Fly on, big wings - Giant eagle sculptures give hope and beauty to Libby
By MICHAEL JAMISON of the Missoulian
LIBBY - Over the past 10 years, the tiny town of Libby has shuttered not a few downtown businesses.
The local lumber mill has closed, as has the plywood plant.
A couple elementary schools have quit classes, and Main Street has been named a Superfund site, clouded beneath a pall of asbestos.
But life, Todd Berget says, persists, even thrives now that the eagles have arrived.
“These eagles are like phoenix eagles,” Berget said, “helping us rise up from the ashes. The eagle is a survivor. It came back from the edge of extinction in this country. Hopefully, the eagles will help take Libby off the endangered list, too.”
A bald eagle with a 24-foot wingspan created by Libby artist Todd Berget hangs over the Mineral Avenue entrance to Libby proclaiming the mountain town to be the city of eagles. “For the last 10 years or longer, people have thought of Libby as the city of death,” says Berget. “That’s what people think when they think of Libby. Personally, I prefer the City of Eagles.”
Photo by MICHAEL GALLACHER/Missoulian
Berget is a self-described “Libby-lifer,” raised here to a family of loggers before leaving to study art at the University of Montana Western in Dillon.
“But I will always be a Libby Logger,” Berget said, and it wasn’t long before he moved back to the thick green of northwest Montana, where 11 years ago, at age 32, he hatched the first of the eagles.
He had been doing big art - nearly 100 murals throughout the region, from Butte to Spokane - and a friend was looking to join him in a creative project.
“He wanted to do something big,” Berget said, “but the man couldn’t paint a stick-man if he tried.”
What he could do was weld, though, and so Berget suggested they hammer out a huge metal eagle. He laid a wooden eagle he’d already carved out on a sheet of graph paper, “and it worked out to a 40-foot wingspan,” he said. “So that’s what we built.”
That first eagle perched up in front of Libby’s Chamber of Commerce building back in 1997. Then, after flying one over West Glacier, he installed the third in Libby, another 40-footer down by the Dairy Queen.
That was his first golden eagle, without the stainless steel head and tail.
Since then, a flock of nearly two dozen Berget eagles have landed in Libby, ranging from the sweeping 40-foot birds down to those with more modest 8-foot wingspans.
Then his son, at age 15, built one of his own for the county courthouse. An art student of his built yet another eagle sculpture. Another teen took the theme and started painting eagle murals around town. Then another teen joined in. And another. A young girl began carving eagle-based totem poles.
But the bird that finally brought it all home to roost was the 24-footer Berget hung over Libby’s entrance to downtown, the one with the sign beneath proclaiming his town the “City of Eagles.”
“For the last 10 years or longer, people have thought of Libby as the city of death,” Berget said. “That’s what people think when they think of Libby. Personally, I prefer the city of eagles.”
And so do enough folk that the name now has been trademarked, and the nickname made official.
Berget hung that eagle up above the sign on an auspicious day - 7/7/07 - and it seems to have proved a good luck move for his small town.
These days, contrary to the view from the outside, Libby believes itself to be staging a quiet comeback.
Building permits are brisk business. Downtown is being “streetscaped” with trees and walkways. Condos and offices and art studios are in the works.
The local Chamber of Commerce added about three dozen new members last year, bringing the total to nearly 300. The ski resort has upgraded from a T-bar to a chairlift, and the golf course from nine holes to 18.
Kelly Joe Phelps and the Broken Valley Road Show come for the Mountain Jam, and there’s rodeo and rugby and archery and motocross competitions. There’s the mountain man muzzleloader rendezvous, and “lemonade on the lawn” down at the library.
Car shows. Triathlons. Bicycle races. Pancake breakfasts. Incredi-Bull riding contests, and Arenacross and Frisbee golf and trap and skeet. Dramatic plays at the Little Theatre.
“We’re doing what we need to do to make Libby a destination, not just a side note,” Berget said. “This town has decided we’re going to make things better.”
It is, he said, the spirit of the eagle.
“We need to go with what we have,” he said, “and what we have is beauty. The mountains and the river and the wildlife. You can listen to the snow fall here in Libby. And the birds soar over all of it; they can see it from up there on high.
“The eagle came back from the brink,” he said, “and so can we.”
Of course, there’s seldom a need to find pride and advertise it when things are going well. It’s only when times are tough that such fierce respect for community tends to show through.
“But that’s OK,” Berget said. “Maybe we’re lucky in that way. We’ve been put to it, so we know better than most towns who we are and what we’re made of. Now, it’s time to step up and do something positive.”
The Libby Main Street group, along with the city and the county and a whole bunch of private folk, put up the nearly $30,000 required for the soaring eagle gateway to downtown. Meanwhile, up on Libby Dam, the real thing - an active bald eagle nest with chicks - is closely monitored from a remote Internet nest-cam.
The baby birds hatched May 1 this year, and the whole town kept close track of their adopted mascots.
Berget, meanwhile, was down in town welding the old to the new, stripping scrap steel straight from the abandoned mill to make the finely crafted feathers that fly over town, putting “a piece of us old loggers in all of them.”
“There are a few people worried we’re changing our heritage,” he said. “They think it should be the city of loggers. I’ve always been a Libby Logger and I always will be, but we need to rise beyond that economic heritage and embrace something bigger. We need to grab hold of tomorrow, too.”
And so he gently and literally strips down the town’s history, taking to it with a plasma torch to create what he hopes is a future just as bright and perhaps not so different from the past.
Currently, he’s looking for a big blank building where he can paint the wall blue. Then, he hopes to invite the entire town to come paint 1,000 eagles on the sky, all soaring over the reborn city of eagles.
“These eagles are going to stand the test of time,” Berget said of his sculptures. “They’ll last 150 years or more. A few of the feathers may rust out, but they can be replaced.
“I’ve built them to last a long time, just like this town.
“We’re all survivors. All you need, really, is hope and a little beauty.”
Reporter Michael Jamison can be reached at 1-800-366-7186 or at mjamison@missoulian.com.
