Losing Ty

Look at the gift of being, now . . . And what will our time leave?

Robert Macfarlane, geophysicist and author

How much evidence needs to be present before something is done? And who gets to decide?

Sandra Steingraber, biologist and author

On a cool spring day, our parents away on a trip, we lose our little brother Ty John. I’m not sure why we called Ty by his first two names, likely because Mom did. Sometimes we simply said TJ, a hard and soft sound with a lyrical ring to it. When we were in a hurry, it was simply, Ty. At any rate, Ty is missing, and our parents aren’t home to lead the search through our eastern Montana town.

None of us four older children remember the babysitter from that weekend. Perhaps it is Mrs. Hehn, who is kind and never spanks us. She also bakes gingerbread cookies, laying them out on racks to cool before helping us decorate them. Our parents rarely go away—once a year at most. And Ty getting lost is no fault of the babysitter. He’s a hard child to keep track of.

I look in all of our hiding spots in the backyard then scour the neighborhood. I play with my brothers; I know their haunts.

As time goes on with no sign of him, the search intensifies. Mrs. Hehn asks for help from other adults in the neighborhood.  My mother’s best friend drives up and questions me: where did I last see Ty. The babysitter calls the police, who stop by in their black car to question us as well. I overhear the babysitter ask the police if she should ring our parents, which makes me think of the river. Two blocks from our house flows the Yellowstone River. Ty loves to fish at the river; however, at age three he’s too young to go alone. We are most certainly not allowed to go in the spring, when the banks aren’t exposed.

My sister Darcy and I, ages eight and nine, walk down the hill to the river. Standing on the high bank I fear Ty is lost for good. Huge blocks of ice crash and swirl downstream. In 1967, break-up of the Yellowstone was an event: townspeople congregated along the hilltops to watch the drama of ice cake collision; our friends who lived close to the river evacuated their homes. The county sheriff woke Dad in the middle of the night if the water crested the railroad embankment behind his farm implement business. We’d hear Dad hurriedly dress and leave to move machinery out of the path of overflow and ice. All this is far from my mind as I peer over the edge looking for a small boy making his way down the deer path with his fishing pole. The image is impossible, though, as ice wedges litter the hillside and the bank is underwater.

Trudging home with a knot of despair in my gut, I hear cries of relief coming from our backyard. Ty is found! Darcy and I run up the street and through the backyard gate to see him standing by our toy box, the lid propped open. Flushed, Ty repeats, “I breathed through the hole.”

I pick him up and scold him, “Didn’t you hear us calling?”

To this day, Darcy thinks Ty hid from us in plain sight. I think he crawled into the toy box to hide then fell asleep. Or he was too young to lift the lid. He is only found when someone hears him call out.

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Years later, in the days after my brother died, I forgot appointments, walked through a construction zone unawares, ran a red light, forgot the names of good friends. I had little sense of how my day fit together, or how it should. I was, as they say, grief stricken. Struck by grief.

Sixteen months earlier, when I learned that our 51-year-old brother had colon cancer that had spread to his liver, my first thought was, “I don’t want to live in a world where Ty doesn’t exist.” I wasn’t being dramatic—this was the depth of my affection for Ty. And I wasn’t alone in this: Ty was beloved. A humble, quiet, witty, observant man who lived nearly his entire life in our Eastern Montana town—marrying his high school sweetheart, selling John Deere machinery to the same families our grandfather served, coaching his children’s basketball and softball teams, maintaining the bow range and teaching young bow hunters, sitting on community boards—Ty built broad and deep bonds.

Eight hundred people attended Ty’s funeral, filling the sanctuary and basement of the Catholic Church, spilling onto the steps and grounds. As our family followed the casket into the sanctuary, I felt bereft by the loss to this community. Ty was simply too dear to lose.

Yet there was something more going on. Something unspoken but as present as the grief.  Ty died of colon cancer, one of the many cancers that affected families in this town. In farming areas there is no delineation between town and countryside—the pesticide drift blankets the entire county, and contaminated groundwater drains into area wells and aquifers. There is a sense in these rural towns that there is a higher incidence of children and young adults dying of leukemia, developing brain tumors; women contracting ovarian and breast cancers at younger and younger ages; men with prostate cancer; farmers with blood cancers and neurodegenerative diseases.

Dr. Rauh, a family medicine doctor in Miles City, writes in a personal letter, “There is little question that primary care providers in Eastern Montana see clusters of unusual malignancies which group in geographic areas … Malignancies of the brain and pancreatic cancer are the ones that seem to jump out ...” Nonetheless, he notes, “Confirming a statistically significant variation from other areas is nearly impossible due to sparse population density …”

When an illness is potentially caused by or in conflict with community practices, the barriers to speaking up can be too strong. Farmers know they’re putting themselves and their community at risk of carcinogenic exposure by using harmful pesticides, but they rarely talk about it. They report that they use only the minimum amount of chemical; nevertheless, they’re not thinking of becoming organic. How much do we sacrifice to the practice of chemical farming? Whom do we sacrifice?

The first strong memory I have of Ty is his presence in my parents’ bedroom, his crib tucked in a corner of their room. Ty was born four years after my other brother, Kyle. We three girls came first. Kyle and I shared a bedroom—his trundle bed sliding under mine during the day so we had room to play—while Brenda and Darcy shared the third bedroom. Ty was a light sleeper so I often heard him in the night. When Ty was four months old, Brenda “brought home the mumps” from Bible school, as if catching a virus was a choice. Soon all of us were sick, including Mom. Mom developed encephalitis and had to spend thirteen days in the Northern Pacific Hospital, which sat directly across the street from our house.

My father worked long hours in the summer. His father, John Milne (our grandpa Jack), bought the John Deere franchise in Glendive in 1941. Our grandpa Jack was one of those rare people who had a long view of things, and, Dad says, always made good decisions. Although Grandpa only had a sixth-grade education, he invested in three businesses in Glendive: the John Deere dealership, a livestock sales yard, and the Coca Cola bottling plant.

All three operations held allure for us as children. On a whim we’d stop by the Coke plant on our bikes, hoping to discover our grandpa, who had a soft spot for us. If we caught him in his office, Grandpa led us to the stockroom and let us choose a pack of candy or gum, a rare treat in a 1960s childhood. Inevitably, we’d sneak into the bottling center to watch the pop bottles circle round, filling with Nesbitt orange, grape soda, or Barq’s root beer. We were teenagers before we drank an eight-ounce bottle of pop without splitting it with a sibling.

The sales yard was where our gray and white Shetland pony boarded during the summer. Grandpa bought Chico for us from his friend in Minnesota. Chico bumped across the Dakotas in an empty livestock truck, and we first greeted him at the sales yard. I remember a Christmas card featuring Chico. We four older children—Mom behind the camera, pregnant with Ty who would be born in late February—sat astride Chico, lined up according to age. I’m squished, barely visible between Brenda and Darcy, and Kyle was perched on Chico’s rump. We were warmly dressed, Mom attentive and careful with us. The image harkens back to previous generations who included their horses in formal photographs.

Early spring jaunts to retrieve Chico, fresh from the freedom of a pasture, challenged our limited pony know-how. Brenda and I walked to the sales yard to wrangle with him after Mom reminded us to watch for trains. I liked the fresh manure smell of the sales yard—not so distant from the earthy scent of soil—and the lolling of cattle or baaing of sheep, depending on the day’s sale. Brenda and I usually found Chico in his stall. We haltered him, one of us took the reins, and the other crawled on his back. Before Chico would walk, he needed a carrot, the first of many. About halfway home, near the city park, we switched places. The second rider had the added pleasure of riding a horse, albeit a small horse, past their friends’ houses as we entered our neighborhood. Children converged, taking turns riding Chico down the streets, through the park, Brenda leading with the reins. In late afternoon Brenda and I reversed our trek, except we both walked because Chico was tired. Our patient father scooped pony droppings off the grass that evening.

Our paternal grandparents lived a half block from us, and Grandpa took his role in our lives seriously. It was he, alongside our parents, who nurtured and instructed us. When we were teenagers Grandpa taught us many things, but I remember most vividly being instructed on how to sweep the shop where the mechanics worked—take short strong strokes—and being counseled on the virtues of working hard and saving money. As a boy Ty thrived under Grandpa’s attentions. Ty loved to fish and Dad had time for nothing but work in the summers, so it fell to Mom or Grandpa to take Ty fishing. Occasionally, Grandpa drove Ty to western Montana to fish the streams with Grandpa’s friend Rusty.  I marvel at my parents letting him go, but Grandpa was an easy man to trust.

One of my favorite stories about our visionary Grandpa is his part in ensuring that Glendive had a good quality medical facility when the railroad decided to close its hospital in 1965. Seven Northern Pacific hospitals were built at the turn of the century in Washington, Montana, and Minnesota to care for the railroad’s employees; Glendive’s was built relatively late, in 1913. Grandpa knew Glendive likely wouldn’t survive without a hospital, so he organized local businessmen to raise the capital to reorganize, and then rebuild as the Glendive Community Hospital. Grandpa died from the ravages of emphysema in that hospital, and Grandma lived her last years in the nursing home that was later attached to it.

In the autumn Dad had a breather from work so he took the boys hunting. Dad’s habit was to place his boots in the hallway the evening before in hopes of not waking Mom in the morning. Noting this, Kyle lined his boots up next to Dad’s. The fall of his third year, Ty carried his Red Wings to the hallway and placed them beside Kyle’s. I vaguely remember someone telling Ty he wasn’t old enough to go, and he insisting that he was—Ty’s lifelong ability to persevere first manifested in his desire to hunt. Upon finding only his boots remaining the next morning, Ty wailed; we girls and Mom suffered his anguish all day. When the hunters returned, Mom welcomed Dad with, “From now on, you take Ty too.” 

Ty and I became hunting partners once I passed my driver’s test. Or rather, I was the sister who drove him to his hunting spots. After I parked the pickup in a scrubby draw, he and his real comrade, Todd or Fred, hiked off with their guns while I read or explored around camp. Shortly before sunset, I’d start a careful fire to prepare hamburger soup. I used to think I invented hamburger soup: 4-H beef, seasonings, a can of tomatoes, fresh carrots and potatoes. Even now, a bowlful places me in an Eastern Montana coulee waiting for the boys.

When I moved to a Yup’ik village in western Alaska to teach after college, Ty visited not once, but twice. The first time he was in high school and traveled with our parents. A friend took us out in his boat—the most practical way to bird hunt on the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta when the waters are open. Ty sat at the bow in my red down parka, his shotgun in hand, adjusting to hitting ducks from a moving object, rather than creeping over a dike hoping to surprise them on irrigation canals, like we did back home. When he reappeared in the village two years later, I had my own boat, so I pointed him into the wind and we skimmed down the sloughs hoping to rouse waterfowl around the next bend.

After I moved back to the lower forty-eight—leaving me with an ache for wild places—our roles reversed. Whenever I made a fall stopover in Glendive, I suggested an excursion. By then Dad had given up deer hunting, saying he’d rather see the deer than kill them. And Ty hunted big game with a long bow, sitting all day in a cottonwood like a vision seeker. Kyle and Ty still pursued pheasants, however, and as John Deere dealers they knew which farmer would grant us permission to flush their thickets. Ty would line up a couple of places to hunt and we’d set out on a Saturday. I always felt put right walking the plains with my tall brothers, grounded by their witty comments and gentle teasing. It seemed my brothers knew each other as well as a married couple, since they worked together every day. At Ty’s memorial service, Kyle said that only once in 30 years did they argue, and it was over a trifle.

On one particular trip, in 1987, I noticed that several farmsteads were abandoned and asked my brothers why. They explained that farming had become more expensive with the cost of fertilizers and pesticides and larger equipment. Many farmers had been forced out because of high interest rates and low grain prices, selling their land to their neighbors. I found the absence of these family farms disturbing—a third of my high school class was farm kids. They knew more than the rest of us, I thought as a kid: neat stuff like how to seed a field and drive a grain truck. Where had their families moved? And who would take their place in town?

Our grandpa ran the Milne Implement business from 1941 until his retirement in 1961. In those days small farms dotted the countryside, the sales yard held weekly stock sales, soda was locally brewed, and farming was primarily organic. I was well into adulthood before I read Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring or Sandra Steingraber’s Living Downstream, two books of many that document the danger and rashness of heavy chemical use on the landscape. And it would be years more before I understood that we’re all—consumers, farmers, and implement dealers included—complicit in the declining health of our rural communities.

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Two major intertwined forces changed the way we grow our food since my grandpa started in the implement business: shifts in farm policy, and heavy dependence on synthetic pesticides. Although the farm crisis of the 1970s and 80s turned out to be as complex as it is relevant, the gist is a new farm bill was passed, which altered the way farmers were paid. Instead of setting a baseline price on major crops, farmers were supplemented directly through government farm program payments. This new farm bill was accompanied by unseasonable weather events, misguided trade decisions, and—as my brothers referenced—a rise in interest rates in 1979 to combat inflation, “throwing heavily-indebted farmers into economic crisis,” Jonathan Coppess, an administrator of the Farm Service Agency writes.

 As a result, some farms failed and the remaining farms absorbed their neighbors’ places. For the most part, the small farmer couldn’t buy new machinery to keep up, Dad explains. “Once tractors cost $80,000, that farmer couldn’t afford it.” Now farms are so large they require big machinery and too much capital investment.

According to the USDA, since 1950 the number of farms in the United States has steadily declined from nearly 5.5 million to under 2 million today. Despite there being half as many farms, total cropland devoted to major crops has remained in the 250-million-acre range, while cropland acreage per farm is 2.5 times the level it was in 1950. The remaining farm families are grateful to still be growing food when so many family-owned farms have failed.

The second force is more sinister, yet consistent with big operations. When World War II ended, chemical merchants such as Monsanto (now owned by a German pharmaceutical company, Bayer AG) had large remaining stockpiles that they wanted to profit from so they decided to market wartime chemicals to farmers. As the biologist Sandra Steingraber notes in Living Downstream, these chemicals needed to be seen as safe by farm workers and consumers even though little testing had been done on them. Monsanto’s and other agrochemical companies’ marketing strategy was successful. Dad recalls pulling up to farms—after pesticides first started being used—and finding the farmer cleaning the nipples on the sprayer by blowing through them.  They had been told the chemicals were safe, so why not? 

“Those early rigs were made so that the farmer sat exposed in the middle on an implement with a Volkswagen-sized engine with sprayers off to either side,” Dad describes. “It was a death trap.”

With the advent of chem-fallow agriculture—in theory an effective way to prevent soil erosion—more and more pesticides were sprayed to kill weeds that had previously been tilled under, according to Jamie Lockman, executive director of the Montana Organic Association (MOA). When I pull up a USGS pesticide-use map, Montana’s north central and northeast corners are dark brown, indicating where most of the 114 pounds per square mile of glyphosate—a widely used synthetic herbicide, and one of approximately 550 chemicals to choose from—were spread on agricultural land in 2017. Montana’s mottled appearance melds into a heavy brown blotch that bleeds over the Midwest, blanketing Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, and shading the Mississippi River to its mouth. Genetically engineered (GE) corn and soybean crops are the big users, responsible for nearly two-thirds of the total 300 million pounds of glyphosate used in the United States in 2017. It is a bleak image.

In 2016, the United States applied a phenomenal amount of pesticide—1.2 billion pounds. It is not uncommon for an Eastern Montana farmer to spend $500,000 annually on chemicals, including fertilizers, on 5,000 acres of wheat. Usually, it estimates to be about $25 to $30 per acre in pesticides, and $60 per acre in fertilizer. Conventional farmers of today use their sprayers more than any other implement.

When herbicide products were introduced, botanists warned that the weeds would just outsmart the chemical and become more resistant, which has happened on millions of acres of U.S. farmland and is intensified with the use of GE crops. Lockman says she’s hearing from Montana farmers who are interested in transitioning to organic certification to address herbicide-resistant weeds as well as “acid spots that develop with repeated herbicide applications.”

Because of pesticide use it’s reported that we’ve lost sixty percent of our insect mass in the United States over the past 100 years. My husband tells of how in the 1950s and 60s their family farm in southern Minnesota was alive with snakes, frogs, jackrabbits, pheasants, fox, raptors, insects, and his favorite, huge spiders. Jon describes for our grandchildren how he ran down the cornrows, sliding to a stop in front of the black and yellow garden spider spinning its web between the stalks.  In killing off insects, we’re destroying not only the fascinating world we chance upon as children, but beings which help pollinate our crops, renew the soil, and remove carcasses.

My parents’ generation, born in the 1930s and early 40s, are healthier later into life than their children. As Steingraber and Rachel Carson remind us, previous generations weren’t exposed to industrial chemicals and farm pesticides in their prenatal periods, infancies, childhood, or teenage years. In Living Downstream, Steingraber writes that anyone born between the 1940s until the mid-1980s—when the identity of chemicals released by industry was still considered a trade secret[1]—"will never know with certainty what we were exposed to as children and what carcinogenic risks we have assumed from such exposures. “

When the CDC released its Second National Report on Human Exposure to Environmental Chemicals in 2003, it confirmed that we all carry synthetic pesticides in our bodies. The CDC found pesticides and their breakdown products in all of the people they tested, in many cases at levels well above officially permitted thresholds established by government health and environmental agencies. The body load is especially high and troublesome among Mexican Americans and children.

A recent study among wild California sea lions documenting widespread urogenital carcinoma —involving 18-23% of adult animals examined post-mortem over the past 40 years—is instructive. Dumping of industrial waste DDTs in the 1960s, and subsequent run-off of newer chemical poisons, means these sea lions have both a long, as well as recent, history with pollution. The study, published in Frontiers in Marine Science, found a positive correlation between contaminants in the blubber of the pups and the milk of the mother, meaning that the pups “will start life with a higher exposure before they are even weaned and feeding independently.”

Scientific, peer-reviewed studies such as the Agricultural Health Study (AHS), a large prospective cohort study which tracked farmers and farm spouses, as well as commercial pesticide applicators and their spouses, link various cancers—including breast, pancreatic, colon, ovarian—to the use and exposure to agricultural chemicals. A valuable and comprehensive study, one of the largest studies of pesticides and cancer, the AHS collected information for 25 years, from 1994-2017, and included 89,000 adult study subjects living in Iowa and North Carolina, two states that represent different farming practices. As early as 1994, the AHS’s authors concluded that it’s “evident that the strongest links of exposures and malignancies have been with pesticides.”

While the European Union, China, and Brazil, the other three large agricultural producers besides the United States, are banning or phasing out chemicals known to be carcinogenic—such

as 2,4-DB, bensulide, chloropicrin, dichlobenil, dicrotophos, EPTC, norflurazon, oxytetracycline, paraquat, phorate, streptomycin, terbufos and tribufos—the process to ban known carcinogens is so onerous in the United States that the chemical companies usually shelf a product for economic reasons before it’s outright banned, according to Nathan Donley, a senior scientist with the Center for Biological Diversity. Even licensing a product is suspect: the U.S. EPA relies on studies by companies who make the product, few of which conduct field studies to confirm what they’ve documented in their labs.

In the European Union, the burden of proof lies with the pesticide industry to show that their product doesn’t cause harm to the environment or humans, rather than to the citizen to protest after harm has been done, Donley writes. Unfortunately, this is not the case in the United States.

When we made an enemy out of a weed and the grasshopper, by extension we did harm to the farming community. By practicing chemical-intensive farming, we do battle with our own bodies and the bodies of our children. We are, after all, an organism—what we do to the earth and its atmosphere, we do to ourselves.

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Our hunting trips grew rare as the years passed, but my brothers and I still had opportunities.  During a summer vacation to Glendive in 2010, I overheard Ty say he had drawn a moose tag to hunt north of Yellowstone Park. Ty, who usually spoke slow and steady, sounded excited. Tentatively, I asked whom he was hunting with. A brother-in-law, he replied. “If you have any extra days, I’d love to meet you,” I proposed. When Ty didn’t respond, I put it out of my mind. So, when he called me in Helena to say Dave couldn’t join him until Sunday, and did I want to check out the place with him, I was gleeful.

On a warm Saturday in early October, I met Ty in Belgrade then tailed him until we turned east at Storm Castle Creek, a drainage in the Gallatin Range.  After parking his trailer in the campground, and eating our fill of hamburger soup, we drove to a site to scout for moose. We followed a trail up a mountainside and scrambled onto a promontory from which Ty could scan the valley.  Leaning on a boulder to glass for birds—knowing how thorough Ty would be—I startled when he bellowed like a cow moose, the sound so authentic it made me laugh. “You can’t make any noise tomorrow,” Ty scolded.

“Of course not,” I replied. I knew my role: bird dog when we were young, bear lookout on this outing. Because Ty carried a long bow, he asked me to buy an upland bird tag so I could scare away the grizzlies—if we came crosswise with any—with my shotgun. Ty and I carried bear spray as well.

The light fading, we bushwhacked down the side of the mountain, in a hurry to drive through the remainder of the district. This hunting district was narrow: around ten miles long, seven miles wide, encircled by craggy mountains. Yellowstone Park lay forty miles south. As we crested a pass, two rifle hunters scoped the creek drainage to the west. Ty slowed down to eavesdrop; they had a moose in their sight. We continued down the hillside to the creek crossing, pulling off at a makeshift camp. “We’ll get up early,” Ty said, “beat them to this spot.”           

That night I settled onto a pullout couch while Ty slept behind a partial barrier in the real bed. It was a strange night of waking and falling back to sleep for brief periods, both of us restless. Unable to sleep, Ty rose around 3:30 a.m., signaling an early departure. We ate Ty’s homemade granola then gathered our gear. Twenty minutes later we pulled over at the trailhead, long before the rifle hunters. Around six, half an hour before legal hunting, we creaked open the pickup doors.

“Have your spray?” Ty whispered. I pointed to my belt.

“Put a shell in your chamber,” he added. This, I hadn’t thought of.

After I set the gun’s safety, I shadowed Ty up the narrow rocky path, half-spooked in country shared with grizzlies. All my adult life I had made noise in bear country, not this watch-where-you-step hunter’s stalk. Soon we arrived at a meadow to the right of the trail—how Ty knew the lay of this land befuddled me. Was he relying on his memory of 10 years ago? But I shouldn’t have been surprised; as children, Ty kept the family ledger in his mind, remembering when Mom promised we’d go to Frosty’s for lunch, where the leftover fireworks from the year before were hidden. His memory served him well as a businessman, the farmers counting on his recall and precision.

“Stay here,” Ty whispered. “I’m climbing higher to call.” Leaving his backpack with me, he added, “And be quiet.” I grinned, knowing he was only half-teasing.

            Ty scrambled noiselessly up the hillside, out of sight. I took my bearings: directly below a marshy area sloped to the creek. A month earlier, mosquitoes would have pestered me. I listened for vehicles approaching on the road, but so far it was only the two of us hoping to attract a bull moose. On one of my first weekends as a young teacher in the Yup’ik village, a neighbor brought me a roast of moose after bagging a cow moose up the Johnson River. Having never tasted nor prepared moose, I roasted it in my oil-burning stove as if it was beef. It turned out delicious, dark and tender, and sustained me for days.

I stood in a patch of sun, then laid my gun on a dry mound of grass with the barrel pointed downhill. I heard Ty imitating the female moose in distress. He bellowed, paused, bellowed again. Then, silence. A long silence. Just as I began to wonder if everything was okay, Ty whistled a warning. Something rustled to my right. I turned to look as a big black wolf ran fast down the trail we had walked in on. And another, lighter in color, not as big. I’d seen wolves in the park, but never this close. Uneasy, I reached for my gun just as a third wolf came into view. This one was nearly white and finer-boned, a female. Hearing or sensing me, she stopped and turned for a quick look. Two more wolves sped by after her, taking cues from the leader.

Five wolves hell bent on getting away from the tall man dressed in camouflage. I was stunned—Ty called in a pack of wolves who thought they’d heard a cow moose in trouble.

As the last wolf left my sight, Ty burst into the clearing as worked up as the wolves. He frantically dug through the pack for his camera. Having unearthed it, Ty lifted his head and met the eyes of the black alpha who had circled round and stood in the brush watching us. By the time I turned, he had vanished.

Ty recounted how he heard an animal running toward him so he drew his bow, expecting a coyote. When the canine—obviously not a coyote—ran full speed out of the brush, Ty lowered his bow and man and wolf considered one another. Then the wolf detoured right, headed in my direction, thus Ty’s whistle, “Look sharp!”

We waited, willing the wolves to reappear. Unlikely, we knew, but to leave this convergence quickly felt irreverent. Wolves are too clever, though, so we packed up after half an hour, intending to keep climbing. The drainage was broad and ringed by high peaks, good country for moose. Ty started out ahead of me, his angular frame still carrying his excitement. I took a step and, as if on signal, the big wolf howled a message right at my back. He crouched only feet away while we two-leggeds had neither seen nor sensed him. The alpha’s cry filled the valley, eliciting a response from each direction and altitude: 20 to 25 distinct calls. The valley rang with nothing short of wolf talk. Ty and I stood in awe.

“Maybe I should carry that gun,” Ty suggested, waiting for me to catch up.

“No way. I don’t know what to do with that,” I said, indicating his bow. “I’m not hunting in this valley,” I added.

“There’s no moose here anyway,” Ty quipped.

We drove back down the road to a trail that headed east, paralleling Storm Castle Creek. We hiked a few miles in, stopping again while Ty called. The day heated into the high 60s, warm for hunting, but any discomfort was eclipsed by our encounter with the wolves. We hiked without talking much; Ty, too, I guessed, was shaping the narrative.

When I headed home later that day, Ty followed to find cell service to check in with Tammy. By the time I pulled into the yard, Darcy had phoned the house and Jon knew all about the wolves.

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Often in the forefront of science in the United States are civil jury trials with battling expert witnesses: one set presenting the industry’s side of science, the other presenting the injured parties. When the science on glyphosate is presented to a jury of peers, the injured party is winning. Lagging behind the courtroom is the bureaucracy of science, whether by academia or government.

This makes sense because bureaucratic science works on a broader front, studying communities rather than individuals. Thus, in Montana, statistics show that cancer rates are generally uniform throughout the state, with some peaks in East Central Montana of certain cancers during defined time periods, according to a 2020 analysis of the tumor registry data by Montana epidemiologist Heather Zimmerman. This is not unexpected given how many rural Montana kids, like myself, have left their birth communities and moved to larger towns, taking their pesticide exposure with them.

Zimmerman has found, however, a significant increase in the overall cancer incidence when comparing 1990-1994 with later time periods. In an email summarizing her findings, Zimmerman noted that “this same trend is seen across the whole state and even in national cancer incidence rates.”

This is what we know—that more people are getting cancer and certain cancers are linked to environmental contaminants. Even given the complexity of determining absolute cause, we know that a cancer cell is made over a long period of time, through multiple steps, and chemicals play a role, Steingraber noted in a 2010 interview. “Cancer is definitely not a random tragedy,” she stressed.

Our rural communities are important, essential to our survival, and we need to start talking about how we can better protect them. Sustainable and ecological approaches to growing food—such as regenerative or organic farming—may be more labor intensive, but the quality of the grain or fruit or vegetable will improve, as will the farming community’s health. In Montana, there is a long history of corporate abuse: early on in the smelter city of Anaconda, as well as the mining disasters and miners’ consumption in Butte, and, more recently, the malignant and non-malignant respiratory deaths due to asbestos-contaminated vermiculate mining in Libby. Agrochemical companies’ hold on our rural communities continues this exploitive tradition.

Although dietary and lifestyle factors may contribute to the development of colorectal cancer, Ty was a cautious man. He didn’t drink or smoke, he ate well, and apart from the stresses of running a business, he lived a fortunate life: grounded in a happy family that he and Tammy created, and passionate about the outdoors. Although my family doesn’t talk about it, I think Ty’s health was made more vulnerable by living in a community heavily reliant on dangerous pesticides.

During our first real conversation after Ty was diagnosed with Stage 4 colon cancer, Ty took a video call from a farmer friend who had recently received a bone marrow transplant for a hematologic malignancy. Ty’s friend wanted to show him how well his new enclosed sprayer worked. I looked over Ty’s shoulder as the farmer, riding in the cab, filmed the mist leaving the sprayer, coating his seedlings. Ty admired the machinery as the two men made small talk; I knew Ty had a deer stand on his friend’s land down along the Yellowstone River.

When their call ended, Ty and I noted the irony: to what extent was this young man’s cancer related to the heavy use of pesticides on his and his neighbors’ farms? The first tool in the fields each spring was a sprayer; the last in the fall, another sprayer. Deadly bookends.

Like most people, if I were to count my family and friends whose disease had a possible connection to pesticide exposure, the list would be long. In his mid-sixties my dad developed prostate cancer. When he was coming out from under the anesthesia, Dad named all the men in the area he knew who had surgery for prostate cancer. Mom said it was like a mantra, there were so many, and she knew none of it. Among my father’s generation, prostate cancer was something only the men talked about. 

And the friends, the innumerable friends. Three of the six women in my mother’s coffee group—all of whom are from the area—have lost children to cancer in the last five years, including my childhood friend Cindy Kolberg. A friend from college, Carol Schmidt, was diagnosed with breast cancer when our daughters were in primary school together. A scientist and an attorney, Carol told me over lunch a year into her diagnosis, “If one more person suggests that breast cancer is a spiritual journey, I’m going to sock them. I have breast cancer because I grew up on a corn and soybean farm in Illinois, where everyone sprayed—even doctors acknowledge this.”

In early May of 2019, I ate lunch with a younger woman, 48, who had ovarian cancer. Maggie Long was especially open about her cancer, telling people her experience so they could benefit from it. When she mentioned that her brother had an aggressive form of prostate cancer and that her parents could lose two of their three children, I asked her if she grew up on a farm. “No,” she said, “but my dad was a crop duster.”

Six months later, during Advent, Maggie died of ovarian cancer while I worked on this essay. Beautiful honest Maggie, daughter of a crop duster.

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Ty couldn’t catch a break—he wasn’t a candidate for immunotherapy; after nine months he developed an allergy to the initial chemotherapy regime that was helping shrink his tumors; then, the final blow, he developed heart problems from an experimental drug in a Stage 1 trial. On Father’s Day of June 2016, Ty looked good, a bit thin, but you wouldn’t know he had cancer. Fourth of July week, after suffering from too high a dose of the trial drug, he looked gaunt, white, and weak. He had to drop out of the trial because the doctors were afraid to give him the drug again, and he was too compromised to continue chemotherapy. Ty came home to Glendive to see his son marry his high school sweetheart, as he and Tammy had 30 years earlier. A week later, he died.

When I returned to Helena after Ty’s service, my closest friends and their husbands brought dinner to our house, a meal of solace. Cindy arrived from Bozeman and joined us. We pulled a round green metal table and five chairs up next to our wooden picnic table. After filling our plates in the kitchen, we found room at the tables: the women perched close together on the wooden benches. Cindy and I sat shoulder to shoulder. No one, not even my husband, knows me as well as Cindy did. We played together nearly every day of our childhoods, lived two hours distance as adults. Cindy watched Ty grow up; we babysat our little brothers together. Having lost a brother years earlier, this pain was familiar to her.

I relate for the women how Ty’s service was held in the Catholic Church with our Methodist minister in attendance because our church was too small, plus Ty and Tammy raised their children as Catholic. Ty’s teenaged nieces on Tammy’s side—slender, tall, athletic girls—presented the offertory of gifts, like heralds preparing the way. The first girl bore Ty’s longbow and quiver with four arrows; the next, his elk bugle; then his family’s basketball; while another conveyed a toy John Deere tractor and his John Deere hat; and, finally, his Methodist Bible. Dressed in a yellow vestment, the monk-like Father Francis laid the bow and quiver on Ty’s casket before placing the other objects around the nave.

A rooster pheasant crowed at the cemetery as we climbed out of our cars. Shauna, Jon and I stood in the open, enveloped by a fine mist, while our family assembled across from us under a white awning. I was amazed by my parents’ strength, shored up by the community they’d lived in for 83 years. As the casket was lowered into the ground, Fr. Francis sang a lament.

It was August 18, 2016. Ty John Milne was 52 years old.

My friends listened intently, asking few questions. Cindy sat unusually quiet beside me. Four months earlier, Cindy had learned that she had pancreatic cancer. She knew she didn’t have long to live, yet she wouldn’t let me acknowledge it. For now, I acquiesced.

In mid-September my folks drove through Helena on their way to meet up with a great-grandson; it would be the last time they drove independently to Helena, although none of us acknowledged this was likely. All through Ty’s illness, Mom had supported and comforted Dad. I had frequently heard my father tell people how fortunate he was to work beside his sons. As Dad aged, Ty often picked him up on the weekend to take him pheasant hunting or to the country to deliver machinery.

The last time Ty was hospitalized, he and I were left alone for a few minutes while Tammy met with the doctor. He looked at me with an expression I couldn’t read, his face ashen. Darcy and I had talked about how we wished it was one of us dying, not Ty. We’re older, our children are older, we had experienced the joy of grandchildren. I told Ty part of this, drifting off, aware of how futile it must sound to him. Ty shook his head, “No one should have to go through this.”

That’s the thing about greed—the agrochemical companies choose to ignore what a terrible death cancer is. Cells run amuck. Children die young. Adults leave families behind, miss out on grandchildren, on becoming elders. Elderly parents grieve in their last years. I rarely use the word evil, but this disregard for human health and longevity on the part of pesticide manufacturers is evil. How hard can this be, to dispose of waste safely, stop manufacturing poisonous substances, develop safe alternatives? Wouldn’t any good person or conscientious corporate leader want to operate under these guidelines? Most of us are familiar with the studies that report more money doesn’t equate to happier lives. Isn’t enough, adequate?

*********

It is late June and the fields are green. Long-billed curlews fly up out of the peas. It has been many years since I’ve been out this direction, a Mennonite community of successful farmers northwest of Glendive, where I have returned home to visit my folks. Dad wanted to come out to look over a sod hut that he has been reading about in a book of local history. He remembers dropping in on Bernie Storms and his wife with Ty on hunting trips and is eager to show us the dwelling. The Storms lived in their sod home for more than 50 years before moving into town; sod is warm in winter, cool in summer, an ideal prairie dwelling in many ways.

 This morning Dad called the farmer—a friend and faithful customer—for permission and directions. I marvel at Dad’s bearings as we make our way through gate after gate along paths paralleling fields, ending on a two-track weaving down a gully that is so faint Darcy wonders from the back seat why she didn’t stay home. But I’m not worried: having hunted with Dad and my brothers, I know how capable he is, even at eighty-six.          

Later we stop to thank Alan, whose land we’ve driven across. He’s delighted to see Dad, says he misses chatting with him when he comes to the implement store. “Stop by and visit the old homestead,” Alan invites us. “It’s just up the road.” We take him up on it—we’re curious, plus we’ve packed a picnic.

After eating our lunch in shade behind the beautifully restored log house, we stop at their family cemetery. A fresh grave sits farthest from the gate. “Do you know who’s buried there?” I ask. Dad says it is Alan’s eldest brother, who recently died of cancer. He and Kyle visited him while he was sick, Dad relates.

Not knowing the specifics of the brother’s illness, I wonder if his death could be at all related to the hazards of chemically intensive farming. Although the fields in production look beautiful, the land that is resting doesn’t look like land at all. Grey-brown and parched, it appears dead, not a green thing grows on it. Back home, Dad confirms that the fallow acres would have been sprayed in the spring.

When a thunderstorm passes through town that evening, Dad hopes the country we’ve driven through has “got some rain.” Elemental seed, clean rain, healthy soil: surely, we can find our way back to these. Our well-being depends on them. As do our rural communities.

Notes

1.      Sandra Steingraber, (Living Downstream, Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, Inc. 1997) 100.