up our trash bin from the alley behind the old place, which cost the truck a rear bumper and quarter panel.  I did have to get a little NASCAR in the pits when a sheet metal screw flattened my front tire at the gas-n-go outside of Noxon.  No thanks to the trailer aficionado who talked me up through the entire tire change without lending a hand, I still made the cabin and had the tractor loaded by the time night fell, which was my goal. I even got the binders on her right in only two tries. Properly securing a heavy load like our old Ford tractor is paramount to trailering success, and seeing as it is something I had never done before I felt pretty good to have the job all wrapped up by the time my brother Calen arrived to visit me.

Calen lives full time in the home country, working as a surveyor. Money there is scarce and, financially speaking, he could probably do better if he took his skills elsewhere, like when he moved to Texas and went corporate. But a poor day in heaven is still better than a good day in hell, so he prefers eking out his existence in the nicest place no one can afford to live, cultivating cynicism with the rest of the valley’s economically woeful population.

Its tough being destitute in the most affluent country on earth, and living so encourages a certain mocking contempt for the Haves amongst the Have-Nots. The biggest Have of all, everyone knows, is the government, and in no place is this as evident as this place. The only people with a steady income are the teachers, road maintenance workers, postmen, Forest Service employees, and the contractors working for the Superfund operation in Libby.

Once, industry here was extraction. Resources were hacked and pulled from the land in dirty, ugly, bottom line motivated ways. Now those resources are gone, played out or no longer profitable. Only their messes remain.

The biggest offender in the area, at least the one recognized as such by the US Environmental Protection Agency, is the W.R. Grace vermiculite mine outside of Libby. Around the turn of the century, high incidences of lung-related illness and death in and around Libby gave experts cause to investigate, and lingering health concerns bequeathed the site with Superfund status. A clean up operation is on-going, to the tune of some $500 million dollars.

“They spent three hundred thousand dollars cleaning up the Rod and Gun club,” Calen tells me. “Said the whole place was full of vermiculite. Found it six feet deep in the ground.

“Hell, that place isn’t even worth three hundred thousand. They say that it’s a good thing, that it stimulates the local economy, but it doesn’t. Give me three hundred thousand dollars and I’ll clean that place up. I’d burn it to the ground, build a new one. Put a dozen people to work.

“Paying to clean up a trailer park? I mean, c’mon. I’d burn all that, build some nice apartment building that’s energy efficient with sustainable blah blah blah. Tell the people, you want some place to live? I’ll give you a place to live, hell, I’ll pay you to build it, but I’m not gonna waste a bunch of money cleaning up a trailer park. I’d just tell ‘em, you can’t clean up a trailer. There’s no more of that in this valley.

“So they’re gonna dig up all the ground out at the Rod and Gun. I’m like, what? To do what with it? Haul it someplace else? It’s six feet underground, for Pete’s sake. I mean, where do they think the stuff comes from in the first place? What, are they mining vermiculite?”

I’m paraphrasing here, but I was laughing so hard at the time that it’s difficult to quote him exactly. His scorn was sincere but so was his rationale. It echoed a theme I had been pondering earlier that day on the drive up there.

Government can’t create jobs, only private entrepreneurs can, I heard some politico say on NPR. Maybe, if we’re talking about random nonessential niceties. But massive, capital shifting changes in the paradigm? Only government has the horsepower to motivate that kind of thing.

As Calen points out, they say that they’re trying to stimulate the economy, but they’re not. A cursory survey of economic history demonstrates that America only prospers when we’re changing, when there is an ushering of a new era. If the government really wanted to encourage things, they would rouse the slumbering beast of transformation. They would lead us from the desert to the watering hole.

We need a new New Deal. We need a new Industrial Revolution. We need to begin construction on the next incarnation of transcontinental railroad or interstate highway system. We need to embrace the prospect of progress, the challenge of change. Because it is when this country is moving forward that the world is at its best.