by Ann Hedreen
“There’s East Broadway, where we are now. And there’s Park. This is where the Pit is now,” she added, sweeping her arm across half the picture.
Staring into it, searching for people and laundry and dogs and evidence of lives lived, was a bit like staring at those human outlines I’d seen on the streets of Pompeii and vainly hoping a face will appear, a voice will speak, some miracle will enable us to know what this place was like before all life evaporated. Back when Henry Grundstrom of Raahe, Finland was a top car man who had renounced the Czar. Or when he walked his teenaged son Alton, my grandpa, up to Black Rock to start in the mines. Or when Grandpa, with nothing to do in the midst of the Depression, built his little girls a tiny table and chairs from scrap wood for their pretend-princess tea parties.
“Linda, this is amazing.”
It felt like such a pathetic thing to say. Linda didn’t seem to mind.
“I know. I know,” she said. “Believe it or not, I don’t get tired of looking at it.”
For a fleeting moment, I felt flooded with envy. As if what I wanted was to be Linda, to be living with these photos, these ghosts, in this deserted neighborhood, spending my time fixing up an oddball outpost of a bar where people would flock to my steak dinners.
“I’m curious, are you Finnish?”
She laughed. “Nope, Mexican! But I love this place. I love Butte history. My family goes way back here too. That’s what’s so great about Butte: what a melting pot it is.”
The state of Montana has never been known as a melting pot. But “Butte people,” as they call themselves, are not quite Montanan. They’re miners, or their parents were, and unlike ranchers and farmers and foresters, miners live close together. People say the old boarding houses used to rent the same bed to two or three miners on different shifts. The miners learned to love each other’s food—pasties, tamales, ravioli—and customs: Saturday nights at the Irish saloons followed Saturday afternoons at the Finnish sauna baths. That a short, dark-haired Mexican-American woman with a tall, blonde bartending daughter now runs the Helsinki Yacht Club makes sense in Butte.
“We need to get these things on the walls,” Linda said. “I’ve got some other good photos and then I’ve got all this nautical stuff. You know, for the yacht club theme.”
I still didn’t get it.
She smiled. “Because we’re on the shores of beautiful Lake Berkeley.”
The PitWatch newspaper and website does not use the name “Lake Berkeley,” although it does call the liquid in the pit “water,” as in headlines like, “What’s in the Berkeley Pit Water?” or “Montana Resources Mines the Water” or “Research Continues on Pit Water,” a fascinating article about unusual Pit-dwelling microbes, known as “extremophiles,” that, according to PitWatch, may someday be able to prevent migraines or fight cancer.
“In the future, what we can learn from the Pit could represent the greatest treasure of the Richest Hill on Earth,” the article concludes.
What we can learn from the Pit. I wonder if that will include anything about Alzheimer’s. Or Parkinson’s, or the Miner’s Con.
The notion of calling the pit Lake Berkeley and calling this little bar the Helsinki Yacht Club—or Bob and Sandy calling their café Bob and Sandy’s BS Café—it all fit, somehow, with the sense of humor my mother once had. I could hear one of her favorite pre-Alzheimer’s quips about getting older—“I just consider the alternative and then it doesn’t bother me”—coming from Linda. Or Sandy, if indeed that was Sandy herself who served me that pasty.
My conversation with Linda kept getting interrupted by regulars who wanted to get on her list for the steak and lobster feed and other regulars who had comments on the state of the pool cues or the jukebox and others who just wanted to say hi. During the interruptions, I found more Grundstrom listings in the 1916 (Henry, Maria, and family, 540 East Broadway) and 1948 (Alton, Cere, and family, 1826 Adams, down on the Flats at last in their own little house) directories.
Tiny, tiny bits of type on a thin page. Nothing, nothing at all compared to a photo or one of Grandpa’s scraps of super-8 film. Nothing compared to a remembered scrap of story from Mom or Grandpa or Grandma. And yet I felt almost seasick, as if I had a new pair of glasses on that were much stronger than the old pair and I could suddenly see: in those cryptic Polk listings I could see the streets, the homes, where my mother’s life had started. Where her father’s life had started. Where old Henry Grundstrom, who never actually was old, began something: a new-world family.
“The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness,” Vladimir Nabokov writes, in the opening words of his memoir, Speak, Memory. Sitting on my stool at the bar of the Helsinki Yacht Club, I felt like I had been given a flashlight that, just for a moment, could see backwards into the darkness.
But of course I couldn’t say any of this, not to these Butte people who were so used to living in a ghost town. A ghost city. A ghost melting pot.
I behaved like a good Finn and stayed quiet.
In the 1957 directory (long after my grandparents had left for Buckley, Washington), I found the Treasure Trails Motel. I showed the address to Linda.
“Do you know what’s there now?” I asked.
She closed her eyes for a minute. “Let’s see, 3440 Harrison: that would be down on the Flats, across from the Hampton Inn—you know what?” She smiled.
“What?”
“I think it’s a casino called the Treasure Chest. I wonder if they named it that on purpose.”
The next morning, I drove down Harrison looking for the Hampton Inn and the Treasure Chest.
When I finally spotted it, I felt some of that slow-burning anger I’d felt at the Pit viewing stand. It was such an ugly little building. It didn’t even look like a casino, let alone a casino deserving of the name Treasure Chest. It looked like an insurance office or a cut-rate dental clinic or maybe a place you’d go to buy something you wished you didn’t have to buy, like a wheelchair or an oxygen tank.
I was in Billings once for work and I found a place to stay that reminded me of the Treasure Trails. It was called the Dude Rancher and it had the same Bonanza décor and the same cozy feel. I remember that it started to snow, tiny dry flakes swirling outside my room and rapidly coating the knotty pine windowsill. It was early October. It reminded me of that old story Mom liked to tell about a million times too often about the day it snowed in June and the Butte kids got to stay home from school. Maybe it got stuck in her mind because she liked the theme, which seemed to be that Butte was the kind of place where crazy things happened, like snow days in June.
Or a yacht club on the shores of Lake Berkeley.
That Park Street address on my mother’s birth certificate, just downhill from the Helsinki Yacht Club—488 ½ East Park—that was where Grandpa lived with his mother and brother Niilo in 1930, according to the federal census from that year. They paid twenty dollars in rent to the owners, Auntie Helen and her husband Albert, who lived in the apartment next door. My great-grandpa Henry had died in 1926. Grandpa’s sister Jemina died within months of their father’s death, of influenza or some other sudden killing illness of the era. I don’t remember and there’s no one left for me to ask. So in 1930, the Grundstrom family consisted of Grandpa, his heartbroken mother, his brother, who was in poor health and died a short time later, and Auntie Helen and her husband. Grandpa and Grandma hadn’t married yet.
My mom was born on March 25, 1931. 488 ½ E. Park was her first address.
I wish I knew something about her birth. I wish Grandma had told me a story that started, “The day your mother was born … ”
The day your mother was born, it snowed tiny flakes like stars that could fit on the head of a pin.
I love all the pictures Grandpa took of Mom as a baby, looking so chubby and jolly that you’d never guess there was a Depression going on.
Your mom’s big baby smile lit up the hou
se. She made Grandpa’s mother smile for the first time in five years.
I love the way Grandma looks in those pictures too: her smile just as big and joyous as baby Arlene’s. Her youth so surprising.
The summer your mother was a baby, we took her to the farm in Red Lodge to meet my family. Nothing soothed her like the roar of Rock Creek. We picnicked by the boiling rapids every day. I thought we’d all be deaf in two weeks! Grandpa fished for trout. We ate as much as we wanted and your mother grew as fat as a little cupid.
But Grandma never talked like that.
Like Mom, she’d been a standout scholar, earning the highest score in her county on the eighth grade graduation exam. But when she was thirty-five, she almost died of encephalitis, and she never again felt the mental sharpness on which she’d prided herself as a young woman. In her final years, Parkinson’s shot its shaky tendrils through her brain. She often thought she was back on the farm in Red Lodge and called me by one of her four sisters’ names when I came to visit.
I wondered so often where Mom was in her final years. I often thought of Grandma and wished that Mom, too, could mentally transport herself to a grassy homestead farm just downriver from Yellowstone.
I feared that Mom was somewhere scarier. That she was caught in a cold white passageway, like the tunnel to the Berkeley Pit viewing stand.
Maybe not. Maybe she was laughing and sledding on a snow day in June.
Or maybe she went back to her baby self. Maybe her brain played the loud symphony of the Rock Creek rapids, lulling her to a deep and deafened sleep, allowing her to rest at last after all those years of struggling to stay afloat on a rising lake of toxic plaques and tangles.
Maybe she found her own Helsinki Yacht Club. Her own dark, cozy respite from the wasteland of her shrinking brain. Where her grandpa, whom she never knew, wasn’t dead of the miner’s con, he was a strapping, strong Finn who had risen to be the top car man at the Black Rock Mine. Where she and her mother were both still young women, still smiling, still sharp as two brass tacks. I could just see them hanging Linda’s photos of Finntown on the walls of the Yacht Club and debating where to put the nautical stuff: the buoys and ropes and life rings that would never be needed to fish anyone out of Lake Berkeley, where no one who had a brain would ever swim.
Driving away from Butte the next day, I decided to stop at Gregson, as my Grandma used to call it. In her day, Gregson was a place where the steam-loving Finns and all the other tired miners could soak away the afternoon in the waters of the natural hot springs. Now, the springs have been tamed into a series of pools called the Fairmont Hot Springs Resort.
I paid my eight dollars and slipped into the ninety-four-degree “lap pool,” where I swam slowly, back and forth, stretching, switching strokes, letting the anger and sadness and lostness of Butte slip away for at least this little while. Then I switched to the 101-degree soaking pool, resting my head on the edge, basking in the last minutes of Montana’s summer, thinking of nothing. When I got too warm, I would get out for a minute and sit in the cool fall breeze that had kicked up overnight and watch the tumbleweeds blow through the meadow outside the Fairmont’s fence. Then I’d slip back in for just a few more minutes.
I had only driven fifteen of the five hundred miles home.
Northern House
Trying to find a home for someone who’s done a stint at the Seattle Geropsychiatric Center is like trying to find a home for a paroled sex offender. We weren’t yet accustomed to thinking of our mother as a parolee, an ex-con of the dementia world. So we were grateful for Northern House.
We knew how hard Lynette, the Gero Psych social worker, had labored to find this new address for Mom after it became clear that she would no longer “fit in” at Fairview Terrace. But that didn’t mean we didn’t notice things, like the split-level, floor-plan-in-a-can dreariness of the place; the peeling, Kleenex-blue paint; the faint lines of moss creeping up the outside walls; the cloying floral furniture you wouldn’t wish on your most impoverished college-aged nephew.
Mom loved good woods, strong stripes, straight lines. She would never have chosen Northern House in a million years.
And yet, it was surrounded by tall trees, some of them probably 150 years old: big, patient, second-growth Douglas firs miraculously left standing when the split-level people came through forty or fifty years ago. And it was tucked into a winding ravine in a neighborhood just north of the Seattle city limits, not too far from the little red ranch house that she and Dad bought when they were newlyweds. Sometimes I took the old highway to get there instead of the freeway and drove past landmarks Mom would have loved: Highland Ice Arena, where she, who had grown up skating in Butte, held out her hands and coaxed us away from the edge of the rink; Leilani Lanes, where she dropped off me and baby Lisa in the upstairs nursery and I watched her through the big glass window, looking so serious as she stared at those pins and then twirling into her huge, happy smile after the crash of a strike, which I still think is one of the best noises in the world.
The round-the-clock staff at Northern House radiated calm and kindness and tree-like patience. Most of them were from Gambia or Ethiopia, and you got the feeling that taking care of people with brain damage and dementia was a breeze compared to some of the earlier chapters of their lives.
They had a completely new view of Mom: the view of people who had never known her any other way.
Before Seattle Gero Psych, in her two years at the Lakeview Retirement Community, she had gone from hosting illicit wine parties and modeling at the annual fashion show to yelling at the staff when they tried to call her out of her room for meals and flat-out refusing to bathe. But the caregivers at Northern House had not seen any of that transformation. Nor had they seen her tied to a wheelchair in the Gero Psych dayroom. They only knew her as the gnomish white-haired woman who walked up and down the hallway all day, muttering and gesturing, but never tiring herself enough to sleep; who looked closer to ninety than she did to her real age, seventy; who had four blue-eyed daughters who were impossibly hard to keep straight. They didn’t wince at having to cut up her food and feed her with a spoon because they didn’t know that just a few months ago, she’d been feeding herself just fine. They didn’t mind if she yelled through her shower because they knew she’d be calm afterwards, soothed by the warm towel and the brush running through her bobbed hair. Arlene didn’t have the thatchy old-lady hair of the other women at Northern House; hers was as fine and straight as her many daughters’.
Unlike the Lakeview or Seattle Gero Psych, Northern House was a last-stop destination. No one pretended that anyone there would ever be well enough to live anywhere else, not even the two youngish residents. One was a brain-damaged car accident victim who was under thirty. The other was in his forties and had inherited Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (known in its infectious form as Mad Cow disease), which, his wife said, was rapidly turning his brain into Swiss cheese. Then there was Jon, who was nearing 100, had no family left, and spoke to everyone in Norwegian because, after eighty years in America, he could no longer remember a word of English. And then there were the two downstairs ladies: one didn’t speak or eat and was fed through a stomach tube and the other was a skeletal wisp who was quietly weepy most of the time but every now and then would let out a series of screams that rocked the house.
And then there was Mom.
Through the looking glass of her disastrous five days at Fairview Terrace followed by the zombifying dose of Haldol and the slow detox at Seattle Gero Psych, Mom had slipped into the late stage of Alzheimer’s. Outings were now too exhausting and overwhelming. My sisters and I no longer got to play the role of liberators, signing her out, as we had at the Lakeview, for family birthday parties or walks or restaurant meals. Now we were visitors. We brought chocolate and photos and flowers from our gardens. We emailed each other constantly, comparing notes about when we planned to visit so that Mom would have visitors on as many different days as possible, then sending updates about how she w
as doing when we saw her.
“Anyway, re: my Mom visit last Sat., she seemed OK, much the same. She was very talkative, almost nonstop with a mix of pure gibberish, words that made no sense, and little snippets of meaningful conversation … ”
“So like a baby now it amazes me. She enjoys eating so much … ”
I often came at lunchtime because feeding her gave me something to do. Sometimes she was happy to see me. Other times, she didn’t seem to know me. Sometimes she liked it when I sat next to her on the couch and put my arm around her as if I was a teenage boy and she was my girlfriend. Sometimes she liked it when I sang songs, the oldest songs I could think of, songs I remembered her father singing, like Darling Clementine. Whether she was treating me like a daughter or a stranger on any particular day did not seem to have anything to do with how well she liked my cuddling or my laughable singing or the food I was feeding her.
She grew tired and cranky if I stayed too long. At least that’s what I told myself, as I watched the clock tick while I sang, talked, spooned macaroni, all the while feeling like some kind of desperate performance artist who just couldn’t get the audience to wake up and was now counting the minutes until I could run from the stage. Herring boxes without topses, sandals were, for Clementine …
Maybe my sisters and I shouldn’t have been so strict about not visiting on the same days. But we knew that if we were there at the same time, we would be tempted to just talk to each other and ignore Mom and also that it would mean she might not get a visitor on another day. Northern House was not a quick drive for any of us: twenty-five or thirty minutes each way for me or Caroline, an hour and a half each way for Lisa or Kristie.
And, we reasoned, it was good for Mom in a general sense if the staff knew that one of us might stroll in any old time.
What we didn’t know is how much any of it mattered to Mom.