Last night I sashayed into our local watering hole and found the bar crowded not with the usual suspects. "Who are all these folks?" I asked Tiffany the bartendress. "Miners," she said, "the mine's shut down". Ah, usually as I finish my day shift and walk into The Grand Bar and Restaurant, the big Greyhound buses taking the night shift to the mine up the Old Boulder Road passes me by. I always make a mental note about day and night shifts and office working and mine working.
The Stillwater Mine, the only palladium and platinum mine in the Western hemisphere, "idled" its East Boulder mine that is in Sweet Grass County, Montana. It's where they shot "The River Runs Thru It" and "The Horse Whisperer" so you get the visuals.
So along with trout, the river runs through a place that holds the minerals used in catalytic converters. So in this small county the size of the state of Rhode Island with only 3500 people in it, the financial meltdown and crisis of the Big 3 all started to make the people at the bar connect the dots. Known as the local liberal, I had a new audience for wonky talk about the Glass Steagall and the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Acts and how those chickens are all roosting right here in Big Sky Country.
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