WITH EVERY GREAT BREATH

Living and Dying in Lincoln County

Editor’s note (from The Whitefish Review): Vermiculite, an ore found in the Libby, Montana, area in 1881, had been mined in the area since 1919. Vermiculite, a mineral similar to mica, expands when heated into featherweight pieces that have been used commercially for decades in attic and wall insulation, wallboard, fireproofing, and plant nursery and forestry products. It was also used in scores of consumer products, such as lawn and garden supplies and cat litter.

IN 1919, E. N. ALLEY BOUGHT THE RAINY CREEK CLAIMS and started the Zonolite Company. W. R. Grace and Company bought the Zonolite mine in 1963 and closed it in 1990. Federal government investigators subsequently found that air samples from the area had elevated levels of fibrous tremolite asbestos, which causes asbestos-related illnesses.

More than 274 area deaths in the past 60 years are suspected to have been caused by asbestos-contaminated vermiculite, and approximately 1,200 residents of the Libby area have been identified as suffering from some kind of asbestos-related abnormality. It has been called the worst environmental disaster in our nation’s history.

In 2005, the U.S. Department of Justice indicted W. R. Grace and seven current and former Grace executives for knowingly endangering residents of Libby and concealing information about the health effects of its asbestos mining operation. According to the indictment, W. R. Grace and its executives, as far back as the 1970s, attempted to conceal information about the adverse health effects of the company’s vermiculite mining operations and distribution of vermiculite. The defendants were also accused of obstructing the government’s cleanup efforts and of wire fraud.

The criminal trial began in February 2009 after years of pretrial proceedings that reached the United States Supreme Court. On Friday, May 8, 2009, W. R. Grace was acquitted of “knowingly” harming the people of Libby, Montana.

Fred Festa, chairman, president, and CEO of W. R. Grace and Company, said in a statement that did not specifically deny knowing of harm that instead “the company worked hard to keep the operations in compliance with the laws and standards of the day.”

David Uhlmann, a former top environmental crimes prosecutor, has been quoted as saying about W. R. Grace: “There’s never been a case where so many people were sickened or killed by environmental crime.”

I’m dressed in my orange county-issued pajamas with some new friends in the holding facility of the Helena jail, having been arrested for criminal trespass in the state capital, the result of overstaying my welcome during a protest against the State Land Board’s plans to lease 1.5 billion tons of toxic coal in Otter Creek, Montana. The Otter Creek coal is too dirty to burn in this country; the plans therefore are to build a rail line to ship it to China, via ports in the Pacific Northwest. This isn’t the Montana way, nor the American way, transferring our harm to others, not for profit and not for loss, and if global warming is not the moral issue of our times, then none exists.

Handcuffs, then, and a short ride through Helena in the paddy wagon. My youngest daughter, Lowry, tried to bail me out, but cell phones don’t work, so to relay messages my jailer has to go back and forth to the sidewalk where Lowry is standing outside the jail in the long summer twilight, waiting. My incarceration has been complicated further by a piece of poor judgment on my part—a single tiny pellet of zolpidem, the generic name for Ambien, which I brought in with me, not thinking the searchers would find it, though they did.

This, I’m told, constitutes a felony in Montana—to carry prescription medicine outside of the container in which it was initially dispensed—and so in an effort to convince the authorities that I simply wanted to be assured of a good night’s sleep, should I be overstaying the night in stir, Lowry has had to rummage through my suitcase for all of my various medications. (I’ve just picked up half a dozen various prescriptions in preparation for a medical procedure in Libby the next day.) Ever the good daughter, Lowry has carried the double-armful of these loose plastic bottles up the steps, spilling some as she goes, to show my captors that her medicated father means no harm, is not a trafficker. (Should I get out, we’ll drive through the night to be back in Libby for the morning appointment.)

This story has nothing to do with coal mining but everything to do with a big pit. The coal lies in the future, just waiting beneath the skin of the earth in extreme southeastern Montana’s Tongue River country—a land as dry and dusty as my home in the northwest corner of the state is lush and green—while the other mineral that I want to talk about, asbestos, lies somewhat in the past, though it too inhabits the present and the future, having been exhumed and shipped all around the world.

It came from my home.

This story has in it heroes and villains and ordinary people, beautiful country, a corrupt government, a dead dog, several dead friends, and dozens of cardboard boxes of files and records and old newspaper clippings and health records, up in the dusty attic (probably asbestos-laden) of one social activist in the northwest corner of Montana, in the town of Libby, named long ago for a miner’s daughter.

It’s a big story composed of millions of tiny parts. It defies structure. It drifts along on the breezes, settles and lands where it may.

About the proposed coal mine: you can’t make this shit up. The world’s richest man is investing in a company that wants to build a railroad through the most southwesterly corner of Montana—the bucolic Tongue River Valley, ancestral home to the Northern Cheyenne and, more recently, cattle ranchers. The power brokers wish to surface mine, from the upper transgressive reaches of a buried old swamp, millennia’s worth of low-grade sub-bituminous coal to send, in open boxcars, all the way across Montana and the Pacific Northwest, to ship to China, under a huge subsidy by Montana and U.S. taxpayers, so that developing countries and investors will build new coal-fired plants and get those countries hooked on coal. At that point, we, the United States—or those investors—can then convert the world to a coal economy.

Ironically, the emissions from this toxic coal with its low energy content will be back on our shores within two weeks. But at least we didn’t burn it here. We didn’t break any U.S. laws, the investors can say.

The citizens of China can’t protest this, and the billions of impoverished environmental refugees of the future can’t protest it, because it is still some short distance into the future, while the trains are carrying their toxic swirling bounty now, broadcasting a brown-black scrim of sulfur, selenium, cadmium, uranium, arsenic along the rail lines, and the windswept communities through which these boxcars—miles long, coming and going all the time—pass, uncontested, unprotected, unreported, the innocuous growl of commerce and liquidation.

There’s no science in this, no data is being collected. The Otter Creek coal story of today reminds me, in my jail cell, of that other story from the opposite end of the state, a story that is also still largely underground, and of another rail line, one that spans the entire northern tier of the U.S. It’s a story that originates in that other far corner of this huge and beautiful state that is sometimes ferociously independent and yet other times willing to roll over for corporations like a submissive little roly-poly speckled puppy.

All right, time to descend into the pit. The illnesses here are not for the faint of heart, but even in the midst of a silent war there is hope, up here near the international border, almost but not quite out of sight of everything and everyone. Due largely to the work of a fairly small number of politicians and activists, there are still slivers of hope up here somehow, somewhere, even if they are not at first visible, or barely visible: as slender, perhaps, as silvery frost needles shimmering in the air in winter.

How do we live?

How do we die?

Surely the answers are the same.

And yet, before I describe how we die, let me testify—as if presenting a breath of clean cool air—how we live, and where we live.

There was (and still partially is) one certain mountain, Vermiculite Mountain, up in the Purcell Mountains of northwest Montana’s Yaak Valley, north of the broad deep Kootenai River, which separates the rock and ice crags of the Cabinet Mountains to the south from the softer, more heavily forested, lower elevation mountains of the Yaak Valley, to the north, where I have lived and spent the most powerful moments of my life. Those Purcell Mountains appear more like the Appalachians than the Rockies.

Along the ribbon of the Kootenai River, lying in the narrow valley between these two mountain ranges, is a slender winding trough that runs with the river east-west toward Idaho and, ultimately, the Pacific. This is the Kootenai Valley, and it contains the little towns of Libby (pop. 2,900) and Troy (pop. 900). It is a landscape of stunning beauty—sylvan forests on steep mountain flanks, ice- and snow-capped peaks. Bald eagles drift up and down the river. Moose wade the river’s shallows. There are relatively few people. There is extreme poverty, sometimes as high as 20 to 30 percent.

For whatever reason, the volcanic-cone-shaped mountain—Vermiculite Mountain—up in the Yaak, about ten miles northeast of Libby, contained—and still contains—an extraordinary concentration of vermiculite ore. There are asbestos fibers in this ore. Asbestos historically has been an insulator against extreme heat. It can absorb up to 1,022 degrees Fahrenheit before burning—and this one mountain back in the middle of nowhere, up near the Canadian border, at one time produced nearly all of the world’s asbestos.

The reason the vermiculite (a glittering gold mineral, reminding one of mica or even fool’s gold) absorbs heat so well is that it swells dramatically during the heating process, expanding with a popping noise as the heat gets trapped between tight structural laminae, exfoliating each layer in the expansion. For fun, children would heat chunks of the mineral with matches and lighters to hear it pop! The spent ore was heaped in giant piles all around the county, after the machines had sawed off the top of the mountain, and—for decade after decade—continued clawing out the insides.

The vermiculite was poured into people’s attics like kitty litter, to provide cheap insulation, and poured into the spaces between walls, likewise. It was mixed into children’s sandboxes, stirred into people’s gardens, used as filler for running tracks and skating rinks. It has no nutritional value but there were even recipes that used it in the baking of muffins. Made the muffins real puffy, people said. Asked for seconds.

The asbestos from this one mountain is incredibly toxic. It’s killed hundreds of people in Libby and sickened thousands, with the kind of illness where you don’t ever get better. For some reason, the asbestos fibers in the vermiculite in Libby are a smaller variety, called tremolite, rather than the more common amphibole asbestos fiber. Either one is incredibly toxic but the smaller tremolite is particularly so in that it is less likely to be filtered by the body’s traditional lines of defense. As well, the fibers are barbed, like porcupine quills, so that once they attach—to the lining of the lungs, the alveoli, the lining of the stomach—they are unable to be ejected and burrow ever deeper, bioaccumulating, and ticking, waiting patiently to trigger the end game, the incurable and fast-acting cancer of mesothelioma.

I think of tiny things being dug up out of the earth and broadcast over a town, and the invisible and irrevocable damage that something so small can do. The miners, of course, working at ground zero—driving the stuff around in dump trucks, and descending into the giant pit where ceaseless dust storms whirled—fell like flies—even in the 1940s and ’50s, they were dying, it was common local knowledge that the mine was a hard place to work, and hard on a man’s health—but what mine wasn’t?

There wasn’t any hard science showing the how or why; dying was just what miners eventually did. The times were hard, and you died if you worked in the mine, or you and your family starved if you didn’t.

The dust kept billowing up out of the pit and being hauled off down the mountain in trucks, poured into railcars, and sent down the line, east and west, to Seattle and St. Paul, swirling. People were getting sick from working in the mines, and when the workers came home dusty from work, their families got sick from the dust that was on their clothes. There was primary exposure, secondary exposure, tertiary exposure. The fibers blew through the valleys, hung suspended for long periods. I would assume that the frequent mountain valley inversions might aid in trapping these invisible curtains of poison. I can imagine that the fog and river moisture and other particulates—woodsmoke, in that cold damp country, so that the bowls of the valleys themselves seem to smolder—acted as anchors on the upward drift and dispersal of those microfibers, bringing them back down to the lung-level of humans.

To the best of my knowledge, I don’t think anyone else understands the dispersal mechanisms and routes, the distribution and density of the tiny fibers, nor how many there are, nor what can be done to clean them from the system, nor what constitutes safe, what constitutes hazardous, or what might constitute the midrange safe space for the daily living in between. And, understandably, after sixty years of government and corporate and industrial denials, obstructions, and even plain old-fashioned human error, even if there were studies and reports purporting to fully understand such things, I can’t think of many of us who would be inclined to trust those answers.

When I think of the country around the mine—the rivers like veins and arteries, the forests, mountains, lakes like internal organs in the body whole—the ridges in the Yaak, particularly, rolling one after another, like the crenellations of a deep and complex brain—the images of treasure that come to me are not of underground petrified rivers of silver or gold, nor lode veins of asbestos, coal, oil, gas, but instead, the treasures at the surface, particularly up on the high ridges, where the winds scrub and scour the stone and blow steadily—places where the forests filter out to a stunted filigree of blue-green, like the outer fringes of alveoli, and where, to a traveler, a pilgrim, there is very much the feeling that you have left one special place, the forest—a place of deep sanctuary and security—and have ascended to another special place, a place where illumination exists.

How we die. Slowest first: asbestosis. Under the relentless accumulation of those tiny barbed fibers, the lungs—cut daily by a hundred thousand knives—build up a scabrous, inflexible scar tissue. The lungs strain increasingly to suck in air. Heard through a stethoscope, lungs—no longer supple or even as moist—produce in their respiration a dry, crinkling sound, like brittle plastic being crumpled. The body soon strains harder to deliver to the rest of itself that which was once free but is now costly and rare, and there is never quite enough.

An asbestos survivor moves more slowly than he or she used to, conserving energy and oxygen. No matter that as young people they were once active in one of the most beautiful places on earth—running up and down the mountains in pursuit of deer and elk, or hiking to favorite fishing lakes, or picking huckleberries, gathering mushrooms; hiking, camping, skiing, playing. Never mind all that. Now the most vigorous thing many of them attempt is to walk out and get the morning paper.

Rarely if ever is age kind to the human body, but here the disparity strikes me as torturous: to become slowly captive in one’s body, while still looking out at those beautiful mountains that were so much a part of youth and health.

They’re not going to get better. It’s not like a broken bone that bends nor a surgery that strengthens. Maybe someday in the future there’ll be replacement lungs, a way to change out the old, crackly, stiff, impermeable-as-waxed-cardboard ones and throw in a new pair; but no such technology exists.

Slowly—year by year—the biology of the affliction metamorphoses the body, transforms the vessel that houses the affliction, in the way that the passage of time modifies and sculpts the rounded mountains themselves.

The sufferers—the survivors—develop great barrel chests, with every muscle in the body—diaphragm, intercostal muscles, pectorals, everything—clenching and pulling and squeezing, trying to pull more air deeper into the lungs.

The heart works harder, too—one day, it will work itself to death—trying to pump oxygen to all the farthest reaches. Extremities grow cold easily. In the early stages, fingernails begin to exhibit the telltale marks of hypoxia: they bulge and bunch up, and take on a clubbed appearance. Sometimes I look at mine, examining them in the light like a prima donna. The nail on the middle finger of my right hand was the first to begin bulging slightly, a couple of years ago; recently, a couple more have begun to swell.

Other symptoms proceed: dizziness, weakness, lightheadedness, reduced oxygen flow. The survivor fights for each breath, negotiates for even a fraction of a breath, while outside, the snow-clad mountains shine as if waiting patiently for the survivor to return to them—to hike the quiet soft trails through the shadowy forest, and to ascend those steep slopes with the same vigor that the survivor possessed in the days before things began to add up.

It’s not like everyone in Lincoln County has it. Far from it. The majority don’t. Only one-third of those examined—whether miners or general air-breathers—show signs of pleural thickening in chest X-rays, a leading indicator of exposure.

In a county of 19,000 residents—an immense land mass measuring 3,675 square miles—there are currently “only” about 2,000 survivors being treated for various asbestos-related diseases.

So the asbestosis is the first way to get sick. You don’t necessarily die from asbestosis, or at least not in a hurry; instead, it can just wear you down, over the space of thirty or forty years. There’s time to think about things. During that same time, of course, you might get hit by a truck.

The second way to get sick is quite different. There’s a presently incurable cancer, mesothelioma—a cancer of the lining of the lungs or the stomach—that is caused only by exposure to asbestos, nothing else. It’s an incredibly rare cancer, and once you get it, it’s lights out. It roars through the body, sometimes within short weeks. It occurs in the general population with a frequency of about one in 100,000, so that from actuarial tables, there should have been between zero and one cases in Libby, ever.

To date, thirty-two at the very least are known or diagnosed. Or rather, thirty-two-plus-one. My dog, a sweet speckled German shorthaired pointer named Point—as strong as a little ox—was the first animal in Lincoln County diagnosed with it, in 2005. He was ten. The mill had been closed for over ten years. He was what the vet called the sentinel case for Lincoln County.

Usually the meso, as it’s called locally, manifests itself in the lungs, but Point’s was in the stomach. It wasn’t painful for Point but it wasn’t pretty, particularly not for such a once graceful athlete. I went out to his kennel one morning in late July to find him swollen like a melon. He was as prancy and frisky as ever, but he was huge and round, a completely different version of the dog he had been the day before.

I hurried him down to Libby, where the vet, Doug, X-rayed him, found nothing, and then drew some fluid to look at.

The fluid was blood, or a blood-water mixture, and was bright red, like dark black cherry Kool-Aid. It took about an hour to drain it all off. I can’t remember how many cc’s we got, that first time—maybe half a liter—and slowly, Point deflated, like a pufferfish going down, no longer alarmed.

He wriggled and writhed on the table. Just when Doug thought he had all the mystery fluid drained, he would stick the needle somewhere else in his abdominal cavity, probing, and a new surge of that bright black-red tarwater would come jetting out, filling the hypodermic’s chamber.

“I don’t know what it is,” Doug said. “It could be a bad cancer. You might want to take him over to the specialists at Washington State.”

So passed a summer, and about seven thousand dollars. We didn’t know what he had. We kept thinking he could get better. We kept searching for an answer, as I went further and further down the slippery slope of dog medical care. If I’d known what it was, I wouldn’t have attempted to fix it, would have taken him out in the field as if going on one last early season hunt and then let him die.

But one small thing—a blood test, an X-ray—led to another, and because he was otherwise so healthy—other than those lengthy drainings each day—I kept following hope, the way he and I would follow the scent or possibility or tracks of birds.

An MRI came next—maybe it was just some soft tissue blockage, something easily removed—he still seemed so damned healthy!—but when it showed nothing, there was something else, I can’t even remember what. That in turn was followed by the last-gasp effort—he was healthy, and he was dying—of opening him up, full body exploratory surgery—and that’s when they found out what they found out. No cure, and the first diagnosis of meso in a pet in Lincoln County. How, why, where, what?

I wanted to bill W. R. Grace for the expenses, but didn’t. There were and are people still unserved, underserved, standing in line, or buried six feet under, waiting. We sewed him up and took him back to the Yaak. He lived long enough to hunt the first month of the season, September, and a couple of weeks into October.

I kept draining him, and watching him closely, for the day that he didn’t want to hunt, and when it came—a cold, snowy, rainy, foggy day—I fed him well and drove him down to see Doug for the last time, and then when that was over I went on to the gym to watch a volleyball game. The same gym, I wondered, where countless miner-fathers had come straight in from work to watch their sons and daughters play volleyball, basketball, wrestle, or to graduate? Dusting their jeans, wiping their boots on the mat, then coming on inside, the invisible fibers swirling around them like an unseen corona, and with the gym filling up, in that manner—for once the fibers were inside, how to get them outside?

The thing about Point was that he had not been an indoor dog—he had stayed out in his kennel, in a fenced area—and our home was new anyway, had been built well after the vermiculite insulation era. After burying him I went down to the EPA office in Libby and told them about it, asked if they could come up and check things out, but was told with a surprising degree of hostility and irritation that they didn’t cover the Yaak, that they were just focusing on Libby and Troy.

The mine was technically in the lower Yaak, just south of Gold Hill, in the Purcells, and there was an old abandoned vermiculite mine, hand-dug, right above the center of Yaak—but they said they didn’t have to check it out and that they wouldn’t, or couldn’t.

I’ve thought about that for a while. For a while, it seemed to me to be an either-or situation. In an era of new limited government resources, I understood that the population centers should receive treatment and remediation first. But to stick our heads in the sand and not follow leads—to not pursue science—seems utterly foolhardy.

I felt that way then, but wanted to believe the Yaak was safe. If it wasn’t, we would have heard about it, right? How could anyone live in the ground-zero center of imminent danger and not know it, or—stranger still—know it or even suspect it, but then kind of look the other way and keep on going, one foot in front of another, one day at a time, hoping that the government and the corporations would keep us all safe and well and sound?

Still, I believed what I wanted to believe. I felt bad for the folks down in Libby and Troy. I had lost a great bird dog, but he was still just a dog. Down in Libby and Troy, at slightly lower elevations, there was real misery going on. I felt like a sentimental fool, having followed the medicine so far down the rathole. I didn’t regret having had those last few September hunts with him, but I don’t think I would call them $7,000 hunts—though who can really say, until the end of a life?

I was glad Point’s illness was diagnosed—that he didn’t just fade away in mystery and grief—that his death held some not-insignificant service to humanity, in addition to the pleasure he brought us as a family pet, and the meals we procured from his talents afield—but I didn’t have the heart to pursue redress against Grace. I just wanted to stay away from the invisible thing—Grace itself, which was seeking to become untouchably vaporous, if not toxic—and I also didn’t want to appear as if I thought a dog’s illness was anything like a person’s.

W. R. Grace was filing for bankruptcy, negotiating with judges and plaintiffs and mediators—plotting, in that peculiarly American way, their brief vanishing, while at the same time plotting and planning and staging their own taxpayer-subsidized resurrection.

I buried him and moved on. We were renting a house in Troy so the girls could go to school, and the year after that, we rented a house in Missoula, to take advantage of a wider degree of course selection. We kept our home in the Yaak—every day I missed, and still miss, being there for every hour that I can—but I also had to wonder: Did I do an unwitting good thing, getting us out, just as any survivor might also ask him- or herself, Did I do an unwitting bad thing, coming here?

The key word is unwitting. The volume of all that is unknown just keeps getting larger, like an immense pit being dug.

Illness is a private thing; mortality, all the more so. It’s a delicate business, asking folks how they feel about what’s happened, and is still happening, and asking them for anecdotes from the days back when they were young and strong.

The defense attorney’s attacks on the sick and the dying were grotesque and repulsive, and wrong in every direction imaginable. I felt as if I had seen it all before. It wasn’t that the amorality in the courtroom was directionless, drifting, like the whims of dust in a gale; it was that the amorality—or, if you choose to call it something else, such as evil—went in every direction. I don’t know what the word for that is: radial, perhaps. It emanated from one source and then went everywhere.

W. R. Grace, sheltered under bankruptcy ruling, was playing with house money; they were able to spend however much they wanted to spend, hiring a dozen or more lawyers, and taxpayers would pick up the tab. The sky was the limit. That court bill ended up being $160 million for a little town of 2,900 in northwest Montana. (The EPA just committed $126 million to try to clean up the Grace toxins—another taxpayer bill for us to foot.)

A hundred and thirty million here, a hundred and forty million there—pretty soon we’re talking about real money. A billion would allow us to fight another year in Iraq, where I hear they have some serious chemical exposure problems as well.

Montana’s two U.S. senators were pissed. From a press release by Senator Jon Tester, dated October 12, 2012, doing the unthinkable, taking on a corporation:

(Washington, D.C.)—Montana’s U.S. Senators Jon Tester and Max Baucus are asking the Environmental Protection Agency to finalize tough standards on asbestos cleanup in Libby. Specifically, they are calling on the EPA to honor the findings of its Science Advisory Board in establishing science-based standards for the toxicity of asbestos in Libby. In a letter to EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson, Baucus and Tester also hammered W. R. Grace for resisting more rigorous standards.

“[W]e were acutely troubled by the response of W. R. Grace to the Science Advisory Board’s review. In our opinion, Grace lost the privilege to opine on the science of asbestos when it knowingly—and for decades—traded profits for lives in Lincoln County,” they wrote. “We are not surprised to find Grace trying to cloud the science or hide behind the speculative liability of other property owners. But we take this opportunity to call a spade a spade, and a snake a snake.”

W. R. Grace and Company is fighting tougher standards being reviewed by the EPA’s Science Advisory Board. The science behind the proposal addresses a fundamental challenge to answering the question of how clean is “clean enough” with regard to asbestos contamination.

Tester and Baucus are pressing the EPA to honor the findings of the Science Advisory Board, arguing that residents of Lincoln County have waited for more than a decade for justice.

I should point out that I am not speaking for Libby, or my part of Lincoln County, but instead only myself. This is just my observation and experience. I think it’s fair to say, however, that when the mine came in, there was no examination. In exchange for jobs, the forefathers allowed a self-regulating entity to enter the valley, coming in over those high mountain walls, and carrying the railcars away, hundreds at a time, with the glimmering dust swirling in the high mountain sunlight every mile along the way.

I neither criticize nor judge the decision. Who among us these days does not make similar choices and decisions—what to eat, what to drink, what to buy—with a similar absence of knowledge or analysis?

My point is that on the surface—independent, resourceful, God-fearing, etc.—Libby appears to be a model community. As does the Tongue River country, and Otter Creek, at the other end of the state. But you can’t have these world-changing extraction projects come in without expecting to lose all that existed before. You can’t. The transformation must occur for the industrial equation to balance. The exchange for the short-term profits. The so-called profits. The liquidation. You give up the land you live on, or the thing beneath the surface.

A little about the geology: while the Cabinet Mountains’ stony peaks were being shaved and scoured by the Ice Age’s retreat, roughly 10,000 years ago, the Purcells—just across the river, in the Yaak, to the north—hibernated almost entirely beneath several thousand feet of blue ice, with only the tiniest knobs and nubs piercing that glistening, gleaming ice-world.

In essence, the Yaak slept for a few thousand years longer, getting a later start at life than the rest of the region. In this regard then it’s almost an utterly new place, having had to start from scratch with bedrock, with the business of the ages: waiting for seed-drift, establishing a bed of primary vegetation and forest, and the beginnings of the patient erosion that would aid in establishing soil upon that late-in-coming bare new foundation of ice-peeled stone.

The surrounding mountains—the Cabinets and Selkirks—would have already had thousand-year cycles of forest growth and rot, fire and rot, with giant carcasses nurturing seedlings, while the bowl of the Purcells would have still been new in the world: glowing, I like to think, in the midst of that forest like a blue brain, ready-made and even inspirited, but still waiting for the first stimulus, first electrical pathways, of life to inhabit those folds and ridges and hills.

How can the most beautiful place on earth be one of the most toxic?

The daily beauty has polished something in people, I think, as nacreous as the sheen of the inner shell of conch or nautilus.

No ice can scour it, the beauty is elemental. Only the dissolution of memory, I imagine, can strip the beauty, though perhaps not even that.

Maybe the identity of this place comes back to its newness. It seems that when I walk here, the air that stirs around my ankles is still original, is first-stirred.

And yet, as simple as it sounds, where, in this country—not just Lincoln County, but in the United States—has that story ever occurred? Where has any one of the fifty states—which hold, through the power of charter, the ability to dictate the conditions under which a corporation will or will not be allowed to operate in their state—successfully challenged this current monstrous hybrid in which the corporations—nothing more than a bundle of words, or a latticework of numbers—possess all the rights of an individual, possess certain inalienable rights, and yet, being monstrous half-human and half-god hybrids, possess none of the responsibilities by which the rest of us hold our own brief charters?

This is important, and it’s coming your way: not just on the rail lines that trucked the pixie dust out in boxcar-loads by the hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions, strung all along the northern tier like the glowing blue circuitry of the brain’s neural pathways, nor is it coming your way in the Otter Creek and Tongue River trains and the swirling random winds that encircle and wreathe the world.

Instead, it is coming more totally, in the breathtaking wave of a new form of corporate intelligence, one which with its mass and span all but promises to overwhelm the little fires of goodness within us. It’s been so insidious that it has operated out in the open. We’ve seen it and talked about it for so long—the dangers of corporate soullessness—that it’s as if we’ve stopped seeing it, long ago, even when it’s right in front of us.

This gives the impression that it’s gone away. Now that we are more accustomed to it, we are no longer so afraid.

This new and evolving thing is an approaching shadow, like the one thrown by a spot on the lungs in a chest X-ray as the growth of pleural plaque begins, not just on the surface of the pleural walls, but interstitially, between the cells, and then into the cells, as if in the process of lithification—as if the body, even in the still-living, is being converted totally to an upright column of shimmering, glittering amphibole asbestos fiber—fireproof, perhaps, but lifeless.

The corporations have endured, have weathered the tiny storms of such protests, and are now operating with such impunity that there’s no need to hide. They have been granted—foolishly—by the state of Montana the right of eminent domain if such taking serves commerce. The plan is no longer and perhaps never was so much to destroy the little fires within us as to instead just isolate and overwhelm them—to encase them, as if beneath a giant earthen dam, a cap of impermeable clay: a buried civilization, or the outpost of civilization, where such little fires still glimmer and sputter in that all-else darkness, no more powerful than candles, though now with but a fixed and finite amount of oxygen.

Gayla Benefield—a dagger, not a thorn, in the side of W. R. Grace—grew up hunting and fishing and hiking and picking berries in the Yaak. A creek up here is named for her family. She might be the one person you would most want on your side in a fight, and the one person you’d least want to see fighting against you. That she has spent her adult life battling invisible things—unseen fibers, and the spiritless irresponsibility of corporations—has in no way diminished her vigor for such defense and social and environmental justice.

Gayla’s father worked at the mine, beginning in the 1950s, got sick in the 1960s, and died. The company gave his widow, Margaret, $37 a week to support her and her five children. Then Margaret died of the same disease. Gayla tended to her over the long years of the slow suffocating death, with her rage building—and her sister Eva’s husband, also a mine employee, died, weakened for five years by asbestosis, until the meso kicked in, spreading quickly from his lungs into his brain and heart—the latter an extremely rare medical condition, with the smooth workhorse muscle of the heart almost never accepting cancerous growths.

He died a particularly painful death—essentially a six-week long heart attack—that no morphine could ease, as he sat up in his bed and screamed No, no, no!

Gayla was diagnosed with asbestosis—her siblings were too—and now, one by one, many of her children are: a daughter, Jenan, who smoked, and, this year, her forty-four-year-old daughter, Julie, who is not a smoker. Strangely, Gayla’s two sons, who work as rock drillers, laboring in the Lincoln County dust and silica, are thus far unaffected. Grasping for straws in completely unscientific fashion, I wonder if this is not somehow an important clue: if the coarser silica they’ve inhaled acts as a prophylactic, or like an immunization, a stimulant, that serves them in good stead while the finer asbestos fibers assault them.

The two men you would think most likely to have it are the two who don’t.

I don’t mean to be disrespectful in this thumbnail sketch of the tragedies long suffered by the Benefields. It’s simply that I’m not comfortable wading down into the personal stories of betrayal, and the long dying: the miners in their family carrying the poison home, spreading it across the generations. Andrea Peacock, in particular, has recorded these intricacies in great and loving detail in her book, Libby, Montana. It’s hard to read, and harder still when the names and people are known to the author. It’s there, now, a matter of historical record, even in the still-living—the struggle of Gayla and her friend Les Skramsted to hold Grace accountable for their decades of homicide and to drive underground the corporation—this invisible barbed and latticed, vertically integrated accounting structure designed to avoid culpability, and to instead gather and redistribute wealth—or rather, money. Andrew Schneider and David McCumber first broke the story of the Libby illnesses and Grace’s resistance to responsibility in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer in 2000, then published a masterful book on it, An Air That Kills.

Rarely do physicians and scientists have the opportunity to study an illness—an epidemic—so rare and new, in which so many of the pages lie blank and open and white, waiting for the accrual of knowledge.

There are days, while out on a walk, thinking about my home, and my good fortune in having drifted into this place, parts of four decades ago, when I cannot help but think of this little postage-stamp place on earth as a kind of do-over for the creation story.

It feels to me sometimes also that although the first Garden of Eden story might have taken billions of years to play out—the first simple life appearing on the third or fourth day as the algal stromatolites that helped create oxygen, and then further on into the week, the fishes of the Devonian, and still later in the week, the gradual appearance of mankind into a garden of incredible bounty and beauty, followed by the apple seed of corruption, the arrival of the serpent, etc.—this second go-round, in this new place, is proceeding much faster than the original. As if, rather than stretching out those seven metaphysical days of creation to span four billion years, the same story, with its oh-so-slight variations, has been compressed to less than a century.

If there is a third do-over, might it, finally, require but those seven brief days?

We need a registry of how and where things went wrong. We need to begin filling in the pit.

A website should be created as a repository for testimonies from this era. Personal and family health histories, anecdotes, vignettes of growing up and working in Lincoln County—then or now, pre- or post-Grace. Testimonies about outdoor activities, quality of life: it all matters. Don’t let W. R. Grace take that away, too. Who knows what data will be important in the future. We need to be gathering it now.

We need to get as much data—scientifically as well as anecdotally—as quickly as we can.

And whether the stories are dauntingly similar, repeating themselves one after another—stories like Gayla’s—or possess perhaps bright strange clues of uniqueness, clues that might help scientists of the future form new ideas, experiments, and cures—no matter, it all has value.

I suspect there is value also to those who present their testimonies and fashion their narratives about what it’s like here under siege from an invisible enemy in a land of sylvan beauty. Call it an artsy-fartsy hope, but I wouldn’t be surprised if scientists and physicists of the future discover that there is an advantage for patients who feel they have greater control, or if not control, participation, in their illness; that they might respond a few percentage points more favorably to treatment, and resist by a greater degree various associated secondary debilitations.

That’s just theory. One thing I believe is that they will feel better emotionally by writing it down—controlling the story, and examining the shape of the interior landscape and their personal histories, caught here in a strange point in time, between a very natural and very unnatural history.

This is one of the three main takeaways I have from living this story. The first is control your corporations: rule them with an iron fist, rather than being a simpering lapdog. Rewrite charters to govern their existence; the corporations should not possess constitutional rights. And by God, whatever you do, don’t let them start voting in our elections.

The second thing has been impressed upon me by Gayla as well as others. It’s important to Gayla that the media not use the word “victims,” but rather “survivors.” Even the ones who have died and gone on were, for a long while, survivors.

It’s a vital distinction. The first step in asserting some control over the story as well as over the actions of industry and government is to not think of yourself as a victim.

For a long time, people had been noticing the death and the dying that was going on up on the hill. Former U.S. Representative Pat Williams tells of how when he visited Libby, the union leader, Don Wilkins, took him aside in the early 1980s and said there was something bad happening up there, and gestured toward the mountains. Ten years later, Don himself was dead from what used to be called “miner’s disease.” No one knows how many other hundreds died of asbestosis or meso in the old days, or how many contracted it. Most death certificates listed “cardiopulmonary failure,” or something similar. During that time—in 1985—Williams introduced a landmark piece of health legislation, which would have created a national workers’ compensation system to help people with occupational diseases, but the House never passed it, and the Gingrich Revolution and the “Contract on America” killed it, in the deregulatory fervor to provide ever more favorable conditions for corporate power, the cultural acceptance of which was spreading over the land like unseen fog.

So much political pussyfooting went on in those years. The corporation planned to shut the mine down almost the instant the EPA passed the Clean Air Act. The Reagan and Bush administrations fought to keep Libby from being declared a Superfund site. The state of Montana initially resisted it too, and there were predictable polarizations, even at the local level: a split between boosters who didn’t want the stigma, versus those who were frightened or sick.

It was like shoving a huge boulder up a steep mountain, but it got done, against powerful odds. It took relentless pressure, ceaselessly applied. Down at ground zero, there were Gayla and Les, and others I haven’t met, but whose testimony and record-ledgering is needed; within the EPA, there were a few whistleblowers and champions, like the much-revered Paul Peronard. There was the Kalispell attorney, Roger Sullivan, of McGarvey, Heberling, Sullivan and McGarvey, and there was U.S. Senator Max Baucus, who at last count has visited Libby well over twenty times. It is not an easy place to reach, is on the way to nowhere. Baucus, by enduring year after year, ascended to seniority where so many others did not, until finally he became chair of the Senate Finance Committee, at which point he found himself in a position where he was, ironically, interviewing and approving nominations for leadership of the EPA.

The attorneys operating within the giant crane-like structure of W. R. Grace threw everything they had at defending themselves against criminal charges. The $160 million Grace borrowed from taxpayers for their own defense against the very taxpayers who were suing them was but a drop in the bucket compared to what was at stake.

Had Grace lost the trial—had a corporation actually been held criminally responsible and accountable for its products and their effects—the entire free world would have been remade. Instead, Grace was acquitted of criminal charges. The corporation was allowed to proceed with virtual immunity, and case law precedent was set for all other corporations. You can bet all the other major corporations in the world were watching the Libby case with interest.

The Libby asbestos story isn’t just about asbestosis and meso. Gayla has been saying that for a long time. But one story that’s not getting out into the public as much as it should be is the prevalence of asbestos-related autoimmune diseases.

So Gayla’s working on this, too, agitating for the scientific and political communities to catch up. Specifically, she points out five autoimmune disorders that are showing up in Lincoln County: lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis, scleroderma, and fibromyalgia. There are other illnesses, too—one-in-a-million rarities that are showing up in multiples. Gayla is pretty much the keeper of such knowledge. She has files in cardboard boxes, data stacked upon data, cross-linked and connected vertically across generations as well as horizontally across circumstances and time and locations, within the inimitable workings of her brain.

When she dies—and she will one day, almost surely from this disease, this legacy—more will be lost than can ever be gotten back.

She says that the years of fighting the issue and fighting the ever-elusive corporation of W. R. Grace, as well as her and her family’s declining health, have ground her down; that she’s trying to step away. But what Gayla calls stepping away would be pretty much still be front-and-center for anyone else.

There currently is no systematic wide-ranging analysis of the consequences of asbestos exposure in Lincoln County. In the post-Iraq invasion economy, there are limited financial resources to pick up the pieces of Grace’s legacy—caring for the sick and dying should come first, with remediation—if such a thing is even possible. In a finite economic system, that leaves epidemiology, as well as research, a too-distant third and fourth priority.

We don’t even know what we don’t know.

A billion dollars wouldn’t begin to cover it. It takes about half a million dollars to provide oxygen for each asbestosis patient over the course of a long and increasingly physically compromised life.

The cost of cleanup—chasing down tiny invisible fibers—could be bottomless. But that’s just the asbestosis and mesothelioma. What about the other illnesses?

I get the sense Lincoln County is being Agent Oranged on this. Sometimes the political community accepts a medical condition that has symptoms but no internal marker, while other times it ignores or denies that problems exist.

The medical community, led by longtime Libby physician Dr. Brad Black, is treating anyone who is sick, and Congress, under the urging of Montana’s two senators, Baucus and Tester, is trying to clean up the fibers. I wish some giant electron lint-scraper could be dragged through the air, sucking up with static electricity every last fiber—a cleansing—and that residents could then return for another chance at inhabiting paradise. As well, all people with asbestos-related diseases (ARD) in Libby have been enrolled in Medicare and/or Medicaid (the program should, in my opinion, be extended to the other residents in the county).

But I perceive there’s a dangerous lag in reporting and acting upon the as yet undefinable miasma of what might be called secondary illnesses: the hard-to-diagnose and sometimes hard-to-treat conditions of general autoimmune breakdown, which is the result of bodies beleaguered, it seems, by phantoms.

This, too, is one of the reasons we need more testimonies.

Multiple sclerosis, in particular, can be like chasing a ghost. Unlike asbestosis—easily diagnosed, a definable shadow on an X-ray—diseases such as multiple sclerosis and other autoimmune disorders can be hard to pin down. They can come and go, ranging from mild to fatal. Multiple sclerosis—where the immune system begins attacking the body’s own myelin sheaths, eroding the protective fatty coating that shields and insulates the wiring of the central nervous system—has been studied for decades, but scientists still don’t understand why it appears. Theories include exposure to various environmental substances, or genetics, or bacteria, or viruses, or lack of Vitamin D. Nobody knows.

There are general trends in the prevalence of multiple sclerosis—people close to the equator have less—but there are clusters, too, all over the world, and Gayla says that Spokane, Washington, has the highest reported incidence on earth, just as Lincoln County has the highest incidence of mesothelioma.

What do the two communities have in common? W. R. Grace. The asbestos was mined outside of Libby, but then it was dumped into open boxcars and transported to Spokane. Only when the boxcars reached Spokane was the asbestos poured into sacks for shipping and distribution around the world. Gayla and others say Spokane is sitting on another story like Libby’s, and that there, too, people have built their homes on top of toxic foundations.

She also says that if the studies were done, she thinks Libby would usurp Spokane for the greatest incidence of MS in the world.

Who’s lucky, and who’s not? I’m lucky. Not only have I gotten to live in one of the most beautiful places on earth, doing what I want to do for a living—I also got to experience deeply the last of the last, a dying piece of Americana; an old-school small-town newspaper editor, a community-minded do-gooder who could always be found in his office.

I got to witness, and participate in, the whole journalistic experience, back when newspapers were a big deal, back when they were the voice of the news and the voice of a community. They were a conduit between history and change. Every issue, every day, could be as powerful as a small-scale revolution.

Roger Morris moved to Libby to edit the Western News after having worked for a newspaper in a ski town in Colorado. He’d seen the cultural wreckage wrought by gentrification and was enamored with Libby’s less-polished edges. The bitter local battles—intense small-town dramas over weed ordinances, for instance—amused him. He was not condescending or patronizing, he understood that the things closest to home are what most consume our hours—but he was stimulated too by the almost mythic propensity that Lincoln County has for so often being ground zero for events of wider historical significance.

In Lincoln County, there was always one federal lawsuit or another going on about a proposed mine in a protected wilderness, or a proposed ski resort, or endangered species violations. There were domestic terrorists at large in the area (and I don’t mean the Grace executives, despoiling the homeland killing hundreds, sickening thousands, but less sophisticated terrorists and anti-government zealots, hoarding ammunition and shooting up federal agents, and trying to rob banks, and tinkering with homemade bombs).

There were international water issues, conflicts with our neighbors to the north, and drug trafficking, as well as the trafficking of humans across the border. There was always something, and he was always on the job, working usually with just one reporter, going to county commissioner meetings, school board meetings, congressional staff meetings: interviewing, writing, typing.

The lights would be on in the little newsroom on California Street at almost any hour of day or night, and he loved his community, loved the always messy and usually irreconcilable differences within this little snapshot of ultra-white and ultra-conservative America, isolated hard and poor against the end of the twentieth century. He loved the small-town football games where fans of the Libby Loggers revved their chainsaws after each touchdown by the home team, and he loved hiking in the surrounding mountains, best of all in early summer, in the high alpine country where wildflowers bloomed briefly and wildly right at the edges of retreating snowbanks.

Then came Andrew Schneider and David McCumber’s big series in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and Roger—lucky Roger, you could say, having gotten out of the retrace of hyper-rich ski town life—found himself in the heart of a huge story, one he sure didn’t want to be in.

He reported diligently, daily, yearly, as the civil damages trials and bankruptcy proceedings unfolded; he harangued the state, under the administration of Governor Marc Racicot and then Governor Judy Martz, as well as the feds. He was a relentless fly in the ointment, sending out tiny oscillations into the universe. He would have traded his luck for anything, would have given anything for the invisible air to be clean, but it wasn’t.

And while it would be an oversimplification to say he was born for battle—more accurate, perhaps, to say that he was born for justice—he found, in the words of Abraham Lincoln, that “In a larger sense, we cannot dedicate . . . we cannot consecrate . . . we cannot hallow . . . this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us, the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.”

Ground zero, hallowed ground; it was his chance to be of use, of service, to his home, his community, and the greater good of man, and he took it.

Roger died quickly. He, like many, had moved here after the mine had closed, but he contracted an extremely fast-moving form of lung cancer, and it was lights out before he could barely even register what was happening.

He did live long enough to report on one more scoop. As a young man, he had worked construction in his home state of New York. He had been on one of the crews involved in erecting the Twin Towers in Manhattan, pouring in W. R. Grace’s vermiculite, asbestos insulation that had been mined from the mountain just above Libby, put on the train and sent east, following that railway corridor like a long fuse burning, where it found him, two thousand miles away, and took root.

It took thirty years for the powder keg to explode—to blossom to fire—but it did.

It speaks volumes about Roger’s instincts as a journalist that there was a wounded part in him that didn’t even yet know he was wounded, but which somehow led him to the source of his illness to come.

Sometimes you can’t help but dwell on it. We need a registry. A young man, Mark Schmidt, dying of colon cancer in his twenties, a new father. A dear friend, Scott Daily, the first executive director of a local grassroots community service and environmental organization, the Yaak Valley Forest Council, has been battling painful bone cancer for years now, and recently had an entire leg and hip removed. You can’t build science from anecdote, but you can build story.

The cancer lodged in Scott’s hip. Scott was a young man, only forty-one. Young wife, young daughters: the genius-dreamer, grand visionary, exuberant spirit behind that organization, on whose board I sit. A peace-and-granola gentle spirit, but a hell-raiser, once upon a time, too, a late-night devotee of the Yaak bars.

I remember a story Scott told me about a kind of Superman day he had, one summer. He had been out doing stream surveys all day, had come hiking down off the mountain with a full pack—a glorious day, one of the longest days of the year—and had been crossing the bridge over the West Fork of the Yaak, just downstream of the falls.

He stopped to look down at the beautiful riffling river, some twenty feet below, and leaned just a little too far forward, a little too top-heavy with his pack, and pitched forward, toward the stony riverbed: free-falling.

Without missing a beat, he allowed himself to continue falling, and though he had no gymnastics training whatsoever, he leaned farther forward, performed a midair somersault, and landed perfectly upright, midriver, on his feet, unharmed, heavy pack and all. The jolt smashed the heck out of his hips but nothing broke, not even an ankle: landing in the current amid all those slippery stones.

What could have been tragedy was just nothing, and he stood there, ankle deep in beauty, looked up at the setting sun over Waper Ridge, and continued on into the long summer day.

He kept his home in the Yaak, but moved to Sandpoint, started a native plants restoration business, growing seedlings to plant in disturbed areas harmed by roadbuilding, wildfire, excavation, mining. I don’t know where he got the idea. Some slow genesis of values, intuition, observation, science.

A few years later, working on his house in Idaho, he fell off a high ladder, breaking his jaw, ribs, and incurring all kinds of stoved-up injuries. Not long after that the hip pain started. He stood it until it was unbearable, then went and got it checked out.

He’s had ever-larger chunks of hipbone cut out—in March of this year the tumor returned with such vengeance that he had to have the entire leg and hip removed—and is pushing on, living each day with wonder and that other thing, the thing Gayla and so many others have—the thing that is blessing and curse, the extreme mindfulness of not just being alive, but living. His oldest daughter, Abby, had a school project to build an Amazonian hut, a rite of passage we all recall from grade school days: the thimble-sized little clump of thatch.

In typical Scott fashion, he and Abby cut some reeds from his nursery and built a life-sized hut, a Habitat-for-Humanity-sized bamboo house.

Tell me, writes the poet Mary Oliver, what is it you intend to do with your one wild and precious life?

Did the trauma of the bridge leap, or the ladder fall, stir to action some latent toxins, or allow them access to the very marrow of things, changing the chromosomal orders within? What do each and all of us—not just in Lincoln County, but as humans—carry within us, sleeping—not just the harmful, dormant poisons, but also, perhaps, the brighter burning ability to shine and do good?

Scott is nothing if not a do-gooder. Even after the most recent hip surgery, flat on his back in the bed, he’s working on a big grant for the local independent radio station, these little islands or sanctuaries of resistance against the wave of what’s coming.

I think about Scott’s hip—the inflammation that might have occurred after his bridge jump, or his ladder fall. I think about the little needles of fiber lodging in the joints, hung up there in the cartilage and ligaments like iron filings, pausing in their migration through the body—passing through and between cells and helices like arrows fired relentlessly, daily, by a thousand or ten thousand archers—and causing further inflammation in the joints: lupus, rheumatoid arthritis.

I think about veins—rivers of blood—attempting to reroute around such piercements, trying to find new paths along which to ship and return the blood’s oxygen to the rest of the body, particularly as the lungs begin to send subtle messages to the rest of the body that they can no longer do it alone. I think about Gayla’s brother-in-law sitting up in bed screaming, with a cancer growing inside his heart. I wish I hadn’t gone to the trial.

I wish I had gone for a walk in the bright sun on those days, wish I had gone to the ice cream parlor, wish I had gone to the library and checked out a book of poetry. I wish I had skipped rope that day, had sung a little song, had put on a blindfold and walked on further and deeper into the future.

My observations are that those most affected by the disease tend to try their best to avoid inhabiting the territory of bitterness. Kathleen Straley, who worked in home health and hospice care in Lincoln County for many years, has noted that most of the dying don’t harbor ill will toward the mine (though the spouses and children who are left behind after the dying certainly do).

Gayla—with the air drawing away from her breath by breath, each slow lung-hardening year—even Gayla, the fiercest of warriors—says much the same thing. “Let your vices kill you,” she says. “Don’t let Grace kill you.”

Lesson One, maybe, is the hoary chestnut of living one day at a time. Lesson Two might be don’t let the fox into the henhouse, and don’t give corporations the power they ask for. Or rather, we’ve given it to them. We need to get it back.

Our story, here in this green garden, is drifting slowly out to the rest of the world. It is the understandable tendency of human nature to not attach to stories that do not affect the individual directly, but a wise reader or listener will perceive and understand that this story is not able to be compartmentalized and walled off behind the mountains.

What if the unique assault our bodies are facing, here in Lincoln County—unstudied, and unprecedented—might be yet again a tip of the iceberg—and let’s name the iceberg for what it is, species extinction—not grizzly bear or salamander, but Homo sapiens, Homo gluttonous, Homo denialus, Homo corporatus, Homo whatever-we-are-quietly-becoming?

Lincoln County is one of the only places in the world where the human immune system and central nervous system has become subjected to so much infiltration by such ultrafine fibers for so sustained a period. As our little mountain range is the birthing ground (or burying ground) of landmark environmental case law, whereby a corporation, for the first time, was tried for criminal accountability, so too might this newest garden on earth, only a few thousand years old, be ground zero for a demonstration of what happens when the drift of tiny particles are sucked into our airways, particles so small that they can penetrate cell walls and travel interstitially, clogging up the traffic of veins and slicing electrical lines in the nervous system.

Such are my worries about the impending approach of nanotechnology. Perhaps there can be physical materials so small and sharp in the world that they knife through traditional, evolved defenses, are able to slice and sever, bend or bruise critical strands of DNA and electrical wiring, causing the body to spin out of control.

Can such a thing happen? I don’t know. It can happen metaphorically and culturally, and it is. Who we once were is not who we are now. We exist increasingly as fodder or cultivar for the products that are generated by the corporations. Whether it’s scientifically possible or not, the truth remains undeniable: tiny things are coming into us relentlessly in Lincoln County, and they are making a lot of people very sick. It’s unprecedented, and I believe intuitively that anything and everything we can learn about this small valley will serve the rest of mankind—one of the newest species on earth—well.

How to survive? It seems so much that luck is involved. The monitoring that has occurred this far has broken sites down into “detect” or “non-detect.” The Environmental Protection Agency has determined that a concentration below about 0.02 fibers per cubic centimeter of air is safe, but there’s no one who is really comfortable with that number. Nobody really knows how clean is clean, nor which cubic centimeter of air in the big valley contains which percentage: the air tending to swirl around the way air does.

In the criminal trial, the defense attorneys made a big deal of how there were more non-detect sites than detect sites in Lincoln County! It wasn’t all poisoned!

As if the defense truly expected that each of us should somehow identify those little refuges, and like hostages, hole up in one or another, or wend one’s way, the rest of one’s life, as if through a minefield, from one point that the government had deemed temporarily safe to the next.

Who gets it, and who doesn’t? Luck—being in the right place at the right time, again and again and again—and maybe genetic or biological luck, too. Perhaps some immune systems have a greater vigor, or a slightly different response, to lower “pulsed” exposures. Perhaps two consecutive days on the toxic pathway has little if any effect, whereas a third consecutive day begins to elicit dramatic response.

With regard to multiple sclerosis, there’s a phenomenon called “Clinically Isolated Syndrome,” or CIS, where a patient presents with full-blown symptoms once, which then either never recur, or lie dormant, contained, walled off by the body’s newly tested and adjusted immune system: almost like an immunization, an inoculation.

Why?

Could the self-immunized—survivors of CIS—somehow help either the non-immunized or the debilitated? We don’t know.

Who’s lucky, and who’s not, in the face of ecological disaster, and in the surviving?

When Elizabeth and I first moved up here, in 1987, we spent a lot of time in Libby. I was in the gym more often than not, and she swam at the pool. We drove out to the Champion mill and loaded odds and ends of two-by-four short lengths into the back of our truck to burn in the woodstove, knocking the sawdust from them—industrial disarray, junk piles of this and that everywhere, but free firewood—and we went to the grocery store, and the Ben Franklin.

Within that first year, Elizabeth’s knees and elbows blew up one morning—this lean, athletic young woman of twenty-nine suddenly possessing melon-sized joints that were painful.

We rushed down to the clinic in Libby, where blood tests couldn’t find anything. Lupus, came one suggestion—there had been another local patient recently diagnosed with that—or maybe extreme rheumatoid arthritis, perhaps in response to some bacteria, or some environmental contaminant.

Elizabeth went on antibiotics even as the swelling was already beginning to recede; essentially, she got better on her own. It was a mystery. And had not returned since.

I think that in northwest Montana—and all along the rail lines, where the loose asbestos was shipped for decades—there are tens of thousands of stories like these. Something is stirring in the wind in all the communities along the railroad tracks.

Three years later, in 1991, I was hiking in the Brooks Range of Alaska when I developed a range of alarming symptoms that were initially diagnosed as either a brain tumor or multiple sclerosis. For some weeks beforehand I had been having what I considered neurological anomalies—misspelling simple words with which I was familiar, and mispronouncing words. Calling salad “saddle” and crust “crusp.” Up in Alaska, my vision went haywire, flooding my line of sight with a shimmering, oscillating aura. No doctors could pinpoint what was the matter. Finally one suggested I take an aspirin a day—maybe the eyesight was the result of a silent migraine—and, eventually, the shimmering faded. I got better, though what the mispronunciations might have been about, I couldn’t say.

What if our bodies are less static than we suppose them to be? What if there is constantly a roiling and shifting within us, a quivering, in which chromosomes and genetic templates that call for phenotypical expressions oscillate within a certain range of variability, second by second and day by day?

What if there are days when certain illnesses—including cancers—enter us, begin to take hold, then are sloughed away, defeated, with their losses—our victories—never known?

Perhaps we pass through a hundred such eyes of the needle, or a thousand, in our mortal span. Maybe it becomes old hat to us, and, like some miracles, never even seen or known.

What questions would a full-blown countywide epidemiological study ask? The primary exposure—the mine—is a no-brainer. The pathways of secondary exposure are becoming increasingly illuminated, as more and more fibers are detected in the day care, the schools, the gyms, the running tracks, the skating rinks, the yards and gardens, the mill.

What of the swirling, shifting tertiary pathways, glowing sometimes like the lit-up neurological circuitry of a brain in use, and other times silent, dark, clean and free?

We have one chance to study this well, from crisis of outbreak to recovery.

Some people deal with the asbestos-related diseases by running. I don’t mean metaphorically. Tony Smith—ironically, Gayla’s next-door neighbor, growing up—is surely the most beloved teacher ever to work at Troy High School. Born and raised in Libby, he played in the first basketball game ever held in the now-aging Libby Loggers’ gym. He has played or coached pretty much every sport available in high school, and is a member of the Libby High School Hall of Fame. His social sciences classes are the most popular at Troy High, year after year, ranging from U.S. and World History to History of Rock and Roll. He has steadfastly avoided getting roped into administrative duties in order to be more available for the students, and each year, in addition to being a longtime championship basketball coach, he also directs the hugely popular and much anticipated annual school play. He left Lincoln County briefly to go to college and then was in the marines before returning home to teach.

Troy, population 900—eighteen miles downriver of Libby, close to the Idaho state line—is, like much of northwest Montana, extremely poor. Some people live there because they can’t get out, but some live there by choice, choosing the region’s beauty over higher wages and amenities that are available elsewhere.

With his teaching awards and accolades, Tony certainly has had opportunities to work anywhere other than one of the poorest school districts in the nation. There’s a tradition at Troy of teachers giving their lives to the young people there. Tony isn’t the only great teacher who’s toiled in Troy for decades, but he’s definitely the exemplar.

If a small town is extremely lucky—and not many are any more, in this way—there might be a teacher like Tony Smith once every generation or two, with his or her influence touching, like the slow laminar accrual of sediment, thousands of lives, spreading far and wide in ripples from one epicenter.

Teaching is his first and greatest passion, but so too is music—he sings in a popular regional group, the Men of Troy, and plays piano, has recorded several CDs. He finally had to retire from coaching basketball for health reasons, and sometimes misses that, he says, almost more than he can bear.

And still another passion, his and his wife Peggy’s grandchildren, and still another, the wild, beautiful mountains that frame the Kootenai Valley: the Yaak country to the north, and the Cabinet Mountains to the south, and, a little farther east, the magnificence of Glacier National Park.

Tony’s got asbestosis, has been carrying it a long time. He probably contracted it from any of a dozen or perhaps a hundred well-established secondary pathways, though he never worked at the mine—but he just keeps on going. He and Peggy have bought a small piece of land up in the Yaak, where they hope to put a small cabin that will one day be a family place for their grandchildren, and when he’s not doing his other activities, he’s hiking, always hiking: ascending the steep slopes of the mountains to the high peaks and ridges that look down on the little bowls and valleys of this country, with the lowlands often hidden beneath smooth luminous billowings of silver-blue fog.

From those vantages, he looks down on a view that must surely be pretty much identical to how this country looked three or four hundred years ago, before the first roads entered.

The Kootenai and Salish would have been living in camps down along the river, following the fish. Once in a while—perhaps—a traveler on the game trails in the millions of acres of backcountry above the river might have encountered a lone hunter.

For Tony, the math is simple. Mentally, he must accept the illness, but physically he must run from it. If he keeps busting his old stiffening-up and shrinking lungs, keeps stretching them out every day, maybe he can hold at bay a little longer the tightening double-fisted grip that is trying to close them off. Maybe.

And in the meantime, he gets to see the most beautiful landscape in the world, again and again: for as long as his legs and heart will carry him.

To a man, it seems, the miners who died didn’t hold a grudge against the company. The job of a man back then—the identity of a man—was to secure money: to pack up the lunchbox and go, to surge out into the dark and the snow, plowing through the hours, securing so many dollars per hour, so many pennies per footstep, and to keep pushing forward, head down, in order to help keep one’s family secure and attached to the world.

It makes for an inelegant logic: as if such men, having already decided long ago to give up their hours and days in order to provide for their families, viewed the final giving up of their bodies as but one more extension of the continuum that began long ago when they first signed on for a job which, while not stimulating to them spiritually or mentally, nonetheless helped secure a future for their family.

The absolute worst, then, is the knowledge that when they came home dusty and dirty, they brought the poison back with them, and gave it to their wives, children, grandchildren. Testimony after testimony repeats this lamentation. It seems they can even forgive the company—that ethereal stock-driven blind gnawing investment vehicle—but they cannot forgive themselves.

Kathleen Straley’s job as a home health care and hospice worker required that she enter people’s homes with a hazmat uniform and spaceman helmet, to comfort and tend to them in their last months, weeks, hours. But that wasn’t what they needed, wasn’t what any of them—she or her patients—had signed on for, and so she just kept on going into her patients’ homes without such indignity, providing aid and comfort as if to soldiers felled, lying dazed and bleeding on a vast battlefield, though with no enemy in sight.

They found the asbestos in the day care facility, and on the carpet too, where the little kids crawled around, shoving their hands into their mouths. The stuff got tracked in year after year. I don’t know what concentrations they found. I know we took the girls there occasionally, for an hour or two, while we played tennis (another place they found it), or swam or lifted (they found it there too), or went to the laundry and car wash (the absolute worst possible places to go). When we visited friends: whose houses were safe, and whose were not?

The wind swirling down the dusty streets. Going in the bank. Going to the car wash. Where are the safe paths, where are the islands of refuge?

We can do a better job of measuring and monitoring. We can establish better maps for a landscape laced with invisible mountains and epicenters of toxicity.

We know some of them but others are yet invisible.

This might be how it was for us when we first came into the world as a species, not in the least bit dominant, but vulnerable instead to almost everything in the world. Moving carefully through a savannah filled with lions, and possessing no more defense than a sharp stick and the fierce will to go on.

What paths were safe, which routes were more dangerous, and how to live, really, when each ticking moment was filled with significance?

All throughout Lincoln County, you see the orange safety ribbon around one property or another—the workers in their space suits working inside that orange plastic fence, while just on the other side, regular people come and go.

Portable generators growling, giant vacuum hoses throbbing, all day long, trying to suck out all of the invisible thing. Dump trucks groaning up and down the roads in the bright sun and wind, taking away one yard and garden after another.

When I ask Gayla where it is all going, she says, “To the Magic Place.”

It’s a long death. She’s able to find humor in irony. “To the dump,” she says, the landfill up Pipe Creek, above town, and above the river. The place where everything goes: back up into the mountains from which it came.

Scott was the Yaak Valley Forest Council’s first executive director. After he retired from that position and became our grant writer, another member, Robyn King, stepped in and agreed to be the new executive director. It’s a stressful position, one that requires not just the day-to-day management of the small grassroots nonprofit organization, but also attendance at innumerable meetings, public and private. Often the meetings are contentious, held between opposing stakeholders, which can create a stress, an internal toxicity.

Over the years, after many such meetings, Robyn would be debriefing, and would comment to me that “at one point I thought the top of my head was going to explode!”

It turns out she was on to something. One day a massage therapist felt a bump on her skull and recommended she get it checked out. She did, and the tests showed a soft tissue mass that was diagnosed as a meningioma. She had brain surgery—the growth was attached to the underside of her crown; they scraped it all away; it was benign—and sewed her back up. Within a couple of weeks, she was back at work.

I’m simplifying it, of course, skipping over the gory stuff, the weakness, the dizziness, the fatigue—the cranial leaking, the swelling—and at the time, I didn’t think her illness had anything to do with other asbestos-related diseases, which, again, are associated more commonly with lung and stomach.

But just a little digging into scientific papers turns up some interesting articles. An Italian physician, Dr. Paulo Zamboni, is reporting a link between MS and a phenomenon known as “chronic cerebrospinal venous insufficiency,” or CCSVI. In Dr. Zamboni’s study, “the team evaluated abnormalities of blood outflow in major veins draining from the brain and spinal cord to the heart in 65 people with different types of MS . . . The investigators reported evidence of slowed and obscured drainage in the veins draining the brain and spinal cord of many of those with MS. They also reported evidence of the opening of ‘substitute circles’—where the flow is deviated to smaller vessels to bypass obstructions, and these were often found to have reverse flow (reflux) of blood back into the brain.”

Is this what’s going on with Robyn’s meningioma? Certainly, she hasn’t been diagnosed with MS, just a venous tangle in her brain, in which those vessels—like a partially dammed or occluded river—seek an alternate route. Zamboni’s study, it is noted, “has raised as many questions as it has potentially answered,” one of which would further examine the link between CCSVI and MS.

There’s a saying that when you’re holding a hammer, everything looks like a nail. When so many around you are getting sick with rare and inexplicable autoimmune disorders, everything around you looks like, well, an autoimmune disorder.

Why would there be venous tangling in the brain? Is that like a settling pond for the fibers—a swamp, a magnetic lodestone for the fibers, a blood-rich marsh? Or do such venous tangles begin to occur everywhere, and it is only in the central nervous system where the tangling most dramatically manifests itself?

The authors speculated that the reverse flow of blood back into the brain—the body seeking alternate paths—“might set off the inflammation and immune-mediated damage that has been well described in MS.”

It’s interesting stuff, the way the body does repair itself—and the way the land tries to repair itself, as well. I’m not a researcher like Dr. Zamboni, nor a large-scale landscape restorationist like Scott Daily or Robyn King. I’m in the middle. I’m just walking around observing things, and watching all these trains go by.

As the body—particularly the front line of defense, the lungs—is absorbing these fibers, so too is the forest.

The largest private landowner in the world—and Montana—is Ted Turner, but the largest corporate landowner is, or was, Plum Creek Timber, with nearly a million acres. During the timber wars of the 1980s, Plum Creek began selling liquidated, cutover lands as real estate developments.

Conservation groups such as the Yaak Valley Forest Council sought for years to purchase some of those lands to manage as community forests or restoration forests—local lands to be managed for a sustainable flow of timber, rather than used for gated communities in the distant backcountry.

In the Yaak, there were—and are—13,000 acres of such lands. After working with the Trust for Public Land (TPL) for years, we succeeded in convincing TPL to purchase those lands and deed them to a sustainable timber production model, only to have that phase of a larger statewide landmark conservation purchase get put on hold, in the Yaak, due to attorneys’ concerns that when Plum Creek transferred those lands to TPL, there might be an associated liability for asbestos exposure. Preliminary studies indicated that asbestos fibers were showing up in the bark of the trees; that the lungs of the land, the forest, were absorbing the exhalation of the mine and the dusty plumes of the ore’s transit.

Are the leaves and needles of trees likewise absorbing the fibers, or only the bark? Might some species of trees and plants be more facile at absorbing the fibers than others? What happens when these trees—and the fibers—are burned, either in a forest fire, or as firewood? What happens when they’re sawed down, or milled, and the sawdust whirs through the workers’ lungs? Is it like working in the mine all over again?

Is the concentration of tree bark fiber located only in the immediate vicinity of the mill, or is there a more coherent pattern of such concentration and absorption, one that follows primary roads and wind currents?

Is the best remediation to merely let those trees continue growing, pulsing, breathing, absorbing more fibers for us—for those trees to then grow old, fall over, and rot, being slowly converted back into soil, with other vegetation covering up the fibers?

How long might such a cycle take? How clean is clean?

In her book The Global Forest, Canadian scientist Diana Beresford-Kroeger describes “a new violence in the world,” one which “is measured in microns . . . The 2.5 (micron patricles) or less is lethal to the human body . . . Particles of 2.5 microns or less” go into the deeper passages of the lungs—the tiny bronchioles, where the body begins its oxygen extraction from the air. These bronchioles are paper thin and delicate. The lungs can produce free radicals to fix matters, but this in turn causes scarring of the lung tissue, a condition called fibrosis. The natural act of breathing becomes more difficult with fibrosis.

“The story for the heart is similar . . . These smallest of arteries deliver oxygen-rich blood to the local tissues. Such paper-thin walled arteries must relax a little further to complete their oxygen delivery. They do this by means of a dissolved gas called nitrogen oxide. But, in the presence of particulate pollution of 2.5 microns or less, the nitrogen oxide doesn’t work, again because of irritation, and the arterioles cannot relax and deliver oxygen. This causes damage to the local healthy tissue . . . Nasal passages, too, break down, leaving areas of the brain open for contamination by brain plaques . . .

“Trees and forests hold the answer to particulate pollution in a way that is surprising. Many trees have leaves that differ from one species to another. The diversity is found in the leaf’s anatomy. Some leaves have a waxy cuticle on their upper surface. These leaves repel water and attract particles that are water insoluble. The underside of the leaf is downy. This down is composed of thousands of fine hairs, all only a few microns in size. These hairs are multiplied in the full canopy into billions of fine hairs.

“This microscopic world of the leaf within the tree canopy acts like a fine-toothed comb for the air. The particulate pollution of the air becomes caught mechanically like dandruff in this microscopic world of hairs. Sometimes the particles, which hold a charge, can get grounded on the tree. This depends on weather conditions, and on electrostatic forces of attraction generated by the tree’s leaves. The trees and the forest act as a sweeping brush or giant comb. The leaf hairs numbering in billions clean the air of these tiny particles. These particles get swept down the trunk by rain and are detoxified by the hungry . . . living soil.”

Doubtless there are many in the country who are applauding the Supreme Court and this increased power and presence of corporations. The widening shift from a democracy to a corpocracy.

It’s everyone’s story, whether afflicted or not. More days than not, I find myself, at fifty-four, rubbing that slightly swollen, slightly bulging fingernail, as if rubbing a wedding ring. It’s my home. But I’ve been so lucky. I’m just trying to listen, mostly. Laying out the puzzle pieces and trying to make some kind of sense or order.

I remain haunted by the trial. It would have been a lot easier to be all philosophical about this whole deal if I hadn’t sat in on some of the daily sessions of the month-long criminal trial against Grace, held in Missoula.

Watching the defendants—former CEOs of Grace—appear with their phalanx of defense attorneys, mocking the plaintiffs and the asbestos survivors, as well as those who did not survive—mocking the guinea pigs, the rodents used in scientific studies to determine how much asbestos was required to cause respiratory damage, heart failure, and cancer—joking about the debilitation and ultimate death of those test animals, back in the 1960s—being present in the courtroom during these proceedings, witnessing this banter and ridicule, opened in me a revulsion not quite like any I’d ever experienced.

I understand that human beings are capable of just about anything, but never before had I witnessed quite such a depth of amorality—neither moral nor immoral, but instead, simply a vacuousness, a hollow bravado or swagger, the defense attorneys like blind hostages to evil, not acknowledging or considering the consequences of their servitude, other than the short-term treats of their sterling careers.

I had heard about such things but had never witnessed that phenomenon, and I had been totally prepared for the hollow, desperate, wheedling mirth and mirthlessness. The lead attorney was a small fellow, David—never mind his last name—and to say that I felt a new low, watching him try to bond with the jury with his jokes about the guinea pigs, isn’t accurate; what I felt was a despair and bottomlessness, like looking down into a vast pit.

I felt sorrow and pity for the little man in his sharp suit, who was trying so hard—Love me, be with me on this, jury—we’re alike, you and me, laugh at the guinea pig joke, isn’t life fun, isn’t this all just one grand misunderstanding, darn it all?—and I was reminded again of how the plaintiffs in this case—the survivors, and families of those who did not survive—were prevented in this trial from even being able to bear witness, due to the graphic and prolonged suffering of their illnesses and their deaths, which the court claimed could inflame and sway the jury!

For what to the best of my knowledge was the first time in the history of this country, an accuser was not allowed to testify at his trial.

Surely there was a greater loss of freedom and constitutional right in that censorship than any military tribunal for suspected terrorists or enemy combatants, and yet it passed uncommented upon, unnoticed.

And as such, it was a field day for the little lawyer. The part that made me feel sorry for him was that he enjoyed it, and began to think he was special, and then, worse than special, he began to think he was right.

It broke my heart open.

Because the plaintiffs who had been harmed by Grace were not allowed to testify in their trial, it turned into a document case, one in which actions and consequences were not viewed, but instead, only written documents could be considered: letters, rebuttals, hypotheses, claims and refutations. The corporation turned in over a million pages of documents, which the jury had one day to examine, and which the prosecuting attorneys—the U.S. Department of Justice, representing the plaintiffs—had to condense into a two- or three-day narrative.

The government’s attorneys tried. But every time they flashed a corporate memo onto the overhead screen, the defense countered with the response that just because Grace knew their product was toxic and sought to avoid financial responsibility didn’t make it criminal, and that there wasn’t a “conspiracy,” but that instead such evasions were simply part and parcel of acceptable corporate culture—that evasion of laws was for corporations as natural and unquestioned an act as breathing.

It was awful. Department of Justice attorneys would flash on the overhead screen copies of notes from meetings in which the accused criminals would be talking about how to keep the Sierra Club or some other do-good organization from finding out what the executives knew about the toxicity of asbestos, and what to do if the news did leak, which it didn’t.

Damning correspondence was flashed onto the screen—a culling of half a century of the conspiracy’s greatest hits—wherein meeting participants, the very executives on trial, had in my opinion conspired on how to avoid turning over certain documents and test results they had run in which, yes, the guinea pigs died horribly.

There were documents, letters of resistance and obstruction, calculated evasionary instructions from Grace attorneys to Grace executives about how to stonewall EPA mine-site investigators after 1990 and the passage of the Clean Air Act—secret padlocks on the gates, canceled appointments, that kind of thing—but again, it was decided that such actions were not criminal but instead fell within the normal range of actions that were required to keep a corporation a living and breathing entity.

The closing arguments were particularly hard to take. If hypothetical witness testimony might have been able to be described as potentially inflammatory, then the replacement evidence—blurry overhead black-and-white transparencies of correspondence written on ancient Royal typewriters—letters written in sleepy 1950s lawyer language—was by comparison abstract and even narcoleptic.

The letters possessed no soul, they were just words on a page, and from long ago, hence how could there really be a crime, or even criminal proceedings? All the defense attorneys had to do was stand up and say “Did not, did not, did not,” with a living, breathing human—a defense attorney—so much more personal and, well, alive, than any old sheet of paper.

Graphs, bars, charts, and tables showing the effects of asbestos exposure on lung capacity: so what? Boring.

The deeper the documents went, the wider became the separation between the defense and the plaintiffs, between pleasure and pain, between justice and calumny; in the end, the executives walked, they got away with fifty years of murder and mayhem—fifty down, and maybe hundreds still remaining.

Nobody knows where all the kegs and fuses are, and the better a job we insist upon being done to find out, the more it’s going to cost.

In the meantime, Grace—having shape-shifted, vanishing for a while, but now reappearing—is working over on the East Coast; has fled Montana. Law professor Andrew King-Reiss, who participated in a post-trial forum at the University of Montana, reports that the newly reformed, emerging-from-bankruptcy Grace has just received philanthropy awards for its donations to those communities in the East.

Living a life amid invisible poison, and seeing so many of your comrades fall suddenly as if felled by an invisible archer, can be horrific, but again there can be a blessing. For many, there can be a subconscious effort to always have one’s affairs somewhat in order. We’ve seen too many of our kind get that six-week to two-month call to arms, the shipping-out papers.

Gradually, I think, there might be developing in the populace the dawning idea of not leaving too many important things unsaid or undone. It’s not exactly like everyone goes around living like there’s no tomorrow. But I think it’s fair to say that an awful lot of us don’t take mortality—or the brief beauty of health and physical strength—for granted. If there’s a mountain you want to hike, go ahead and do it this summer, not next. And again; and again.

My brother Frank was for many years a reporter for Associated Press, before that news organization, like so many others, went down in the flames and fallout of the Great Recession. He worked in New York, and covered the fall of the World Trade Center. He breathed the air of the burning rubble that authorities were saying was not dangerous, and three months later came down with an inexplicable fever, in excess of 106 degrees. The doctors threw him in an ice bath and he survived, though they had no idea what caused the fever. A year later, it recurred—again the ice bath, antibiotics, CT scans, MRIs, spinal taps, blood work, revealed nothing—and again, he survived.

Some years later he began developing numbness in his extremities, numbness alternating with pain, as well as extreme fatigue, to the point where he had to sleep more often than not—and doctors ran him through every test, it seemed, known to the medical profession, but found nothing. Not Lyme, not lupus, not malaria; not Parkinson’s, no tumors, no virus, no bacteria. The new CT scan showed a little scarring, a little venous tangle, like burn marks, in one patch of the brain. They told him the circuitry would reroute around that traffic jam.

But what had lodged there? What had disrupted the currents to begin with?

The doctors theorized that it might be rough sledding for a while, as the brain slowly rewired itself in these areas, but that then he would get better; amazingly, that’s what happened.

There’s no proof yet. But there’s another story developing, a pattern and similarity: the body, faced with initial exposure to a high pulse of the fibers, surges with an isolated major response by the immune system—reacting massively to the inorganic substance as it would to a plague or virus or bacterial invader—and some get lucky and survive, while the bodies of others cannot isolate or turn off the autoimmune response, but fall into a feedback loop in which the body keeps attacking itself.

No terrorist’s calculation could have been more devious or cunning, no attack on the homeland more insidious.

Admittedly, I’m pretty good at finding things to worry about. Most environmentalists are. We’re not always right, but we’re right just often enough to perpetuate our cycle of worry.

Global warming is the big one these days. Oh, wait, that reminds me, I’m back in jail, I’m talking about Otter Creek again, and the Montana Land Board’s idea to help convert the third world into a dirty coal economy—why do they keep coming to Montana for these things? What is it about us that draws them?—but once more I can’t help but look at the coming of nanotechnology, and wonder how our bodies are going to respond to an infinitude of new particles, so small they can penetrate not just organs but cells, and the spaces between cells, causing the body to respond in the way it always has to foreign invaders.

I imagine I may be in the minority on this, but I worry that the positives of nanotech will not come close to outweighing the negatives.

I worry about the Supreme Court even more than the embrace of nanotechnology and the unleashing of forty quadrillion sharp-edged nanomolecules glittering into the air every hour. I worry about the Supreme Court more than I do about rising sea levels and the rapid release of ancient mutagens currently trapped in permafrost and ice caps, or about the vanishing of free oxygen here on the blue planet.

Is this all a dream, that something as immense as this world can be erased by the utterance of one man or one woman in a decision that goes either 5–4 or 4–5?

How can a nation that separates church from state then turn and refuse to separate corporation from state?

I’ve never been a big fan of amending the Constitution—past screeds and lamentations aimed at tweaking or altering that living document to explicitly prevent ultraspecific activities typically abhorred by the right-wingers, such as flag burning or gay marriage, have always seemed ridiculous to me.

But this might well be the time to spend that one silver bullet. I fear that corporations already own the Congress too deeply—that already, insufficient independent representation exists, and that a congressional bill amending the Constitution on this matter might fail to even secure enough votes to be introduced or passed. I fear that already corporations have infiltrated the political lives of our leaders—like unseen narrow spindles insinuating themselves—to the point where if an elected official voted against corporate donations, the corporations would destroy him or her, would swarm his or her district with anonymous and unregulated donations, coalescing, like antigens swarming a foreign object in the body.

Fevers, chills, shakes, swelling; cancer, asphyxiation, death.

We want to believe the Constitution is a perfect, holy text, sent down from the Mount in a single act of divine inspiration. But it wasn’t. Creating it was an awful mess, more than ten years in the making, and even after it was ratified in 1787, the founders acknowledged its imperfections, its continuing need for amendments. There were a lot of folks back then who were against the Constitution; they feared it would give government too much power. Fresh in their minds was the memory of the Southern states’ violation of civil rights before and during the Revolution. These opponents demanded a bill of rights “that would spell out the immunities of individual citizenry.” These opponents eventually ratified the 1787 Constitution with the understanding that subsequent amendments preserving—or securing—those immunities, those freedoms, would be offered.

We don’t have to take up arms. We just have to petition for one amendment. But we need to do so quickly. The corporations become ever more powerful in their unaccountability, while those who would stand before them do so for but twenty, thirty, forty years before becoming old and infirm, and crumbling.

We worship the corporations even though we would deny it is worship, and when they fall ill, we pump our resources—our time and hopes and money—into them as if with prayer; and when they die, we resurrect them.

There’s a screening program going on in Libby, held in a portable building such as the temporary structures in which one used to take driver’s ed classes after school, in the long ago.

The program starts and stops according to funding and budget cuts, but whenever we get a postcard saying it’s open again, and that it’s our time, we go in and have the X-rays—so far, nothing—and blow into the little tube for the lung capacity test.

I always fail that one; I always have to take it four or five times, just to get to 97 percent, 98 percent capacity. It doesn’t make any sense to me. Elizabeth always tests 110 percent, easily. Hiking, I never get tired or short of breath. It doesn’t make sense. Maybe I’m used to delivering oxygen to my muscles in a different or more efficient manner, making more to do with what I’ve got.

Or maybe my lungs are larger, so that 97 percent of them sends out more than 110 percent of someone else. I don’t know. It seems a crude test but I fret about slipping, always slipping; from 98 to 96, to 95, and so on. I fret about the quality of life—the burning—slipping away, the hot coals cooling to heavy gray ash.

And yet what answer is there but to try not to oversleep, and to get out and burn as often as one can? I think that I’m just getting older. I think that’s all it is. Other times I roll my shoulders to help get those deep breaths, even while seated at a desk, not exerting myself, as my body tries to remember or summon that feeling. It’s maybe like what a whale does before sounding. It’s strange, these tiny threads that the Lilliputians throw across our chests, hour by hour and day by day. It’s strange. Each one is so small and insignificant.

The last ice carved the mountains around Libby, in its leaving. Grassland came in—sagebrush—then cool dark forests. What happens when the forests burn in the coming, warmer world? How much smoke will we filter again through our pink-red lungs, and through our stomachs?

Maybe the burning—the rising tide of the world’s fire and heat—will come all the way up here to the Yaak, but this will be the high-water mark of change. The high-flame mark. Then things will finally begin to get better, and heal. The burning will recede.

We should install those detect/non-detect sensors at every spot, every residence, where a meso case has occurred. They need to march the detect/non-detect monitors right up over the top of Vermiculite Mountain and into the Yaak. They need to place one on the house of everyone who died of meso or who has contracted ARD. They need to put one over Point’s grave, to see if he is still exhaling the fibers from his body, from the soil, even in death.

This isn’t about my dog. This is about science—or about science, and data, being willfully ignored. This is a data point being willfully ignored.

How many other data points are being ignored? Too often, we tend to find only the science we want to find.

I have hiked up the steep slopes of Rainy Creek, beneath Vermiculite Mountain, in hunting season, before I knew any better—watching the waters cascade down Rainy Creek toward the sprawling Kootenai River, largest tributary to the Columbia, bound for the Pacific—the waters crashing down through the forest like a current of electricity sizzling through the brain of the valley, with the lopped-off skullcap of the mine, just a little farther on, a little higher up, a little farther north.

As the biology of the affliction—slow suffocation—might be said to match the story of an isolated, rural community so afflicted—relatively voiceless, in terms of the ability to dictate terms of existence to a multinational corporation—so too might the biology of the affliction hold some clues to a recovery or restoration.

In the scarring of cells and cell walls from exposure to tiny foreign objects, perhaps a story of counterresponse might be found. Perhaps we can yet isolate and build protective covenants around the dangerous corporations—sealing them off, encasing them in the scar tissue of our hard-gotten experience, just as the scar tissue in a body seeks to isolate an infection, attempts to seal the pustulous wound.

It will not make anyone who is currently afflicted better, but it might serve the story of the future—the story of a do-over in the garden—to cover up the old sawed-off mountain, Vermiculite Mountain, with a cast of clay: to bury it, and to revegetate the surrounding area, to begin the slow hard work of filtering those deadly fibers not so much with tender human lungs, but with the green bark of living trees. Trees, perhaps, like the native larch, particularly the mature or old-growth ones, with thick crenulated bark that maximizes the surface area for such absorption, and which, being the world’s only deciduous conifer, might even filter the fibers into its needles each year before shedding them, gold needles flying harmlessly through the sky each autumn, and back down, then, via the composition of the rainforest into the soil.

To identify the safe paths in our community through more testing, as well as the dangerous paths, and to have the cleansing lungs of plants—in gardens, flowerpots, planter-boxes—in every building and every room, every hallway; to move, like aliens in our own homeland, from one breathing station to the next, breathing the cleansed or cleaner air in the vicinity of the living plants.

Already, for years in Lincoln County, we have been seeing too many of our neighbors patrolling the streets in electric wheelchairs, oxygen bottles strapped to their sides, and moon-suited hazmat workers probing their giant vacuum hoses into one building after another, seeking to suck out literally billions of invisible micron-sized poisons.

Already, here in this new place on earth, this new start from where the ice went away, we have become like aliens yet again, cast out from paradise.

If this is a new world we are all entering, why shouldn’t one of the first stories of that new world come from one of the newest and most injured, and yet also most pristine places in the United States?

The fact that there are not many of us who live here shouldn’t matter. The fact that our story is new and usable by others is what should matter. And it is our duty to make it be.

It’s far from an original thought, looking to the processes of nature to help determine the shape of a story. And maybe I place too much faith in the power of story to affect the coming flow of history and the course of events. But I don’t think so. I think stories are a lens through which we view the world, and our responsibilities and parts in it: and that that affects everything, or almost everything, that is to come.

It may be a simple ceremony, as primitive as the first story, but in addition to a commitment to identifying safe paths and sealing over old wounds, I’d like to see religious and community leaders petition the greater spirit of the world for a third do-over: to place a blessing on the broad wide river, the Kootenai, that cleaves the valley, and into which all the veins of the surrounding mountains flow.

There are logistical proposals to restore our air, our health, our power and independence—political and financial fixes that are required, and environmental remediations—but I think a ceremony would be valuable too, as a cultural marker of Before and After.

In a perfect world, or perfect ceremony, we’d have someone like the Dalai Lama, and leaders of the region’s tribes, in a boat, floating past Rainy Creek, bestowing a blessing of compassion on the river and the handful of people who live in the shadow of these mountains.

It would be an ecumenical ceremony, with political leaders, local churches. In a perfect world, apolitical, the president would be in one of those boats, drifting in the autumn with the mountainsides all around burning gold with the going-away—for the winter, at least—of the larch. And in a perfect world, for one day, much if not most of the world—even if just for a moment—would be listening to our story.

The intent is to help personalize the histories here, and to learn from them. The trouble is that Grace’s—and any corporation’s—goal is to depersonalize those stories, those voices, those bright-burning powers of the individual within.

Still, my goal here is to bring honor to the afflicted: not to waste my breath haranguing an invisible thing.

I don’t think all of Lincoln County has been examined or repaired. I think there remains work to be done. As bad as the asbestosis and mesothelioma is, I don’t think that’s all there is. I don’t think it’s that neat. Would that it were so.

In the meantime, there remains work to be done.

Who gets lucky, and who does not? Every morning I wake up feeling lucky. I would not go so far as to say every morning I bound out of bed with a spring in my step and joy in my heart, but every morning, I realize my luck that any of us are here, and the implicit obligation—the mandate, the inalienable duty—to make our lives count, in some fashion or another, even if only to one’s self.

It’s cliché stuff, but living amid death or perhaps even more so the shadow of death helps bring a greater clarity to such thoughts.

Nobody I know of goes around redlining it, thinking, What if my six weeks begins today? But speaking only for myself, becoming middle-aged in a land of illness, I am aware with every physical exertion, every glorious lung-bursting short-of-breath hike up a steep slope, of the glory of being able to stagger around in these mountains, the glory of being short of breath as opposed to possessing no breath at all. And while I wouldn’t quite go so far as to say I’m compiling a bucket list—I hate that idea of looking down the mountain, to descend, rather than seeing skyline and new country beyond—I can’t help but notice this year, particularly, with so many still falling ill, even though the cleanup is proceeding, that there are certain places I’ve been thinking about going for years, which I absolutely am going to visit this year, come hell or high water.

I have gone and seen them, but here’s the thing: from those ridges, you see new places, and want more.

I think even if there had never been this dust, this invisible fiber, I would be feeling this way, at this age. It’s just that the circumstances put a little finer edge on it. And while I have always loved such hikes, there is often these days an added emotion, the bittersweet complication of mixing pleasure with something akin to duty or responsibility; that it is in some way more important than ever for me to feel the full depths of joy possible on those hikes into such amazing backcountry, now that there are increasing numbers of peers and neighbors and friends who are unable.

The survivors have an obligation to survive, but more; there is more to life than just surviving.

In the old days, I ran marathons, triathlons, cross-country. I ran all day, ran up mountains. All my life, when I inhaled, I would take in a delicious and seemingly bottomless double-lungful of sweet clean air that made me stronger each time: taking in air as if it were a great meal, and with the oxygen igniting, combusting, feeding, and fanning a fire that burned away all impurities and weakness. Even then I did not take it for granted; even then, with every great breath, I recognized it for what it was—glorious. Soon I’ll be going to court to testify why I wouldn’t leave the governor’s office, the capital, when asked. Soon, hopefully, I’ll have an opportunity to present testimony about why I thought that was necessary, and about Otter Creek, and the Tongue River country, and open boxcars, and rail lines, and conspiracy and secrecy.

The prison is not the iron bars here in Helena.

In a little while my prescriptions will be produced, and my bail, and I will walk through the bars of the jail as if through a veil. The state of Montana may well soon be eradicated by Mr. Peabody’s coal trains, black plumes may snake through all the sleeping towns and communities of the Northwest—but we’ll all still be free, sort of. Only if you have lived and worked in Lincoln County will you be imprisoned in a kind of waiting, a kind of statistical limbo.

The corporations like it that way.