A Different Perspective: 8/14/2024

I had a reunion last week with a friend I will have known for 60 years at the end of this month. We were freshmen in the Montana School of Mines dormitory in 1964. Although we kept in touch, primarily via email, we had not seen each other for nearly thirty years. Over a few days, we relived our early time together, much of it wasted, and shook our heads in amazement at the things we did without thinking.

It’s an established fact that young men’s brains don’t fully develop their reasoning and self-preservation areas until sometime in the late twenties. We were like the perfect lab rats to verify that hypothesis. What a difference a few decades makes in perspective.

Steve came from Saranac Lake, New York, but was born in Butte with a father from Anaconda. In an odd twist of the universe, his mother was born in Lewistown, as was I. Like all of us engineers-to-be, he was a nerdy, smart guy, and we quickly got to be friends. He had a classic normal upbringing, with very little out of the ordinary, while mine was more of a surviving willful child, getting ahead despite myself. I was raised by a single mom, but there were some old guys who were into small mines and filled in for the absent father. By the time we met, I had done quite a bit of mining and other work in a lot of unusual places. It was really easy to lead him astray.

Our main entertainment, aside from the usual drinking, was exploring the wonders of Butte mining, and out into the surrounding districts. Lots of holes to find our way into, as well as acres of old buildings. We worked together as student miners and brought home lunchboxes filled with explosives and other trinkets.

As he put it when he arrived last week, we would relive our early years, but with less beer and dynamite.

Just like home-grown Butte rats, it was a game of avoiding the Anaconda security guards, the Burns Detective Agency, lovingly called the Burnsies, as we slipped in and out of forbidden areas. We only got nabbed once and got let go when we used the School of Mines student ticket, which was better than the Monopoly Get-Out-of-Jail Free card in those days. The town was very supportive of the school and forgiving to wayward students.

We went down any mine opening we could find that wasn’t securely locked or active, with little or no concern for caution or consideration of chances of survival. There were several close calls, but, as we said many times during this visit, “Here we are.”

Looking back from our aged perspective, we could only be appalled at the things we did without hesitation or, as was so clear now, any flicker of logical thought. It was especially sobering for me because I had a lot of experience around mines and machinery, and I felt some pangs of guilt for having led my virtually inexperienced friend into the extremes we explored.

It was a great visit, one he probably needed more than I, having lost his wife of 40 years last year, but I also found it wonderful to find we still had the connection that had brought us together so many years ago. Our careers were widely divergent. He was a corporate manager while I worked for myself. Yet they were parallel in a major element: the ability to solve problems by painting outside the lines.

Nowadays, it’s too bad that more people from widely divergent backgrounds and beliefs can’t find and enjoy their common ground.