A Montanan’s Climate Story
During the 1980s and 90s, the same decades in which human-caused effects on the climate became undeniable in spiky global temperature graphs, I was growing up in Missoula. I was the kind of kid who read National Geographic and Audubon magazines which lay around the house, and I knew about global warming, or the “greenhouse effect” as it was often called then.
Those summers were times of water play and camping and riding bikes around the neighborhood. Climate change was abstract. We always tried to schedule camping and backpacking for the first two weeks of August, when the mosquitos would be mostly gone and it was least likely to rain. Forest fires happened, sure, including one notorious year, 1988, when much of Yellowstone National Park burned. But although weather data now tells us that summers were gradually getting longer and hotter during this time, our day-to-day lives were unscathed. I cannot remember a single summer day of thick smoke in Missoula.
The year 2000 stands out as a beginning and an end. I’ve read that it’s a characteristic of human development experiences in our late teens and early twenties are imbued with special significance in our minds and memories. Maybe it’s because this is when we must survive (or not) on our own with limited experience, so our biology helps us learn. Regardless, that year looms large in my memories. I completed the one-year Wilderness and Civilization Program at the University of Montana, which turned out to be deeply impactful and resulted in several cherished friendships. In June of that summer, my wife Rachel and I were married, in the backyard of my parent’s home in Lolo. We honeymooned in Belize, and I learned how different a slippery stingray and coarse nurse shark feel to the touch.
And that August, something else began. It had been an unseasonably hot and dry summer, and one morning we woke to dim light. Oh nice, fog, my friend Moriah, who grew up on the East Coast, said she first thought. It was not fog, of course, but smoke. We lived with it in our throats the entire month. Our apartment had no air conditioning. We couldn’t open the windows at night because of the smoke; the apartment became a little hotter each day. Desperation began to build in my chest. It felt that clear views of Mount Sentinel, and air that did not choke us, and rain, would never exist again, perhaps had never existed. I remember going to the Eastgate Albertsons with a friend and sitting on the cool tile floor and reading magazines in the air conditioning. We left in the dark with street lights making halos in the smoke.
Rain and mountain snow came in September, and the smoke abruptly ended. Unfortunately, in the ensuing 19 years, that freakish August of smoke became a regular event. We can no longer plan our backpacking and camping trips for August without wondering whether we will be smoked out, or whether the forests will be closed due to extreme fire danger. The abrupt switch from clear summers to smoke in 2000 was shocking, although in our mobile society I’ve found that many people who live in Missoula now don’t realize summers were not always this way.
Rachel and I took a mid-July backpacking trip to Gunsight Lake in Glacier National Park in around 2002. Cool, windy weather kept the mosquitos down. On the way in, Blackfoot Glacier lay thick and creased at the head of the St. Mary valley. The next day I hiked south from the lake, through tangled green alders while yelling for bears, and across slanted alpine slopes nodding with flowers. When Glacier National Park was established, in 1910, the Blackfoot and Jackson Glaciers were a single continuous mass. The Jackson Glacier has now pulled back and the two glaciers are separated. The meadows ended at the trough where Jackson Glacier had recently been. I climbed the lateral moraine left behind along the sides of the glacier, kicking my feet into the loose gravel and cobbles piled as if by a bulldozer. Already, scrubby willows were beginning to grow. Behind the moraine was bare bedrock, canted steeply to the east. I knelt on it and felt the linear scratches incised deeply in its maroon surface by rocks in the glacier’s belly as it had flowed over, like perfectly straight claw marks. Hiking half a mile uphill on the scraped, barren slab, I came to Jackson Glacier’s toe, dirty blue ice sticking out from under its protective layer of newer snow. A stream gushed out from under the toe and crashed away down the slope behind me. I placed both hands on the old ice, leaned in, and tasted it.
Our children were born, and we spent much time outside with them. Late summer being frequently choked with smoke is all they know. A documentary about retreating glaciers, Chasing Ice, was showing at the local Wilma theater, and we all went to see it. Our youngest, Mica, was about three or four. He watched the movie in silence, rode home in the backseat quietly. I thought he was tired. At home, he suddenly burst into tears. “I don’t want the ice to melt!”
There are moments when your heart bursts for your child. This was one. I had not expected him to fully understand the movie, and here he was, devastated. Had we made a mistake letting him see it? There was nothing to be done but make the best of it. We explained there were things he could do, and helped him write a letter to one of our U.S. Senators.
Later, I’ve reflected on how deeply wrong it is for a child to grow up with the weight of climate change, the knowledge of slow catastrophe, on their skinny shoulders. Seven years later, Mica remains a climate activist. I attended the September 2019 school walkout with our children and many of their friends, and felt a mix of pride, hope, and sadness at the large gathering in the autumn sunlight at Caras Park. Pride in these children and our community, hope for the same reason, and sadness for what has already happened, for what these young people now face.
It is a dark, rainy November day as I write this. The sound of raindrops on the roof is soothing in the somber light. It is too late to leave our children, and the generations to follow them, the world they deserve to inherit. Artificial climate change is in motion. But it is not too late to help them have a future where they know we have made the turn, that carbon emissions are dropping, that the worst will not happen. That the future is lit with hope.
Isaac Kantor 11-17-19
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