Letter from the editor 

'Life after people' easy to imagine in Montana

The History Channel has a new television show "Life After People," that provides a fascinating, if unsettling, intellectual exercise. It provides an artist's interpretation of how popular landmarks would fare if its tenants suddenly up and left. It appears — according to the show's Photoshop wizards — that they would not fare very well at all.

I mention this show, which I have never actually watched, only seen many photos on its excellent Web site, because I seriously doubt I am alone in indulging in such a fantasy.

I have found that it's nearly impossible to walk anywhere in Montana and not wonder what the vista looked like before — or after — people. Maybe it's because "civilization's' arrival here was so recent. Maybe it's because even for the thousands of years this land was occupied before Europeans arrived, there were so few people in so large a place.

Whether it's looking out at Flathead Lake and imagining it without the million dollar homes on the waterside or Lower Valley without hay fields, the relative lack of development only seems to encourage these visions.

An admitted Lewis and Clark buff, I had the good fortune to work at a state park near Missoula that is home to some of the only archeological evidence of the famed expedition. Being the low man on the totem pole there, I was often given the late shift, waiting for visitors until we closed at 8 p.m.

The hours between 4 or 5 p.m. when the last person left, and closing time, were among the best of my life. Walking the empty grounds in Montana's peerless evening light it was impossible not to imagine the Corps of Discovery gathered around a fire, or better, the wind blowing through that glacially carved valley long before they arrived.

With the recent hysteria surrounding the swine flu outbreak, life after people doesn't seem as far-fetched as it otherwise might. But here in Montana, we don't need digital artwork of Wrigley field after the outfield ivy has taken over (that is this St. Louis Cardinal fan's fantasy, anyway) or London's Big Ben toppled to the ground.

We have the Jewel Basin, Glacier National Park and the boundless tracts of the Bob Marshall Wilderness just out the back door. Leave the car behind and walk a mile into the woods around here, it's easy to see what the land would look like after we're gone. It would look just like this.

—Alex Strickland