From Great Falls to Butte, Montana.
Well, first… it doesn’t feel like Sunday! At any rate, I’m heading to Butte, but first stopping in Great Falls, which is along the way, to take a look at the falls for which the town is named. It was another nice and warn day, with temps going up and down during the day from lower 70s to lower 80s, and nice and clear.
Well, it turns out the falls aren’t that easy to get to. They’re out a ways on back country roads, and google maps first sent me along a small country road to a dead end, but then, after returning to the main road, my car GPS correctly took me back exactly the same way, except a a couple of miles further along. There are five falls, which are actually dams along the Missouri built atop the different falls, which each step down the river, heading west. I made it to just one, Big Falls, which is the largest of the falls, located at Ryan Dam, built to harness the falls and step the river down. The best view of the dam/falls is from the foot bridge leading to Ryan Island, but, not only was Ryan Dam really out of the way, but the island is closed after Labor Day, and so is the bridge. Too bad, but still a nice spot.
I took another trip into the town of Great Falls, which is pretty dead on a Sunday (although it wasn’t that lvely last night). It’s a nice, and nice and clean, little town, but not too much more to say about it, at least from just these couple of cursory looks. Along the main street, speakers located on lamp posts pump out contemporary music, which is a nice touch.
Okay, back on route 15, heading 155 miles south to Butte. Heading further south, fir covered mountains started appearing as we ran alongside the Missouri River, with some lovely river side scenes, but not too many opportunities to stop the car and photograph these serene scenes.
Coming into Butte, the first and unmissable feature of the town are the now unused mineshaft headframes, lots of them, all over town.
The town is filled with mining boom buildings from the late 19th century through the 20th, many of which are really run down or barely maintained, with the downtown area ranging over a number of streets, with no clear center. These downtown streets are a mix of closed or really rundown store fronts in old buildings, with working stores and restaurants scattered in among them. In their day, when the copper mining was booming, you can imagine this being a pretty elegant, cowboy-era mining town, but no longer.
I wondered why such a large has a population of only around 36,000, which is less than Amherst. Of course, it’s because the city was built for a much larger population, somewhere between 80,000-100,000 around 1920, again, in its heyday.
It’s a Sunday, so not that easy to tell how things are during the week, but certainly today there was very little activity, and most of the working stores and eateries were closed. It is a kind of run down, depressing place, although fascinating as the age and appearance of the town buildings lock it into the past, when it was clearly a booming and bustling town.
The hotel where I am staying is in a separate and newer strip like area of town, with lots of generic stores, running off of route 15, capturing much of the business traffic passing though town, and residential areas away from the old city center.
The residential streets in the central Butte area are a mirror of the downtown buildings, many of them old, and a mix of well kept and run down, but you can see how magnificent these streets must have looked in their heyday. Some of the nicest older homes seem to be on Excelsior Avenue.
And then I was done. I found a hiking trail, but by now it was colder and windy up on Big Butte Loop, so I instead headed back to my hotel. I think, this was the actually the first night that I had time on my hands, with nothing much to do. So, I watched some TV and wrote this blog.
Tomorrow is the last day of September, and I’ve been on this trip for a little over two months now, with over 14,000 miles on the clock. I’ve spent countless hours thinking of Bev, just about every day, and our life, and how things unfolded, and the thoughts almost instantaneously sadden me. Nothing much has changed in that regard, except for my steadily getting used to the idea, even though it remains powerfully upsetting and viscerally an almost immediately saddening, with the the constant re-realization that Bev is gone and isn’t coming back.
As to where I’m going in my life after I return to Amherst, I still have no clue, and don’t expect to at this point. As I said at some earlier point in this blog, perhaps that will take a year or more to figure out. Right now and in the foreseeable future, it’s just day to day. I do wonder whether I will stay in Amherst in the long run, as there is little there for me, other than Amy and Pat in particular, and other close friends like Jane and Elana, and, of course, the house itself and the memories and sweat labor it contains. We’ll see, I suppose. Still, it will be several more weeks before I’m back there.