by Ann Hedreen
When I was four, my big sister and brother were picked for a road trip to Butte with Mom, Dad, Grandma, and Grandpa. I was consumed with jealousy: Johnny and Kristie would get to see Butte with their own eyes! Not only that, they would get to sleep at a real motel: the alluringly named Treasure Trails, owned by my grandparents’ best friends, Auno and Phil Mikkola.
Finally, when I was twelve and Lisa was ten, it was our turn to go to Butte. But ours would be a different kind of trip: no Dad, because Dad had moved out. Grandpa would drive, with Grandma and Mom next to him in the front seat of Grandpa’s cavernous Pontiac and Lisa and I bouncing around in the back, hiding behind the clothes on hangers and taking in, for the first time, the hugeness of the landscape that lay beyond the wet side of the Cascade Mountains.
The Treasure Trails Motel was just as Kristie had described it: like a miniature version of the house on Bonanza, with tooled wood and branding irons on the walls and paintings of old Western scenes and a bowl of agates on the front desk and keychains, made from agates, swinging from a little display rack next to the copper bracelets and the postcards. The beds had wool plaid blankets and crisp white sheets. Phil was funny and skinny and Auno was friendly and warm and pillowy. I wanted to stay forever.
This time, all by myself and all grown up, I drove east from Missoula to Butte wishing that the Treasure Trails Motel was still there. But I knew it was long gone, not to the Pit but to the mindless blight of chain hotels and fast-food restaurants that has infected the outskirts of every small city in western America. Phil and Auno were long gone too: like Grandma, like Auntie Helen, like a lot of people in Butte, Auno had died of Parkinson’s disease, her big white hands shaking like a cottonwood in a storm.
On this trip, since I couldn’t stay at the Treasure Trails, I decided to travel further back in time. I had hoped to stay at the Copper King Mansion, once the home of the mighty copper baron W. A. Clark and now a bed & breakfast inn. I loved imagining what Grandpa or Grandma or Auno or Mom would think if they knew I was sleeping in one of Clark’s bedrooms. But I couldn’t stay there; the entire mansion was booked by a wedding party. The proprietor suggested I try the Finlen.
Growing up, I had heard stories of the Finlen, which I had always thought was the Hotel Finland, since it was on the edge of Finntown. But no, the nine-story, 1924 landmark was the grandiose project of an Irish businessman named James T. Finlen, who modeled it after the Hotel Astor in New York City. Charles Lindberg, Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy, and Richard Nixon had all stayed there. Historic photos show the bar, the ballroom, the restaurant, the barber shop, the beauty shop, the coffee shop, the grand lobby—all full of people, most of them dressed to the nines.
When I walked in on that Indian summer Friday, it was just the hotel clerk and me, both of us in blue jeans, leaning on the counter under the crystal chandeliers.
She let me look at a few rooms. They were both sixty-eight dollars, twenty bucks less than the Campus Inn back in Missoula. It was hard to choose between the sweeping downhill view to the south, drenched in afternoon sun, or the quieter uphill view of red brick buildings and the gallows frames of the old mines. I chose the uphill view: it would be full of light in the morning and it had an eastern corner window that let in a cooling breeze straight off the Continental Divide.
On Main Street, I found Bob and Sandy’s BS Café, sunny and empty, and took a table by the window. The waitress called me “dear.” I impulsively ordered a meat and potato pasty, a Butte favorite brought over from Cornwall a century ago by the Cornish miners, who called them “letters from ’ome.” My pasty came smothered in gravy, which I hadn’t expected and which I knew made it an even worse offender re my little middle-aged cholesterol problem. But the gravy, with its flavor of all the best, crispy bits of roast from the bottom of the pan, reminded me so much of something my grandma would have made forty years ago that it was like a letter from childhood. Like something my tired, solitary self hadn’t even known how much it was craving.
After the pasty, I walked, slowly, down the same streets I’d been looking at the night before in the Butte Memory Book. It was Friday afternoon. On the busiest blocks, there were maybe half a dozen of us, walking in the sharp shadows of the Metals Bank Building, the M&M Café, the offices and storefronts: many empty, some newly busy with Superfund subcontractors or bead shops or antique stores.
I turned around and headed east on Park Street, crossing Main, towards the blocks where all of my Butte relatives had once lived. Now I was the only person on the street. Now the only business on the block was a thrift shop with a window full of dust-covered baby swings and car seats. Even though a sign said “Open,” it was dark and locked.
Then there were no businesses.
Then there were no buildings.
Now I was in the heart of Finntown, which for the last fifty years has resembled the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina: block after block of bare dirt lots with an occasional, lone, broken-down house or a remnant of a foundation. At the end of it all, you arrive at the barbed-wire fences surrounding the Berkeley Pit, where the rest of the neighborhood once was.
There was always one holdout in Finntown: the little white stucco Helsinki Bar, clinging for decades, all alone, to the side of the hill. It was still there, I was happy to see. But as I got closer, I saw that its name had changed since the last time I was in Butte. The new sign said “Helsinki Yacht Club.” There were several pickup trucks parked out front. It was, apparently, open.
But I didn’t even think of going in. No, I did—it was open and there were people inside—but the sign said “club” and I was a stranger. Though I might feel shy and behave politely, I knew what I would look like, walking in there: a big-city rubbernecker. And who was I to violate the privacy of people who preferred to do their drinking in deep gloom in the middle of the afternoon?
I took a few photos of the exterior. Then I decided to get the car and drive down to the Berkeley Pit viewing stand.
I’ve been there before, more than once, so it no longer shocks me, this silent canyon that made world headlines in 1995 when 342 migrating snow geese landed on its lethal waters and died within hours. But this time, as I walked through the long white tunnel that leads to the wooden deck overlooking the vast Pit, I felt—something else. Something that I thought might be sadness. My throat was tightening up and I thought I might be about to have a really good cry for my grandparents and my mom and all the other Finns in Butte whose homes and businesses and memories have been chewed up by the Pit. But then I realized that what I felt was not sadness. It was a kind of slow-cooked, well-seasoned anger, an anger that had been simmering on my mental back burner like a strong pan gravy made with toxic wastewater.
Yes, the world needs copper. Yes, I have enjoyed a lifetime supply of electricity and plumbing. But was this really the only way the Anaconda Company could keep the copper coming?
My great-grandfather died at fifty-five of what in Butte was known as the miner’s con, short for consumption: coal miners call it black lung. My grandpa died of emphysema. Auntie Helen and Grandma—Parkinson’s. Mom—Alzheimer’s disease. On the way to Montana, I listened to Mildred Armstrong Kalish’s memoir, Little Heathens, in which she notes that nearly all of her relatives live healthily into their nineties. Not my family, I thought. Whatever chance we had at that kind of longevity is long buried under that Pit water.
I’m not a scientist, I’m not a doctor, I’m just a writer and a filmmaker who will always wonder why my beautiful, brainy mom wound up with Alzheimer’s disease. Staring into the strangely maroon waters of the Berkeley Pit, what took my breath away was not the depth or the circumference of this man-made, poisonous lagoon but the depth and breadth of the greed that dug it, the greed that brought the copper kings and their company heirs to a point where they were willing to first pollute Butte’s soil, air, and water beyond recognition and then bulldoze half of it, all for the sake of a profit shared by a very, very few.
I
needed a break from sightseeing. I headed back to the hotel.
I thought, as always in Butte, of Hopper and how he would have loved my room at the Finlen at four o’clock on a late September afternoon, with the sun bouncing in off the red buildings across the street. I loved it too; I loved the light and the breeze blowing through. I loved the big dresser and desk and chairs, all dark cherry wood, like something Auntie Helen might have owned.
It occurred to me, as I sipped a strong cup of coffee, that this was the first time I had been to Butte by myself. Maybe that was why the Pit made me so angry this time. I wasn’t showing it to my husband or my children, saying, Can you believe this? I was seeing it, by myself, without distractions, seeing what it really was.
The first time I stood on that viewing stand was in 1997, on the trip to Montana with Mom and Lisa. We had just come from Red Lodge, where we’d been looking up the homestead farm where Grandma Cere grew up, and now we were in Butte to see what we could find of Mom’s roots.
Lisa and I had hoped that being in Butte, or what was left of it, might trigger some childhood memories for Mom. Though we were still a month away from Dr. Forsythe’s pronouncement of probable Alzheimer’s disease, her memory problems had been getting steadily worse and we felt like if we didn’t make the trip that summer, it might really be too late.
But even if your brain is in tip-top shape, it’s hard to get much of a trigger out of standing on a weedy lot with nothing to look at but other weedy lots and a big, strangely colored lake that didn’t used to be there. Especially if you lived in a dozen different places in your first ten years and nothing is left of a single one of them.
Mom had been to Butte many times during the Berkeley Pit years, so she knew that most of Finntown was gone. But she kept wondering if we were in the right place.
“Well, the Helsinki Bar is still here,” she’d say. “So I guess we are. But it just doesn’t seem right. Do you think they could’ve moved the Helsinki Bar?”
A year later, when she returned to Butte with Kristie for her fiftieth high school reunion, she was unable to find her way around the hotel without help.
Five years after that, Rus and I went to her fifty-fifth reunion without her. By that time, she was getting around-the-clock care. Traveling even a few miles in a car was almost impossibly traumatic for her.
Her classmates welcomed us and our camera to the Class of 1948’s fifty-fifth Reunion Barbecue at the War Bonnet Motel. They reminisced about how “Arlene was the smartest girl at Butte High School.” They asked how she was doing; I told them she was getting really good care and was in good spirits. I didn’t tell them that she spoke mostly gibberish and had to be spoon-fed, that her renowned brain now resembled Finntown: a few Helsinki Bar–style holdouts, but overall, not much still standing.
The brick storefronts across the street from my Finlen windows were starting to blaze and shimmer. I went outside to catch the sunset and call home.
I tried to describe to Rus how the old buildings looked like they’d been ignited by the setting sun, how someday he should think of some reason to shoot a film in September in Butte. I told him about the anger I’d felt, staring into the Berkeley Pit after walking the rag-end of Finntown. I thanked him for persuading me to bring a kettle and coffee on this trip: my Finnish forebears would so deeply approve of me brewing up an afternoon cup at the Finlen.
Then I told Rus about the Helsinki Bar and how it was still there but it had changed its name to the Helsinki Yacht Club.
“You have to go in,” he said.
I felt that old marital discomfort: bold Rus versus reticent me. But it was a discomfort I well knew was one of the best things about our marriage, though I sometimes pretended otherwise. How many times had he urged me on when I needed urging?
“Are you kidding?” I said. “What if it really is a private club?”
“Well, then they’ll tell you it’s a private club. But meanwhile, you’ll get a look inside.”
The sun was resting now on uptown Butte like a fat Cornish pasty on an old iron stove.
“Couldn’t I just take a lot of photos of the outside of the bar in this great light?”
Big sigh. “Are you writing a photography book? Go. Just go!”
I told him it looked really grim and depressing, like the kind of place where people drink all day.
“Just go in and order a beer,” Rus said. “What’s the worst that can happen? It’s research. I bet they get people like you all the time, lurking around trying to find their roots.”
I watched the sun drop below the horizon and then I walked down the block and into the Helsinki Yacht Club.
It helped that the sun had just set: no more jarring contrast between bright daylight and artificial night, no dismal taint of daytime drinking. But it was dark. Everything was the color of tobacco: the wood of the bar, the barstools, the walls, the air itself, thick with tobacco smoke. Even the dozen or so people inside took on a tobacco hue in the shadowy light, their faces shaded by trucker caps.
The members, if they were members, of the Helsinki Yacht Club ranged from not credibly of drinking age to ancient. Some were standing in groups, some sat or stood at the bar, a few were playing pool. Some looked like they’d just gotten off work and others like they’d been hunched over a shot and a beer all day. I hadn’t seen so many people in one place since I got to Butte.
I chose the empty bar stool closest to the open door and ordered a beer, a Montana beer called Moose Drool. Everyone else was drinking Bud or Bud Light and smoking like crazy. Montana was a week away from banning smoking in bars. I wondered if the ban would apply to “clubs.”
“Where you from?” asked the bartender as she opened my beer. She was a thirty-something woman with a mane of curly blond hair as thick and healthy as a high school cheerleader’s. In fact, she looked like she could once have been a cheerleader—the friendly-wholesome kind, not the bitchy-scary kind.
“Seattle,” I said. “But my mom grew up right around here.”
“No kidding? You want a glass?”
“No, thanks.”
She set the bottle on the bar next to a half-empty bowl of peanuts. “What was your mother’s address?”
“Well, they moved a lot. But the address on her birth certificate is 488 ½ East Park Street.”
“That’s about a block away. We’re at 405 East Broadway. My mom will be here soon—she can tell you a lot about the neighborhood.”
She plunked four old Polk city directories on the bar. “Have a look.”
I opened the oldest one, 1910, and looked up Grundstrom.
And there he was: my great-grandfather, Henry Grundstrom, “top car man, Black Rock Mine, 738 E. Broadway.”
Henry Grundstrom. I knew his Omar Sharif eyes and handlebar mustache from one solemn family photo taken when Grandpa was a baby, which would have been five years before this crumbling Polk directory was published. But I never knew he was a “top car man.” Did that mean he was in charge of all the car men, whose job was to load the ore into the underground rail cars? Or did that mean he was the best and fastest car man?
I knew, from a copy I had found in Grandma’s box of documents, that Henry had “foresworn allegiance to the Czar of Russia” when he became an American citizen, a phrase I loved because it sounded straight out of Dr. Zhivago. I knew that he broke his wife’s heart when he died in the same year as their daughter. But this little entry in the Polk directory was a snapshot of where he lived and what he did every day. He was a car man, a top car man, at the Black Rock Mine. And in 1910, when his youngest child, my grandpa, was five years old, he and Maria and their four children lived at 738 East Broadway.
The cheerleader-bartender leaned over my shoulder and I pointed to his name.
“That’s my great-grandfather.”
“What’s the address? 738? Well, that’s definitely in the Pit now.”
A short woman with wiry brown hair and a wide, lightly creased face walked in. She wore jeans and an overs
ized, well-worn, plain blue sweatshirt: an ensemble that said either, “I’ve been doing housework” or “I really don’t care about clothes, never have, never will.” I guessed she might be older than me but I really couldn’t tell.
“Mom,” said the bartender, who looked nothing like her. “Meet Ann from Seattle. She’s got roots in the neighborhood. Mom owns this bar,” she told me.
“Hi,” the short woman said. “I’m Linda. Welcome to the Helsinki Yacht Club. You finding some interesting stuff in there?” Her cell phone rang. “Let me take this call and then I’ll show you a great photo that we haven’t put on the wall yet.”
“Put Frank and Sue on the list,” she called out to her daughter, snapping the phone shut. “I’m taking orders for a steak and lobster dinner in a few weeks,” she told me. “Twenty-five bucks a couple. How long are you around Butte?”
“Just a few days.” The dinner sounded like a great deal. I sincerely wished I could be there. It sounded so casual, so unpretentious, so unlike anything that would ever happen in Seattle.
Linda beckoned me into the smoke and the dark. The pool players paused and up-ended their cues as she led me around the table to the back of the bar and pulled an oversized, black-and-white photo mounted on poster board from behind a partition. Rus was right: no one seemed at all bothered by the sight of a visitor fishing for Finntown roots.
“Let’s take it out where we can see it.” Linda led me back towards the open door.
We stood outside under the porch light. She held one side of the photo and I held the other. The picture was taken from up the hill, looking down on Finntown and all the other east-side neighborhoods. Block after busy block of apartments, houses, stores—all gone forever.