Guest post by Susan Kushner Resnick, author ofGoodbye Wifes and Daughters
I’ve been opening readings for my nonfiction book about a Montana coal mine disaster by acknowledging the obvious: I don’t belong with this story. What, I asked the audiences across the state of Montana, is a New Englander who has no connection to the west and had never met a miner before starting the book, doing here? Then I tell them how I found my subject. Or, rather, how the subject found me.
It all started with E.B. White. After reading The Trumpet of the Swan to my son, I decided I wanted to see the Montana swan preserve where White set a main part of the novel. A little research showed that the area isn’t as populated with trumpeter swans as it used to be and that it’s not near anything else that a conventional tourist would want to see. But Yellowstone isn’t far, and Grand Teton National Park isn’t far from that. We made plans to visit the Wyoming parks with the option of driving to White’s swan lake if time allowed. And since we were going to be in the neighborhood, we’d also drive the Beartooth Highway, a 68-mile road of switchbacks that leads from Yellowstone to Red Lodge Montana, with an 11,000-foot peak in the middle.
Plans made, airline tickets purchased, all good. Then: not. My mother died. I wasn’t in the mood for an adventure anymore. And the Beartooth Highway closed for the first summer in its 69-year history due to mudslides. Now there was really no reason to go to Montana.
But you know how it is after a loved one dies. I couldn’t scout the energy needed to change those vacation plans, so I kept them and wished the trip would end before it started. Long story short: while feeling trapped in Red Lodge, Montana with nothing to do, the topic of my book sat itself right in front of me and refused to move.
A hotel waitress had told us that the best entertainment in the area was in the next town over: pig racing at a saloon. Dear God, I thought, when can I go home? But the saloon served fantastic steaks and the owners had hung newspaper articles from the week of the mine disaster above each table.
“Wow,” I said to my family after reading the poignant stories, “I need to read the book about this.”
No such book existed. Turns out I had to write it.
That highway with the switchbacks that had never been closed before the summer of my vacation? It was built by one of the miners who died in the disaster. If you believe in those kind of coincidences, as I do, I guess he thought I belonged with this story, outsider or not. That was welcome enough.
One morning in 1943, close to eighty men descended into the Smith coal mine in Bearcreek, Montana. Only three came out alive. “Goodbye wifes and daughters . . .” wrote two of the miners as they died. The story of that tragic day and its aftermath unfolds in this book through the eyes of those wives and daughters—women who lost their husbands, fathers, and sons, livelihoods, neighbors, and homes, yet managed to fight back and persevere.
