day 30 -- mazama, WA to troy, MT

after breakfast in the resort town of winthrop at the base of the mountains (which had managed to pull off a fake old west vibe without looking ridiculous or too chintzy) the other washington was next, ranches and farms and sleepy towns in the rain shadow. a different world from west of the cascades, for sure, but not the sharply us/them red/blue divide many would like to imagine. I didn't see placards demanding that regular americans 'take back' their country from... anyway. drive-thru espresso huts still showed up in towns, farms advertised organic produce, land was assigned to conservancy. the ferry county weekly news was full of candidates for local office thanking their supporters and reminding them to vote again in november. one race in particular was turning gossipy, in that one dennis boone, running for sherriff, found it necessary to take out a quarter page ad to print a letter battling false rumors. apparently some are claiming that if elected he'll fire all the deputies and cancel a drugs initiative, assertions that a smiling mr boone assured us were categorically false. he was pictured leaning forward over the railing of his front porch, wearing a plaid rancher shirt and jeans. elsewhere in the paper was a long letter criticizing the business column editor for her impassioned plea that people patronize a struggling bookstore in ***. the letter writer felt that the column unfairly criticized any who bought books online as traitors to the local economy, but then also attached a long list of perceived failings of said bookstore -- no roadside signage, wrong end of town, no attached coffee shop. a pretty classic dispute that seems never to have taken off in most places after the shortlived 'buy american' surge of the 1970s. the economy sucks, local businesses struggle, blame government regulation/immigrants/walmart while at the same time doggedly boosting the free market which strangles local business. crocodile tears for mom-and-pop, but rarely a concerted effort to spend a little more or endure the parking nightmare of having to walk a couple of blocks to the store...

the further east I went the more the country dried up. and in the driest parts, naturally, were indian reservations. announcing omak on the edge of one such parcel was a sign spelling out the town name in red figures twisted into the shapes of letters -- cowboy boots, a tepee, and a red-skinned indian. I'd love to find out how indian and settler identities have merged there. crossed into idaho and through the soft upper end of hell's canyon (deeper than the grand canyon at its southern end, but not as dramatic) and then into montana. out of the national forest the landscape changed to a patchwork of regrown forest and more recent clearcut, which was all the more chaotically spectacular in the mismatched patchwork of sun and shadow on the hillsides. I'd considered libby as a destination for the evening (dodged rain all day and so canceled camping plans) because I knew the name and figured it must be a resort-y town for that reason. after a while I remembered why libby, montana rang a bell...the eponymous documentary about the residents' decades long struggle with the predictable results of an economy founded on the largest asbestos mine in the world. the film painted a pretty grim picture, so I settled on the closer town of troy, 'lowest in elevation, highest in recreation.'

but if everyone in libby is dying of mesothelioma, troy is just plain dead. the town was quaint in a ghost town sort of way, but I found the 'ranch motel' at the far end of town, the parking space of which were for some reason full of troy police vehicles. temporary offices? (perhaps...more on that in a bit.) the office door was momentarily locked but opened just as I pulled my hand back by a guy in his mid-20s who was surprised to see that I was not his buddy riding up from bozeman. not exactly the proprietor, he was dressed only in some crazily printed pajama bottoms and lots of tatoos. I didn't get a good look at any of this because he was too jumpy and vibrating to bring into focus. on his left knuckles I did catch 'DOOM' printed in thin, hasty, lines. he told me he was 'just the son,' but that the could probably figure out how to check me in, though he couldn't work the credit card machine. he's recently returned from living all over the seattle area but didn't explain what brought him back to troy...and conversation was as disjointed as his movements, so I gave up. I wandered back into town to find a bar on a sunday night (timing, again, not so good). on the other side of the street from the police station / municipal building was a mobile marquee pointing at the government center and indicating that 'dictator don' was within. I sensed this was not a joke, and a little research came up with a nasty spat pitting the mayor (don banning) against the city council. the former has taken to making executive decisions without involving council, suggesting that it concentrate more on legislating and less on management. the latter has responded by refusing to approve anything and closed the last meeting before addressing anything on the agenda in protest. dictator don is trying to pay city employees anyway, and no one is picking up the tab on $60,000 in obligations the city owes. all this proves that if only we delegated all our important decisions to small town politicos, this country would run so much more smoothly.

I ended up at the 'home bar,' which was empty except for the barkeep and two guys playing video games and/or slots, two guys with hair that matched the journey-class music on the jukebox. though it was dead quiet tonight, in a couple of weeks the home bar holds a huge biker rally and was elaborately decorated with biker paraphernalia, like an old air conditioner to which dual chrome exhausts had been lashed in keeping with the 'cool your pipes at the home bar' theme. behind the bar was a lengthy list of people on probation for misbehavior and a shorter list of those 86'd for a year or permanently. the barkeep had recently moved to troy from aberdeen, WA with her retired-from-the-state husband, who was building a cabin 12 miles up winding roads in the woods above the yaak river. progress was slow, and they were just starting to think that they should find a place in town to spend the winter (sounds wise). troy is low elevation-wise, but the cabin is just high enough (but not too high and dry) to get a good amount of snow in the winter. and soon, I'd think.

so she wasn't a great source for local lore, but to the rescue rode 'junior.' junior was clearly happy to see a stranger at the bar and sidled up straightaway and started to fumble for change for his $2 budweiser, and I crawled under the pool table to retrieve a dropped quarter. junior is the sort to offer his life story without prompting. and it was a solid one. he's clearly of native extraction, though he didn't mention this, and looked about 65 despite his birth certificate age of 81 (except for some key missing teeth up front). he was wearing a yellow and white mesh baseball cap that advertised troy, montana, but has lived there for 'only' 44 years. moved from minnesota to work in construction. the rest is murky...despite his hearing aid, junior spoke in a barely audible not quite whisper, and a lot of enunciation was lost in the space where his front teeth were supposed to be. but he related everything in such a matter-of-fact tone that I didn't doubt much of what I pieced together. worked hard and followed the money, always cognizant that one has to work long hours when the money's available...perhaps an inevitable conclusion for any who work in the boom-bust economy of construction and logging and mining, but junior pointed out that he turned down longterm company jobs several times because he knew that the 'guarantee' of lifetime benefits was never really a serious one. so he moved from digging ditches to operating a crane to buying a logging truck, then more logging trucks, then log loaders and cranes until he'd amassed a small fleet of construction equipment and thence a small fortune. through it all there was a current of perceived disrespect, as in a long story of his expertise in fixing a crane on the libby dam project. company higher-ups ignored his suggestions, but when the manufacturer reps were called in they concluded that junior knew more about the machine than they did. and so junior saved the day, and promptly quit after fixing the problem but sneakily not calling attention to another one. I have no idea whether junior is the know-it-all pain in the ass sort of line worker or a non-company-man indian who suffered undeserved condescension. the next story was even harder to gauge, the more recent murder of his wife. junior was off in north dakota somewhere working when it happened (he too adamantly insists), the police pinned it on 'bikers,' and junior spent a while trying to point the sherriff in the right direction to the man he knew did it. the rest was completely opaque...where/why it happened and so on, but in the end junior found peace in knowing that whoever did it had to live with the guilt, and one of the two conspirators (the number of the guilty grew with the story) had already died from shame. again I leaned hard toward respect and compassion here -- his demeanor demanded it -- but then again the canned and unprompted nature of the narration was suspicious. I barely got a word in after 'did you grow up here?' other than the murder story, the rest was typical enough...grandkids have moved off in search of work, either down to missoula or up north to work on a gas pipeline. nothing to be done...but of course better than things in libby.