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Where the Wide Benches of Southwestern Montana Spill Into the Rivers

By: Verlyn Klinkenborg
Publication: New York Times
Date: April 21, 2004

As a description of landscape, the word ''bench'' doesn't mean much in the Northeast. The terrain is simply too tangled and wooded, the views too short. But the word comes into its own in Montana, especially in the southwestern part of the state. The mountains there dominate the view, of course, their ranges rising almost naïvely against the sky: the Madison, the Gravelly, the Tobacco Root. They seem, at first, like the largest part of the landscape. But where the mountains stop, the benches begin, great alluvial fans that shelve outward from the base of the mountains to the middle of a broad shallow valley. There, a river is trenching its way between the benches.

In spring, the mountains gather the rain, and the rivers focus it. The benches, as always, seem to dissipate it. I drove not long ago along the edge of the enormous bench that sweeps westward from Ruby Mountain and overlooks the Beaverhead Valley. Down in the thick of the valley, the river seemed to be slowly choking itself, encumbered by brush, twisting this way and that, hiding its true extent in bogs and alders. If you looked at Beaverhead Rock, you could almost imagine the valley as it was when Lewis and Clark found that ''beaver were basking in great numbers along the shore.''

But up on the bench, sandhill cranes courted each other in the shadow of giant irrigation rigs, which were themselves dwarfed by the ground they had to cover. Tractors were working the earth into a dustlike tilth, and in the ranch yards rose great mounds of seed potatoes, which were being loaded into semis bound for Idaho and planting. The bench beyond, that broad swath of dry grass, created an optical illusion. Without some point of reference -- a line of utility poles, a house in the near distance -- it was almost impossible to judge how far the bench ran. It was just short of prairie, open range for the wind.

Where the true bench breaks down into pasture, a greener, wetter landscape closer to the river, it looked as if the sky had rained calves a few weeks earlier. Once every day or so, a rancher would drive a tractor through the pastures, pulling a device that shaves hay off a round bale. The cows and their calves stood along that line of hay, grazing, and they bedded down along it, too. From the sky you would have seen great underscorings of black cattle all across the county. A couple of fences away, Angus bulls waited placidly for the coming weeks, when their call will come.

We always think of ferocity when we think of bulls. But in herds of their own sex, they can be perfect gentlemen. While fishing one day, I watched some bulls make their way down to a triangle of fence that reached into the river. There was room for only one bull to drink at its apex, so they took turns edging into that corner and backing out again so the next bull could drink. I wondered whether they noticed the tiny mayflies -- the Baetis -- making their way downstream in the film by the billions.

At some point, most anglers begin to wonder why they fish. Over the years the reasons pile up into a beaver dam of arguments, tangled this way and that, some more reasonable than others. I've come to a point in my fishing life where I simply like walking down the drainage -- seeing where the streambed goes, where the tributaries enter, where the view rises from. Standing in the low spots is a good way to see the world. Nearly everything comes down to the water sooner or later.

And along the river, the landscape shrinks. All that's left is the rim of the benches and the mountains beyond them. After a day on the river, the world seems to be reduced to its essentials: light, along the peaks, and motion, in the stream itself. Then daylight begins to tail off and, after hours of hard fishing, you start to see motion wherever you look, as if the river had gone still and a current were now flowing through the sagebrush and the rocks beyond. The only way to stop that illusory flow is to go back up onto the bench, where nothing seems to move, except the sandhill cranes flirting in the distance.

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