Her Beautiful Brain

by Ann Hedreen

  Memories Exist, Even When Forgotten. Really? Where?

  What if she and I were walking in the park right now and I was listening to her stories?

  It is hard to move beyond walking in the park with this whole “What if” line of thinking. Because what she would be in my life, if she were still alive, is such a part of the fabric, the dailiness of it, that it would be impossible to tease out and name the strands: of borrowing things, the way I borrowed her old bathrobe to play Beatrice. Of sharing books and movies and rants about the news. Of drop-bys and phone calls. Pots of strong coffee. I bet she would have first resisted and then embraced cell phones. And email. She would have loved being able to email photos and updates when she traveled: “That’s me on the camel!”

  I know it’s not unusual to be motherless at fifty-three. I know there are many women who no longer have a mom to borrow clothes from or call for a quick pep talk. But the if if if that is so haunting, with Alzheimer’s disease, is that there is no one moment when the bells ring out and you realize: This is going to mean saying goodbye. We need to talk about and do and experience everything we’ve been putting off—now.

  Part of the problem is that by the time you know what’s going on—Arlene, we think you have Alzheimer’s disease—it’s already too late to do quite a few of those things.

  And then one day you look up and realize you’ve traded places. You’re giving the pep talk: “Oh, Mom, don’t be silly. We all forget each other’s birthdays sometimes—this family is so huge!” You’re giving her a sweater because she forgot to bring one. And the stories that never got told? Well, who can think about those now when we have to have conversations about giving up driving or filling the pill-minder or wearing a Safe Return bracelet?

  And so the little girls in the photo remain mute. Likewise the pre-teen Arlene holding the trout and the fishing pole. And all the albums full of Mom and Jo Ann, playing and mugging and posing through the years.

  Jo Ann and Mom grew apart when they grew up and Mom never really told that story either. It may have had something to do with Jo Ann moving to Texas when she got married and becoming so Texan that she adopted a full-on drawl.

  But it’s not just Mom and Jo Ann who are mute. There are photo albums in my basement that are more than a hundred years old, full of portraits of veiled brides, stiff-suited grooms, sausage-curled children: some with names—a few that are familiar, many that are not—penciled underneath; many others nameless.

  And after Mom moved out of her Madrona house, all of these albums wound up in boxes in my basement.

  Where they mutely exist, even when forgotten.

  Maybe we Finns are too good at turning our backs on the past. Maybe it was seven centuries of being ruled by Sweden. When Sweden handed Finland over to Russia in 1809 and Russia decreed that Finns would be allowed to speak their own language again, many had to learn it in school. One of those students was a tailor’s son and future doctor named Elias Lönnrot, who became so enamored of his new-old language and so concerned about how very little of it existed in writing that he interrupted his medical studies several times to travel the country, collecting and writing down Finnish stories and poems. He began to see patterns, the threads of a Finnish mythology, and he wove the old stories together into an epic poem he called the Kalevala, whose dramatic cadence inspired Longfellow’s Hiawatha and whose fantastic tales, some say, inspired J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.

  Lönnrot’s name is no longer well known outside of Finland, but he remains a national hero. He gave his people not only a written language but a recorded culture, a unique identity: not Scandinavian, not Baltic, but something different, something ancient, a self-knowledge that the Finns brought with them when they migrated to the mines and logging camps and fisheries of North America.

  One summer Mom finally read Grandma’s copy of the English translation of the Kalevala, a four-hundred-page tome I now keep on my shelf and have read—some of.

  The hero of the Kalevala is Väinämöinen, the magic story-singer, who was born an old man, and whose power lay in his amazing memory for every song and story that ever was. He was like the mythic version of Elias Lönnrot: the one who made sure that all the old stories existed, even when forgotten by mere mortals.

  Väinamöinen’s stories were as powerful as his ability to remember them. He could recite a story and poof! A copper-bottomed boat would appear right when he needed it to get away from some enemy. His stories could make fields flourish or snow melt or the darkness of winter lift from the land. And being hundreds of years old didn’t slow him down for a minute.

  It’s hard not to love a hero like that. Especially if you were an English teacher like Mom and you spent your days trying to persuade teenagers that words are powerful and important.

  I wish she’d written down some of her own stories, and some of Grandpa’s and Grandma’s. But she wasn’t blessed with Väinämöinen’s centuries or even Elias Lönnrot’s eight blazing decades. And all the wishing and What Ifs in the world won’t change that.

  The other day Nick was loafing around the doorway to my office.

  “Mom, what’s this?” He picked up a piece of weathered wood from my shelf. “It’s been sitting here forever.”

  “That is not just any piece of wood,” I said. I told him that I found it when I went to Red Lodge, Montana thirteen years ago. That I was with Mom and Lisa and we drove around with a map from the county courthouse until we found what we were pretty sure was the farm that Grandma Cere’s parents had homesteaded.

  “The house was abandoned and we walked around and took pictures and I found that piece of wood outside what looked like it might have been the sauna, which would have been the first thing they built.”

  “Oh,” he said.

  “You can see the nail holes in it. Who knows? Maybe my great-grandpa pounded those nails.”

  That day in Red Lodge, Mom tried so hard to remember the farm. She had visited it many times when she was very young. But it was sold for taxes in 1939, when she was eight years old. Now she was sixty-four and her memories were blowing away like the topsoil of eastern Montana did all through the thirties.

  It was on that trip that Lisa and I noticed another strange thing that her brain was doing.

  “We saw him yesterday,” Mom would declare, pointing to a hitchhiker on the freeway whom Lisa and I knew none of us had ever seen before in our lives.

  “This hotel was great the last time we were here,” she would say of a hotel none of us had ever stayed at.

  It was as if the sorter mechanism in her brain was misfiring, and new experiences were getting wrongly labeled as memories. As if her brain was trying to compensate for the memories that had gotten trapped in plaques and tangles and were, if not lost altogether, no longer available. As if her brain was working hard to create new stories to fill in for the old ones.

  What if someday some scientist as powerful as Väinämöinen figures out how to take that urge that the brain has—to compensate, to do something that works when what used to work no longer does—and uses it to pry loose those trapped memories?

  If, if, if it could’ve happened for Mom.

  It didn’t.

  But what if it could for some other mom? Some other grandma, some other girl with shiny bobbed hair forever frozen in a photo, so much of her story as lost as the Finnish language almost was?

  What if?

  The Helsinki Yacht Club

  Montana looked beat. Whipped. Ready for a six-month nap under a nice white blanket. It was September 24, 2009 and the edge of that truly big sky that greets you the minute you come out of the Idaho forests was not blue but sooty brown with the smoke of the summer’s last stubborn forest fires. The foothill pastures of the Bitterroot Range had gone from golden to silver gray. The cottonwoods along the Clark Fork River wore the faded green of a soldier’s oldest pair of fatigues, showing no sign of putting on their fall show. A week from now, a jolt of frost would make them do it. But not yet. N
ot on this dry, ashy, eighty-degree afternoon.

  I was whipped too, after seven solo hours on I-90. Up until the minute I finally got in the car and left Seattle, I had debated whether to make the trip: so many hours of driving; so much to do at home. So wasteful, from a planetary perspective: one person, me, driving from Seattle to Butte, Montana and back: ten hours at least, each way!

  So lonesome, the thought of knocking around eerie old Butte by myself.

  But I hadn’t been there in six years. It was time for an update. If you care about Butte, you need to see it now and then, because bits of it are always disappearing. Which you could say about any place in America, but Butte is a special case.

  “In 1955, mining in Butte saw the light, literally,” begins the lead story in the Summer 2009 edition of PitWatch, a publication of the Berkeley Pit Public Education Committee. 1955 was the year that the Anaconda Company closed nearly all of its honeycomb of copper mines under Butte and began bulldozing the city’s surface. “But,” according to PitWatch, “mining had always been the lifeblood of Butte, and so the community embraced the new mine, and there was little objection to the sacrifice of some of the city’s neighborhoods.”

  The article goes on to describe how, between 1955 and 1982, the Berkeley Pit, named for one of the shaft mines it replaced, swallowed one neighborhood after another—Meaderville, Dublin Gulch, McQueen, Finntown—until it stretched a mile and a quarter from west to east and a mile from north to south. When mining at the Pit stopped in 1982, the machine-made canyon slowly filled with more than forty billion gallons of contaminated groundwater. Years of environmental litigation ensued. While the lawyers were arguing, scientists found ways to extract the last bits of copper from the wastewater itself.

  Now, the Berkeley Pit is part of the biggest EPA Superfund complex of sites in the country—a poison necklace that extends from Butte 120 miles down the Clark Fork River to Missoula. It’s a new era in western Montana: if you’re drawing a good paycheck, chances are you’re an environmental engineer.

  Eight hours after I left Seattle, I got off I-90 in Missoula one exit too early. I was distracted by a frightening billboard that featured a photo of a grimy public toilet, with the words: No one thinks they’ll lose their virginity here. Meth will change that. It was about the tenth Meth billboard I’d seen since the Idaho border.

  I found myself in the newest part of Missoula, a neighborhood that had not existed the last time I’d been there, a sprawl of look-alike homes and chain hotels and stores so huge they gave new meaning to the words “big box.” Finally I stumbled into the older, more familiar part of town and reached my modest destination, the fifties-vintage Campus Inn, which looked just as beige and worn out as Montana and me.

  After I checked in, I went out to stretch my legs. Though I could still smell the forest fires, the evening air revived me. Sandwiched between chain restaurants, I found the River Wok. I took my saffron-steamy Singapore Noodles back to my room and holed up with a few bottles of Bent Nail IPA from Red Lodge, Montana—purchased in honor of Grandma Cere’s birthplace—and Grandma’s copy of Butte’s Memory Book.

  Published in 1976, Butte’s Memory Book is the size of an extra-fat coffee-table book, though it is more like the city’s own eccentric photo album than some glossy PitWatch kind of publication. It includes a two-page spread on the Pit as it looked in the mid-seventies, when it “had crept to about four blocks from the center of town.” But my favorite photos are in the section called “Street Scenes.” Most of them are taken in the 1920s, thirties, and forties, when downtown Butte resembled Times Square: every crossing thronged with people, cars, trolleys, but mostly people, all busy, all going somewhere. Eight or ten across on West Park Street at three in the afternoon, according to the clock in one photo from 1941.

  Maybe Mom, age ten, is somewhere in that crowd, I thought. Maybe it’s a Saturday and Auntie Helen is taking her and Jo Ann out for an ice cream. It looks like a bright, early summer day.

  In the foreground of the photo, I spotted a girl with short brown hair walking next to a girl with a mane as glossy and blond as Veronica Lake’s. Their backs are to the camera. Their sleeves are puffed and their arms and legs bare. It could be Mom and Jo Ann, who knows? Maybe Auntie Helen couldn’t come and they’re doing an errand for their grandma, who doesn’t like to leave Finntown because she doesn’t speak English. They’ve walked the long blocks from Grandma’s house out on the east side and now they’re in this crush of people and everyone’s got somewhere to go. The Depression’s over—Europe is at war—the world needs copper and Butte has the mines and the men for the job.

  And, on that fine day in 1941, Butte has children, so many children whose lives are changing even as the photographer snaps his shutter. Their fathers are going back to work.

  Their fathers—my grandfather among them—grew up at a time when there was so much good-paying work that it was all a boy could do to stay in school and not bolt for the mines. Grandpa bolted when he was sixteen. Who needed a diploma in 1921 when a strong, healthy teenager could walk away from high school and right down the shaft and be earning what his own father earned in no time at all? In the 1920s, every country in the world needed copper wire, more and more and more of it, to turn the new electric lights on and copper pipes, miles of pipes, to connect all those new faucets and toilets. The Anaconda Copper Company was working three shifts a day to meet the need.

  But then, just when Grandpa and his friends were courting and marrying and having their first babies, everything changed.

  In 1929, the price of copper plummeted with the stock market and Anaconda started drastically cutting back on production. And a new generation of Butte children, Mom’s generation, was born to fathers who worked only some of the time. Fathers who, like my Grandpa, sometimes even took care of the babies and the house while their wives worked as maids. Mom remembered Grandma telling her that Grandpa would pull the shades so no one would see him washing diapers.

  That 1941 photo in Butte’s Memory Book is a picture of a beaten-down city waking up. Even the season is changing: those two girls in the puffed sleeves of summer are surrounded by grownups still in jackets and even coats, still not ready to believe the warm weather’s going to last.

  I couldn’t sleep that night at the Campus Inn. My mind was a jumble of all the photos in Butte’s Memory Book and all my own Butte memories and all the things I’d left undone at home in order to make the trip. The fan in my room was wheezing like an old miner. I wanted to just turn it off and open my window wide, but I was on the ground floor and all the meth billboards I’d seen on I-90 had made me nervous.

  In the morning I went for a shambling run along the stretch of the Clark Fork River that edges the University of Montana’s campus. I stopped to read a plaque that proclaimed the riverside trail to be the very route that Lewis and Clark followed two hundred years ago. On this smoky Friday, the most intrepid travelers I passed were a group of barefoot, dreadlocked young people who looked like they’d slept outside.

  As I ran, I thought about Mom’s one unhappy year as a student here and how the first time I’d visited Missoula I had marveled at the thought of her being unhappy here after growing up in Butte: here, on this leafy campus in this velvety river valley, after a childhood on top of a bare hill riddled with belching mines. But Mom had taken a stand against pledging a sorority. She thought sororities were silly and shallow and she didn’t realize until it was too late how lonely that would leave her. She began to spend as many weekends as she could at Montana State in Bozeman, four hours away by train, with her high school boyfriend. When John transferred to the University of Washington and her parents announced that they too were moving to a small town near Seattle, Mom followed, thinking she’d resume her studies after a quarter off to earn some money. But it would be twenty years until she went back to school.

  The red brick halls Mom knew in 1948 are dwarfed now by a ring of newer, glassier buildings. But the big white, chalk “M” on the side of M
ount Sentinel still watches over the campus. And the old bungalows where the professors live are well tended and well gardened and sheltered by the same cozy canopy of oaks and cottonwoods and big-leaf maples that have lined Missoula’s streets for a century.

  Montanans call Missoula the Garden City, because you can actually grow a garden there: the temperatures are not quite as frigid as the rest of the state and, EPA Superfund complex stretching down the Clark Fork River aside, the dirt in the town itself is not too toxic to grow grass and trees and flowers. But to a girl arriving from Butte in 1948, it might have felt more like a greenhouse than a garden: stuffy, claustrophobic, all dahlias and zinnias and sorority tea parties and country kids from Montana’s ranches and farms and forests who hadn’t lived through the urban opera of Butte’s worst and best years. Kids who thought a crowd meant the county fair, who could not imagine crossing the street in a throng ten deep on an ordinary summer afternoon.

  But I wondered, too, as I always do in Missoula: what if Mom had made a few friends and stuck it out at the U of M? She had been such a star student at Butte High School. She had several small scholarships. And yet, as she wrote in a psychology paper when she finally did go to college two decades later, “My biggest problem lay simply in making decisions … By the time I was twenty-one I had married and had my first baby. By the time I was twenty-five I had two babies and a divorce, not of my own choosing. The only goal I can remember having when I was in high school was to complete college, begin a career, and remain single until at least the age of twenty-five. I didn’t plan anything; I just let it happen.”

  I didn’t linger in the Garden City. I wanted to get to Butte.

  Though I did not set foot in Montana until I was twelve, Butte loomed large over my childhood. We spent a lot of time with our grandparents and one of our favorite things to do was to look at their old photo albums and ask them questions: What is this parade? Who are these people? Grandma, did you really make these Halloween costumes from scratch? As he played solitaire at the kitchen table, Grandpa would throw out cryptic lines about Butte’s glory days: about the crowds that greeted visiting presidents and movie stars, mines a mile deep, dance halls that could hold a thousand people, bars full of gambling cowboys and miners.