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70 - I, Mary MacLane by Mary MacLane · I, Mary MacLane

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  Speaker 1: Chapter seventy of Iye Mary mc lain by Mary mc lean.
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  Speaker 1: This LibriVox recording is in the public domain recording by
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  Speaker 1: Lynn Thompson, Chapter seventy. The gray purple to Morrow Close.
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  Speaker 1: At the east edge of this butte is a barren
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  Speaker 1: ridge of rockies that is sudden and big and breathing,
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  Speaker 1: looking barbarously personal, touched with varying gifted color moods and glowering,
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  Speaker 1: morose color passions. At the south, the snow topped highlands
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  Speaker 1: lie long, fairy, solitary miles away, caressed at their summits
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  Speaker 1: by thin, soft sun rings and sun vapors of salmon
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  Speaker 1: and sea green and turquoise and mauve. At the west,
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  Speaker 1: a gray shadow desert burns red gold in the setting
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  Speaker 1: sun and sleeps in pearl and ashen stillness under midnight stars.
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  Speaker 1: At the north, smaller spurs of the range breaking too
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  Speaker 1: foothills and bluffs and gulches, RESTful wastes of lonely stones,
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  Speaker 1: and blurred radiances of tawny sand. On top of all,
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  Speaker 1: the rarefied air of these plateau heights refracts the light
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  Speaker 1: into hot, dazzling prisms at any vagrant flash of sun
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  Speaker 1: on a trailing storm fringe. This butte is capriciously decorated
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  Speaker 1: with sweet, brilliant, metallic orgies of color at any time,
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  Speaker 1: all times, as if by whims of pagan gods. Slightly
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  Speaker 1: drunk and lightly mad. Saint Paul, Minnesota looks a greenlier,
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  Speaker 1: prettier town. The Arizona Canyon looks vastly more fearfully beautiful. Wichita, Kansas,
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  Speaker 1: probably looks small a regular town. Akron, Ohio doubtless looks
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  Speaker 1: more americanly reassuring Rome, Italy must have a more settled look.
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  Speaker 1: New York is much larger and much brighter looking. Only
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  Speaker 1: this butte looks deeply and exactly like Butte Montana. Its
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  Speaker 1: insistent charm is that it goes on strongly resembling itself
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  Speaker 1: year after year. There is love in me for this butte.
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  Speaker 1: I am profoundly lonely in it. My life tissues are
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  Speaker 1: long familiar with the feel of it. Its mournful beauty
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  Speaker 1: has entered like thin, punishing iron into my soul, and
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  Speaker 1: my love for it is made of those things. For
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  Speaker 1: no reason, I feel love for this butte as much
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  Speaker 1: as for the mountains in their morning intimateness. I feel
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  Speaker 1: love for all the outsides and surfaces of the town itself.
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  Speaker 1: The stone streets full of houses and shops and stores
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  Speaker 1: and brick walls and laundry wagons and persons. The vacant
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  Speaker 1: lots where boys play ball. The school buildings, which for
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  Speaker 1: twenty years have needed the same green grass around them,
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  Speaker 1: and the same playgrounds for school children to play in,
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  Speaker 1: and will go on twenty years needing them. The little
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  Speaker 1: mines in unexpected midtown blocks, with their engines and hoists
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  Speaker 1: and scaffolds and green coppery dumps. The big mines on
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  Speaker 1: the hill, busily working day and night, a bristling citadel
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  Speaker 1: of smoke stacks and tall buildings above the treasure drifts
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  Speaker 1: and tunnels that come down honeycombing the town under its
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  Speaker 1: streets and hoses and yield up wealths of monthly millions.
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  Speaker 1: The desolate, wind swept cemetery on the flat, the timber Butte,
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  Speaker 1: the school of Mines, the Brophy Grocery window full of
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  Speaker 1: attractive grocery food, The Saint Gordon's statue of Marcus Day,
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  Speaker 1: the few sweet green trees on North Montana Street by
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  Speaker 1: the courthouse, the edge of Walkerville. Ex Senator Clark's old
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  Speaker 1: fashioned close house in Granite Street. The Stone Episcopal Church
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  Speaker 1: with the memorial windows, the surprising steep Idaho Street Hill,
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  Speaker 1: the old reduction works reminiscent of the bygone Hindze and
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  Speaker 1: the bold buccaneering days. The Montana Street Cemetery at last
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  Speaker 1: Kempton nurtured green as Beloit, Wisconsin. The little Rocky Missoula Gulch,
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  Speaker 1: the North Excelsius Street neighborhood where I wrote my Devil
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  Speaker 1: and Gray Dawn book. The Butte High School where I
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  Speaker 1: studied and meditated youngly. The old library where I used
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  Speaker 1: to get a variety of books in my gangling girlhood.
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  Speaker 1: The electric ore trains going to Anaconda, the vegetable chinamen,
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  Speaker 1: the post office newsstand, the Mexican Tomli vendors in the
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  Speaker 1: early night, the sweet green trees and other greenness in
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  Speaker 1: people's yards, garnered and cherished in a way which would
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  Speaker 1: astonish Toledo o'ha. The brilliant sparkling look of the town
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  Speaker 1: from far out on the flat late in the evening,
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  Speaker 1: like a mammoth broken tiara of starry diamonds, twinkling points
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  Speaker 1: of blue and orange and ceres and violet, fired and
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  Speaker 1: flung against a mountainside of dark velvet an aspect intensely Butte,
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  Speaker 1: The cool, mosquitoless summer nights, the Anaconda standard, the sulfurous, smoky,
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  Speaker 1: deadly cold winter mornings. The Cornish and Irish and Austrian
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  Speaker 1: and finn miners, the little slim green onions in the markets.
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  Speaker 1: The noise and colour a morale of the crowds on
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  Speaker 1: a miner's union day. The markets on the afternoon shade
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  Speaker 1: side of West Park Street, full of crabs and lobsters
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  Speaker 1: from Seattle, and shining fish from California, and mushrooms and
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  Speaker 1: frog legs and squabs and hot house things from hereabout.
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  Speaker 1: The Parrot's smelter, The Chinese gardens at nine Mile, the
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  Speaker 1: Italian village of Meadeville, the fortified, battlemented look of the
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  Speaker 1: town at the east of South Butte, the mystic, familiar
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  Speaker 1: sand and barrenness. All of it has a feel of
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  Speaker 1: something aloof and metallic and distinctive, and gray purple and
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  Speaker 1: Butte Montana. Gray purple is the color of the town.
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  Speaker 1: Its spirit tone, its odor, and fascination are gray purple.
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  Speaker 1: This Butte's bodily, a young, rich, present day city of
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  Speaker 1: one hundred thousand populations, all told. Miners who bulwark its foundations,
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  Speaker 1: masses who maker manage its business, millionaire members who spend
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  Speaker 1: most of their lives and dollars in New York. All
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  Speaker 1: are Butte made. But its soul is still the soul
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  Speaker 1: of Frontier mining camp which sprang into copper, being when
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  Speaker 1: the Comstock mine in Virginia, Nevada failed of its silverish
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  Speaker 1: promise a very few years ago. What one could count
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  Speaker 1: on one hand's fingers, there were no lids in this Butte.
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  Speaker 1: Every summer, bony thoroughbred horses from Puarez and Denver raced
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  Speaker 1: round the oval track on the flat, watched by a
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  Speaker 1: shrieking betting throng of Butte citizens and citizenesses, ridden by
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  Speaker 1: silk blouse black booted jockeys, their finished spirts under the wire,
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  Speaker 1: chaperoned by a flock of bookmakers. Roulette and poker and
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  Speaker 1: farrow were wide open in the town and flavored the
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  Speaker 1: air with a taste of gray purple. Hazard Gin palaces
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  Speaker 1: and mining camp dance halls highly deluxed lent their tinted
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  Speaker 1: breath to the current noodlish and little bacchanalian dives flourished
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  Speaker 1: in unexpected nooks. The police caught on a Monday morning
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  Speaker 1: resembled the debris from an alcoholic human volcano. A condemned
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  Speaker 1: but owned portion of this butte in its Butte Montananes,
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  Speaker 1: All of it was but one element in an isolated,
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  Speaker 1: prosperous town of many elements, but it's some way tinctured.
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  Speaker 1: All no pagan wild sunset burst above the west desert,
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  Speaker 1: but suggested that the vague lid was off the town
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  Speaker 1: and vaguely lost, a lost lid. The gambling lid is
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  Speaker 1: fast on now. If they gamble, they gamble under it,
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  Speaker 1: and no more do ruby horses and surprising mixed crowds
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  Speaker 1: disport them at the deserted race track. But the setting
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  Speaker 1: Butte sun suggests the same wealth and wildness as if
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  Speaker 1: always its celestial chemistry were shot with essence of mining
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  Speaker 1: camp rich, generous, feverish and viryle. Brophy's grocery window and
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  Speaker 1: the Marker's daily monument and the parrot smelter and the
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  Speaker 1: clerk house and the Idshose Street hill. All of it
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  Speaker 1: owns the gray purple, which is not Saint Paul and
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  Speaker 1: not Wichita and not Pittsburgh and not spokene, not anything
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  Speaker 1: except intensely. Butte, Montana. I have felt it since I
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  Speaker 1: first lived here in little, young, short frocked days, and
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  Speaker 1: I felt it when I lived away from Butte. I
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  Speaker 1: feel it all these nowadays to the roots of myself.
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  Speaker 1: I have no reason but the contrary to love Butte.
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  Speaker 1: As a townful of human beings, I have no friends
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  Speaker 1: in it, no feel of friendship, no human friendliness. And
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  Speaker 1: the sculpturesque poetry of the outlying deserts and Buttes pushes
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  Speaker 1: and presses hurtingly upon the lonely and introspective gazer. In
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  Speaker 1: body and soul. I it as a child and girl
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  Speaker 1: and woman. There is nothing benign, nothing enlightening, no gentleness,
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  Speaker 1: no pity in its barren beauty. But its hard, chaste
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  Speaker 1: influence on the sensitive spirit is beyond any analytic power
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  Speaker 1: to gauge. Its wonderful aridness starves human nerve soil till
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  Speaker 1: the sad, wide eyes of the soul grow bright fever,
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  Speaker 1: bright light, bright starbright from denial and unconscious prayer, involuntary worship,
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  Speaker 1: homage of the unsuppliant, unhoping devotee. Because of that, and
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  Speaker 1: because of all its long familiar outsidnesses, mournful, beautiful, mystic, lavish,
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  Speaker 1: madly mixed gray purple, A fascination beyond pleasance or pain.
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  Speaker 1: I feel love for this butte. End of Chapter seventeen.