Opportunity, Montana

Starred review from January 21, 2013
Memoir, history, and the unequal application of economic justice come together in Tyer’s deeply felt and sharply penned nonfiction debut. Tyer’s reportage spotlights the process by which the tiny Montana town Opportunity became the dumping ground for millions of tons of toxic copper mining waste. The waste was uncovered as the result of a dam removal that helped beautify Missoula. Tyer also puts the fate of Opportunity in the context of Montana’s 19th- and 20th-century mining history, which he documents in crisp, entertaining style. A long list of costly toxic Superfund cleanup sites follows. Tyer laces his withering descriptions with an outsider’s appreciation for the myth and reality of the 21st-century West, some heartfelt words on the pleasures of canoeing wild rivers, and a moving exploration of his strained relationship with his late father. It’s a complex tangle of themes, but the book finds a concise focus when Tyer observes the “perverse poetry” and grim logic of pouring staggering amounts of waste into a place that’s already hideously polluted, because “the waste had to go somewhere. Waste always does. It doesn’t disappear. It just gets kicked down the road.” Remarkably, Tyer paints sympathetic portraits of the environmentalists, cleanup officials, and resilient survivors of an environmental catastrophe who are trying to keep living in the only home they’ve ever known.

February 15, 2013
Journalist Tyer deftly weaves memoir and reportage in a tale of the reclamation of a river and the failed reclamation of a father's love. The Clark Fork River in southeastern Montana, writes the author, was "the most fucked up river I've ever met." The culprit was copper. The river's watershed had plenty of it, and as Edison's light bulb ushered in the age of electricity and hence the need for copper, millionaire owners and hardscrabble workers mined the area literally to death. A century of mining and smelting had left behind a river poisoned by tons of lead, arsenic, toxic heavy metals and other detritus of a blind "attachment to progress, and estrangement from consequence." In the 1980s, reclamation of the river and region began and is ongoing downstream near Missoula. But the issue remains: where to put the tons of waste dredged up. The answer was upstream, at Opportunity, Mont., a town of apparently no particular consequence already surrounded by 4,000 acres of dumped mine waste. The new poison would simply go on top of the old waste, and Opportunity would unfortunately be collateral damage. Tyer explores how and why this happened, as well as the lives and disappointments of Opportunity's residents. He also turns to thoughts of his father, a man he didn't like and who didn't like him, and whose death a decade earlier made reconciliation an impossibility. Waste, as with regret, never goes away. The debt owed Opportunity, and the debt owed a father who perhaps gave his son more than the son realized, maybe cannot be paid: "Better perhaps to just bury the debt....You can't save everything." In lesser hands, such a story could be maudlin or gimmicky, but Tyer's evocative prose of quiet melancholy and gentle humor avoids such pitfalls.

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February 15, 2013
Montana is a beautiful state, full of soaring peaks, deep valleys, and scenic rivers. But beneath that beauty lies environmental damage largely invisible to the visitors who, drawn from other states by stunning advertising campaigns, float and fish its rivers. Copper mining in Butte, once home to the richest hill on earth, left a legacy of poisoned aquifers and waterways running a hundred miles downstream. Environmental activists in Missoula scored a major coup in forcing ARCO to remove a dam and restore the river, but toxic sediment dredged from behind the dam still had to go somewherethe dinky, already dumped-on community of Opportunity. Tyer mixes expos' with memoir, asking big questions with no easy answers: who should pay the price of history? What does it even mean to restore a river? After paying homage to a place often omitted from the discussion, and even from maps, he concludes that the least we can do is to acknowledge what we've done. An intelligent, insightful, and finely crafted book that channels outrage into clear thinking.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)