by Tim Cahill
Grand Terror was what I had come to Montana to experience, and since it appeared that the weather was going to get between me and my attempt to unravel the mystery of eclipse addiction, I decided to make a quick forty-mile run up to Seeley Lake. Darkness under the ice was going to have to substitute for darkness under the Big Sky, and one man's terror would have to do for everyman's.
The road runs by the lake, which is long and narrow and deep. Mountains rise on either side. The winter community at Seeley Lake is quite small, and if you sat long enough in Barney's Bar and Cafe, you'd likely meet everyone in town. The first person I ran into there was Roy Brown, a husky, slow-talking man who had been on the grader with Kelley when it went down.
"Yeah," Brown said, "I went out with him because I didn't want him to go. Everyone told him not to do it. But he was determined, and I decided to go along and keep an eye on the ice. As soon as we hit the lake, there were all these popping noises, from the ice contracting. We began working the snowmobile course, but on the first turn we started to go through. The wheels dropped through the first layer of ice."
The Montana winter had been especially severe, but there had been a few thaws. By late February the ice was honeycombed with air pockets and was perilously thin. There were two major layers separated by air and slushy snow. The back wheels of the grader dropped through the first layer, but the second layer held.
Brown and Kelley decided to get off" the ice—fast. Kelley brought the plow blade up and rammed the accelerator down, but before they reached shore, the grader broke through the ice again. This time it didn't stop at the second layer.
"Both doors of the cab were open," Brown said, "and I was standing on a little four-inch ledge outside. I shouted that we were busting through and yelled at Mike to jump. I jumped off, and the last thing I saw was Mike still sitting at the wheel, being thrown backward. When I landed, the front wheels of the grader were just going under. The thing went down like a concrete block dropped in a bathtub.
"There were bubbles coming up and a sort of whirlpool
effect, sucking down big chunks of ice. I thought about going in after him, but I thought I'd be pulled down by the suction of the sinking grader. It was pulling all sorts of stuff down with it, like the draft behind a big truck on the highway."
Brown lay out over the solid ice and cleared slush and float ice out of the hole so Kelley could get up. He began pounding big chunks of ice around the hole to direct Kelley to the surface. (Because sound underwater seems to come from everywhere, this was not an effective strategy.) "I started clearing away snow from around the hole to see if he had come up under the ice," Brown said, "but it was a cloudy day and you couldn't see through the ice at all. So I waited by the hole, hoping to pull him out when he came up." But Kelley never surfaced, and when the bubbles stopped, Brown ran for help.
Over coffee at Barney's, I asked Bruce Copenhaver— a reserve deputy, a member of the search-and-res-cue team, and a snowmobile racer—why it was necessary to have anyone clear snow off the race course. On a straightaway, he explained, hopped-up snowmobiles can do 120 miles per hour, and loose snow on the track can be extremely dangerous. Powder thrown into the air by the drive belts can cut visibility substantially. A clear ice track makes for a faster, safer race. That's why Copenhaver had been out on the ice with a bulldozer several days before the Kelley tragedy. Unlike Kelley, Copenhaver is an accomplished scuba diver with experience in the arcane art of ice diving. When his Cat crashed through the ice, Copenhaver took a long, deep breath. But the Cat sank so fast that he found himself pressed tightly to the canopy over the driver's compartment, unable to free himself. The bulldozer settled in the silt at a depth of about forty-five feet.
In the sudden stillness, Copenhaver struggled free of the canopy. He was in big trouble. The sudden shock of the
cold water had upset the delicate membranes of his inner ear, and he experienced a sudden burst of vertigo from the rapid pressure change. His ears ached, and the cold water sapped his will like juice being sucked from a section of orange. There was no visibility at the bottom of the lake; it was as dark as Dracula's crypt down there. In the icy blackness, Copenhaver thought of the lesson instructors drum into every new diver: Panic kills. There is always time to think.
"Luckily," Copenhaver told me, "I found I was positively buoyant." He had been wearing thermal underwear, jeans, and snowmobile pants. Air was trapped between the layers. Ordinarily, the pressure at that depth should have compressed his clothes and forced the air out of them, but he had gone down too quickly for that to happen. Still, he knew he had to ascend in a hurry, before the pressure turned his clothes into a dozen or more pounds of dead weight.
Assuming that the Cat had dropped straight and a perfectly vertical line could be drawn from the machine to the hole, Copenhaver began kicking, moving as well as darkness and vertigo would allow along that imaginary line. There was a thick layer of snow on the ice, and the sunlight did not penetrate it. At thirty feet, Copenhaver saw the hole. Sunlight on the water made it look dimly fluorescent. It was like being in a huge, windowless, unlighted warehouse with one small skylight, just at dusk. A shaft of dying light penetrated the water.
Copenhaver was on a slight angle to the light and kicked rapidly toward it. His confidence grew. He even exhaled a little air and saw with satisfaction that he was ascending faster than the bubbles. Every scuba diver knows that smaller bubbles rise at about sixty feet per minute. Making a quick almost unconscious calculation, he knew he'd be on the surface in fifteen seconds. He could do it.
It wasn't quite that easy. Copenhaver came up under a huge chunk of floating ice. He sank back down, tried another section of the hole, and once again hit ice. He was as close to panic as he had ever been when he burst through
the water on this third attempt. He pulled himself to an ice ledge and gulped great drafts of frigid air.
Lying there with his wet clothes freezing on his body, Copenhaver couldn't stop coughing and spitting up a bloody, pink froth. The pressure of the water at forty-five feet had ruptured some blood vessels in the back of his sinuses, but the injury wasn't serious.
Mike Kelley had been an older man, and one untrained in the art of ice diving.
Copenhaver and others on the search-and-rescue team had made several dives, looking for their friend's body. They wore wet suits and boots and hoods worn in cold-water ocean diving, and they coated the exposed areas on their faces with lanolin. The dives were meticulously planned. They went down in teams following a descending line, each team of two connected by a close-quarters buddy line. One member of each team was tied to a line held by a tender on the surface. Fanning out for the search, they tied a pivot line to the descending line, and when they worked their way around an obstacle, one team held the point. Three sharp tugs at any time and the diver was pulled rapidly to the surface. They found the grader at sixty feet, sunk into a soft layer of silt. Even with high-powered diving lights, visibility was a mere thirty-six inches. A thick cloud of mud and silt hung over the bottom to a height of about ten feet. One diver worked his way into the cab of the grader. Kelley's body wasn't there.
A former Navy diver who had seen too many bodies and who no longer worked with the search-and-rescue team devised an ingenious method of dragging the area where the grader had gone down. They hooked the body on the third pass. It was some fifty feet from the grader.
Another team dived to the grader and attached a cable. Five hundred yards away on the shore was a huge heel-boom crane, anchored to other heavy machinery and trees.
The cable was dragged over the ice and fixed to the crane, which strained against the weight of the twenty-six-thousand-pound grader. The cable sawed a line through the ice, and when the grader was close enough to shore, volunteer labor from the community cut huge blocks of ice and pulled them up with tongs. When the hole was large enough, they pulled the grader out of the lake. It came up front-end first, then twisted ponderously on its back wheels. Blue-black lake mud dri
pped from it, like some monstrous and alien thing.
The 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 Kel-ley'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 Kel-ley'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.
Things 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.