A Wolverine Is Eating My Leg (21 page)

T
he owner of the grader, Fred Drew, of D&D Logging, stopped into Barney’s and sat down with Copenhaver and me. He was a short, compact, tired-looking man. A few days ago an anonymous caller had asked him why he had “ordered” Kelley out onto the ice. Drew wasn’t angry, just saddened, and it showed clearly in his eyes.

“I didn’t order Mike to do anything,” Drew said. “He was in charge of the heavy machinery. He told me he was going to take the grader out, and I told him to use his own discretion.” Drew turned to Copenhaver. “That was my Cat you went down in. Do you think I wanted another one down?”

The proprietor, Barney Bowles, a longtime friend of Kelley’s, sat down with us.

“Was Mike being paid to plow the ice?” I asked.

Barney laughed, and Drew quietly said, “No, of course not.”

“What then? Was he a snowmobile enthusiast?”

“He didn’t own one,” Drew said. Barney added, “He was a community enthusiast.”

Barney explained it like this: In the winter, the population of Seeley Lake runs around one thousand. In the summer, vacationers swell that number to as much as ten thousand. People like Barney, and many others in Seeley Lake, make most of their money from tourists and local recreation seekers. The winter had been especially severe,
and the weather had reduced the number of cross-country skiers who normally visited the area. The community had felt the pinch.

But the fine, warm weather of late February had coincided with the Montana State Snowmobile Championship Races, which would have attracted more than 125 racers from seven western states and Canada. At least one thousand people were expected to crowd into Seeley Lake for the two-day event. Economically, it was the most important two days of the winter season.

The racers needed clear ice. Drew donated the use of his equipment and Kelley donated the labor. When people warned Mike to stay off the ice, he realized that they were asking him to take food off their table in exchange for his safety. He took the grader out on the lake for everyone in the community. For Mike Kelley, taking that chance was a sort of sacred duty.

The championship races were canceled after the tragedy. Barney Bowles would help organize a benefit for Kelley’s wife. It was volunteer labor that got Drew’s machines out of the lake, and volunteer labor that would help build a new landlocked snowmobile course to be named after Mike. There would be no more snowmobile races on Seeley Lake.

“I knew Mike since he was eleven years old,” Fred Drew said. “He was my brother-in-law. I think about this all the time. I’ll have to live with it for the rest of my life.”

“We all will, Fred,” Barney Bowles said softly.

T
hings began looking up the day before the eclipse. A slight northerly shift in the jet stream and the storm riding in on it doubled the chances of clear weather in Missoula from 10 to 20 percent. East of the Continental Divide, along a line roughly from Great Falls to Livingston, meteorologists expected a chinook, a warm, dry wind that could rip big holes in the cloud cover. The chances of clear skies in that area were 40 percent.

In Livingston, at 3:30
A.M.
the day of the eclipse, I could see stars shining through the cloud cover off to the north. Up that way, over some pretty substantial hills, was an area of high plains. I ran for it.

The sun rose off to the right, coloring the sky a pale pink and orange pastel over snowy fields. There were high cirrus clouds, wispy and insubstantial. The mountains dropped away, and the roads rolled out over the prairie, straight and dry, only now and again dipping into shallow river bottoms. Once, at 80 m.p.h., I hit a two-hundred-yard patch of black ice and had rocketed over it before I realized how nearly fatal that little ride had been. I had a strong urge to pull over for a minute to let my hands stop shaking, but there was no time; I shot along the black ribbon of highway thinking about Mike Kelley and machines on ice and how death and destiny make no allowance for good intentions.

Diarrhea doesn’t either, for that matter. I was clutching an open, economy-size bottle of Pepto-Bismol between my thighs; it served as a blunt reminder of a solemn oath I had taken the night before: I will, forevermore, avoid restaurants advertising “Mexican Cuisine” when they are situated near the Canadian border. Just before that oath I had consumed, to my almost immediate dismay, what the special menu described as an “eclipse enchilada” and a “totality taco.” At present they lay in the bottom of my stomach like a pair of poison army socks.

Towns, restaurants, and motels along the track of totality were cashing in on the eclipse the way Seeley Lake prepared for the snowmobile races—and for all the same reasons. In Manitoba, for instance, locals had built an ersatz igloo village to draw more eclipse addicts. In Winnipeg, the Colonel was selling eclipse-viewing goggles along with fried chicken. And at the Big Sky Resort near the entrance to Yellowstone Park, 550 people had paid $385 apiece to stay for the weekend and make a run for clear skies in a caravan of buses.

At Harlowton, where U.S. 191 crosses U.S. 12, I passed seven or eight of those same charter buses, parked on the
side of the road. They were obviously trying to decide whether to run north toward Lewistown or east to Roundup. There were several CB-equipped cars and trucks parked along with the convoy; I tried them on the road channel.

Of course, I hadn’t paid a cent for the services of the convoy’s eclipse meteorologist, and the answering silence let me know that quite clearly.

Switching to AM radio, I caught a forecast that confirmed what I could see with my own eyes—the weather was looking good around Lewistown. Deejays on the Lewistown station proclaimed their city “the eclipse capital of America.” Local stores, they said, would be closed for two hours and would reopen when the lights came back on. There would be incredible savings. At one store, I was intrigued to hear, bras and panties would be half-off.

I took 191 north. There were folks in the fields now, and you could see them tinkering with telescopes and cameras mounted on sturdy tripods. Just outside Lewistown, I pulled over and walked out into a flat, snowy field, where I met a half-dozen students from Arizona. They had driven up to Montana stuffed into a wheezing 1964 Chevy Impala. Other small groups dotted the field. In one there was a short, dark-haired woman with wandering eyes, who called herself Meadowlark and who had seen a total eclipse in the Caribbean—“It was rully, rully amazing,” she said. She had dragged several scruffy-looking and less-enthusiastic friends with her. They were all from Boulder, Colorado, and except for Meadowlark, they sat around smoking hash in a bored and desultory manner.

At 8:30
A.M.
, the moon took the first nip out of the sun. The students had set up a four-inch reflecting telescope and were projecting the eclipse on a large, sturdy sheet of white cardboard. They spoke of sunspots and shadow bands and coronal prominences in an entirely giddy manner. On the cardboard, the dark ball worked its way over the shining ball with all the inevitability of a Greek tragedy.

Meadowlark’s friends became interested, and they drifted over to ask a few questions of the students. It was getting
undeniably strange out, and now they wanted to savor the weirdness.

It was about twenty degrees with high cirrus clouds sketched across the sky like strands of angel hair. A fuzzy, indistinct, red-orange rainbow formed around the sun, covering a fifth of the sky. In that field outside Lewistown you could feel the tension all around. It was like a wire being drawn taut, a wire that was near the breaking point. When the moon had covered 90 percent of the sun’s disk, the light began to die. At 95 percent, it was much darker and colder.

At 99 percent, the band of totality, that 170-mile wall of darkness, erupted out of the west. From all over the field, you could hear a low, moaning sound, the kind of sound people in a roller coaster make at the top of the first high dip.

There was a range of mountains far to the west and I could see the sun setting on those craggy peaks. Then the mountains were gone, lost in darkness. The band of totality came roaring over the snow-covered plain. There was nothing you could make out as a distinct line of darkness. It was more like a huge, rippling wall of strange purple-black. The deeper you looked into it, the darker it was. As the eclipse reached totality, the wall of darkness—moving at about two thousand miles an hour—loomed up over all of us like a great, silent, inky tidal wave.

In the sky, the dark disk of the moon completely covered the sun, except for a single spot on the high rim where bright, golden sunlight poured through a deep crater on the moon. Surrounding the blackness of the moon’s disk was the sun’s corona, yellow with tinges of pink. The circular corona and that one bright crater full of sun created what is called the “diamond ring” effect. Then it was gone.

At Goldendale, Washington, in the rain shadow of the Cascades, it got especially dark because the skies were shrouded in clouds. My science-writing, eclipse-addict friend muttered curses amid the howls of the assembled meteorologists and astrophysicists. Near Roundup, folks
from the eclipse convoy got their money’s worth; the moon, like an inky thumb, blotted the sun out of a nearly cloudless sky. In Missoula, novelist James Crumley stepped into the parking lot of a bar called the Elbow Room, and the clouds parted briefly, giving him a perfect view of totality. In Bozeman, two thousand people gathered at the Museum of the Rockies, and, as John Woodenlegs chanted a prayer in his native Cheyenne, the clouds parted. “You’re the Creator of us all,” Woodenlegs said in English. “Bless all the people here.” In Livingston, out by the Raw Deal Ranch, the chickens stopped scratching and went into the henhouse to roost. Confused dogs howled, and the horses got skittish in their stalls.

The darkness itself was like nothing I have ever seen. It was not quite black, but rather an iridescent indigo—a glowing, science-fiction sort of color. All over the field people were shouting and cheering. Meadowlark hugged everyone, and her friends rolled in the snow like puppies.

Totality lasted almost two and a half minutes, and though the darkness was not the bitter, impenetrable sort one finds at the bottom of Seeley Lake, I thought of Mike Kelley fighting the blackness and the cold in the most brutally hostile environment imaginable.

It occurred to me, in the inky iridescence of that field, that eclipse addiction has much to do with mortality; it is a shared premonition of death, enacted on a vast scale.

The first sensible monotheistic religions worshipped the sun as the giver of life—“the Creator of us all,” as John Woodenlegs would have it. There is a truth there so deep and obvious we seldom acknowledge it, but it helps explain the suicides in Seattle’s sunless seasons and why an eclipse has the power to stop the heart of a king. What we know intellectually—that totality is a transitory phenomenon—is not something we share with our emotions. The eclipse is a sudden, sharp view of the apocalypse.

The moon swung slowly through the sky, and a salmon-colored sunrise glittered on the mountains far to the west. In the sky we saw another diamond ring, and then the wall
of darkness rushed out over the plain to the east. Cocks crowed. I found I had been holding my breath, like a man trapped under the ice, and I let it out in a great, braying rebel yell. I hugged Meadowlark, she hugged me, the students hugged each other and me and Meadowlark and her friends, and we were all laughing and shouting, and it seemed, for the moment, as if we’d live forever.

“B
ut I reconfirmed with you, personally,” I said. “Three times.” The woman from Air Polynesia shook her head sadly. “We have no record of your reconfirmation.”

“But I was here. I talked to you. Two days ago you said I was on the flight.”

The woman showed me a handwritten list. There were five names on it, and mine was not among them. “You see,” the woman said patiently, “we have no record of your reconfirmation.”

Outside the office, the island of Hiva Oa sighed under the weight of a heavy tropical sun. In the shade of the mango trees, the air itself was golden, as sweet and thick as honey. The sea was the cobalt blue of deep water, and it glittered in the hard brittle light of unfiltered sun. Breakers eight feet high thundered onto an expansive beach of black volcanic sand. Above the town of Atuona, above the tiny airline office, volcanic peaks rose in immense green velvet spires that caught and collected drifting South Pacific clouds so that rain fell on various summits, and the high peaks shimmered in impressionistic shades of blue and gray.

There were worse places to be stranded, to be sure, but few that are farther from home. Hiva Oa is the southern administrative center for the Marquesas island group, which is about a thousand miles from anywhere: 3,500 miles west of Peru; 2,500 miles southeast of Hawaii; 740 miles northeast of Tahiti. The Marquesas, a part of French Polynesia, are, in fact, the most remote islands on the face
of the earth: the island group that’s farthest from any continent. This isolation makes tourism rare, and as a consequence, a visit to the islands is rewarding and frustrating in equal measure.