On
17 January 2015, the Poplar pipeline, which transports 42,000 barrels of crude
oil a day under the Yellowstone River, failed, dumping an estimated 50,000
gallons of crude into the river. This is Montana’s second recent pipeline
failure; three years ago 63,000 gallons polluted Yellowstone’s water. This last
breach occurred seventeen miles upstream from Glendive, Montana, where
cancer-causing benzene was detected in the city’s water supply. Another twenty
miles or so upriver from the spill is the proposed site where the Keystone XL
pipeline will pass under the river.
Major
news sources like CNN and Fox weren’t able to see the connection, and neither,
obviously, were the politicians who approved funding for the Keystone XL
pipeline twelve days after the Glendive accident. A rancher whose land borders
the spill site had a closer, better view. Her take is tough and true: “Pipelines
leak and pipelines break. We’re never going to get around that. We have to
decide if water is more valuable than oil.” The headline for the Associated
Press story was probably more hopeful than accurate. “Montana Oil Spill
Renews Worries Over Pipeline Safety.”
Another
headline from another time comes to mind: the lead story of the 18 May 2000
issue of Glendive’s weekly, the Ranger-Review,
“Anglers But No Fish,” and the subhead “Paddlefish wait for river to rise.”
This was my first trip to a town where the week’s most important news story was
about fish waiting for something to happen. The story clarified things: “Forty
percent of the snowpack is left in the mountains, and when that melts and the
river swells, there may be one or two good weeks of paddlefishing here.”
As
it turns out, I was wondering where the
paddlefish were. I had driven to the Intake Diversion Dam about fifteen miles
downriver from Glendive because a student had told me about the tradition and
spectacle of paddlefishing and had given me a pamphlet from the Montana
Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks about Polyodon spatula that zoomed it to the top of my fish list.
“CHARACTERISTICS: Body naked except for scales on upper lobe of tail. Lobes of
tail fin unequal in size. Skeleton largely of cartilage. HABITAT: Slow or quiet
bars of large rivers during spring high water. STATUS: Native. SIMILAR SPECIES:
None.” None indeed.
This
is one strange, pre-historic-looking fish. The body is reminiscent of a
shark’s, cartilaginous and with a large, lobed tail. The mouth is remarkably
cavernous. And then there’s the snout — the rostrum, the spatula, the paddle.
It’s huge, up to two feet, sometimes making up about a quarter of the fish’s
length. It is thought to contain thousands of receptors for positioning in
shifting currents and over varied river-bottom topography. A paddlefish feeds
by sucking in water through its mouth and sifting out zooplankton with its
gills. Because of this, it rises to no bait; it must be snagged. So the fishing
technique is as distinctive as the fish. Anglers line the river, armed with
saltwater surfcasting poles with sixty-pound test line. At the end of the line
is a six-ounce weight and a treble hook tied about a foot above it. Cast it out
and pull it back with a series of hearty yanks. Hope.
The
fishing grounds without the paddlefish are without fanfare: a flood plain, a
campground with a few trailers and campers scattered among its cottonwoods, a
dusty parking lot with a half-dozen pickups. On that day of the disappointing
headline, the Yellowstone hurried along, breaking up into rapids at the dam. White
pelicans floated there or stood on the rocks. A man and a woman sitting on
overturned buckets watched their lines disappear into the café-au-lait water.
Robins chirped. Bass notes from a stereo in the campground thumped. At the edge
of a dusty bluff that overlooks the scene, is a commemorative plaque. Years ago
a young man from out of town, perhaps not river-wise, had waded out too far,
slipped on the muddy river bottom, and was carried away downstream. On the
plaque was a picture of a boy in a basketball uniform and an inscription that
declared he had “lost his beautiful life to the Yellowstone River while
paddlefishing.”
What
to do when snow won’t melt and fish won’t migrate to fit my schedule? Drive the
six hours to Yellowstone Park where the Yellowstone River runs clear and fast
and anglers gently drop their feathery lures and pause over the colors of the
trout they catch and release. Hike a week in the mountains while the paddlefish
wait for the ancient command and people come to the riverbank at Intake, eager,
then disappointed.
~
A
week gone and the word is out: the paddlefish are running. The Yellowstone at
Intake is just as brown but more agitated and higher on its banks. Anglers have
replaced the pelicans, lining the shore and milling around the riverbank. A
huge fire burns in a firepit to keep away the gnats. Nearby, people crowd a
concession stand. Kid in strollers, moms, dogs. Two anglers, call them snaggers:
George (his name is on his shirt pocket) and Leroy (a crowd favorite). Both
have the gait and legs of men who have spent a good part of their lives on
horseback. They cast out as far as they can, turn their poles to 9:00, and
begin to retrieve: pull, reel in, pull again. Each pull bends their huge
surfcasting poles double, the reeling is frantic.
George
snags his fish first. His playing of it is hard and aggressive, much like an
ocean surfcaster landing a striped bass. In fifteen minutes the paddlefish tires
and lies struggling about ten feet offshore. Someone takes George’s gaff, wades
into the river, gaffs the fish, and pulls it ashore. Used up, it lolls among
the beached logs and other detritus of the Yellowstone in spring. George
untangles his line, attaches a tag, sticks the gaff into the gills, and bends
to the difficult job of dragging fifty pounds of fish one-hundred yards up the
riverbank to the cleaning trailer. The fish’s body leaves behind a meandering
furrow in the mud and silt.
Here
at the cleaning trailer is another unique feature of Glendive paddlefishing. If
it’s not a catch-and-release day, they clean and dress each fish in exchange
for the roe, which is donated to the Glendive Chamber of Commerce and
Agriculture. The chamber processes it into caviar to sell worldwide. In the
first nine years of the program more than a million dollars were realized. This
money is divided roughly in half between the Montana Department of Fish,
Wildlife and Parks (FWP) and the chamber. FWP money is used for paddlefish
research and fishing site improvements. The chamber awards its money in grants
to nonprofit organizations for cultural, historical, or recreational projects.
Meanwhile,
back on the river, Leroy has begun an adventure with Hemingway overtones. Either
because he has snagged a larger fish, or because he has lighter line, or simply
because he prefers to, he allows fish and current their way. His technique
seems more a river technique: tip up and line taut, walk downstream, and avoid
other anglers and a temporary dock. To cheers of “go get ’em Leroy,” he disappears
around a bend about 300 yards downstream from where he got his hit.
It’s
not a pretty scene. Nobody wears Oakley sunglasses, Patagonia shorts, or Nike
water sandals. Those who have waded into a swift and silty stream with their
clothes on know what it does to shoes and socks and jeans. And a paddlefish is
so unlovely—a gray, scaleless thing that looks a bit like a shark with a canoe
paddle rammed down its throat. At the weigh-in area George is having his
picture taken with his fish hanging beside him. “Turn it around, George, you’ve
got the dirty side toward me.” And from the cleaning trailer, “Hurry up and get
that fish in here, George, I haven’t killed a thing all day.” The banter acknowledges,
celebrates, the grittiness of what is going on. No one will write a novel about
paddlefishing that will be made into a movie.
It’s
this simple. Sexually mature paddlefish migrate from Lake Sakakawea in North
Dakota — up the Missouri to the Yellowstone to reach the flowing water and
clean gravel they need for egg incubation. On the way they confront the Intake Dam,
which diverts part of the river’s flow for irrigation; some years they stack up
there by the thousands. These ancient fish wait each spring for the snow melt
and the river’s renewal to stir a community into action: action of reunion with
friends and family, action of stewardship to the river and its inhabitants. And
they stir Glendive to memory: of stories of fish caught and lost, of Leroy’s
fishing style, of a young basketball player drowned in the river, of a tie
between a community and the land it inhabits.
~
Unless
another unarmed youth is shot or another school-full of girls is kidnapped,
media interest in a story wanes after a week or so. Lacking a second accidental
oil release, the Poplar spill is quickly fading into memory. Glendive water has
been pronounced safe, the Keystone pipeline “debate” ignored 50,000 gallons of
oil in the Yellowstone, and all’s well in the world of Big Oil and politics.
Two weeks after the incident, however, damage to the river’s living inhabitants
remains unknown.
Given
a society with an ephemeral attention span, a grotesquely delusional
comprehension of time is to be expected. Paddlefish have changed little in the
last 70-75 million years. The approximate age of the Yellowstone River near
Glendive is 20,000 years, and during that time it has been alluvial, which
means it flows through the sediment that it deposits itself. In other words, it
has been constantly shifting, redefining itself over time. In this shifting
river bottom, the Poplar pipeline was buried in 1967. The question of how the
pipeline’s owners perceive time seems rather important, and, unfortunately, the
answer is at hand.
The
leaking pipe is owned by the Poplar Pipeline System, which is owned by Bridger
Pipeline, a limited liability company that is part of True Companies, a
conglomerate of companies that specialize in all things oil: pipeline,
transportation, exploration, and oilfield equipment companies. Here’s Henry “Tad”
True, Vice President of Bridger Pipeline, speaking at the 2012 Republican National
Convention:
“I
am part of the third generation of family-owned businesses, and we operate
pipelines in the great states of Wyoming, North Dakota, and Montana. These
companies were started by my grandfather, and then run by my father and my
uncles. . . . My hope is that my 3 boys — Henry, Sam, and Charlie — will be
part of the fourth generation of our family business. And although my kids
think pipelines are boring, I know and you know that Mitt Romney knows that
pipelines are vital to America’s energy system.”
Okay.
Now we know how far ahead Tad (and probably Mitt Romney) is thinking: Just as
long as my kids get their share of the wealth. This from the head of a company
that is slated to, as he said in that same speech, “build an on-ramp” to the
Keystone XL pipeline. This from the leader of a company that, according to its
hometown newspaper “. . . has a checkered environmental history, spanning 30
oil spills, multiple federal fines and a warning that the pipeline firm did not
learn from past mistakes.”
Only
a radical change of perspective can reverse what is clearly a treacherous downward
course of wrong-headed thinking. One such worldview — from 500 years ago or
more — is provided by the Great Law of Peace, the founding constitution of the
Six Nations Iroquois Confederacy. Originally an oral tradition codified in
wampum belts and then eventually committed to English, it states that all
deliberations and decisions must turn from self-interest to that of “the whole
people” and “the unborn of the future Nation” — to the community and coming
generations. Later interpretations have set the number of generations at seven.
Tad
True will spend all he wants to spend of the money he makes building the “on-ramp.”
So, doubtless, will his three sons. But sometime within seven generations, the
Keystone XL pipeline will surely burst. Just as in other rural locales across
North America, an increasingly rare sense of place and community is threatened
in Glendive. A community that could
boast they had, as one civic leader put it, “turned fish eggs into baseball
uniforms and museum exhibits” will eventually be forced to choose between oil
and water.
*******
*The Yellowstone caviar image is from midrivers.com.
**Casper (WY) Star-Tribune
