Mitch would never have called himself a parent anyway.
On the lake’s northern shore, I learned from informational placards that mountains as big or bigger than the Himalayas had once stood there, maybe the highest mountains that ever existed, but they’d eroded away to nothing, time kicking down that particular sandcastle, glaciers scraping the rock bare and then disappearing, too. I asked Mitch other questions about my parents, but mostly he didn’t know or couldn’t come up with anything interesting.
One night when we’d stopped at a diner, I said, “What if they didn’t die?”
Mitch was smacking the side of a ketchup bottle. “What do you mean?”
“What if they just went off somewhere and never came back?”
He put down the ketchup and fixed me with a grave expression, not easy to pull off under the David Beckham faux-hawk he’d had at the time. “Hadley, they wouldn’t have done that to you.”
“Or to you?”
“They died. That’s what happened. You need to believe that.”
“Yeah,” I said. I knew what I needed to believe, but knowing and believing weren’t the same.
Where I was sitting, there’d once been mountains higher than Everest. Anything was possible.
An Incomplete History of Missoula, Montana
c. 13,000 b.c.–February 1927
Fifteen thousand years ago.
An ice sheet advances from the north. A long glacial finger reaches down and plugs the Clark Fork River west of where Missoula will be. A lake forms, grows massive and spidery, three thousand miles square, two thousand feet deep, reflects the shadowed undersides of clouds. Mountaintops turn to islands.
Icebergs calve into the lake, float and drift. Sometimes boulders are locked inside them, carried south from far away: a journey of hundreds of years, maybe a thousand. When the bergs melt, the rocks plummet to the lake bed.
The lake gets too big, too deep, paws and digs at the ice dam until it turns buoyant and cracks apart, releasing the water. Collapsing, the lake churns over what will be Idaho, Oregon, Washington. The whole thing drains in three days, emptying at ten times the combined power of all the rivers in our world, though no statistic can get at its marauding violence, its deluvianness. Like gleeful strongmen, the currents toss giant rocks and huge chunks of ice into the air. Canyons are dug, herds swept away. Mastodons and mammoths are caught up and drowned and washed into the slack water. Saber-toothed cats, too, and beavers the size of grizzlies and dire wolves and giant ground sloths and all that lost, oversize menagerie.
From the north, the glaciers creep back down the mountains until the river is blocked again. Again, the lake fills. Again, the dam breaks. For two or three thousand years the cycle repeats, until something changes and the ice recedes. On the empty lake bed, where five mountain valleys come together like the twisted limbs of a sea star, where the peaked and porched and turreted Queen Anne house belonging to Wallace Graves will one day stand, grass grows. Saplings bend in the wind.
At some point: people. Hunters with stone tools, walking from Siberia, leaving behind carvings and paintings on the rocks. （What do they make of this endlessly unspooling land? Who could imagine a blue sphere suspended in black infinity?） Leaves rustle, rivers bend through valleys. More hunters pass through with better tools, subtler languages, myths about a great flood. Tipis and sturgeon-nosed canoes. Dogs and horses.
In 1805, white people make the scene: Lewis and Clark heading west, then back the other way ten months later, having seen the Pacific.
A narrow and wooded canyon, good for ambushes, leads east out of the valley to plains coursing with bison. Hunters coming from the west are attacked there sometimes by plains people, Blackfeet possessive of the herds, and the bones of the dead are left behind.
White people sidle in again. Porte de l’Enfer, French trappers call the canyon because of the bones. Hell Gate.
In 1855, a treaty is signed between Isaac Stevens, the governor of Washington Territory, and the local tribes （Bitterroot Salish, Pend d’Oreilles, Kootenai）。 The document is a fine example of its pernicious genre, full of tricks and mutual incomprehension, implied promises of death and loss. At night Stevens dreams of scraping shovels and clanking hammers, of seams stitched with timber and iron.
The grand metropolis of Hell Gate, population twenty, becomes the seat of Washington Territory’s new Missoula County （Missoula from a Salish word for cold, chilling waters）。 Before long there are tents and sod-roof cabins, a few rinky-dink farms, a saloon, a post office, thieves strung up by vigilantes. In 1864 Missoula County is made part of the new Montana Territory. A lumber mill and a flour mill are built upstream, and Hell Gate turns into a ghost town in a flash, everyone gone to Missoula Mills.