“Copper had drawn people to Butte
— the mine owners looking to get richer and the miners hoping to feed their
children while their wives took in laundry. But when I went there on an
achingly bright day last summer I formed a different impression — that Butte is
where men went to escape from the sky.
“First they dug mines that ran a
mile deep into the earth, which was about as far from the sky as you could get,
and you had to be so desperate to get there that you’d risk being crushed in a
collapsing tunnel or atomized in an explosion. Then they built the smelters to
blur the sky with toxic smoke so that no miner emerging from the end of a shift
would be exposed to the naked firmament, even for the short time it took him to
get into the reassuring darkness of the bars, where you could count on the
cigarette smoke to soften any stray intrusions of natural light. These are the
lengths men will go to avoid being eaten alive by the emptiness, or at least
that’s how I began to see it as a child.”
— Barbara Ehrenreich, Living with a Wild God
