The Yellowstone Conundrum (37 page)

McCone County, Montana

  “Charley, the Fort Peck Dam is gone. The Missouri River is running downhill from here into North Dakota and a month from now it’s going to destroy New Orleans. I’m not sure what I can do,” from the passenger seat Robert tried to explain what had happened.

 
Driving like a bat out of hell, Charley constantly gave Robert looks to the side like he had a ghost in the passenger seat. The image of three buffalo protecting his former boss, who might as well have been dropped from the planet Xenon, was jaw-dropping. His momma (the slut) might have told him he was catching flies, so great was his astonishment. At this very moment if Charley had been told that Robert O’Brien, Secretary of the Bureau of Reclamation, was Jesus Christ walking the earth again, he would have nodded and shouted
praise, Jesus.

 
Charley was driving north, back on highway 24 toward the dam.

 
“We can’t go there,” Robert started. “We need to go east, that way,” Robert pointed to the right.

 
“I can do that,” and soon as he said it, he turned right onto highway 528 which appeared out of nowhere.  The junction of highway 528 and state 24 was dead smack in the middle of nowhere.

 
Charley turned right, hard going too fast but quickly settled in. His passenger, Jesus Christ Himself, nodded and pointed straight ahead. In all directions there was nothing but flat; no trees, no hills to define, a huge sky; in the distance were buffalo, just out of eyesight; nodding their huge heads up and down in an
OK dude
formation.

 
Charley put the petal to the medal and raced across eastern Montana toward the advancing darkness, window down, the cold morning air whipping through the Blazer as if it really didn’t matter. Robert O’Brien found the air to be exhilerating.
A half hour ago I was dead. Two hours ago Slim Jim was dead. Why aren’t I dead?

             
Sweet Nancy. I’m still here.

  The town of Wolf Point, Montana, where city counsel meetings are held the third Monday of every month, was an early esta\blished “fort” for the Lewis and Clark expedition in 1803.  Wild as a wooley bear and as eye-catching a place in the northwest US as there could be, Wolf Point, Montana on the morning of February 20
th
was about to be a Federal disaster center.

“
Wolf Point got its name from the fact that one winter the wolfers killed such a large number of wolves that they froze before the skins could be removed. The frozen carcasses were piled near the river to wait the coming of spring and the pile was so high, it became a landmark for all the country around.”

  Wolf Point, Montana was the first community to experience the rolling destruction of the Missouri River as it started its three-month tour to rip the heart out of the United States of America, to split the country in two.

 
Across and south of the river Charley Lame Deer was driving like a mad man out of hell long along highway 528; it was Toad’s Mad Ride with Charley as Toad and Robert O’Brien as poor Ratty. The hardscrabble road slithered along and across a treeless expanse of empty prairie, over rises, up and down gullies, only to straighten out for fifty yards or so, then dive down into another gully; it was empty only in the sense that there were no trees, nothing but rolling grass; Kevin Cosner would be just over the next hill, a sneer on his lips; behind him would be Robert Duval, ready to kick ass if anyone got in the way of him bringing his cattle to graze north.

 
Oh shit oh shit oh shit oh shit
Robert’s brain shouted.

 
Where the hell am I going?

 
The Missouri River was headed downstream at 4 miles per hour, just as fast as a Roger Bannister ran the first 4-minute mile; except the Missouri River was doing the second mile just as fast; and the third; and the fourth.  The river began to wander, the water began to slosh up against the snake-like oxbow undulations of the opposing buttes, as it descended through McCone County, back and forth, back and forth; tiny tsunamis dashing across the river reverberating, the water getting angrier as nature’s high lands dictated the flow of the river, falling 300 feet from 2200 elevation at Fort Peck Dam.

 
Then, just west of Wolf Point the land began to level off.  The Missouri had a chance to breathe.

             
 
Wolf Point MT
Permission granted from Dave Arndt from web page
www.d48.net/wp/

 
Charlie Lame Deer barely slowed down as he reached the intersection with state route 13, 112-mile connection between Circle, Montana and the Canadian Border. Turning left Charlie raced toward the Wolf Point Bridge (also called the Lewis and Clark Bridge), an old-fashioned truss bridge that looked like it had been built by adults using Tinker Toys, fashionable for the 30’s; two lanes with a center support on the southern bank of the Missouri River that stretched another two hundred yards across a flood plain. The bridge, now 84 years old was one of the 80,000 pieces of Old Stuff the National Register of Historical Places (NRHP, an actual Federal government agency) kept track of; or an Hysterical Monument his dad used to say; a brief smile crossed Robert’s lips.

 
Now more carefully, Charley Lame Deer crossed the narrow two-lane bridge and without being told to, stopped in the middle of the bridge. There was no traffic in either direction.  It was a cold February morning; the trees along the Missouri’s banks were devoid of leaves, with not even a hint of buds trying to burst in the 10 degree afternoon heat wave. Charley and Robert got out of the Blazer and stood on the western side. Below them the Missouri lazily made its way downstream; the water a chilly 33 degrees.  Along both banks of the mighty river ice had formed in the still waters, crusting the river with a five-day beard.

 
Robert tried his cell phone again. Nothing, not even an attempt to find a network; not “network busy” or “try again”, just nothing but dead air; shout and pout and knock yourself out, someone in his long-past memory had said.

 
There were no bird sounds; no wind, no trees whistling or moaning on the river’s banks. Up close there would be a sloshy kind of sound as the river moved downstream.

 
“There!” pointed Charley Lame Deer. Two miles away the Missouri River seemed to change itself from 2D to 3D as churned around the last bend in the river west of Wolf Point before straightening out toward the east. The water, now moving due north toward the town, simply became tired of being constrained by the low, meandering serpentine prairie gully it had been. Up close the river had a “storm surge” of nearly fifteen feet, a quarter-mile wide swath of river filled with every Tom, Dick and Harry of river debris imaginable; automobile tires, barbed wire, trees, plastic bottles, tree stumps. The surge launched itself out of the normal boundary and struck out across land, like a 2
nd
grade child freed of supervision; it ran amok.

 
The bank at the corner of the bend had been shaped over many years by the path of the river into a smooth, sandy bar; at impact, the river surge angrily splashed twenty additional feet into the air, similar to the effect of a seawall on an approaching hurricane. But the river would have none of it, and treated the northern bank as no consequence. Now free and with sixty miles of unfettered water behind it, the Missouri rushed northward across Knorr, Idaho, Helena, Granville, Edgar, Dawson, Custer, Benton and Main Streets; the paved roads acting like autobahns for the water.

 
Cutting through the town, the largest on the Assinboine and Sioux Reservation, also called the Fort Peck Reservation, was the Burlington Northern Santa Fe railroad line, separating the town into a north side and south side.  The downtown business section, the high school, the Ford dealership, the American Legion and Elks Club, Arlo’s Bar and the Wolf Point Café were all on Main and Anaconda Streets, each one-way, just south of the tracks. Four five-story grain silos had been built near the tracks for easy access to ship grain to Billings to the west and Minot to the east.

 
The Missouri rushed up Sixth and Forth Avenues South and without stopping, crossed the tracks and started thrashing the north side of town before losing some of its initial steam. The rushing water beat Wolf Point with an ugly stick. Houses on the south side; many were trailers on concrete blocks, were destroyed in the first wave of water.  As the water poured in rushing to the north it crossed US Highway 2, which runs from Houlton, Maine to Everett, Washington, now called Sunset Drive, smashing through the Homestead Inn, McDonalds, the Old Town Grill, Subs n Such, KFC, before starting to bend eastward, ever so slightly downhill. 

 
Unlike a hurricane which has a start- and end-time to the beating, the new Missouri River had sixty miles of rushing water behind it and a reservoir of impounded water 150 miles long behind that. The amount of force would be calculable but the resulting number wouldn’t make any sense.

 
Water started to shift eastward, being guided by the EW streets. In the first ten minutes of river surge, Wolf Point, Montana was scoured, erased from the map. Only the prescient and lucky were able to escape; most on highway 2 in either direction. 

Wolf Point Bridge on highway 13

  “Mother of God,” exclaimed Robert O’ Brien under his breath. It was like being witness to the Apocalypse. The two were stunned speechless; their breath two trails of vapor in the cold morning air.

 
“Boss, we got to get out of here,“ Charley said simply, his senses recognizing that the 84-year old bridge might not survive the onslaught it was about to get. To the west the air was filled with debris, as if the town of Wolf Point was being blown up.

 
“Shit!” shouted Robert, hustling around the Blazer and into the passenger seat. Charley Lame Deer quickly started the car and slammed it into gear, heading north across the bridge toward the junction with highway 2.

  “Wait a minute, Charley! Just wait!”
Charley stopped
what the hell
on his face. Robert’s face was screwed up into deep concentration.

 
Geography maps showing the various power grids ran through his mind. The Missouri River runs from Fort Peck, Montana eastward into North Dakota, then makes a sharp turn at the end of Lake Sakakawea, an impoundment of water equal to Fort Peck Lake, straight south through Bismarck and into South Dakota where massive Lake Oahe is dammed at the state capital of Pierre; cuts through South Dakota and is the border between it and Nebraska, then forms the border with Iowa, past Sioux City and Omaha, before being the border with Missouri and Kansas, makes a sharp right turn at Kansas City (KS/MO) and slams into the Mississippi River just north of St. Louis.

 
If I go north and the power stays out, it’s very possible we’ll be trapped on the “wrong” side of the river, again!  Winter has another eight weeks to run, there is snow on the ground everywhere, and with the Missouri River running rampant, normal crossings may not be possible.

 
I can’t get to Colorado by going north. Sweet Nancy. I could provide some technical and management assistance downstream in the Dakotas or further south. There’s nothing I’m going to be able to do to help in Williston, but perhaps at the Garrison Dam in Pick City
.