The Crazies: The Cattleman, the Wind Prospector, and a War Out West
In her Acknowledgements, author Amy Gamerman writes, “A story like this comes along once in a lifetime.” Readers can be grateful that Gamerman was there when this story came along, and that she—as cowboys would say—rode it for all it was worth.
It is a story that pits a land-rich but cash-poor fifth-generation rancher, Rick Jarrett, against his billionaire neighbors in his attempt to erect wind turbines on his property. The events chronicled in the book take place in Montana, around Big Timber, in beautiful country between the Yellowstone River and the Crazy Mountains. Whether the title, The Crazies, refers to the mountains or the people involved in the dispute is an open question. Everyone, it seems, on all sides of the conflict will go to any lengths—never mind what is reasonable, logical, sensible, or advisable—in order to prevail.
As Gamerman weaves the fabric of events, she stitches in numerous people and places, the principals as well as those who play tangential but important roles. She does so seamlessly, never losing the thread of the story as it grows. She explains the gritty details of developing wind farms, the actions of the powerful public utility, the Public Service Commission, politicians, and the economies of livestock ranching, and does it all with descriptive, interesting, and engaging prose.
The driving force in the story is the “Wind Prospector” of the subtitle, Marty Wilde. “He didn’t pan for gold in a stream, he sought it in the air,” Gamerman writes. She writes that Lindsey Kroskob, editor of the local newspaper, “first met Marty when she started at the Pioneer and Coyote Wind was in the news. He always made her think of a used-car salesman—just the way he was so gregarious and talkative. Talking to Marty, Kroskob always felt like she was being sold something.” Marty was not to everyone’s liking, but he was relentless. And he was masterful at finding any loophole or crack he could squeeze through in pursuing his ends. “But Marty did speak Rick’s language, and Rick liked him. Birds of a feather. Somebody who was not a big curser himself might feel different.”
Russell Gordy, David Chesnoff, Jan Engwis, and Whitney MacMillan are the forces fighting Marty and Jarrett in courts of law and the court of public opinion. And they are formidable forces—all extremely wealthy men who own vast amounts of property, who do not care for the idea of wind turbines spoiling the views they paid millions of dollars for. Gamerman writes of Russell Gordy, “‘I like people,’ he told me once. ‘I just don’t want to be around them.’” So he, like the others, purchased privacy: “North to south, Gordy’s new ranch stretched seventeen miles, with its figurative toes splashing the Yellowstone River and its head in the Crazy Mountains, pillowed by clouds.”
The wealthy landowners give actual ranching little more than a nod. “Jan, who had a Wilford Brimley mustache and a florid complexion, embraced a ranching lifestyle. He bought himself a tractor and a couple dozen cows,” Gamerman writes. And, “‘You don’t really make a living doing cattle, but it preserves the land,’ Gordy said. And it was fun.” Chesnoff, too, enjoyed playing cowboy on his visits to his property. And, “MacMillan bought the twenty-thousand-acre ranch in 1979, three years after being named Cargill CEO, and named it Wild Eagle Mountain,” but he left the running of the ranch to hired help.
Of them all, only Rick Jarrett knew the realities of making a living off grass and livestock. “Ranching was a starve-to-death industry, Rick reflected. The only people who were successful at it were those who came into it with a big enough cushion of cash not to care how much they lost.” His rich neighbors certainly had that “cushion,” caring little or not at all for the economics of ranching.
Marty Wilde’s years-long machinations in developing the wind site on Jarrett’s land resulted in a deal with Pattern Energy, an experienced and powerful company that had developed numerous wind and other projects on both private and public land. Their view of the legal situation sums up the question that will drive readers to the book’s conclusion in a page-turning frenzy: “The plaintiffs had brought a nuisance case riddled with baseless claims about a state-of-the-art renewable-energy project that would provide electricity to twenty-six thousand Montana homes and benefit the local economy. The case, as Team Pattern saw it, boiled down to one question: whether the project’s opponents should be allowed to effectively shut down a lawful, economically beneficial development just because they didn’t like it.”