Becoming | Stained by History

Glacier has a history of oil extraction. We travel to Many Glacier to see the consequences, and the causes of climate change. Along the way we talk to young people about how it feels to live with the weight of history.

Glacier Conservancy: https://glacier.org/headwaters Frank Waln music: https://www.instagram.com/frankwaln/ Eric Carlson art: https://www.instagram.com/esccarlson/ Behind the scenes pictures: https://flic.kr/s/aHsmSxSe2J

Rising Voices Poetry Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast

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TRANSCRIPT:

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Lacy Kowalski: Headwaters is brought to you by the Glacier National Park Conservancy.

[wolves howling]

Narrator: It’s the winter of 1902, and I’m cold and content. Each night seems to grow longer, and each storm brings more snow—a welcome break after a hot and sweaty summer. I usually have this place all to myself... [sparse and eerie music begins, with strings plucking] But not tonight. A flash of orange erupts from the valley below, a ball of fire and billowing black smoke—leaping flames joined by a chorus of shouting, desperate men. It all started a few years ago with the sound of footsteps in the valley below. Men sharing around a campfire the story of what brought them here: [crackling of a campfire] rumors of bears covered in petroleum. “If we can find where the bears wallowed,” they said, “we’ll be rich.” I’d never seen men like this before, and I’m not sure if they saw me. But they did find what they were looking for: black puddles seeping out from the rocks along the lake... Oil. [sounds of water lapping at a lakeshore]

Not long after came hooves: twenty horses loaded with clanking metal, and twenty men clamoring with excitement.

[men’s voices in the background] From my perch on the mountainside, I watched trees crash to the ground. I heard the thumps and scrapes of hammers and saws that built cabins, boats, and a small sawmill. The sizzling of a cookstove; grumbling about canned food. Noise was constant. [squeaking of a drill; men’s voices quietly in the background]

But the most frequent sounds were the hopeful conversations of men as they stood around a massive drill. Through the wind and snow, they looked to the ground—some dreaming of a better life, others of power and riches. [wind howls] Eventually, their drill reached a bubble of flammable gas that inflated their hope to new heights. Profitable oil cannot be much deeper, they thought.

[men’s voices; the roar and crackle of a fire] Tonight, in a flash of fire, the promising gas is accidentally ignited, and all their work burns. Their cabins, their tools, their dreams, glow red as they die.

[a driving drumbeat begins, adding to the music already playing[ I am Kintla Glacier, and I have watched over this valley for thousands of years. I grew to my largest in the 1800s, in an era of rainy summers and blizzard-rich winters. Those times are gone, but I am finding a new equilibrium at the dawn of the 20th century. I’m smaller, but stable. I could survive for centuries more… Unless something changes...

[drumbeat finishes suddenly; crackling of a fire slowly fades under Headwaters Season Three theme: Wild West, by Frank Waln, which begins with a haunting flute line]

Daniel Lombardi: [a drumbeat begins, and strings layer in with other instruments] Welcome to Headwaters, a show about how Glacier National Park is connected to everything else. I'm Daniel. This is season three, and it's all about how this place became what it is today.

[theme song continues to play, then finishes]

Daniel: There's a thing that people say: “Oh, that's ancient history.” Meaning that because it's history, it can't be relevant anymore—that something buried in the past doesn't have the power to impact the present, let alone the future. But I don't buy that. History is the study of what happened in the past. But it's also a study of the present and how we got here. This episode is about the search for oil here around 1900. Before this place was known as Glacier. But this story is also about how the past in the future can get tangled up. The climate crisis has a history here. It goes back more than a century. The very first oil well in Montana was drilled in what is now the park.

Gaby Eseverri: It's a surprising story about the way history is always closer than we think. This season, we're looking at history from different angles. And before we turn back the clock, I want to start with the world today.

Daniel: This is Gaby. Gaby, you've been talking and interviewing young people all summer long.

Gaby: Yeah. To talk about climate change and to learn how they cope with it. And it varies. Some use poetry, some use humor. [footsteps walking on concrete] And a good place to start is a trip I took to Browning High School right outside of the park. I'm walking up to Browning High, and I'm wearing my favorite sweater vest, because I'm hoping it'll make the high schoolers that I'm about to talk to think I'm cool. It's this blue vest, and it's covered in geese, strutting and honking all over the place. [sound of a doorbell] I like to think that some of them are mid honk.

Employee, through an intercom: Pull on the door.

Gaby: [in the field] Thank you.

Student: Oh, my God. I love your sweater.

Gaby: [in the field] Thank you.

Gaby: My goose gamble paid off. I'm here to meet with the Rising Voices Poetry Club. I'm introduced by their librarian and advisor, Amy.

Amy Andreas: Guys, this is Gaby.

Gaby: And they introduce themselves to me.

[sparse music in the background, playing just a few haunting notes]

Amy: I'll just have you start and you guys go around and introduce yourselves.

Sovereign Smith: My name's Sovereign Smith.

Trysten Hannon: Trysten Hannon.

Emily Williams: Emily Williams.

Rebecca Edwards: Rebecca Edwards.

Emaeyah Bird: Emaeyah Bird.

Kiera Big Horn: Kiera Big Horn.

Lily Crawford: Lily Crawford.

Amy: My name is Amy Andreas, and I’ve graduated. [all laugh]

Gaby: We gather in this cozy little space called the coffee shop, which is the usual meeting place for the club.

Student: This room is the coffee shop.

Gaby: [in the field] Because there's coffee?

Student: Because there's coffee--

Student: We usually run a coffeeshop

Student: --sometimes, sometimes we sell. [all laughing]

Gaby: [in the field] Wait, wait. Can someone please read that?

Amy: Well, she wrote it. So I made her write it up there this morning cause I was like, I love this.

Rebecca: I had to write a small poem about a very minor incident that I still remember, for my English class.

Gaby: [in the field] What was the incident?

Rebecca: It-- [laughs] It's, it's called "Milk." I don't trust it. It's weird how it curdles How it's fine one day and spoiled the next The horrendous aroma emanating off the milk Burned my nostrils.

[the group chuckles]

[sparse music from before plays briefly]

Gaby: At the beginning of the episode, we imagined the past, our history of oil exploration, but these students are trying to imagine what that history means for their futures.

Student: I don't really like thinking about climate change too much. I start getting scared and then angry. And so I usually just like push it aside and I feel like, it's really unfair because we're so young.

Student: It's—it's just it's a lot of pressure for young people to take on.

[sparse music plays briefly]

Gaby: I reached out to Amy a few weeks ago to ask if any student would be interested in writing and sharing a poem with me. And I'm glad they agreed. Articulating our feelings about climate change is hard.

Student: It took me until, until I had, like, five days left to actually sit down and write it because I wasn't in the headspace until that day. Our society like, their past mistakes and just—”you're our future generation. You got to fix this when you're older,” like—[distressed noise]

[sparse music plays again]

Gaby: Surveys show that Glacier County, where these students live, ranks the highest in the state for concern about climate change. And you can hear that in their poems.

Lily: "Terminus" by Lily Crawford. Her air whispers of decay Melting the Arctic's frozen waters, breathing fumes Through branches traveling with every howling wind Increasing slowly Soon becoming Over time like dominoes slightly too far apart Just close enough to gently knock over the next Every crash gets closer and closer Then all at once Noticeable within one's own lifetime Things begin to shift

Gaby: [in the field] Lily, so what was that about?

Lily: The world is kind of dying, a little bit, and that makes me sad.

Daniel: Okay. Gaby.

Gaby: Daniel.

Daniel: We looked forward—you talked to young people about their futures. But now let's look backwards. How did we get here?

Gaby: Of course, the climate has changed naturally in the past, but today the biggest cause by far is burning fossil fuels like oil.

Daniel: Yeah, this is a good place to start. I think of Earth's atmosphere, it's like a blanket surrounding the planet. And when we burn fossil fuels, like oil, that releases greenhouse gases into the air, gases like carbon dioxide.

Gaby: And those gases trap heat.

Daniel: That's, I guess, why they call them greenhouse gases. They get added to the atmosphere and they make that blanket thicker and thicker, trapping more heat.

Gaby: And wh