A dazzling piece of narrative nonfiction about land lust and the American West, “The Crazies” tells the story of a wind farm that triggers a 21st century range war between a struggling fifth-generation rancher and the billionaires next door.
Big Timber, Montana (population 1,673) is one of the windiest towns in one of the windiest states in the country. Arctic chinooks and slashing westerlies howl down from the Crazy Mountains like a pack of coyotes, nudging semi-trucks sideways on Interstate 90. Most locals learn to live with the wind. Rick Jarrett sought his fortune in it. Like his pioneer ancestors who staked their claims in the Treasure State, he believed in his right to make a living off the land-and a newly precious resource, its million-dollar wind.
The trouble was, Jarrett's neighbors were some of the wealthiest and most well-connected men in America, trophy ranchers who'd come West to enjoy magnificent mountain views, not stare at 500-foot wind turbines.
And so began an epic showdown: a wildly entertaining yarn that would pull in an ever-widening cast of characters, including a Texas oil and gas tycoon, a roguish wind prospector, a Crow activist fighting for his tribe's rights to the mountains they hold sacred, and an Olympic athlete-turned-attorney whose path to redemption would lead to Jarrett's wind farm. All the while, the most coveted rangeland in the West was being threatened by forces more powerful than anything one man could muster: dwindling snowpack, record drought, raging wildfires. In time, the brawl over Crazy Mountain Wind would become a fight over the future of an iconic landscape, and the values that define us as Americans.
“The Crazies” is a Western for a warming planet, full of cowboys and billionaires and billionaire cowboys, a real-life Yellowstone. But it's also so much more. It's an exquisitely reported, ruggedly beautiful elegy for a vanishing way of life, and an electrifying inquiry into what it means to love the land.
