Getting to know a place takes at least as much work as truly knowing another person, especially if that place is as diverse and historic as the Flathead River Basin.
Just ask Lori Curtis, a local woman whose goal of writing a primer on the people, characteristics and influences of the watershed resulted in a stack of research that stands five-feet tall.
“I bit off more than I thought I could chew but I managed to survive,” Curtis said, laughing.
Curtis is the project director and author of the recently released “Flathead Watershed Sourcebook: A Guide to an Extraordinary Place.” It is the culmination of a year and a half of intense work, backed up by a network of people with decades of local knowledge and the drive to create a one-stop watershed resource.
The sourcebook contains more than 200 pages of the basics on the Flathead watershed, covering such topics as natural history, cultural history, water, influences, land and economics.
There are also more than 50 sections called “Watershed Perspectives,” which highlight the little stories that make up life in the Flathead as told by the people who live here.
While the idea of a sourcebook has been floating in certain educational circles for some time, the actual creation needed the perfect storm of circumstance to come to fruition.
It started with the Flathead Community of Resource Educators (CORE), a coalition of environmental educators and natural resource professionals who came together in 1992 to promote local conservation and educational activities.
As a CORE member, Flathead Valley Community College professor emeritus and Crown of the Continent Ecosystem Education Consortium founder Lex Blood said the group had been reminiscing about previous watershed projects and teacher workshops held in the summers.
This led to the formation of the watershed education committee within CORE, and the members decided they would like a single resource for watershed basics, Blood said. One hurdle was finding someone to do the incredible amount of work necessary to develop something like this.
Enter Curtis, who had returned to school to get her master’s degree in environmental studies. She had decided on a career change after years as a corporate consultant and project manager. Her pro-bono work had included conservation, Curtis said, and it was a passion she wanted to pursue.
“It’s all I’ve ever wanted to do since I was a little girl,” Curtis said.
She and her husband Walt, who designed the sourcebook, live in the Flathead, but she was enrolled in a program through Green Mountain College in Vermont. Her thesis was an “applied project,” which is supposed to help the community in which it is based.
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TEliza Sorte, left, Director of the Northwest Montana Educational Cooperative, watches as author Lori Curtis, right, and her husband, Walt Curtis, show a Web site that is a companion to Lori’s book “Flathead Watershed Sourcebook: A Guide to an Extraordinary Place” at the Flathead County Library in Kalispell. |
A mutual acquaintance introduced Curtis to Blood, who was admittedly wary of working with a graduate student.
“There are a lot of graduate students both in and out of the state that would love to work here in the Flathead to do their thesis work,” Blood said. “It was obvious that she was not the standard graduate student; she’s obviously had a life history and a great deal of experience in the conservation field.”
Curtis met with CORE’s watershed committee, which eventually led to the creation of her project’s steering committee and Blood became her local advisor.
However, there were still doubts that a project of such magnitude would ever get off the ground.
“I honestly don’t believe anyone thought we were going to pull it off,” Curtis said. “I’m an extremely determined person. I’ve never left anything undone in my life.”
It also helped to be extremely organized, since the sheer amount of information involved in forming each chapter was staggering, Curtis said.
For example, the cultural history of a watershed goes back multiple millennia. Curtis approached this chapter first with high-level research, identifying the watershed boundaries and any group of people that has lived within those borders. From there, she had to boil down her research, send it to reviewers and deal with inevitable conflicting information.
Curtis said she quickly found out there are varying perspectives on each topic, and the book could not include her opinions.
“It had to have a voice of a very diverse and disagreeable community,” Curtis said.
This applied to funding for the project as well, Blood said, which came from multiple organizations that may not see eye-to-eye on conservation or political issues.
“People were skeptical that someone could bring together this vast amount of information into something that could be useful,” Blood said. “There’s a glow of amazement and interest when people start getting into it.”
The book will be used primarily as an educational tool, he said, and the steering committee now has the responsibility of developing other educational materials to complement it.
It is a book the entire community can be proud of, Blood said, because it was a collaborative effort among dozens of agencies, people and other organizations.
Curtis noted that the original intention for the sourcebook was for K-12 education, as well as community college level courses, and it may take root in some Flathead curricula.
And since the sourcebook has more of a narrative feel than that of a textbook, it could also be useful to anyone interested in any aspect of the watershed, from hunters and fishermen to farmers and timber companies.
Curtis said she is still recovering after a year and a half of 17-hour days, seven-day weeks. She kept full-time employment while also going to school full time, and now that she has her Master of Science degree, she’s ready to pursue the next chapter of her life.
She hopes this chapter keeps her in the Flathead, now that she has a deeper, fuller understanding of her surroundings.
“You fall in love with a place, you become really endeared to a place, when you know its details, even the dirty old secrets,” Curtis said. “It’s like knowing an old friend.”
“Flathead Watershed Sourcebook: A Guide to an Extraordinary Place” is available at many organizations throughout the Flathead; for a list of participating organizations or to see a digital copy of the sourcebook, visit www.flatheadwatershed.org.