Story: Red Water Refugee: Scratching the Surface in Montana

The model from Red Water tells me I cannot use the real name of her town in my story. We can still shoot in Glacier, she says, on a family homestead the government can’t close down, but I must use the name Red Water.

I agree to meet her in Polebridge, the tiny town on the North Fork of the Flathead River, next to the little-used entrance to Glacier National Park, the shiniest gem of Montana’s natural jewelry. But I laugh at Murphy’s words about the government looking to wrest away the family homestead, because here is the paranoia again, common to nearly everyone in Montana: the condominiums are coming, the price of land is stratospheric, rising, the water is flavored with fertilizer and pesticide . . .

“Why would the government want your homestead, Murphy?”

Her answer is spiked with suspicion and defense: “My folks have the most beautiful piece of land in Glacier, right on the river, deep into the park, and you bet they’d like to rent it out to a family from Chicago for two hundred bucks a night.”

Murphy is nervous about going back home. She is in Los Angeles now, taking her clothes off in Hollywood for a living, but her fear isn’t scandalous Lalaland gossip. She’s famous because her family is dead, poisoned by a mining company. We will meet in Polebridge at the North Fork entrance, and drive up to Lake Bowman to shoot nudes in her family’s grandfathered homestead, but she doesn’t want to talk about dead people.

“I’ve got a little brother who plays football in Missoula, and I’ve got an aunt who hunts with a bow and arrow given to her by a Lakota thirty years ago, and there’s me, and you said you were interested in me because I read Voltaire and have red hair and can be Venus in your photo shoot,” says Murphy Tolstoy on the phone from Hollywood, “But if all you want is to talk about the people in my family who died from the chemicals in Red Water, no way.”

Relax, I tell her, I just want the nudes and the work in Montana. Journalism is somebody else’s cross to bear. I’ve never shot Montana, and I do indeed have a story about Venus that Murphy can illustrate.

We meet in Polebridge, and she apologizes for being so brusque on the phone. Look, she says, the place is burnt down. She waves her hand at the blackened trunks along the road from the saloon at Polebridge to Lake Bowman. At the saloon called “Northern lights” we listen to G. play flamenco guitar and argue briefly about the origin of bullfighting: Murphy is sure it started in Ronda along with flamenco, at the same time, but G. is not ready to agree. He tells me, “She may be right, the Red Water girl, but I’m not gonna agree with somebody forty years younger than me unless she’s willing to give me a reference, Wikipedia or something. You know how many people’s word I took in my lifetime, only to end up with grief?” G. also tells me the condominiums are certainly coming when I mention people in Montana being a little touchy about the future.

“We’re losing everyone like Murphy, to Hollywood for moving pictures, or to Texas to look after the rest stop facilities, all the young people, and I agree with you that the Californians are paying the taxes for the state of Montana to some degree, and they’re not using the schools, but they’ve got a virus on their shoes, just as if they were bringing in fruit flies,” he whispers to me in the saloon’s daytime darkness. “And that virus is condominiums. The need to imprint on something beautiful, make it yours, give it your smell, your color.”

The road to Bowman is scarred with burnt trees. Larch, mostly. Murphy asks me if the scalded terrain looks like Venus. It’s 900 degrees, I tell her, and no Larch tree exists on that planet. Nothing but rock and an acidic air you couldn’t breathe unless your lungs have the power to breathe under water, at 3,000 feet below.

“My brother and me, the Red Water chemicals, they’re coming up in our lungs,” says Murphy quietly. I’m wise enough to keep my mouth shut. But she doesn’t say anything else about Red Water.

We reach the head of the lake and take pictures. Murphy Tolstoy is smiling. “The Sunshine likes you, because it doesn’t often come out in late October,” she says. “You can shoot me in front of the window, and it will look as if I am in California, warm.”

As long you have the Venus acid in your face, I say, the shoot will be just fine. She starts to rehearse her lines, about falling in love with a redhead and waking up on a planet that everyone on Earth describes as Hell. Except that for Murphy Tolstoy, Venus is a pretty place. A cauldron it is, maybe, but Venus is not the crippled little Montana town where 27 of her people lie buried, with more to come.

As we shoot, she turns sullen, clouded. She clambers out of her clothes, and lifts her chin at my camera, barely following my instructions. I have shot with her before, twice, and I adore this sort of attitude because it gives the images depth that flesh will not guarantee.

“I was just thinking,” she says, “That people look at me like the tourists look at the Lake or Rainbow Mountain. Pretty on the outside, but secretly ripped to pieces inside.”

Montana is attractive, I think, because of its fragility, because of the superfund sites, because of the clean water burbling beneath dams of toxic sludge swelled with age and poor design, but I don’t find Murphy Tolstoy so ruined, and I tell her so.

“I’ve got the same gunk in my veins,” she says. “Maybe I can pose with a bottle of beer and flash you a smile and help you sell tires at the racetrack, but I look in a mirror and I am just now beginning to feel sorry for myself. Sort of like Montana.”

She will not let me shoot her outside, among the Larch trees or beside Lake Bowman. She’s reluctant to exploit her state, already mined to death. She tells me we can go to a fake place like Lake Powell for those kinds of nudes; she’s paying me for emotion, and not for cheesecake.

“Did you take a picture of that wagon?”
“Yes.”
“Sometimes I stand there and look at it with the blue mountains behind, and think it’s a metaphor for beauty, that wagon, broken down.”
“How so, Murphy?”
“Your eye appreciates the ruins, whether it’s old forts in India or stone temples built by the Incas, right? And you look at me and see youth in ruins. At least, I do.”

I protest a little at this, because Murphy will be young for a long time, and I tell her this, too. The wagon is debris, and Murphy is dynamic, ambitious: I look at her and feel the future, but she shakes her head solemnly:

“You forget, I’ve got Red Water in my blood, and the Venus atmosphere in my lungs. Sometimes it feels like a rock is on my chest, a big stone out of Rainbow Mountain, rolled onto me by the future. Every breath I have now costs me how many more later?”

The shoot is over. I have my own pains, real and imagined. A urologist is leaving me messages on my phone back in the Imperial City. I have my own history with radiation, I am my own little Hiroshima, exploring the graceful places of my planet with a memory of destruction always hovering nearby. How does a survivor listen to the melody of a small brook tumbling through the forest when his dry cough reminds him of every breath in his future, spent?

“Thanks for the job, Murphy.”
“My agent will write you a check.”
“I’m going to write a story about the girl from Red Water, about the rocks crushing your breath.”
“Cool, Sean. Put some nudes of Montana in there for me, too, so I can decorate my website with eye candy for my subscribers. They won’t have to know what I think about condominiums and gold mining.”

We stop at the Northern Lights. G. is standing outside the bakery, waiting for a ride as if he has waited all his life, his guitar from Sevilla encased. Clouds everywhere. There is a local who wants to talk to me about the Badlands, Makoshika. He is Lakota, related to the man who gave Murphy’s aunt her bow and arrow 30 years ago. I notice that Murphy is short with him, brusque, barely acknowledging his nod. G. pulls me aside.

“Make sure you make Murphy look like she’s gonna live forever,” says G. to me, loud enough so the model can hear. “She thinks she’s sick, but we’re all sick, we’re all coming apart, it’s the nature of being. She’s pretty and she’s young, so maybe it’s a shock to realize it in her case, but she’s something special, what with the Voltaire and the smarts she pulled out of the forest. She’s from Montana, so we gotta act as if she’s fine, not torn up for profit, if you understand what I mean.”

I do, I do. I will tint my pictures of Murphy Tolstoy with immortal sheen, and show them off next to pictures of her spawning ground, of her crib of flowers and trees, pristine and serene, of a place as big as the sky where models sprout from the woods quoting Voltaire and studying the atmosphere of Venus, willing to go out on a limb as she has done to claim there is no more gold in Montana, no matter how rich the property looks.

The Lakota waits silently until Murphy and G. drive away; she is taking him to his homestead, a five-mile ride on a washerboard track that is a local courtesy about as inconvenient here as holding a door open for somebody going into the 7-Eleven would be in your neighborhood.

“I’m a miner,” says the Lakota. “So Murphy can’t talk to me, and I respect that, but I have some things to say to you about the Badlands, because I need a photograph of a certain rock there, and I wonder if you got it.” He leans toward me, and I can smell his tobacco and leather. “But first, let me just say, with all respect, that what the Tolstoy family has in their blood, we all have. Me, my kids, you, the writers, and even all the people from California. We’re all the same, only so many moments in a lifetime.”

I agree, I say. Only so many moments, and this moment, here with you, is one of them.

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More about Murphy and Montana can be seen and read if you track down Seanie Blue, here at Everywhere or elsewhere on the web.