Jessie's Life Place

What Will Happen to the Wolverine?

Somewhere in the Rocky Mountains, a wolverine is burrowed 10 feet under the snow.  His body heat is warming the snow around him, and in his icy sanctuary, he stays warm enough to survive another winter.  Some of the snow below him melts and seeps into the earth.  A quarter mile away a fresh water spring bubbles up as the soil can’t hold any more snow melt.

  The trickle of water grows over miles and slowly picks up speed.  Several other fresh water springs draining an area of 28,820sq miles[1] join the first and, a hundred miles later, a steady creek is flowing, carving out a bed in which to flow down through the mountains. In a remote part of Montana, the now swift and dangerous river cascades 100 feet over a cliff.  In the pool below, a mountain lion drinks from the water and bathes her paws.  A few miles down, where the water is a little less treacherous, a black bear teachers her cubs how to catch trout.  The trout that escape swim down into the valley below.  They fill the streams, breeding, jumping, eating mayflies. 

A fisherman on the North Fork Flathead River stops fiddling with his fly to watch a pair of bald eagles dive over and over into the water, bringing up a hearty trout each time.  The river, however, continues on until it dumps into the largest freshwater lake in the Western United States, Flathead Lake.  Here, a moose island-hops, swimming awkwardly from one small land mass to the next, his antlers bobbing up and down while tourists watch from a speed boat. 

At the southern end of the lake, a thicker river emerges.  It winds through valley after valley, until eventually it weaves its way into the Missoula valley, joining a tributary that flows 479 miles into the Columbia River Basin[2].  In the city of Missoula, the river passes under bridges…the highway 12 bridge, East Broadway Bridge, Higgins Street Bridge, and my favorite, the foot bridge.  I stand on the railing of the bridge in my bathing suit and Birkenstocks, gripping a support beam, my toes dangle over the edge of the railing.  I hear her friends egging me on from below, trying to convince me that “it’s not scary.”  Finally, I close my eyes and jump into the Clark Fork River.

So much affects the Clark Fork River before its waters flow under the foot bridge and that is by no means the end of its journey, but it is in Missoula, Montana that the river is most personal to me.  I have only lived in Missoula for five broken month – hardly enough time to memorize my new address – and for only two weeks of that time could I have swam in the river before autumn weather made it far too cold.   Despite weather and time constraints, I can already feel myself growing a strong attachment to the bioregion that is the Clark Fork River.

The first weekend I moved to Missoula, I was thrown into a rush of buying books, registering for classes, moving in, and meeting new people.  The craziness was subdued on a Sunday afternoon when I walked with a few new-found friends down to the banks of the Clark Fork River.  The water was cold, but inviting nonetheless.  I immediately found peace among the slippery, rainbow-colored rocks and the stream of floaters drifting by in their black tubes, beer in hand.   It was only two weeks later that the water became too cold for me to want to spend time in the river, but its effect on me has only grown.

Almost every week I walk over the foot-bridge that stretches over the river to buy groceries.  Even on days when the cold bites at any exposed skin I find myself lingering in the outdoors to snap a photo on my cell phone of the icy banks, or simply gaze at the flowing water.  There have been some nights when I walk with a single close friend to sit by the banks, to talk, or simply listen to the water and the creatures of the night.  Even when I get dressed up for a night on the town, and nature is the last thing on my mind, I must walk along the river to get into town I often stop for several minutes, mesmerized by the twinkling lights of Missoula that reflect upon the black river. When I scroll through my photos of the past five months that I have spent in Missoula, I find that a disproportionally large amount of them are of the river in some way.

The American Heritage Dictionary says a bio-region is “An area constituting a natural ecological community with characteristic flora, fauna, and environmental conditions and bounded by natural rather than artificial borders.”[3]  These technical terms are fine, but what is a bio-region – or a “life-place” as Robert Thayer describes it[4] –to a person, who thinks and feels and ponders existence? 

To me, a place turns from a geographical feature, to a life-place when I become protective of it.   What would make a person want to defend something as monumental as a river, or a mountain, or a valley? I think because when a person finds a life-place that they call their own, it becomes a part of them, and they want to protect that part.  A rafting trip down the Clark Fork River means more than just a girl and a tube and a body of water.  It means memories and emotions and unforgettable experiences.  When those experiences touch you in a way to make you protective of the place that made them possible, that is when that place becomes a part of what defines you. 

I have been fortunate enough to find a place as beautiful as the Clark Fork River to define me, but this has not always been possible for the generations before me.  With the discovery of gold, silver, and copper in Butte in 1864, began years of mineral pollution in the Clark Fork River.[5]  The pollution built up to toxic rates, so that when the River flooded in into the Missoula Watershed in 1908, thousands of people found themselves without drinking water.[6]  It wasn’t until 51 years of clean-up efforts later that fish began returning to the river, and  an additional 50 years after that, that real efforts were made to clean up the river, and restore wildlife and human health hazards so that the river is how we know it today.[7]   

The Clark Fork River has an incredible power to affect the human soul, as it has affected mine, but that does not strengthen its fragile and precariously balanced ecosystem.  Only forty years of mining turned a pristine example of nature into a toxic waste. And it wasn’t until 100 years and hundreds of millions of dollars later that the river was swimmable again. My hope is that conservation efforts will continue, and grow stronger.  While the time and money spent on cleaning the Clark Fork is admirable, it is not enough.  Thousands of miles of ground water come together to create the river, with wildlife dependent upon it every step of the way.  If the Flathead Lake floods due to excessive melting of glaciers, the moose might drown in his crossing, and the bear cub might find the river before it too dangerous to learn how to fish.  If after the glaciers melt, the river dries up, what will there be for me to jump into on summer afternoons?  Where will the fish swim and what will the eagle catch?  What will happen to the wolverine who has adapted to survive in the harshest of winters when the winter is gone?

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[1] Wikipedia, “The Clark Fork River”

[2] Wikipedia, “The Clark Fork River”

[3] American Heritage Dictionary, “<a href="http://www.thefreedictionary.com/bioregion">bioregion</a>” 2009

[4] Thayer, “Life Place”, pg. 3

[5] Missoulian, “Timeline of Clark Fork River Pollution and Clean Up”, <http://missoulian.com/article_85707bd6-9ab5-11de-aa1f-001cc4c03286.html>, 2009

[6] Missoulian, “Timeline of Clark Fork River Pollution and Clean Up”, <http://missoulian.com/article_85707bd6-9ab5-11de-aa1f-001cc4c03286.html>, 2009

[7] Missoulian, “Timeline of Clark Fork River Pollution and Clean Up”, <http://missoulian.com/article_85707bd6-9ab5-11de-aa1f-001cc4c03286.html>, 2009