Bushwhacked_ Life in George W. Bush's America Large Print - Molly Ivins [76]
“Look at that,” Goodwin said. “It’s everywhere. Everywhere! I had no idea.” Goodwin banked the plane, opened the front window. Fuller leaned forward to stick her head out and shoot as the plane circled. Below, a stretch of low hills and river bottom known as Lower Prairie Dog looked like a Brueghel the Elder painting. But in the place of dancing and ice-skating peasants were hundreds of machines. Bulldozers kicking up clouds of dust as they dug “perc ponds” to hold methane water. Backhoes digging pipeline easements. Drilling wells working on several locations. Large float trucks carrying heavy equipment. Banks of 1,250-horsepower screw compressors, each the size of a Texas double-wide, pressurizing gas lines. Small spreader trucks broadcasting snow-white gypsum that oil operators hope will neutralize the damage they have done to the soil. There were old pits filled with a green-brown water near flowing wells and new pits, shiny black with plastic sheeting to retain water that is yet in the ground. Less than a year earlier, this entire landscape was a pastoral stretch of rolling hills above the tiny, meandering Tongue River.
Goodwin banked the plane to the right and headed south, following the interstate down to Gillette. Along the way, the contrast between the undeveloped federal mineral rights and the “fee land” in full-blown development could not be more stark. Verdant hills covered with native grasses bumped up against what looked like industrial parks. South of the rugged Powder River Breaks, Morrison pointed to the left and the plane slowly descended toward a huge CBM water pit sitting a few hundred feet from the Powder River. Goodwin followed the river for a while, then headed dead south for Gillette, where he was to pick up a rancher who would photograph his ranch before drilling began.
HOURS LATER AND back on the ground, Gillian Malone, a Powder River Basin Resource Council organizer and researcher, stood on the banks of Spotted Horse Creek. Bathed in a white moonlight, a half dozen dead cottonwoods behind her looked like ghost trees. What remained of two dozen more dead cottonwoods was stacked in five pyres. From a mile upstream, the loud, low hum of a screw compressor was audible. Bill West, the owner of the ranch and the downed cottonwoods, couldn’t make it, nor could his wife, Marge, who called to say, “Mr. West is real sorry he couldn’t be there.” West had problems more immediate than his downed cottonwoods. Three days earlier while loading cattle he was caught between a gate and a panicked steer, and he had just gotten out of intensive care. Malone had surveyed the damage before, but she seemed stunned. “It looks worse at night,” she said. The Wests are Powder River Basin Resource Council members, pushed into environmentalism by the CBM drilling on their land. “They’re the very best kind of people,” Malone said. “Modest, hardworking ranchers. This shouldn’t be happening to them.”
THE TWO GREAT MISCONCEPTIONS about the American West are that it is an almost endless open space and that the land is extremely rugged. In fact, the West is both finite and fragile. From the earliest paintings by Albert Bierstadt, which were immensely popular in the East, to the great Western films of John Ford (and those of lesser mortals), the notion has been planted in the national psyche that the West is a tough, wild, indestructible place of vast spaces in need of “taming.” It’s damned hard to get rid of those notions; that’s why we keep using the West as our national dumping ground for everything from bombing ranges to atomic weapons