They counted on easy agreement—the natural gas company bigwigs. They’d planned to bury their pipeline beneath those Missouri River shallows, slide it under badland slumps, save miles. They needed a fistful of permits including our State Preservation Office approval. I almost tumbled to the sketchy cultural resource report: no tipi rings, no one-room schools on those bluffs, just a couple broken-down log cabins and rotten cords of wood. And what turned out to be the improbably preserved remnants of a century-old business: hawking wood to steamers bound upriver to Fort Benton.
The company offered a tour. “OK taking a helicopter from Lewistown? That way you’ll know.” And meant, of course: know just how dilapidated, how insignificant these ruins are. The men sat at my desk, easy in their thousand-dollar Denver suits. “Sure, why not,” I smiled shyly.
When else could I have been left on the grassy, crumbly edge of the universe to wander in another time? The suits lifted off, buzzed elk, confident. I stepped alone into the woodcutters’ homes. Fingered spongy unsold boiler-lengths. Smelled sage in the whistling fall wind. Leaned on an empty door frame and looked to the shallow, stair-stepped river.
The shoreline stirred with holograms of men unloading freight, of long-skirted ladies clambering off to lighten the weight, raise the draft. Rekindled wood smoke belched above an anxious captain as he horsed his gold-field-bound fortune hunters up and over Dauphin Rapids.
I heard the rotors, climbed the bluff, answer ready for the unsuspecting suits. ©
