- Snip -   

      Altogether over the year, we went through Butte twice and Anaconda once. Butte was a story unto itself, not because it was a glory hole for flowers, but because it sat smack on top of one of the world's largest open pit glory holes for ore.

      When the founding father's first arrived on the scene, the landscape around Butte was nothing special, just the low rolling type of hills and semi plains mix which was common throughout the area just east of the Rockies.

      The only exception was a six hundred foot high ant hill sitting right in the middle of nowhere all by itself, sticking up like a sore thumb. Hence the name Butte. The giant open pit ore body that originally started the whole thing off, was way over there. The ant hill was way over here and never the twain would meet.

      Or so apparently went the theory because they built the town right on top of the ant hill, probably for the spectacular view. Eventually covering the entire hill like a blanket over a Mayan mound.

      Then came the good news and the bad news. The good news aws that the ore body was way bigger than original suspected. The bad news was that the direction of the new ore was right through the ant hill.

      Why on earth nobody thought of drilling in advance to make sure, who can say. Either no one had, or the results got lost because the town was put on top of the hill and the hill ended up dead center on top of the progressing ore body. More likely, the hill was so far away from the original ore body that nobody ever dreamed the ore body would end up being that big. 

      At any rate, the problem was therefore that either the town had to be moved lock stock and barrel, or the mine eventually shut down. Any fool could see what kind of a contest that was. Money wins every time. Besides, if the mine shut down, there would be no reason for the town. Sort of its own non sequitur.

      So the mine got the nod and the town got the boot. Instead of just ghost towning it to somewhere else though, the town was being moved way over there out of harm’s way, a street at a time as the digging entrenched into the hill a street at a time. Already well under way for some long time when we arrived.

      The streets were being moved day by day. The ant hill in behind was being inexorably eaten away by the giant mining shovel, both going on in a perfect dance of desperate engineering syncopation. Since butte was anything but a tiny little hick town way off in the middle of nowhere, this was anything but a trivial little operation. Albeit way off in the middle of nowhere.

      When we got there, a third of the hill, er town, er ant hill, was already gone. It looked just like someone had just spaded one big huge shovelful out of the side of an ordinary sized ant hill in the backyard and tossed it away. You've got to love the American industrial spirit to persevere against all odds.

      Anaconda's was a whole different story. Anaconda was at one time, maybe still is, home of the world’s largest freestanding smokestack.

      The stack was red brick and enormous. Talk about a finger up to the environment. It was almost a city block square through the base and probably a good bet to be the original inspiration for Jack and the Beanstalk because it went way up there.

      Anaconda was way off everybody's beaten path. The only thing to do in Anaconda seemed to have been to work and drink, because the only thing in town besides the five square miles of smelter were a few houses and a lot of bars.

      On the trip through, my friends dropped me off with a full load of flowers at one of the town's more promising strips at about seven in the evening. The cue up was that they would pick me up again at eleven.

      The strip looked like any residential commercial zone, with a few storefronts and a couple of houses. But just about every intersection had a hot spot watering hole or two. I had finished going up one side of the street and had been coming back down the other at about nine o'clock. I came to this neat quaint looking little place with weathered barn siding and a liberal festooning of wagon wheels and lanterns all over the front.

      "Ah", I said to myself in eager anticipation, "a country western bar". In any part of North America, the two things you could always count on with certainty were that the sun would always come up in the morning and that you would sell a flower or two in a country western bar. Either something about smelling the roses along the way, or that all the males suddenly saw light at the end of the tunnel.

     Therefore, already pumped before I even got into the place, I burst through the door and headed boldly towards the first table on the way to the bar to ask permission. I had already started asking if anyone would like to buy a flower.

     I stopped in mid sentence. I had also stopped in mid stride. I had stopped striding so fast, my right leg was still frozen halfway up in the up cycle.

     Then in what is surely one of the most slickly choreographed retreats in the annuls of flower selling history, I said, "nope, guess not", and went straight back out the door in the exact reverse order of the way I had come in. Literally a video recording in reverse.

      What had stopped me in my tracks so suddenly was the fact I had looked up and saw nothing but a sea of black tee shirts, black caps, black beards, lots of tattoos, and big white round eyes staring at me out of slack jawed blank faces like a tabloid frozen in time. It was a goddam biker's bar.   

- Snip -