This is a reanimation of the Vicaribus blog as lived by Miro Kazakoff and Ehren Foss in 2004 and 2005. The photos may be spotty.

She's a Butte!

Posted by ehren

At the end of the afternoon, when the General Mercantile closed (last of the WiFi offering businesses), I started walking towards the mountain at the edge of town intending to climb it and look out over the valley. Then I saw a much smalleer and closer hill and decided to go for that instead; 20x less effort for 0.5x the panoramic majesty. Miro caught up, it didn't take more than a half hour to get to the top, and we stayed up there until 7. He told me about "Sara's Porkies," a meat sandwich proprietor farther out Last Chance Gulch Rd., close to the town's other movie theater. We caught the owner just as he was closing and bought some outstanding sandwiches (though the fries were far over-salted). On the menu, but as yet unassailed, was "The Hawg", a $12, 24oz center cut pork loin patty, breaded and deep fried on a 7" bun. Ye gods. When asked if we should head to Butte for the 4th, he said "Butte...yeah... wow... that's a place" with a twinkle in his eye. It sounds to us like Butte is the wildest corner of the Montana frontier.

I spent around two hours wandering around the movie theater, borrowed a pen from the gas station / casino so I could go over to the Dairy Queen and make my first substantial To Do list in several weeks. The bus fluids need changing, the dash rattles, the front tires need to be swapped, I have work to do on two or three fronts, I want to find a job for the fall, the bus needs cleaning, my 2002 and 2004 taxes are almost done and should be sent once the post offices open again on Tuesday, along with the continual battle to remember to brush my teeth.

I saw "Mr. and Mrs. Smith," which was entertaining and almost exactly what I expected. Movie tickets in Helena are a flat $7. Satisfying.

On the way home (to the wrong side of the tracks) I stopped at Hap's, it was almost empty, so I talked to...Bruce? Brian? Anyway, the bartender was bored. He told me about how he owned a local bar in Hawaii from age 20-32. He said the natives stopped picking fights with him after about 6 months, and after that he was in; owned the bar and 3 houses, eventually cashing it all in to re-open his dad's place in Helena.

Still ill today, at first breakfast consumed 7,000% of my daily regimen of Vitamin C, then we hit the road, Miro driving, for Butte. In 60 miles I-15 climbs 2,400 feet, bringing us close to the highest altitude the bus has achieved on the trip (probably runs a close second to parts of Rt 66 in Arizona, on the Colorado Plateau. The landscape was standard high-mountain, dry, pine trees, somewhere between mountains and hills.

Coming over the Elk Park Pass, we stopped at a viewpoint for Butte and 'Our Lady of the Rockies.' I saw it on the map -- a red square with a name -- but hadn't filled in the blank until we looked up at the ridge and saw a giant, white marble statue surveying the land. In an attempt to "feed a cold, starve a fever" I suggested we GO BIG for lunch, and Miro selected Perkins from a populous but not diverse array of trough/chains. While there we read the available selection of free / public / underground / monthly / weeklies available near the host's stand, and learned that other than the 4th of July festivities there's almost nothing going on in Montana that fits with our schedule and path, aside perhaps from a small rodeo in Big Sky on Tuesday. The line between editorial, column, and news item was blurry. We weren't sure who wrote the page-long diatribe about "green tree huggers" who want to prevent the anonymous author from riding his dirtbike. Nor was the piece blasting Bush as a draft dodger signed...and I think they sandwiched a 2-page spread of poetry.

After lunch/breakfast #2 we drove to the Berkeley Pit. For $1 per person you can take a long look at one of the world's most toxic environmental disaster areas. The Pit, according to the informative signage, is around a mile square, 2,000 feet deep, and has a Ph. of 2.5, same as vinegar. The water in the pit is bright purple, and contains arsenic, copper, cobalt, molybdenum (say it 5 x fast), aluminum, iron, and probably cholesterol and trans-fatty acids. Raquel told me at certain times of the year you can go 'birdwatching' at the pit: Geese land, die, and dissolve. As Miro put it "I don't want to live in a town with a 3.5 billion gallon cauldron of arsenic perched just below the water table."

Cheered that we have enough clean water in the bus to survive well beyond Butte, we drove around town, through Montana Tech, and then back to a tanning salon, laundromat, cafe, and day care center that also offers wireless.