00:00:08 Speaker 1: This is me eat your podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug bitten in my case, underwear listening podcast. You can't predict anything presented by on X. Hunt creators are the most comprehensive digital mapping system for hunters. Download the Hunt app from the iTunes or Google play store. Nor where you stand with on X? All right, Thomas mcguen, are you okay talking about really old work of yours? Oh? Sure, right, I don't care what we're talking about. Because when you when you look at all the things you've done and written, Um, where does Rancho Aldi? Where does the movie ranch Aldi Lux? Where do you stack that into? You know, if you were gonna live, if you're gonna have had a tombstone, and they were gonna list your accomplishments on your tombstone, what I put Rancho Deluxe? Rancho and make the tombstone. I've already written the text for the tombstone. It says it's been a great life. I wish I understood it well. Rancho Deluxe was a happy accident in a way. I mean, it's never stopped playing, as I'm sure you're aware, But basically what happened was a producer, uh bought nine two in the Shade and they couldn't get the they couldn't get the financing together in a short term, and they said do you have because they didn't have a script, I said, They said, do you have anything ready to go? And I said, yes, I do, I have a screenplay ready to go. That wasn't true. I hadn't written anything. And he said, well, i'll be I'll be back in two weeks. Uh, and let's see what you've got. So I went into my son's bedroom. He was about ten years old at the time, and in two weeks I had written Ranch of Deluxe. And he flew in from l A and I said, here it is. And he went back to my son's bedroom and he came back out he said, this is great. We're gonna make it. So it was a lucky thing from then on, you know. And then there were people just were amused by the idea that Jeff Bridges was early in his career. Sam Waterson was early in his career. My brother in law did the music. Uh. Other people came up to hang out, like Warren Oates and Harry Dean Stanton and other people. We we just had a lot of fun making that movie. So I'm glad it have found an audience. Oh. I recommend it to people all the time, but I find that when I show it to people, they need to have they need to have a little bit of pre awareness. Yea of the West, Yeah, and some of the conflicts and different personality archetypes from the West, well or else there. They wind up being a little baffled by it. Well that's good. It's a litmus test. Yeah, that's good because that was actually that was actually the impulse to write it, write it, because I mean, we were I was under when I got here in the sixties. I was aware there was this kind of official version of Montana life, which was the same as the Chamber of Commerce version. It was all big sky um uh cowboys and Indian stuff, and and everybody I knew was you know, poaching, selling, selling, uh the ill gut and gains to buy dope and motorcycle parts. You know. I thought, well, this is what I know to be going on. Why doesn't anybody talk about this? So that's what I wanted, That's kind of what I wanted to do. I haven't quite got over that. Actually, I'm still very conscious between of the tension between what I know was as a day to day person in Montana for fifty two years with the official version of life in Montana, and I've always felt that tension that I went and I'd like to use that think of things i want to write about. Uh. You mentioned that your brother in law does the music. And your brother in law's Jimmy Buffett, and he has a cameo by the way, he sho he would had a concert yesterday in Michigan. People came wow. By the way, I have to interject it. I just came back from a book festival in France. Do you know how many readers came. They were running trains from Paris to sam Melo and Brittany just to carry readers. Could that happen here? That's yeah, that's really amazing. And in France, like I know that your your late friend Jim Harrison would talk about how well his books would do in France. Do you have a lot of reader Do you get a lot of readers? He and I both have more French readers and American readers. Really yeah. In fact, one of the publishers over there said, you literary people would be out of business if it weren't for France as semi true. Harry was there like ten times a year. Yeah, he's already honored over there. Yeah, and he had a huge following there. Um. It was really kind of a rock star over there, Odd who they settled at him. Not odd in Jim's case, but like Paul Austro, who's a sort of a not easily absorbed writer. He's another rock star in France. This I'm gonna come back to my question. I didn't get to my thing yet about Ranchodi Lux. But because you know, I, as I talked about often, I grew up in Michigan and we would and you for us like kids that like to that like to read, um, and like the fish and hunt like we all idolized you guys, and we would think of you as like nuts on a dog. You and Jim Harrison, um, where people be like, who do you like to read? And people would say mcgwain and Harrison has that Do you feel that that's just the thing that comes from like a Michigan perspective where you guys are so lumped in because you both I went to the same school there. Yeah, has that been your whole life? Have you found that people will roll you guys together even though you're writing is so different. Yeah, no, that's true. Uh, I mean it's confusing, I think, you know. I mean, Jim and I were pals from the time we were just out of our teams, really, you know, I mean we just coulda grew up in some ways together, you know, pretty closely. Link. We wrote letters each at least every week to each other for almost a half century. I mean we did only stopped writing letters when he died. I mean we did that so we were mentally really involved in each other's consciousness, you know, to the to the degree that since Jim died, I've got this kind of uh it's like a blank channel on my phone or some blank thing, you know. I don't know what to do with it, you know, because I filled it up for two thirds of my life with these dialogue that we we had going. Jim was Jim and I were very interested in the same things, uh, Other than literature. We both hunted and fished constantly, or just found some reason to be outdoors. He was a bird watcher, and we wanted we didn't want to be in the house as the bottom line, and he was a terrible terrible hunter fisherman. He was all in his head. Really. I remember one time we're you know, he couldn't hit He couldn't hit up the barn with a bull fiddle, you know. I mean, but if you ever shot something, he'd run out and grab it and say it's mine. Oh and one time, one time I said, now, Jim, I said, I just shot that grouse. You know it's not yours. He said, I know it is mine. And I said, well, okay, but how how could we ever approve this? I said, you did let off your gun, but I know you can't hit anything. He said, We're going to get a cheese grater and we're gonna shred this bird in count Pellets. He said, you're what are you shooting? I said, I don't know. I'm shooting seven a halfs. He said, well, I'm shooting eights and we'll be able to tell after we shred this bird. Did you ever find out? I think it's usual. I just handed the bird over. But he had this tremendous responsiveness to anything in the natural world. I mean, um, he just ignited. You know, in the presence of any little thing it was going on, you felt, you felt that in the like he did in a genuine way, not just in a literary way. No, it's very genuine, Like if he wasn't a writer, he would still be doing that same thing. Yeah, right, I think that's great. Yeah, that's where it hard a little bit hard to understand him as I get older and older, is it's hard to um he kind of in some ways like set stage a little bit for uh, kind of the literary madman, you know, like he kind of created in somebodys He kind of created what we expected to see there, and it was always hard to tell, Like as I get older, it's hard to tell to what degree that that he did it because he got away with it, you know, like he did it because that became expected of him. You know. Yeah, there was a lot of that, the wine and the food and yeah, the women, you know, yeah, I think that's right. I mean there was a lot of that going on in that era. You know, Hunter Thompson was very much like you know, my son worked as Hunter tons of bodyguard briefly, and I was around Hunter a lot too, and you you know, you to spend a a day with Hunter doing stuff or being around be very normal. But the minute there was an audience around everything changed, you know for the worst. Yeah. Uh, Jim was very audience awear two I think right. Yeah, But um he was also you know he was he was a very genuine in other ways and and the other thing about Harrison he was not often recognized as he was unbelievably intelligent. Um. You could give him a tough European five page novel, he read it overnight and remember everything in it. Um. So that was That was probably the first thing I would think about with Jim. But he was also pretty curiously self propelled. I mean he would come out to Montana for long, long stretches. Nobody ever knew he had a wife and children, you know, I mean he just did what he felt like doing. He was remarkably uh, either independent or unilateral. Everyone looks. I want to come back to my question about Rancho he Lucks. I was worked as an arborist right for several years in western Montana, and I met a guy um the last name of what Glenda and he had been brought up on a ranch in the Bridge Arrange. And he one day I was telling me he said he was reminiscing about being a kid. He talked about how they were filming a movie once and his dad sold someone. I came here if it was a bull or a steer, Oh yeah, I know that. Yeah, I know that bull and that family. Yeah right, there's a big sheryl A. Yeah. It was great, great, that was a great actor. You know, we put him in a motel room. I don't know how we did that. Oh no, was it that the one? I thought the one he was talking about, Yeah, he's talking about the one we shot. Maybe it was the one of that. I just can't remember. But he had no idea about the movie. You just knew a story about some people making a movie. Maybe it was the one that went into the hotel room. Yeah, and then then, uh, you know, we thought, well, we've gotta been the hotel room. What are we gonna do with him? And then he then he charged the TV set and explode. The TV exploded, perfect for the film, completely unplanned. Yeah. And then the one, the one that gets shot with the one gets so obvious, like if you've seen animals, you know, you know, when you're seeing something real, it's like apocalypse. Now. I made the mistake recently of showing my nine year old the end sequence of Apocalypse now where they kill water buffalo and I didn't remember it the way that it looked, and it traumatized them a little bit bad. But watching in Rancholdilocks like that was a time like that. Stuff doesn't wouldn't really happen anymore, that they would take a Sharp's buffalo rifle shoot something for the camera. Well, we had stuff like that happened. I'm glad it doesn't happen anymore. I mean we had some catastrophes that we're making Missouri Breaks with horses. Um, we wanted horses. We wanted horses to swim the big Horn and they got tangled up with old barbed wire on the bottom and stuff. Yeah. Yeah, and that was your film with Marlon Brando. Did you work on that one? Yeah, I lived with Brando for a while. Uh. That's a huge hit in in Europe, the Missouri Breaks. Yeah, it's it's widely considered the best modern Western. Just mad about it. I love it. Yeah, it's so off the wall, you know, I mean it was, Uh, it was very interesting. I mean Brandon Jack Nicholson's kind of a prick, but Brando was really a fabulous human being. I just enjoyed all the time I had with him, because he just had almost a Harrison kind of big aura, you know, naturally speaking and uh and very unusual person. I mean when I was staying with him, these kids would come over to the house to get him to repair their bicycles and get a little workshop and he could do some electronics to fix it, fix their their walk man. And I mean, he's just a very ordinary guy. Never saw The Godfather, never saw the movie. How detached he was from the industry. What did you not like about Jack Nicholson. Oh, it's just a prick, you know, uh, I said, It's a great actor. He was very much overshadowed by Brando. Brando did an interview in which he said it was he loved watching Jack act. He said, because like watching a guy with one finger play a piano with one key, that that shouldn't bode well. And then we cast the girl was hot girl, you know, for the the love interest thing, and she was just as gorgeous girl. But they got to and Nicholson was trying to be sort of interested in her, you know, sort of get into the sort of mood for the movie. When they arrived in mont tennis, she announced that she was a lesbian and moved into a tent with her girlfriend. So anyway, you had to do it. Adapt man, that was such a seems like such an unusual time there to be involved in the culture around here, because I feel like this area hadn't really been discovered by broader America. Now it's true, you know, and I feel some of that's my fault, but you know, I was I mean, I was broke, you know. I was trying to figure out how to survive here, and you can't. I couldn't really survive writing literary fiction. I had a teaching gig at Berkeley when one season and I thought, oh, I don't want to do this because I loved teaching, but I didn't want to write at the end of a teaching day. And uh so I had to make some choices. And so I moved over and go to place for twenty eight dollars a month on South Age Street in Livingstone and just started scrambling. You know. It's a room for Sports Illustrated. I wrote novels, I wrote short stories, and then I wrote the movies. You know. Um, I heard an interview with you not long ago where you were talking about that you like to hunt quail. Yeah, I like any kind of bird hunting. Again, and you had an observation about quail hunting where And I might get this wrong, but I think this is basically what you had said, is that when there's a covey of quail and you kill one of them, you don't have the guilt that you might not otherwise have because you think of the of the being as being the covey, and the covey lives on. Well, it's true, first of all, it's true, but yeah, but it's the same thing could be true of any population if you look at it at a metal level. Well, let's you kill a human and be like, well, but humanity lives on. Well that's a great point actually, and I'm you're a little jump ahead of me on that, but I think I think you're right. You know, Ivan Stradarn once said, he said, people are really in the animal world. You know what they talk about hunters, They're very worried about the individual animal and not particularly worried about the species. And uh, that's key to what you are You've got guys are doing. And I agree with that. However, every now and then I'll be out grouse hunting and two grouse will get up, like it's late November. I'll kill one of them and the other one goes off for a long winter, and I sort of feel shitty. I can imagine, but for some reason, I mean, I I have I have a covey of huns that I've been shooting into for thirty years. They're always the same side, you know, it's always twelve to sixteen birds. I'll kill three or four birds every year cove. He's always in the same place, always the same size. If there are grasshoppers for the babies that year. Did you used to hunt big game a little bit and and not in your interest in that faded? I don't know. I mean I was getting to be a little bit of a trophy hunter, which was a sort of against my principles. But we ate a lot of game. I remember when my son and I I was for a while, I was a single parent, and uh, we were eating a lot of game. And I didn't have any money, and I said, I said to him one time, oh, I had a movie sailor something happened. I had a bunch of money suddenly, And I said to him I'm going to town to get some steaks. We're not gonna eat this deer meat for a while. And so I went and I get these beautiful ribbis, you know. And he was out playing in the yard and I cooked up these rig ribbies and he came walking in the house. He said, oh my god, what's stinking up the house. I said, it's these steaks. He said, oh God, throw them away. The whole house stinks. He ran around opening the windows to get this beef stink out of the house. So that kind of was a watershed moment for me. I mean, it's just, uh that and the fact, the overnoticed fact that people don't seem to know where meat comes from. And uh, I like, how you say that's overnoticed. And I remember one time we're down in Florida and my wife I like to snook fish and my wife loves to eat snook, you know, And she said she was going to the movies and a little community center. She said, catch a snook tonight. We'll have a snook for dinner. So I went out and labored away, and I look this big snook and I'm down on the dock and I'm getting ready to give him the wood shampoo, and my wife's car lights come into the dry way and she could gets out of the car and I said, I got what I'm just gonna bring up to the house now, and she said, don't hurt him. She had been a filet. Should have been happy when he said, you became a trophy hunter for a while. What do you mean? Well, I got like interested trying to find a big like you wanting to find a big mule here? Yeah, and uh did you find one? Yeah, a huge one? If there's five of them. I killed the big one. It looked like an alk lying out among the five pointers. I mean he had an orange crate on his head, and uh, I knew I'd never kill a bigger wood. And also I questioned how good he was going to be to eat? Uh and uh, But I mean I look back on it, I mean I really missed those days of really being obsessed, you know, getting up in the morning and thinking which way the wind is and how much snow there is. You know, where I think they'll be that day, or where I could stay out, where they'll come out of the trees, and I mean where that whole scenario is running in your head. It's fun to be obsessed, you know, I mean I like being obsessed. Uh, And and I kind of missed that part of it. And on the strictly the meat level, I mean probably uh, last year's fawn would be the one to shoot you if you wanted to want some meat. And there's not much of a quest involved there, There's no there's the sort of predatory adrenaline. Doesn't necessarily get engaged over that that sort of thing. But probably one of the reasons I've drifted towards bird hunting so much is I really get obsessed with that. You know, I've always I've had bird dogs my entire life and just watching each one mind developed and how they get, how they figure the game out, and how we do this together. Um. Uh that that's a similar obsession. And you try you travel a little bit to hunt, right because I remember in an email you mentioned that you were done in Texas hunting quail. Yeah. I've got a friend who lives over by McAllister who had a little quail camp down there. Um, a couple of trailers on on a on a lot in West Texas and then we find leases or places we can go. Um, I have a I have a friend Burt Jones. Do you remember Burt Jones, quarterback for Indianapolis? Great player? Really I know, Yeah, he's a wonder wonderful guy. Anyway, he's got a quail least out there and West Texas. West Texas is a great place to bird hunt because it's totally First of all, there's a lot of habitat left in West Texas for these birds. Uh. And it's completely dependent on weather. I mean, you'll go almost to zero where you couldn't find a quail with a helicopter, and a year later they're hitting you on the head, you know, just depending on the rain and the particular distribution of weeds and things like that. Um So, anyway, I'm gonna hunt with him this year. And then broke and I went to a couple of places uh uh in Georgia and um, North Florida. In fact, my cousins were all here and we had a big quail dinner night before last. I brought a big lot of them back. Uh. But I that whole quest thing that shared things like for forty years I competed on cutting horses, and there's a little similar thing where you're just trying to understand what that horses figuring out and you're trying to cooperate in that quest, you know. And it's the same with bird dogs. You know, you see that that moment where they're wondering, wondering if you're kind of off track, and they look up at you and they're a hundred yards out, and you go, you go like you know that communications thing, and then when boom, when it works, you know, and they've got them and you know they're out in front and it's your job now, and they kind of they kind of look back a little bit like this, and I mean it's very the heat rises considered. Yeah, what is it real quick? What does it mean to compete on a cutting horse? Oh that's a long story, but I mean if you don't haven't seen a cutting or something. I mean the rule book is ad pages long. So, but it's basically, uh, you know, sorting cattle in a competitive situation with very athletic, speedy, tough thing to figure out. You never get to the bottom of it. It's very tough and sorting just like they throw you in an arena with a hundred and you cut out the tube. Yeah, you'd have to see it. We'd have to have a a video to you could show you what was going on, you know, what correctness and what the horses are doing, what the riders are doing. Um. But the analogy to bird hunting is is that it doesn't work unless you have a pretty profound and sort of emotional relationship with that horse or that dog. I mean, I've seen really good dog handler you know, would if that dog got out three yards and you wanted to stop and turn and go someplace else. I know, dog handlers tap on the whistle and that dog will freeze. I mean, just chill and go someplace else Whereas if you you can blow the whistle all day long, that won't dog won't even hear you. And all it is the tap, but the the communication is so intricate at that level that and you have to work at it all the time for it to happen. So um, that's kind of supplanted my big game hunting thing. Uh, but I've very you know, I really value the impulse to hunt big game. I mean, we're all talking about this all the time, but they need stakeholders, and uh, I had I was fishing in the Bahamas with them. Uh, Johnny Morris. You don't guys know who Johnny the founder of bass Pro shops. Yeah, he's got two hundred billion and loyal customers. He's he just won the Audubon Award. Very much more of a environmentally alert person in the Cabella's group were. But it's one of the same now. Yeah, but the purchase and but their data tells them that the gun and hunting community is declining. And I was talking to my friend and Barbara big Timber and his son manageres Cabella's a Missoul and they're frustrated because they're not getting then the volume of weaponry um that they used to get before this changeover is because Johnny Morris knows the future really is fishing, not hunting um. And you know, we have a wonderful shop here in town, sporting and story called the Sport. Have you all ever been in the Sport? No, I haven't. Anyway, it's been real deepot from sales and stuff like that, And until very recently it was just you know, all sporting things, you know, varmint rifles, big game rifles and shotguns and all that stuff. Well, it's just the great presence of high concealable weapons. Now in a K forty seven's completely supplanted. This sort of not completely. They still carry a lots, but it's I mean, it's a huge presence in that store in Big Timber, I mean, you know, so, you know, I know, there's a lot of zealotry around the Second Amendment and a lot of controversy about that, but all these people who are sort of gun nuts. I'm sort of a gun nut, but all these people are sort of gun nuts who are fanatical about our rights to have every kind of gun and have it in every place, church, at school, every place, by the way, except the legislature. In the banks, can't take guns there. You take them to kindergarten, but you can't take them to a bank. Yeah, I've seen warnings in entering sporting good stores. Yeah about Yeah, you can't take them to the can't take them to the n r A convention, yeah, in Las Vegas. Yeah so. But but my point is not so much that is that they're more interested in what often flies under the aegis of hunting weapons. They're more interested in protecting the rights to have as many of those they want. They're not very interested in protecting the quarry or the wildlife that these are supposedly uh being sold to exploit. So they're not they're not they're not. They're not battlers for public land access, they're not battlers for well being, wildlife and any of that. They just want the guns. And I don't get that. A lot of people become pretty segmented when it comes to the things that they're giving advocacy for. Yeah, you know, like when someone's a crusader for something. Yeah, they tend to fixate. Well that's that's that's possible. They noticed that they're sort of boundaries there. I mean, it's like the smart play there. The smart play is to understand, um like play there is to understand and I think the people that were playing the real long game on that do understand that public participation in certain activities depends on viable resources and depends on access and then they understand that. But some people, um, you know, there's people like there's elements of the of the gun community that they even have a derogatory term for people that focus too much on hunting, where you become a fund fud would be someone who views firearm ownership through the lens of hunting would be a fud if you d like I guess, yeah, I'm gathering elmer fud. Oh oh yeah. Have you found like you know you can't fix stupid? Have you found in your career this is guy. There's probably a double edged sword to your involvement and throughout your life with hunting, the implicit x bliss at involvement with firearm ownership and fishing, where it's made up so much of what you write about and so much of your understanding of the world. But then you not out of necessity and perhaps personal preference, You've worked with many people who would be regarded, you know, like people in Los Angeles or Hollywood, people in New York who would have an innate suspicion of those things. So on one hand, you're probably uh penalized in some way because of the things you've been involved in. But in the other hand, you wouldn't be here if it weren't for those things, because those are the things that make up your work. When I hear that, like in my line of work, personally, when I heard it, some media enterprise or whatever doesn't want to work with us because of the hunting thing, or because of the gun thing. I'm always like, oh, what a bummer, But I'm like, baha on it. If it wasn't for those things, I wouldn't talk. I wouldn't have any reason to be in the conversation anyways. Yeah, because this is all I've ever talked about. Yeah, right, right right? How have you ever felt that? Uh? Have you ever felt that in a way that was painful to you? Well? You know, you know, I'm in the American Academy and I go back there for those meetings, and one of my good friends is Joey Williams and Joy Williams the most eloquent anti hunting book I ever. She's the best anti hunting writer out there. No, She's fantastically good. And she just feels it very strongly, you know. I mean, I don't I don't quibble at all with the genuineness of her rage against the idea of killing animals. And the old the old head of the uh uh Humane Society once said, you know, why would you want to kill something that wished to live? You know, it's a big question. How do you get around it? I mean, uh, you can't skip it, you know. Um, And I'm not sure you get by by saying an incremental portion of the meat I eat, I killed myself. You know, I mean, I mean, I'm a big McDonald's guy. Was right. Yeah, I like junk food. I like good food. I like junk food. But um so. But when I'm back in the bubble, you know, I know there are things that's just gonna be warfare if we want to have to talk about it. I'm under contract to the New Yorker. I wouldn't send them a hunting story. I barely would send him a fishing story. You send him a lot of story a lot of cattle ranchers. Yeah, oh yeah, Listen, I'm aware of the of the uh, the the contradictory nature of it. There's no doubt about it. Do you feel that they wouldn't Do you feel that they would not publish a story they had a protagonist or antagonist who was a hunter. I don't know, but probably not. But I mean, one of the things that drives me, and one one reason I'm fairly comfortable with a ranching culture is that some pretty profound studies have indicated that when a ranch goes out of business for any reason, if it goes out of business for any reason. No matter what other trajectory it goes to, biodiversity drops sharply. Okay, So even though you know I most of my friends after at this point in my life were our right wing ranchers, you know, Um, for reasons I could never quite understand it. But but my county went, My county went for Donald Trump. They're doing. I don't want them to go out of business, you know. And also, uh, also I know that their reasons for voting and thinking the way they do are a lot more subtle than they are ascribed to them. Um. A lot of them I know had problems with Obama, not because he was black, but because he's an elitist and talked like a Harvard guy. They had real issues with his his his way of expressing himself. He reminded him of the kind of people that are trying to run them out of here. Uh nadn't care if it's black, I mean anything to him. Uh. There is a simplified way I found that, you know, time and again where there's a very but people have people on both sides do it where you try to boil people's motivations down to something that you know is unfair. Yeah, but it's it helps with the rhetoric. I just got a friend of mine just forward forward to a really brilliant piece. Actually it was in the Washington Post that Rum Emmanuel wrote Rum fishes here, and it was the idea that the only way to beat Trump was the best way to beat Trump is to not try to out trump him. Um, and that the idea, uh, that the squad is going to somehow another destroy at the election is just craziness because moderates have always dominated presidential elections. And but it is tempting to fight fire with fire, you know. Uh, I mean I find this age culturally politically to be unbelievably obnoxious. You know. I was just I just came back from this book toward Europe, and I mean, they wanted to know why we machine gun our kids and why we do all these awful things. And it used to be you go to France, there's quite a little bit of hostility between the Americans and French people, even among intellectuals and culturally elites. It's not true anymore. They just feel sorry for us. Uh. They think that we are taking what was the greatest experiment democracy in the history of the world and ruining it, and they can't figure out why we're doing that. They mean that because you think they mean that just because of the aesthetics, like the name calling and the divisiveness like that aspect of American that level of discourse, of the kind of wall building, and the and the a country that uh build on the idea of free trade wanting to launch all these tariffs, I mean, doesn't make sense to them. Looks like we've flipped out and knowing that, uh, that approach has tremendous support here. Right, It's real, it's it's it's kind of alarming. But if you if you live in a very conservative community, you know that that's just part of what people are. You know, you know, it's just part of what people are. It's not it's not as sweeping an indictment as it looks like it is. Do you feel it? Do you feel politically? I mean, I know politically you probably feel out of place, But do you feel out of place being in a I mean being you've been involved in ranching, but you but you sit outside of ranchers in general? Just being a writer's bad enough. I mean, uh, uh no, I I was I feel pretty comfortable, you know, I spent ten years roping stairs in the Northern Rodeo Association. Yeah no, no, it's and uh, you know they think they just view my progressive ism is just another quirk. You know, some guy's got a drinking problem. I've got a progressive as a problem. What are the Because there's a there's a three you sit on the you're in the fly Fishing Hall of Fame, the Academy of Arts and Letters, and then there's a there's a schizophrenic. There's a horse. But what's ther You're in some horse hall of fame. Yeah, cutting cords, all of fame. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I just saw this thing. I read this quote. It was just so great. Dostoevsky visited Charles Dickens, and Charles Dickens said, well, I'm really too people, he said. There, he said, I'm the person who creates all you know, all these these are positive characters. I'm also the guy that creates scool Scrooge, and and he said, there's are two two of me that does these two things in Dosky said only two. So I write an interview with you or you're talking to I think some kind of He's like a literary reviewer. I can't remember his name, like like a literary figure. Um, and you were talking about a thing that you like, you were explaining that, I thing you liked about horses, and you think they liked about fishing because they had ritualistic qualities too. I think that's right. Yeah, keep explaining that a little bit. Uh, I think it's partly that. And it's something I mean, my my problem. My father used to accuse me, this is I'm just interest interured so many things. You know, there's a problem. I can see that. Yeah. And and uh, but those are things that really concentrate me, you know, I mean, and pretty quickly too. I mean, it's afternoon, I'm gonna string up a fly rod, and the minute I set foot in the water river, all the kind of conflicts and sort of multiplicity of my brain life are going to go away. I'm just gonna I mean, I'm gonna get focused. And and uh, part of the things that enables you to focus, you don't have to reinvent the wheel every time you go hunting or you go fishing. There there is there is there is ritualized behavior that has a quasi religious dimension to it. And uh, you know, since I don't have any other kind of religion, I like to I like to access that thing, that pattern of doing things. It's the right way to do things. And hunting is full of that, and and so fishing. Give an example of of an activity that you would find, I mean an activity within the activity, an activity within fishing or an activity within hunting, that would be the type of ritualistic behavior you're talking about. Boy, let me think I come up without well, I'm not sure I can. I'd have to, I'd have to brow down that for a while. What you're saying, I think so that I understand correctly. It's not so much the rituals that man or humans have come up for these activities, but more so the rituals they just come about of doing the activity. Well, I think probably that. I mean, it's some of it is habit for him. There's some of the things you know that my father, my grandfather were hunters, or right ways to do things. They're right ways. They're right ways around guns and dogs and things that you're supposed to do. How are you supposed to take care of things? Um? Uh? And you really feel it when you're around people who haven't had that kind of approach to it. They don't. They don't have to inherit it genetically, but they have to honor these kinds of practices about the way the way you do things. And I guess that's ritualized. Now that's that's a funny observation or not funny. But I do notice that I hadn't thought to put it in those words. But when you're with someone, I spent a lot of time around people who uh have began hunting later in life. It began fishing later in life, and it does that they have in their behavior or in the way they do things. You realize there's nothing really wrote, Yeah, there's nothing that they do it because that's how they were shown to do it and always did it. And I find too, now that I'm a parent, um, I oftentimes encounter other parents with young kids who, for whatever reason, are parenting with all new strategies that they earned or read about or heard about, rather than sort of the activities that you would have seen the way your grandparents behaved, and there was a way your parents behaved and the expectations of children and these things sort of march on, you know, And then I'll meet people who parent totally outside of whatever inertia has gathered up, right, Yeah, that's great, that's interesting. And they're like, oh no, we're trying, um, we're trying a new type of parenting. And it strikes me in the same way that you see the same thing in certain like just tying a fishing hook on, Like there's the person that does it all the time, and there's the person that seems to be dabbling, like the dabbles in there, right. Um, I just have a thought of a version of that. I have a good friend. I won't name him because he's so well known, but oh, go ahead, but he you know, I have fished for steelhead for a long time, and there's a lot of stuff about fishing through a run and if you catch a fish, you know, you need to go all the way back to the top of the run letter or whoever was the run fish on? Yeah, And I was. I was in a Charo del Fuego with this friend of mine and we hit this really great run on the Sea Run river and I said, you go ahead and fish through it, and I'll fishing behind you and you can catch fish. Blah blah blah. So he fished all the way down and get to the bottom of the run, catches a nice fish, like a sixteen pounds he run brown trop and he circles all the way back and he gets in front of me to do it again. And I remember fishing that when I was living and going to school and steel that fishing in northern California. I mean, they have these lineups, you know that there was really strict. You know, everybody in the lineup was a phenomenal cast. They're all great fisherman. If you went down, caught a fish and circled up and got in front of him, it'd be time for an obituary. He just I looked at I thought, is that rude? Or is he stupid or uh, you know, I couldn't or greedy. I mean, I couldn't couldn't figure out. So, I mean, I thought, this is I had the moment of being this sort of out of body experience. Am I with a lunatic? I like reading your short stories a lot um. If I had to pick one thing of the of the all the kinds of work you do, from novels, short stories, nonfiction essays, you know, I like your short stories the most personally, I do too. But why are the characters, Um, why are your characters in your fiction so different and at wits end and kind of disheveled and their personal lives? Then when you read you about you and your friends in your life, it's it's like a completely different worldview. Well I'm suppressing the truth. I don't know. Well, I don't know, but I mean I think that especially short Fisher depends on a sort of a crisis atmosphere. I mean it has. In a effective short story, a lot should be at stake, you know, it should not be the quotidian day to day lives of people, you know, unless unless it's a Ray Carbor story. Um so, I I mean a narrative. Fictional narrative is kind of driven by conflict in a way. Um, and you know it's Henry James said, it only has one responsibility and that is to be interesting, you know, and that's it's not the same level of interest that you have and nonfiction, you know, where it's fact driven or information driven and stuff like that. It's a very different kind of atmosphere. So it calls on different things. I think then that sort of stuff you would describe in your life as a hotter or officierman or all those other things, although those could be part of it. I'm reading this. Some just got this book UH called um uh Fishing in Paradise, SOI going to title something like that. But it's about a guy who lived in Sweden during the period the fishing. He's a fishing fanatic. It was during the period when the Swedish dream of a sort of utopian society. That's the title fishing in Utopia, when the utopia dream and Scandinavia was still intact before the big waves of immigration. All the things that have changed that happened, and he's gone back as a fisherman. But he's really an observer of what has happened to this utopian fantasy of the Swedish people and how it's changing everything. So the idea, I find this a very appealing idea, The idea of of UH finding a way these things that we do impinge on other things that are less recreational, for example, than what we're talking about, or less UH focused on solip systemically focused on the things we want to provide for ourselves as individualized, individualized characters known as the great hunter or the Great fisherman or something like that, and there was a little bit broader view of how these activities uh illuminate other things. And so I just got this book and I just started reading. It's very interesting, kind of kind of way to do it. Uh in you your characters also have uh an incredibly dim view of marriage. You have a dim view of marriage. And it's funny because the thing that makes it okay, I guess yeah, is that you the man is typically at the at fault. Well that's interesting. I mean, I like the idea of of faulty men. You know, that kind of feels to me. I don't know why anybody gets married anymore. I mean, it seems like slightly defund institution. So well, I mean, what what is it? I mean, it's sort of documentation for something you do anyway, you know, uh, And I have a checkered married history. I mean my history is that I been married three times, but I've now been married for forty two years to the same person, so it's kind of a little bit of an odd thing. And one of the marriages for like eight months, So, um, what what goes on in an eight months marriage? Lust? I guess yeah, I don't know acts or an accident or rebounding or doing all those kinds of things. Uh, the background of growing up in an Irish Catholic household, which is supposed to do you know. I mean, I would never get married a second time under the current uh sort of cultural convictions. But on the other hand, I've been in this really happy marriage for more than half my life and forty two years. That's a long time. And uh so I've I'm not I just don't see why it needs that kind of impremontor you know, of officialness. Uh. Not bad. I mean, if it makes people feel more committed, you know, um, then they should do it. And I did it, you know um. But I don't think it has a lot of meaning anymore. And statistically, almost most marriages in the divorce. So what does that say about it? Yeah, that in and of itself, what does that say about it? It's a non enduring institution. No, I think it was. I feel that it's helpful. It's helpful because it makes you take yourself seriously. Yeah, Oh, I see that's what I felt. Yeah, I felt like, all of a sudden, it makes you take some part of yourself more seriously than he might. That well, that's a good reason to do it, and I feel like it also, it's like you're putting certain things to rest. You know, I had chasing girls, right, Yeah, at the time you spend Remember buddy my I was talking about. He got married and the next day he felt like he needed one of those old top hats from the nineteen so he could like head out to work, Like he felt like he should be grabbing his briefcase and putting his hat on and getting onto the business of life now that he's married. And he said that was the first time he ever felt that way, like there was some other reason. There was he had this other reason to go work. Did he fall out of his eyechair? Whatever? How could? Why are you? Have you ever been married and you're thirty five and you're beautiful? What's going wrong here? Because you don't believe in the institution. It's you know, I think for me. Yeah, and they need to feel healthy. Yeah, Well, you can't apply all these criteria. You have to shoot from the hip, grant if you're gonna continue, let's put your headset on. I gave you one. I think there are a couple of situations where I could have almost been at that place and then you know things fell apart. Um. Has anyone asked you to get married and you said no, no, no, that hasn't happened. Um. Yeah, I don't, you know, mm hmm, I don't. I don't think that wherever at and arrived at place really, you know, if I look back at my life past couple of years, the decade before, UM, there's always been a core of myself that kind of knows. But a lot of other things. Do you wish you would ever get married? You look forward to I want a family? I do. I do, I would like a family, UM, But I think that before that happens, I I do want to feel that the person I'm with UM is committed to teaming up with me in in doing that. Have you ever considered a starter hubby starter? UM? No, No, I'm not sure if I have. UM. I think I think I have maybe some feelings similarly to what you have around marriage as an institution. And I think that or I've come to a place now with the experiences that I've had that I think, Uh, to be in partnership with someone is a choice that you make every day, UM, and that you it is you renew that every day for as long as the both of you do no no, then you're wasting all kinds of time. Why because that's I mean, do you feel like you do you feel like you stay in something, I like, force yourself to be part part of the beauty of it is. This part of the beauty of it is and not the whole thing. I'm not I'm not trying to like trivialize marriage, but like a nice thing about marriage is that you make a set of decisions. You have a lot of time to think about those decisions, right, there's a hundred ways to get out of it, and you add it all up in your head and you decide that this is what I'll do. And then at that moment you stop pretending that you didn't make that decision. It becomes like the thing that you did and the thing that you now do, And then you turn yourself to the other ship in life, and you don't wake up every day being like, am I really committed to this person? You just decided that's that that's where you're at, and then that part of that question is gone, and all the energy you'd apply to that question you apply to other stuff. And I don't think that most people go through that, um, the precursor that you describe, they all do. Yeah, I agree. Okay, I gotta tell I gotta tell you my approach to my very successful forty one or forty two year marriage. You can all learn from this. Please fall completely silent. I want to reverence silence. Ready. I was lying on the floor of a bar and Key West with a cocktail in my hand, and my soon to be wife walked by, and she had this heavy Alabama accent and I heard her talking, and I said, raised my glass and I said, will you marry me and take me to your southern mansion? And she said, well, I don't have a merrit mansion, but sure I'll marry you. And we've been together for forty two years. That's how much that That's how much forethought went into this. So, like I say, I've I've fought them through before they failed. Uh. I never meant to move to Montana. Everything that ever happened to be had was an accident. So this rashi asinutive approach, right, it's gonna it's gonna blow up like an exploding cigar. Right. It's like, if you intellectually make a decision to be a certain way into the future. Then what if a disconnect arises between what you decide intellectually you're going to be with who you organically feel you become based on your experiences day by day. Yeah, well I like to think, Okay, let me put it this way. If I got out of it, I like to think that I would do it as carefully and with as much thought as I got into it. The key to the whole thing is comedy. I mean, if you if you like to laugh, and I do. My wife likes to laugh. We laugh all day long, one thing or another. And we could quit going to cuttings. We had people say to a because we had a little living quarters in our trailer. They said, we don't know how to go to these rodeos anymore because we could always hear the laughter out of your trailer at the first of daylight. And uh so that's really you know, because you have inevitably I mean, I don't know how early on you are in your marriage, but they're full of conflict one way or another. Yeah, man, you feel like kids, um, we're a burden or a stress on? Like were you able to keep that level of laughter or was there a little bit of a low spot as you sort of had to do. It adds to the potential, it adds to the potential for conflicts. So it tests your other resources, you know, I mean, because you see you feel differently about what they should do. And now that uh um, it's uh, you know, it's unusual because my I had children and my wife had children. We got married and they became a sort of amalgamated family and that worked out great. But Lori's daughter was like five years old. She's fifty now, but she was five years old and we first got together. And actually my stepdaughter is the one I'm the closest to. Um. Uh So it's all so unpredictable. I mean, if if I've learned anything in life is that it is so unpredictable. And it's a great mistake to imagine that it is predictable, because then you start imposing this kind of template of what you imagine to be your control of over future events, which is nonexistent. Um. It's not the same as analyzing the stock market. I mean, it's a it's much much much more myriad, and it's but you just have to you know, you have to you have to be good on your feet. You know, you have to have a sense of humor and be really good on your feet. And you have to have a highly qualified ego. What do you mean by that, Well, you don't. You have to lose that part of yourself that operates out in the world where you really need to win a lot oh um. And you have to have for it to work over long term. You have to have a really highly developed you have to train yourself with this. You have to have a highly developed sense of fairness. You just have to think about fairness all the time and those kinds of things. Have you given up on or did you ever tally wins and losses in marriage? I do that, yeah, and I try him to quit, but I do do it. Yeah. I don't think I've done that. I mean, like other people's marriage. No, no, no, no. I mean I'll be like, wow, I gave in on something that was important to me, and I'm like, okay, never mind, and I remember that, and then I'm very aware of it the next time. Oh, like your old one. Yeah, and I'll be like bank account. I'll be like, well, yeah, but I professional help. Yeah, it's not gonna work for you. Like I gave up the one thing. But then so I feel like I should get this thing because you won. Oh I think you do. Do that actually a little bit, Um, we'll make formal deals to be like, I'll stop talking about this. Yeah if if I get this win, Yeah, I seriously bring negotiating. Yeah. You know you know. The one I hate is when you say, when you finally make a point, you're right about something, and the other person says fine, I hate fine, Yeah, you wanted more of a like you know what, you're right. It's like I was told this woman who was in some kind of relationship. I said, you know, when the guy tells you that you're amazing, it's over. So are you Are you familiar with Jerry Mills and the idea he keep popularize this idea that about how to describe Southern literature, Oh, the mule theory and the dead mule theory. And he's like, how do you tell? Like that was like his defining and he broughte this very spirited essay about the test the litmus test of Southern literature has a dead mule in it. In Um, In reading your work, I find that, uh, there's uh quite often there is our activities around irrigation always. Oh, there wasn't a lot of that because someone's ears like someone's irrigating, carrying irrigating you. I was the irrigator, and I hated it. It's really something the degree to which when you're describing, like someone driving down a highway, a thing that they're likely to notice there's some aspect of irrigation. I've never met anybody that likes that job. Nailed it. It's just the worst job. This is the worst job. In fact, about five years ago I managed to lease the hay fields to somebody who liked to irrigate. I mean, if you have a ranch, if you have a ranch, if you have a ranch, everybody wants the grass and nobody wants the irrigation. And uh so, you know, if you're fathing, if you're phasing out, as I've been for probably ten years, you're always trying to find somebody wants some component of what you've been doing. Oh, I'll take the grass or yeah, and nobody wants to fix the fence. I mean, I have all these little rules get cowboys. I fixed fence, but I don't build fence. Um, you know, I you know, I like working cattle, but I don't want to irrigate, and we did a lot of that ourselves for so long. But the part that I really resented was the irrigation. I mean, we had one point flood of irrigation. Flood of irrigation. Yeah, we had. We had a gated pipe eventually, which help a little bit. But we ran a lot of cattle. At one time, I had a lot of land leased north of round Up and we ran hearing steers out there. Oh you were that heavy into running cattle that you releasing pasture land had thirty thousand acres at least. Were you writing then too much? Not much? Yeah, I was kind of. I mean, there's a very intense for a period of time and then you ship, but then you've a lot of free time. And oh so you like, I didn't know you really really threw down and became that, but you were a rancher. Yeah, yeah, pretty much. Well, I you know, I mean I remember I first made some money. I bought a place in uh in uh Paradise Valley wasn't very big, but we had we always kept a lot of roping steers around because we're always rodeoing. And then we then we would lease some ground, and I didn't really know what to do with the ranch. I mean that was in my twenties. I've never had that background. And and uh, and I had a hired man, and uh, I knew this guy, Nevada rancher, old time Nevada ranch. He said, the main thing is to go to bed at eight o'clock, get up at four, and then whoever works for you'll feel guilty all day long. They'll do anything you ask him to do. Then the guy used to live in this ranch to get up at four and go into the kitchen, turned the light on so the neighbors would think that he was at work and go back to bed. About did you enjoy doing being the cattle business? Did I? Did you enjoy? Yeah? I got. I was infatuated with the whole thing because I had a girlfriend in high school who who's uh was from originally from Wyoming, and her dad gave me a summer jobs. So I started going to Wyoming when I was like sixteen years old. Um tried to be a cowboy. So I wanted to, you know, from that point on, any time I was not actually in school, I was out here and uh, I'm well over that, you know, but it was I really joy it, really loved it, you know, I was really caught up in that. Uh. Kept a lot of horses, went to ropings between here in California, and I really love the culture. I still kind of like it. Where I really like it is where it really is intact, you know, in West Texas is where it is. I mean those, uh, the real full time cowboys down there. They'll die poor and they have, but they have incredible skills, um inherited skills, and great reverence for their heritage, you know, and it makes them indifferent to the fact that they'll never own anything, um just what they've got a trailer, stock tailor, a couple of horses, a couple of saddles for ropes, and they're great and they have a kind of a new era. And that ranches down there really can't keep full time help. It's not economical to do that. So once a year they'll hire these guys that come out, come out with the horse trailers, unload all their horses, gather all the rantriable, doctor, all the cattle, brand everybody, and they're going to get a bill. Uh. So that's kept them going for another burst. I think one of the things that makes it that other writers who write about the West and who write about people who work the land, Um, the reason they can't that I don't think they'll ever be able to catch you, is because you have to read your work and read it and read it and read it to find an unbelievable moment. I'm sensitive to the stuff where if I'm reading about someone, um, when I find that they do something or some part of their life or something they're doing at work feels phony. Uh it really, it just puts me off. I was watching the show with my wife. She she was watching the show and there was a guy who is supposedly a carpenter working in this drama, and they had a carpenter in the home doing some carpentry work, and as the cameras on him, it's clear that not only is he not a carpenter, but no one involved on the set, the writer like, no one had any idea what this individual would be doing in a moment of him pretending to be a carpenter. And it's that's like, those glimpses are painful. But in reading your stuff, there's one exception I'll tell you about later. And reading your stuff, um, no one ever does anything that's not just totally believable. Another person who's really good. I feel as Corman McCarthy, but it's so fantastical and it's and it becomes show off where Court McCarthy likes to show you things he learned about in exhaustive research and integrate him in and it's show offie. But your stuff about what people are working or what they're out doing, or what business they're involved in, or how they made money, how they lost money, what they did yesterday. Every time I read it, I'm like, yes, oh, good, well that's great, and I hope it stays true. Oh it is like and I always wonder It's like part of the interests of mine to meet you too, is always wondered, be like, how does he know all that stuff where it's not made up? There's like the story is made up, but no, the parts of the story are all so perfect. That's great. Well, you know, I've always one of the things I feel maybe separates what I want to do are the people that I admire want to do um in writing is that Uh. I always felt that your writing should come from the zeitgeist, you know, the life you lead. I mean, if you think of Fitzgerald or Falkner or having Away, they're kind of writing out of their lives. Well, if I read I read lit Hub all the time, you know, in the morning, and those people are saying, well, I'm researching something about you know, life in the in a isis concentration camp. I've never been there, or I remember this book. I got kind of in trouble over this book. And when the National Book Award was called a Letter from Letters from Ecuador, it was kind of modernist book. It was totally boring, and it was I got into trouble because I did an interview when there were five finalists for the National Book Award and they're all five avant garde women living in New York City. And I said, and I said to somebody in an interview with the New Yorker, I said, it's a big country. Didn't they find somebody who had any had any uh any ability out there the fifties States? Just these five women in the anyway, everybody blew up. It was a night that's on him a bit you need to get anyway, it was horrible. It lasted for a long time as a scandal because there was a gender component to it. That was a gender component to it. And the the woman who wrote the wrote the wrote the award winning book which nobody wants to read. It's unreadable. Her name is thinking of it now, but the name of the book has letter from Ecuador, and she she said that she wrote this book and a lot of it takes place in Ecuador. She's very proud of the fact that she'd never been there. Yeah, and uh so we get kind of right now because I keep track of a lot of new writers, you know, I'd like reading up and coming writers. It persuades me that this game will last, you know, because there's so many good writers coming along, the really good, right young writers. And our women and like Testa most Fager one of my favorites. They're just some wonderful uh uh women writing. The reason is they're not as oppressed by political correctness as the men are. And they're very rare, very they're very i mean, they're just they just lay about themselves with a broad sword. I mean, they do any say anything they want to say. And it was all that's quite it's kind of invasive, kind of and it's really tense and full of interesting stuff. Whereas the men are so afraid of saying something wrong about people who are overweight or uh, you know, unattractive people somebody. They there's a kind of timidity about literary fiction by young men that the women don't have to deal with, and as a result, the men are not very interesting at this point in time. Yeah, you see it in comedy too, Yeah, I'm sure. Yeah, female comics caught loose. Absolutely. You mentioned earlier Key West you met your wife, and Key West you were one of the areas like this kind of fixation we had when I say we that my brother's and nine and guys we hung out with when we were in our kind of in our twenties, like the fish a lot, and we became really aware of um that we had missed the boat on Key West, like something had happened in the culture of fishing, in literature and whatnot. Something had happened in Key West and it had died. Yeah. Can you talk a little bit about your experiences in Key West and what brought you down there and the fishing and what you feel, um, what you feel died? Well, yeah, I can a little bit. I mean I went down there. It was a really uh it was a really virgil situation. Um. I went down there for for two reasons, three reasons. One was I was a sort of a bookish boy and I was aware of its uh literary history. Secondly, it was a rundown cheap place to live, I mean boat to Wall Street, which is one shop after another, and it was boarded up when I moved on there. There's no if your parents came from visit, there was really no place to take him to dinner. There's one place, the A and B Lobster was terrible. And I had the only skiff there. Yeah, I read that once. Yeah, I think it was one of your essays. Yeah, you mentioned that at the time you had the only flat skiff in Key West. What year was that, I think sixty nine something like that. And um, so it was a kind of uh it was partly a sort of hippie brigadune, you know what I mean. Because it was a cheap place to live. It felt like it wasn't in the United States, and you know it was you know, half the people there were uh spoke Spanish or they were conk sin spoke, you know, spoke this kind of creole conk talk. And it was very interesting place. I mean, I was just loved it so much. It was such a great place to be. And then in addition to that, I had a friend who was an outstanding traditional guide who would who would give me a couple of his clients that he didn't on a fish, usually because they didn't know how to fish anyway. That was guiding. Those people gave me a minimal living. And then I had a little contract with Sports Illustrated. I think I had to do six pieces a year for them. Between that and my two days a week deal, I I had a bare bones living and I could rent a rent a place cheaply and just live my life. And it was just a great place to be. And and I know a lot of people who were there then I still know them, and we all agree that it was like it was like the thing that the best part of our lives could never be replicated anywhere. It was just there's nothing like it ever anywhere, never will be again. Um uh. And that's the feeling that I don't have exclusively. I mean, everybody I know who was there I just heard from. I had. I had a friend, it's kind of an artist, and he was smuggling dope. Everybody's smuggling dope. It was, you know, it was smuggling sail boats and acoustic guitars was sort of the basic equipment for life at Key West. And there were some very courageous guys that were going to South America, you know, and bringing bring back loads of pot. And it was considered you know, it wasn't considered a grave thing if you if you get caught. Yeah, And I had two good friends that were bringing back a load of dope from Carla Hana and they hunder ten foot coast guard cut her pull alongside of him, and so they took a chainsaw and they put a hole in the bottle of the boat and sank it, and the coast guard boarded and put a pump on it, pumped it back out, and they and they and they were two great guys. They were wonderful carpenters. So they went up to Eggland Air Force Base, which was sort of a minimum security prison. They had to make roll top death for the warden and all the politicians up there and you know said, you know, go back to what you were doing. Well, one of those guys, now he just you know, because now he's a felon, so he had to do other things, so he moved to the Bahamas. He's got this fantastic fishing lodge on the Bahamas, he's got the he's got two great restaurants in a bookstore and a tackle shop at the US that he runs from Afar. You know, he said, well, if I'm a felon, I gotta do the best I can. And there are a couple of guys like that who still remained and named over the Missouri. You know, they couldn't guide anymore because they were felling, so they just opened a big business. They have homes and belize and they were forced by this limitation on their options something even more creative. But your main draw Key West was the fishing, right, unbelievable fishing. I mean, you have the Gulf. It's the head of the Gulf Stream, so you have this phenomenal depth of species there, and then you have the Gulf of Mexico, which is a whole different kind of fish. You have the Gulf Stream, and you have the Atlantic fishery. Um, it's very intricate, fascinating to try to figure out. We didn't have GPS, we didn't have cell phones, we didn't have online tide information. Uh, and you had to convert everything like you get you get a government tide book that Miami would be your closest information. You had to convert everything and like what the delays are? Yeah, and the delays were very different from the Gulf side from Atlantic sided. They only might be a mile or two apart, completely different tides, a difference of hours hours. Uh, throughout throughout your life. Of because you've been around and you've explored so much, do you have this do you have this ongoing feeling that that um places are ending all the time? Well, yeah, but do you feel like the American West is like has ended? Well, it's very you know, I no, not really. I mean I probably that what I struggled with understanding in my fiction is to try to figure out how it's moving on, because when I got to Key West in the sixties, there were people moving out because they thought it was ruined. When I left left there in seventy eight, that we're quick going there in sight, I thought I was sure it was done. And I know all these people that have moved there since then, I just think it's been the greatest lives and and and that's going to happen here too. Well, is this is not gonna be uh, you know, the imagery, the vision we have in Montana is not the same as it once was. I mean it was when I got here in the sixties and not much had changed. I mean, my neighbors were all old family ranchers, you know, they were They were not polarized. You know, I was a hippie. That's so long hair? You know, they were just why you get your hair long while girls like it? You know, Oh, well that's a good idea. And and uh, you know some of the my rancher neighbors were born in the eight hundreds. Yeah, you know, guy board in nine still ranching. Um. Then it could kind of polarized us against them insiders I'll start, you know, natives, non natives that could. That went on for a while and we're kind of evolving out of that now because there's so many that the what do they call it the attrition rate in Montana, The turnover rates has been very high. I'm not sure it's as high as it used to be, but it was always very high. People are always arriving at departing was part of it. Do you feel as a writer that you're more interested in tracking the change than you are in lamenting or rooting for yep, Like you feel like you can just you could almost stand back and like passively observed as long as you hit it, hit the nail on the head. Oh well, I mean I want to. There's a great book by Lewis Hyde that's just being reviewed right now about the art of forgetting. You know, you can't be uh, you can't be chained by your the past or your own past. In many ways, you really don't have much to say about what's going on. I Mean, one of the magic things about literature is that it really is the only thing that can kind of capture, uh, the atmosphere of a given moment um. You can look at the movies of the twenties, you can read the newspapers of the nineties. You're never going to get the feeling for the twenties that you're gonna get from reading the Great Gaspee. I mean those that's the only thing that can really Literature still is the only thing that can really capture what it was like to be there at that time. And it's no good to be there at that time. But lamenting some other era. Um, but that's hard to do. I mean, it's going by you like clay pigeons, trying to catch up with it. Just what, you know, whatever, it is not easy. You don't write from the past too much, not much. No. Um. Maybe I've kind of you know, I feel I've benefited from the ability to kind of start over, you know. I mean, I wasn't very interested in living the life I kind of grew up with. I mean, I had a great life as a kid, you know, but I didn't want to stay in the Midwest, you know, and or stay in the southern Midwest. It seemed to be much going on there. And also I had a kind of a divided childhood because all my family lived in on the Massachusetts coast, you know, and I loved it out there, and my mother never wanted to leave there. So in the spring of the year, she just load us kids up and we lows us up in the car and drives back to my grandmother's falling down triple decker Irish ghetto house and in Fall River, Massachusetts. And I thought that was the greatest you know, go fish for stripe bass with my cousins who just left. I've been fly fishing with my cousin Fred for sixty five years. We just left. We're still doing it. You guys just fishingly. Don't need to say a whole lot of time. We'll go anywhere we can go. Did you fish? I heard mentioned that you were going to fish with Rachel Matten? Do you do you fish? And tell? Like? Uh? I was gonna Rachel was a bad fisherman. And I met her once. I was surprised. I went to an event. It was her and Tucker Carlson on stage. They didn't known each other and work together and we're friends. Their friends with her, and they were bound by um an interest in fishing. And they got up and they were on stage together talking about that, and I was very surprised that she was the angler. That's fascinating. Well, Tucker Carlson comes to the same place we're go doing anyway last or we were gonna go stripe fishing to stripe bass fishing together. I'm a big admirer of hers and UM. And then NBC grounded her, just said, you know, you can't go off for a few days. There's just she said, unless we actually she wrote back, she said, unless we get real indictments. I can't go, oh, I got you so, and uh, what's the story you have where I can't hear the name of it right now? You have a story where you guys go hunting birds and and in the end, uh, one of them, he goes off over the hill and kills himself. Yeah. I hear that story. I hear so much about that story. That thing has really had an ongoing life. What's that story called? It's called there's two of those hunting stories, what's called sports one. This one's called Uh. Yeah. I had to read the end a handful of times to make sure that in fact he had going off and shot himself because he gives his hunting partner. He kind of in a very unceremonial way, explains a little bit about his dogs. Take care of the dogs, Yeah, the care schedule. Yeah, when she goes into heat, what she eats? And then he wanders off over a hill, which is a little bit misleading because they had seen the covey birds go over the hill. But he goes over the hill and there's a gunshot. Yeah. Well, you know I had to be like, oh what you know, I'm like, oh no, he absolutely killed himself. Did that come from? It is that I don't anything in your personal life, not really a couple of things kind of, you know. I don't expect to head out in the rapture, you know, But I always thought the closest thing to rapture that I know is to step into a cuvey covey rice. There's really nothing like it. There's so much life, so many beating hearts, so many eyes, so much expectation, all goes up like a big celestial corsage. And I thought, if I was gonna if I was going to sort of moored out by my own hand, that would be kind of a nice way to go. And I heard when my cousin just told me he had an old friend, uh it was terminally ill and was going to I'm gonna end that day. Either knew that was his last day or uh or they were going to pull the the pain mid plugs or something. But he knew it was over. And there's an old friend of his lives in Rhode Island, and so he was very cheerful about it. He had a great life, he had a good run, said me, I find a find with this. Well, they said, what do you want? He said, well, this was actually still in the winter. He said, just build a big fire. I don't want my lap rob robe. I want my bird dog, I want my cat. That's it off he want. He's fine with it. Were you friends with Richard Brodigan, You have very you have very good friends. Tell a little about that. I mean, were you involved, I mean, were you It's kind of like this famous story about a bunch of guys that were hunting and he was supposed to show up, yeah, and didn't show up. The thing that I remember the most was, um uh, I thought he was doing great. I talked to him into giving up drinking for a period, and he just transformative, I mean physically changed. He had this big, sort of projected belly, you know, and he's drinking all the time and starting at daybreak practically. And then he spent this whole summer being this happy, thin guy to give readings around the neighborhood. Everybody was determined to resume drinking as soon as possible, especially he liked to go to Japan and stay drunk the whole time he was in Japan. That was his big deal. And I'm not sure. Maybe it's put apart of bonding and culture or something in Japan. But um, so he came to my house, uh, and he brought this black Japanese funerary funerary urn. Are you Japanese or Chinese? Half Chinese? Half Chinese, half Chinese? So you don't you know what a funerary urn is? Is that Japanese or Chinese? But I believe that it's Japanese and that's where the anyways, beautiful, beautiful black ceramic thing. He brought it over to my house and he said, I want you to hang on to this, and he said, you'll look, someone will call you for it. Fine, Richards, I put it there. I had it two fly ras, one of which I gave the ripped torn and uh, not too long after that, I get a call, you know, from his daughter. I think it was from his daughter saying, you know, Richards committed suicide. We've sent the urn no ship. Yeah. He even told her where to find it. Huh. You know why I asked you about that. We're driving up here, driving around looking for your house. Um yoanninging here Yannie and I were talking about our friend Doug, who's out here with a couple of buddies of his from Wisconsin. Right now, they're here in Montana and they're just driving around fishing, and Joannice mentioned me that part of their plan while they're driving around fishing is to read Trout Fishing in America. And I said to Joannice, well, you know, it doesn't really have anything to do with trout fishing, and he said, they know. Oh, that's great, greatly. Hey, I gotta Richard's daughter just sent me a new addition of it. I might be able to see it. I saw it the other day, Um of troun Fishing in America with Billy Collins introduction. Okay, isn't that cool? Yeah? Well, it was a magical book. I mean, and whatever it was, I don't know what it was. I've read it two or three times. It's just a great book. Yeah, one of the most requestioned books in the entire American library systems, right up there with Huckleberry Finn or something. You know, there's a couple more questions for you. There's the thing that I've read where you've written it a couple of times or said in interviews, UM that fishing is the second most published subject after mathematics. Yeah, what does that mean? Though? I have no idea. It is way too much stuff about fishing out there. I hate to throw throw another little one out there. No. I thought about that when I came in and looked at your bookshelves, and I remembered that. I can't remember if you wrote it or said in an interview, but you've written it. Was the second most published subject, next to mathematics. I don't know why. It's just because for the sort of outdoor activities, especially the ones with any kind of a predatorial component, it's the most contemplative. So it may that maybe what what leads to it. I have a book that I tried to get. It's called Blood notts um unbelievable book by an English writer, A good name for a fishing book. Yeah. He was the he was the dance critic of The Observer, really and he wrote the stunning book about fishing. Um. And uh, I mean it's just a great book U. And I got all sorts of people to help promoted. I had always always renowned people write blurbs and stuff for it really didn't they was published very poorly and didn't really go anywhere. Um. But it was one of these books like the book about the Swedish utopia VSA v angling you know. Uh. And this guy grew up he comes from. It starts out dad was teaching him to fish, and he he never could understand why his mother would get up in the morning and apply saves to his fire to father's body and then they get dressed and go fishing, and he couldn't understand what that was about. Uh. And then as he learned to fish, he started quick singing his dad about these things. Turned out his dad was in a tank battle and his talent in the Nazi tank hit it with an anti tank weapon of some kind of The thing burst into flame and he was one of the first guys to get a total plastic surgery treatment of the Second World War. Well, that kind of folds in as he's learning to fish. Then he has a He has a hero at school who's like one of those super male figures that young guys kind of identified with when they're kids in school. He's a falconer, he's a great fisherman, and he followed him through life. They often fish together. The hero guy joined the Royal Irish Constabulary in uh in Northern Ireland during the troubles. These guys all went to this ancient Catholic college in England's like six year old college and grew up in this kind of intense Catholic atmosphere. He joins the the r U R what it was called, and he's captured by the I ra A uh and they tortured him for two weeks. They brought fake priests in to do the last rites, and then they killed him and then leers. Afterwards, this guy fishing runs into some of those I ra A guys and they said, well, I can tell you this about your friend. He was a real soldier, he never broke But this is all interwoven with with hardcore serious fishing. And I began to think, you know, it's pretty seamless, you know. Then O, this would have happened if he hadn't been a fisherman, you know. So, Uh, what's the name Harry? Uh? Oh? What is that? Uh? Anyway, there's a wonderful writer. He died long ago. What about fishing? Uh? Starlight Angling Club was was one of his one of his books. They were so intermeshed with life, you know, And that's so maybe that's why there's so much fishing stuff out there. I don't know, do you feel that if you ended the world now and let it start back over again and the world gets going again, would um would so many writers that fish be fly fisherman? Or do you think you could let it start over again and it would wind up that so many writers that fish were spin fisherman. What a question? I don't know. I don't know. I mean, the mentality of trying to catch a fish with a fly is so very different, I mean with spin fisherman basically attacking fish. Yeah, and I like that, And uh, you have to fly fishing is you kind of have to make a deal. You know what English fly fishing writer Shaip, what do you do? What's this all about? He said, Well, you make a cast and then you await results. That's a that's a whole other thing. Then, you know, you know what I'm saying, Man, I like them. I like all that. I like any kind of fishing you got. You got a line in one of your fishing stories where you're talking about a fly presenting a fly to a fish. You said that it's like a highway exit that's labeled free beer, right, and most motorists are just gonna blow pass. Some motors are gonna think like, oh, that's a ruse and they're gonna ambush me and kill me. I didn't remember saying this, but some guys are just gonna get off. There are gonna take those are the fishy catch. You know. He had a magic moment. I was last year. I was fishing on the New Fork of the Green and Wyoming. I was fishing with dry flies. That big, big dry flies. Are a lot of great drakes on the water and fired out there's floating along, dancing along. We're all filled with hope. This big brown trout comes up. It stalls. He says, this is bullshit and he swims away. As he swims away, it's all going downstream. He's developing doubts. I can see him go through this thing, and he goes, I think I'll eat it. So I recently had uh. But we're at my mother's home, and my mother lives in the house I was brought up in, and my kid, who's nine, he looks under the pontoon boat. She's got a pontoon boat moored up to her dock. He looks out of the pontoon ball. There's a big, large mouth um feeling it hovering in the hovering in the shadows, you know, and he takes his beach saying and eventually gets a big what we call like a horn nose chub. Those big those now they get the males get a knobby knows on him and I free hook it on their for him. There's no weight, it's just this chubb and I tell him to flick it up under there, you know. And the way that fish, just the total conviction with which that fish took that chubb, like no hesitation or doubt like something like that. Though, it is a little bit magical to watch. Well, that fish is like I'll take it, I buy it. And it's interesting because you know, it's almost startling. You know, there's fish that living around docks and stuff in Florida. You know, they've had so many people try to catch them. I mean, you can slide a live shrimp down their face like this. They're not gonna let it fall uh one more for you. I know. It's on the way in. There's turkeys hanging around here. Are they living here? Yere? Around? Are they migrate up and down? No, there're a lot of a lot of them around here, and they get very yeah, they get very tame. They hone in on the imagine that they're only making their living because they can winner up around animals, livestock. I think that's part of it. We had we had one living on rusty, living on the porch all winter long, and he went off with his pack. Used to be when we would grain our horses out of a trough, you know, we take a bucket of grain and put it in this long wooden trough and we gotta go out there. The horses will be lined up and there'll be turkeys lined up between the horses. So do you do you hunt the turkeys? Do I have turkeys? It wouldn't be very sporting here. I have gone turkey hunting. I haven't been successful at it, but I've gone turkey hunting when I've been visiting my in laws in Alabama, and that's very that seems very interesting to me. But I mean, this would be case of going out and plugging one. I mean, these are Miriam's turkeys. They were established there a New Mexico turkey originally. They they're like hans. They just found a biota that they could move right into. Uh. Remember earlier I was praising you for just how believable everything, and you're and your work is We're gonna move on to something unbelievable. Yeah, I just want to ask you about the one thing that I was like, uh, that's not cracked. What was it? You know, your story Canyon Ferry. Yeah, there's a guy that's taken like his he's taking a kid out of ice fishing on Canyon Ferry Lake, but it's the wintertime and he has a coffee can full of crawlers. Oh I really didn't like that. Yeah, they'd phrazed, wouldn't they Just he wouldn't have that guy. Yeah, he wouldn't have that guy, wouldn't have that. He couldn't buy him like that. Yeah, it might be true. Ye know. I feel like if you ever do a revised version, you need to change. He needs to have a styrofoam container. Yea that he bought a Bob Wartz a styrofoam container from the cold. That was the only thing I've ever read. And this is this is this sounds like an insult, but it's a it's a compliment. How many books have you written? I don't know, fifteen or something, I guess, and how many how many short stories? I don't know? A lot. I just collected him in excess of like, you know, dozens and dozens and he've written an entire of essays about horses. Yeah, I know. Yeah, I just want to point out that all that and that I'll take it if that's the worst one time when I was like, no, oh, it was painful, but it just I think that it it reveals how um, just the how well versed you've become in your life, just everything having to do with America. Yeah, no, I'm you know, it's funny. I have a friend who's uh, who just married you just married a girl from Prague. There's a guy that I fished to sail with luck and she has some kind of a uh problem coming going out of the country. I mean her, you know, you can't just get married now and automatically assaults of this problem. So they're out of the country now, they're wandering around, they've been on the Croatian coast, they're doing stuff. Um. But I can tell how homesick he is for America. And he's a real ex hippie, you know, he's not nostalgic about America. But I lived over I lived in Ireland one time. I lived in Spain. I lived in Italy, but I was always trying to find what's going on in America, you know. And uh and also I got sort of educated in the early idea that there was such a thing as American literature that wasn't the same as English literature. That was actually when I was going to college. That was a relatively new idea that you know, it wasn't always in the air. And uh, programs like American Studies, all those kinds of things. The old idea that there is such a thing. We're not just a disparate in Malick, we are kind of a people. Uh and that's not been for sure forever. And uh so I'm kind of now that I see it, kind of imperiled. I'm just really interested in what it is, what this country is, what it is to be an American. Um And when I just was overseas, I really noticed that. I was just like, what's going on. I gotta get the Buildings Gazette. I'm done in Brittany, you know, powing mysel phone. What's going to happen to the Billings Gazette today? It's kind of it's kind of ignorant in a way to look at that, but I don't long to be an expatriate as some people did at one time, never did want to be. And whenever I'm not here, I want to know what's going on and I and I would like to kind of claw my way to a sort of a template or an overview of what an act, what this country actually is, since it's changing so quickly. My wife had a job for a while where it would have been possible to go and take a position overseas, and when she brought this up to me, I told that I was just too American to live somewhere else, which I felt was Yeah, I thought I wouldn't be able to pull it off. I wouldn't be able to pull it off either. And you know you noticed it if you you know, if you get translated a lot, because they really have a lot of a lot of uh problems with our language, you know what I mean. For example, they couldn't translate the title Cloudbursts, which is my collected stories. French couldn't translate that there isn't a cloud, but there isn't a term for that. Where do they go with I can't remember? Or what's what? Whatever they went with? What's it? Translate speak French. They went with wandlecil city near when I was in franchise. Is that a nice tale? Oh yeah, it's very nice. Thank you. There is there anything that you wish you've gotten asked about? They didn't get asked about here today? Yeah? Any you want to wedge, you know, But this has been really fun. I could do this for a long time because it's you know, it's kind of intuitive. You know, I'm I'm enjoying this. I guess I was concerned that there would be more of a template for what we were going to go toward that hasn't happened. Um, maybe I missed out. What would that have been? I think you sucked up. I'm not sure, but that's what I like. That approach to anything. I mean, that's the way I write. You know, something arrests my attention. I have no idea what's going to happen. I had an image one time we rented a house down the Gulf coast when you're I went down ahead of time. I didn't know anybody at this town. It was seemed very strange to me that people seemed fairly strange. But I had the rental host, you know, on the renter, the realtor gave me the keys, and I went out to look at the Gulf of Mexico and the the wind blew the door shot. Now I'm on the porch. I can't get back into the house. I don't know anybody. Somebody drove me there, and I mean I felt this kind of derascinated panic, you know. Suddenly I became nobody on this windy porch. So that's how I had to go on. I had just had that image. I said, well, wonder where this goes? And that life is kind of like that, I think. And that's what most fiction writers, uh uh, admit at some point in a time, most of them not all that writing is really improvisitory. I mean, as a cheever said it over and over again. In fact, my my experience is if you really know where it's going, it's probably not going to be any good. You don't write the end first, no, no, hell no. But I revised a lot. I'm a I'm a rewriter, you know. I do a lot of drafts, but I don't know where it's going. Maybe I want to be a reader when I'm writing. I want to be a reader with a little bit of an advantage, which is what I used to do magazine stories, which is totally different, but pieces of reporting or whatever. I would start with a place I wanted to get, like a really cool scene or something that was impactful, and then picture writing the rest of the article in the way that would warrant such an impactful ending. Did you actually follow through with that or oh, that's just how I would start. I feel like if only I could write something so good that it could end with this and have it makes sense. I wrote a note down, I wrote this note of dialogue done. I'm gonna try to do something but eventually and it just just in quotes. It's just a u ass whole Did you dictate this? I don't know where is that going? But it has energy. You know, well, this is the perfect way to get out of the interview. Stay tuned as you read the life's work of Tom mcwayne and watch for that line and you'll have a feeling of coming full circle back to this. But seriously, thank you for coming on. Appreciate it. I appreciate it, and I am kind of a fan of what you do. Keep it as loose as it as it has been, and the only way you can be sure of. That is when you realize how many enemies he requires. There's a couple out there. Yeah, I'm sure. Well, thank you again, appreciate it. Okay, my pleasure.