My name for the town is Butt, MT. The asshole of the state. Literally one of the most toxic places in the country, with what used to be the largest copper mine in the country, maybe the world. The old pit copper mine is a blight on the whole area. Just ugly, and many a murdered person has been dumped into the very, very deep uber toxic mine "waters" over the years. Supposedly the entire body is gone, like an acid bath.
But the mining here has literally made this a toxic waste dump. There are a few old money families here who control most everything and have kept the rest of the town down. And convinced the people here to buy into their bullshit on how/why they do this. It is a corrupt town, top to bottom. City/county administration, police, you name it, it is corrupt. So many here live in housing that is beyond pathetic, and have been trained to be "proud" of the "history" of this old shithole. What the reality is, there is so much unbelievably horrible, run down housing here and people think it is some kind of badge of honor to live in white trash shitholes. They go in debt for expensive trucks and campers, but live in houses that have tarps over the roof the condition is so bad.
Super high cancer rates here from the toxicity of all the mining. That is never going away in our lifetimes, it is what mining like this does to an area. Mining is a very hard job, which leads to people living hard also. Drinking and drug problems are rampant here, and at one point, if not still, this town had more bars per capita than anywhere in the country. People are bass ackwards here, true little man syndrome where they convince themselves how great they are, while turning a bling eye to the horrible societal makeup of hard drinking, hard living, and backwards thinking of living in what is basically poverty from all of this. Just a toxic place in all ways.
My ex wife was from here, which is why I moved here back in 2001 when I decided to make a change, get out of my thriving home building business in Lincoln, NE and move to the mountains. I have relatives in Colorado, Vail to be exact, so grew up going there to ski/visit and the mountains have always called to me. I bought 4 franchised small retails stores in the state in 2001 and moved out here. Ran those, but was still also a contractor picking up jobs part time. All that while building my own house. Very busy.
Once we moved here, which I was warned by my ex wife (we were married then), if I really knew what I was getting into moving to Butte, MT, things went to shit quickly. I scoffed at her, said I grew up on a large hog farm in northeast NE, I am sure I can handle Butte. Boy was I wrong. She went totally off the rails as soon as we moved here. Got in with her old friend group, which consisted of hard party people, and things spiraled quicly with our marriage. We were never a good fit anyway, but her being back to her hard party stomping grounds was the end.
I do love the mountains, try to ski a lot (the closest ski hill, about an hour away, has super cheap year passes), so I try to take advantage of things like that here. White water rafting is also a favorite of mine, and have rafted most of the rivers in the state. I have explored all over the mountains of the state, and during the couple of decent weather months of July and August, that is really fun.
I don't hunt, but if I did this would be a dream location. We have so many elk on our land it is crazy. Moose, bear of course deer (whitetail and muleuy) are in abundance. Have seen wolves, a brief glimpse of a mountain lion twice, bobcats - you name it, they are here. Fly fishing has always appealed to me, hell one of the reasons Montana was high on my list is from the movie A River Runs Through It. But like all movies or shows based on Montana, it is not reality. Take the show Yellowstone for example. Talk about not even close to any semblance of reality of Montana. I don't fly fish much anymore, but do love it. Hell, 99% of the fish I catch in a year are on my parents private lake in northeast NE - talk about a lunker almost every cast. And I fly fish 99% of the time on their lake, too. There is something about fly fishing that is so much more elegant than rod and reel.
But the very long winters have been wearing on me. I don't want to suffer through the much longer. They are brutal. Plus this town, which is economically horrible, offers almost no opportunity (there usually aren't ever even any new subdivisions to go buy a lot to build a spec house here for instance) for being a builder. Instead, I end up working a lot on old shithole houses, most of which in this town are literally 5 feet apart as that is how close they built to each other for much of the 20th century, working on broken down old shit that many should just be bulldozed in, not money sunk into them. The city/county government has actively prevented expansion of new housing (I had to pull teeth to buy my 20 acres and build on it), and does not allow new box store businesses in because the old money here does not want progress, they see it as a threat to their old money businesses. Thus, people here have to travel out of town to Helena, Bozeman, Missoula for any real shopping that isn't Walmart. But people here bitch up a storm about those towns and any out of stater that has moved here. They don't want progress, they want to stick their heads in the dirt and fingers in their ears and block out anything that isn't ingrained "them". I've never seen a more insecure bunch of people than this town has.
So I don't plan on being here much longer. Unfortunately, that means not seeing my 22 and 23 yr old daughers much. They both need to get out of here too, but the toxicity and ingrained insecurity of daring to move somewhere else is wired deep into them from this backwards community. Which makes it a hard decision to make a major life change for me which will mean not seeing them regularly. But that is where I think I am heading on all of this, likely sooner than later.
