Rick Bass and David James Duncan | The Heart of the Monster

Published: June 24, 2011

What riles a pair of Montana writers into crafting a “rapid response book” in just four months? The efforts of ExxonMobil and other oil giants to establish the windy highways that snake from Lewistown, up the Clearwater and Lochsa rivers to Missoula, and then east, along the Blackfoot River, crossing two formidable mountain passes en route, as a “High and Wide corridor.”

If approved (and state governments in both Idaho and Montana have said “yes”), the route would be used to ferry mega loads – “nearly the length of a Fenway Park home run, three stories in height, and weighing up to 670,000 pounds, seven times the legal federal load limit” – across 600 miles of Wild and Scenic highways. In The Heart of the Monster, Why the Pacific Northwest and Northern Rockies Must Not Become an Exxon Mobil Conduit to the Alberta Tar Sands, Rick Bass and David James Duncan take different approaches to the same issue.

Duncan’s opposition to the plan is both philosophical and deeply personal. His family’s home is just off U.S. Highway 12, where the mega loads would rumble.

In his essay, The Heart of the Monster, he not only attacks the premise of “dragging” 24-foot-wide loads along 26-foot-wide roads, but also excoriates the Tar Sands development, where vast swathes of boreal forest are clear-cut (“obliterating millions of trees from one of the two great lungs of the living Earth”).

Two tons of earth must be excavated to make a barrel of tar, in a process “that consumes and defiles three barrels of fresh water” to yield one gallon of bitumen, pollutes the once-pristine Athabasca River, and is predicted to kill at least six million migratory birds in the next two to three decades. “The Alberta Tar Sands are a BP Gulf disaster, and worse, unfurling in slow motion,” he writes.

In his novella, A Short History of Montana, Rick Bass suggests “our best interest maybe found in places left fallow and wild. Montana is one such place. We have ruined too much.”

He imagines massive citizen blockades, on the pass, on Reserve Street in Missoula, along the Rocky Mountain Front, and a citizen’s initiative that keeps the High and Wide corridor “open, wide, lonely, lovely.”

And he imagines telling the story, someday, of how the trucks came, and were turned back. “We sharpened our knives, we will tell them. We were frightened and we were fearless. We chose courage rather than silence.”

Their passionate collaboration and call-to-action was written with help from journalist Steve Hawle, who supplies research and fact-finding, and fine-art photographer Frederic Ohringer, whose stirring images evoke the beauty and eccentricity of our imperiled neighborhood.

Their book sells for $15, softcover; to learn more, visit allagainstthehaul.org.

– Kristi Niemeyer