Popular searches
Articles
Series
Topics
Shop
Recipes
The MeatEater Podcast
Ep. 432: Hit 'Em Where They Ain't with Ian Frazier
Play Episode
2h12m
Steve Rinella talks with Ian Frazier, Ryan Callaghan, Brody Henderson, Phil Taylor, and Corinne Schneider.
Steve Rinella talks with Ian Frazier, Ryan Callaghan, Brody Henderson, Phil Taylor, and Corinne Schneider.
Topics include: Frazier's bajillion books and articles in The New Yorker; the Lakota word, ichipasisi; Steve's piece about fishing in the turbine, which led to his big break; the "weights in fish" guys plead guilty; a correction on a correction about Dale Hollow Lake; rewards for turning in bands and the million dollar phesant; a note to the hater; how many pythons are really out there; circumpolar distribution; globigerina ooze; Steelhead Joe; the Chukchi hunters; seal liver with angel hair pasta; not wanting to live near other writers; hog distribution maps overlaid with voting maps; the Bronx; the in between-ness of a place; steamboat explosions; and more.
Shop MeatEater Merch
00:00:08
Speaker 1: If this is the me Eater podcast coming at you shirtless, severely, bug bitten, and in my case, underwear listeningcast, you can't predict anything presented by first Light, creating proven versatile hunting apparel from Marino bass layers to technical outerwear for every hunt, first Light Go Farther, Stay Longer. Okay. Joined today by fabulous author Ian Fraser, author probably arguably, when I make lists of the of my favorite books of all time, usually at the top of the list is the book Great Planes.
00:00:51
Speaker 2: I'm glad to hear that I taught you a word with that book. You did remember the word ichi PASISI?
00:00:56
Speaker 1: Oh, yeah, but I can't remember what I meant.
00:00:58
Speaker 2: It's a Lakota word. If it's growing, going along a stream, crossing back and forth, it is a very useful word. You can say I went down that stream, I went down that crek ichi PASISI. And later I checked with Lakota people and they said it actually means sewing. But yeah, but the guy was using it, the guy I was talking to was using it as ways telling me how to get to.
00:01:20
Speaker 1: It.
00:01:20
Speaker 2: Is like we even back and forth with a sewing right, It's like you're yeah, it is a sewing motion.
00:01:27
Speaker 1: But author of I don't even know how many things so award winning writer, hem, how many books you have? We have a zillion written down, but it's.
00:01:36
Speaker 2: A zillion, it's like it's slightly less. It's about I would say a million, billion, trillion.
00:01:43
Speaker 1: Author of a lot of fantastic books, including Travels in Siberia. Yes, it's a great book. Thank you, and culminates in a very spirited argument that Stalin Joe are not okay.
00:02:03
Speaker 2: Stalin jokes are not okay.
00:02:04
Speaker 1: I don't remember writing that you did? I did? Okay.
00:02:07
Speaker 2: Well, the thing is, you had a big influence on that book. I did because I wrote that. The New Yorker paid a lot of expenses for it, so I owed them a lot of that book. So I gave him the book and they kind of condensed part of it, and he said, don't do that. And I think they did a good job condensing it. But I'm that that decided me. It's very hard when you have a book and then you have a magazine excerpt to do justice to both of them. And the next time I'm not doing not doing more anymore condensing. But that was you don't remember. That was your verdict on it.
00:02:42
Speaker 1: No, I can't believe I had any advice. You did have advice. The best thing you ever said to me. You said a lot of great things to me. The best thing you ever said to me. I can't say. Why can't you tell the story all the time. I wouldn't tell it publicly, I'd tell it privately all the time. Okay, I'll tell you later what you said. Okay.
00:02:58
Speaker 2: It was a financial advice you.
00:03:01
Speaker 1: After you wrote, after you wrote your book about the Pine Ridge Reservation. We were a book called on the Reds, which is a phenomenal history of the Pine Ridge Reservation in the in the in the wars against the Sioux and confinement to reservation and what happened on the reservation. You offered a summation of you offered a summation of your findings, and it was I just wanted to say it publicly. Okay, Well, you can tell me later what it was. You said another great thing to me one day, because uh so Ian Fraser, I'm gonna his friends call him Sandy. I'm gonna be using the word sandy. It's from Ohio. Yes, I am from Michigan. Yeah. And you said to me Not long after we met, you said, whenever I think of Michigan, I think of people who say, fucker's.
00:04:02
Speaker 3: That's fantastic.
00:04:03
Speaker 2: All right, Well, I would tell you a story, a Michigan related story about gray planes. Because Great Plains was on the best seller list for ten weeks New York Times bestseller.
00:04:12
Speaker 1: That's that's a hard thing to pull off.
00:04:14
Speaker 2: And it was bumped off the best seller list. And the book that bumped it off, that moved it, that replaced it on the best seller list was Bo by Bo Schambackler, oh Michigan coach for about fifty years. He bumped you, He bumped me, and we were, of course very opposed to Michigan football because we were Ohio State fans.
00:04:34
Speaker 1: But I want to tell you another thing you said to me. Then we're gonna then we're gonna, we're gonna come back to all your work. But here's an earthing you said to me one time when I got out of graduate school. I uh, I want to prefaces by saying, I don't mean any offense to the individual we're going to talk about. When I got out of graduate school, I largely motivated by uh. I never told you this largely motivated by great planes. And what a phenomenal job you did with that book about the American Great Plains. I was, I was like, I want to and and other things too, but I wanted to go. I was going to go back. I went to graduate school in Montana. I was going to go back to Michigan. My dad just died, so I had access to his truck. He didn't need it anymore, and I was going to go back to Michigan and drive all around. I was gonna do like a history of the Great Lakes where I grew up. And I knew certain weird things about the Great Lakes. Have I talked about this before? I don't know. I don't think. So. I knew certain things about the Great Lakes that I didn't think anybody knew, Like, for instance, after after, who's the founder of the Joseph Smith founder of the Mormon Church. So Joseph Smith was hanged by a mob in Carthage, Illinois. Is that Yes, there was a power struggle between his followers, and there was two emerging forces came out of this, Brigham Young and a guy named James Jesse Strange I think was his name. One of them was like I'm gonna head out to the Great Salt Lake, Okay to flee persecution. And one of them was like, I'm gonna head to Beaver Island in Lake Michigan with my followers to flee persecution. Strange. So Brigham Young went on to like very successfully, you know establish you know Zion, right, And Brigham Young goes up to this little dinky ass island in Lake Michigan. Get strange. Strange goes up to this dinky ass island in Lake Michigan like starts trying to intercept ships and act like they were in his waters and tax them like he was a sovereign nation. Yeah, he winds up getting shot by his own followers next to a wood pile along the beach, and that was the end of his whole experiment. They had had it with him. Another thing I knew about the Great Lakes was that I thought was interesting is at one time a Niagara Falls, a guy a zoo went out of business, and a guy bought all the shit from the zoo, all the animals, and put him on a barge and charge and sold tickets to watch him run the barge over the falls. I'd heard of that, Yeah, but I grew up on the grade that nowadays would get you kicked off social media. If you posted reading.
00:07:37
Speaker 3: A lot of people would watch it first.
00:07:39
Speaker 1: They would you would not you'd get all kind you'd never dig out of that hole.
00:07:44
Speaker 4: A third of the crowd's going, well, I mean, listen, he's gonna do it anyway. The apathy.
00:07:54
Speaker 1: So I was like armed with these things, you know. And then this book comes out by this guy named Jerry Dennis, and his hook for his book is that some dude bought a boat. I don't know, Like, some guy buys a boat out in the ocean somewhere in the either way, he's got to get on a boat and sail off through the Great Legs. So that's his sort of angle. So it's a travelog about the Great Legs. But in it, some bitch talks about no offense. Jerry Dennis talks about the Mormon split, talks about the the menagerie of critters going over the.
00:08:37
Speaker 3: Falls that took the wind out of your sails.
00:08:39
Speaker 1: Oh it did. And just as the book was coming out, I called Sandy and I said, man, there's a book coming out by a guy named Jerry Dennis. And I wrote him or email out to I conveyed this to him, and it's really just taking the wind out of my sails on this whole project. And he left me a voicemail. He left me a voicemail some days later and it said, Uh, you know, I've been thinking since you called, and I can't think of one good book ever written by a guy named Jerry. I started. I had to think, like, does Jerry Lewis write good books? Uh, we're going to get into this whole body work.
00:09:19
Speaker 3: Are you guys gonna talk about like people are probably wondering how you guys even know each other.
00:09:24
Speaker 1: We know each other from the so we met. Here's how we met. You probably don't even know this.
00:09:30
Speaker 2: Well, let's see, I probably don't.
00:09:32
Speaker 1: When I was going to when I was in graduate school in the writing program, you came in as like a visiting writer.
00:09:39
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, yeah, of course I remember that well.
00:09:42
Speaker 1: And then you so I used to So I wouldn't be sitting here if it wasn't I wouldn't be sitting here if it wasn't for you and you and a handful like like mister Heaton from Reese Buffer High School, right, And then you know, probably not because of him, but then largely because of you, because is to submit to magazines by just sending shit in the mail, which didn't work out. Well, no one has time to look at all that stuff. And you vouched for me and fronted my work at Outside magazine.
00:10:18
Speaker 2: Well, can I tell my version of this?
00:10:20
Speaker 1: Is it different than that?
00:10:21
Speaker 2: It's a little bit more, it's a little bit more nuanced.
00:10:25
Speaker 1: Oh okay.
00:10:26
Speaker 2: I taught at University of Montana for two weeks, so my contact with the students in the MFA program was not large. I was just there very briefly, and you submitted a piece, and I mean, this is just a personal thing of mine, but I think if you can avoid an MFA program, avoid it.
00:10:45
Speaker 1: Yeah, you didn't tell that because you were talking to MFA people.
00:10:48
Speaker 2: Well no, and because they were paying me, so I was just doing what was asking me. But spiritually I'm not a big fan of MFA programs. So you gave me this piece and it was incredibly good. It was about the weather in Michigan, in northern Michigan, and I mean it was just it just blew me away, and I said, you quit, leave this program.
00:11:14
Speaker 1: You could make a living at this right now. Don't do this. Go and I.
00:11:19
Speaker 2: Could, I can, you know, talk to people, you could get pieces published. Right now, this is really good and you quite sensibly finished. I've given people so much bad advice over the years, but you you sensibly you finished. And then you wrote somewhat later. You wrote a piece about fishing in the outflow from a damt Michigan, where you went up into the tunnel coming out of the generators, sleeping there and sleeping. You had your boat hooked up to something along the side.
00:11:48
Speaker 1: I mean it was like there was such a concrete anchor driven into the roof and you could tie off on it.
00:11:53
Speaker 2: And what are you fishing for?
00:11:54
Speaker 1: White Because like you had to compete in that spot with old men that would get up so early. So we would leave the bar on occasion and take our boat and park it in the good spot in the dam. Oh yeah, yeah, we'd we can sleep in sleeping bags. Two in the morning. Old men get up and we'd be in the tube. And so the fish would come up, steelhead, white fish would come up to feed on these insects. Because this it was a big there was a diversion in the river. They like manually like mechanically diverted a big chain of the suit the Saint Mary's River ran it all through town and then down a slope, and then it powered this big hydro electric dam and that thing that that that river would be so soulful insect life that when it flowed back into the Saint Mary's all this like larva and mayflies and whatever coming out of these turbans. And you could just sit there in turbans watch fish just sitting there feeding in these in the outwash of the turban. So my brother and his body who lived there before I moved up there, they hit an idea to just go in the middle of the night and get the good because you couldn't understand it. But certain turbans produced really well and they would get their turban by just going in the morning. So then old men would think they got it because they didn't know, and they'd pull up and realize you're sleeping in the thing. That it was great. It was great. I can't claim the discovery, but I wrote about the experience.
00:13:33
Speaker 2: So you gave that piece to D. Mcknamer, who taught it you of M and D said, this is a fabulous piece, and she sent it to me, and I sent it to Mary Turner and outside and I said, this guy is great and that was your first piece and outside, as I recall.
00:13:49
Speaker 1: Dude, that was I was happier that you know. You saved your message on my machine.
00:13:57
Speaker 2: You called me after they bought it, and it was the happiest message I've ever gotten on my machine.
00:14:03
Speaker 5: Him.
00:14:04
Speaker 1: Yeah, no, I just talked to Mary Turner. I talked to Mary Turner. She will have the pace. She's gonna pay me four thousand dollars. It was such a huge amount of money. This is like I remember being hanging shower doors or something at the time I was doing cabinet was installing. I was installing, uh, I was installing closet shelving, and then working for in the tree service business. Yeah, and uh, oh my god, there's a lot of money. I remember being in the bar that night. I could have just died that night, be in the bar that night, and like certain friends were like happy. Certain friends were just so tore up, like they couldn't even look at me. They're so jealous. I had all this money. I bought a truck topper when it stayed several days at a hot spring.
00:14:50
Speaker 4: Your closet shelving. Was it just MDF, like prepainted MDF.
00:14:55
Speaker 1: Yeah, you said to drive over to Spokane and pick it up.
00:14:57
Speaker 4: Yeah. So for those of you who don't know, as far as your interior finishes go, this is not uh, this would be the bottom of the skilled label.
00:15:05
Speaker 1: No, no, no, no, because I installed the bottom. The bottom is wire. A good job for us was the melomine the wood bottom is wire melomane. Yeah, all right, Uh, if you remember back a few episodes we had on some anthropologists and archaeologists and we talked about a project in which me and some other folks from the Meat Eater crew went out and butchered a bison using stone tools. We used particularly Clovis points, Clovis projectile points, stone flakes, and we like gutted, skinned, butchered, boned out, and entire bison in collaboration with researchers from Kent State University, SMU, Southern Methodist University, and Oregon State University as all part of this broad or study about developing a toolkit, so to speak, for how to interpret what happened at ice age kill sites where all you have left is bone in stone. So we were using stone tools to butcher an animal, and then the research was to be able to like, look at what happened to these bones, what happened to these stones, and use it as clues, right to put together the puzzles of what was going on when hunters during the Ice Age were chopping up bison and wooly mammoths and whatnot. That is now an episode that we've put together for YouTube, So look for that real soon on the Meat Eater YouTube channel. Oh that this'll you'll appreciate this because this is from Ohio. Do you follow Ohio news a little bit? Yeah, you've reared the walleye cheating scan. Oh of course I couldn't know about that. My god. So well, I'll tell you something you might not know. Okay, did you see in the videos where he cut the walleyes open and got the wine?
00:16:56
Speaker 2: I haven't seen them.
00:16:58
Speaker 1: Well, we own the knife it.
00:17:02
Speaker 6: Was, yes, that is well, I think it's actually just pliers.
00:17:08
Speaker 7: Again, it's a leather man, but don't leatherman make Okay, it's.
00:17:15
Speaker 1: What we own. The implement used to cut the walleyes open to discover the lead weights. In addition to the shirt of the man wielding that weapon, we'll talk about valuable ship. Uh, we own that stuff. So that case is trickling along. We're into the news segment. They pleaded guilty to felony cheating and miss This is an interesting one. Misdemeanor animal ownership, presumably meaning they were owning the walleyes. Yeah.
00:17:48
Speaker 3: I would think that would be like over the limit or something.
00:17:52
Speaker 1: But misdemeanor animal ownership. So Jacob Runyon forty three and Chase Kaminski, who's in which of these fellers is an all that trouble for trying to go to the bowling alley with hard dollar counterfait.
00:18:03
Speaker 4: Kids exactly, which I think plays into the plea deal heavily.
00:18:09
Speaker 6: I think it's Chase.
00:18:11
Speaker 1: Chase, he got a bunch of trouble. He's got like violating a restraining order, bowling with counterfeit money.
00:18:18
Speaker 6: Here's encouraging his kid to do that. I mean, that's like, well the.
00:18:22
Speaker 3: Kid thought none of that stuff was supposed to influence this stuff.
00:18:26
Speaker 1: Well that's why I did. That's why I didn't want to, like, I don't think because there's a thing in America called it's not double jeopardy, it's called he is it habeas corpus. What is it that you can't bring up all the all the best stuff you did.
00:18:39
Speaker 3: I'm not sure the legal term, but that's what I'm getting dude.
00:18:41
Speaker 1: If I rewrote the Constitution, I would lead with fixing that you'd.
00:18:44
Speaker 4: Be like, well, this guy, Well it does go right when you establish somebody's character as a reliable witness. Like if if a prosecutor could get one of these fellows on the stand and be like, so you're saying that the fish just ate led weights and Walleye fill a's and you just caught the fish, right, Sure that that could happened. We can't prove it can't. But for you to be a reliable witness, what's your track record in lying and what's your right and so they could go back. Yes. Now, the why I think it does play in is just the fact that in order to pay your legal counsel and go through a long drawn out trial process of trying to defend yourself by saying, listen, although we cannot biologically prove that walleye eat lead weights and walleye fill as all the time.
00:19:44
Speaker 1: I could prove that they don't eat walleye fil as.
00:19:47
Speaker 4: So that's gonna cost a bunch of money. He's already on the hook. Bad pun for uh having to clear up his other legal troubles too, So I'm thinking he's just looking at the overall cost of fighting it. Yeah, keeping keeping his head above water another bad punch maybe, But yeah.
00:20:10
Speaker 1: They they pled guilty to these things. Okay, they were initially indicted on cheating, attempted grand theft, possession of criminal tools. Tells that mean illegal. I love illegal animal ownership. But when they appeared yesterday Inkoyahogakuyahoga, Cuyahoga County Court, both men pleaded guilty to two of those charges in exchange for the remaining charges being dropped. Now, Jason Fisher, who's been on this show, is glad they pleaded out. Fisher organized a tournament at which Running and Kaminski were caught and appeared in the I'm reading from our own reporting. I should point out to Jordan Siller's piece on the meater dot Com. Uh, this is the one time I'm not like guilty of not adequately sorting or sourcing where I'm getting something from, because Jordan's been on the damn show. So uh. Jason goes on to say it was nice to see they played guilty as opposed to no contest. They admitted to doing everything that the state said they did. It's good for the fishermen in the community as a whole to put this to bed. He points out this is an interesting perspective that Jason Fisher has. Jason Fisher says he's almost kind of glad they're not going to jail, because then taxpayers would have to pay for them to live in jail. He'd rather they just took their boat away and never let them do any walleye tournaments again, so he doesn't have to think of himself footing the bill to pay them to give them their food, which is an interesting perspective on prison time. Usually put people in prison because you want to stick it to them, but he wants to stick it to him by not putting them in prison.
00:21:54
Speaker 4: And let's be fair, they're doing a great job at sticking it to themselves.
00:21:57
Speaker 1: So yeah, because anyone up you'd think if you got caught cheating on a walleye tournament, you would not take one hundred dollars counterfeit bills to the bowling alley. I don't know, do you know what I mean? I wouldn't if I do something a little bit bad, I like play it cool for a while, you know what I mean?
00:22:16
Speaker 4: You don't double down?
00:22:17
Speaker 1: Yeah, we have a correction on a correction. Can you explain how we're at a point where there's a correction ont of correction?
00:22:25
Speaker 6: Okay.
00:22:26
Speaker 7: So shortly after the podcast the Liberal recordded Trey, Yep, we're.
00:22:32
Speaker 1: Talking about it was a podcast called The Liberal Redneck Right.
00:22:35
Speaker 7: Trey wrote in that he did a little bit more digging and he determined that what he had said on air was incorrect.
00:22:44
Speaker 1: That he had said that the only thing going for his hometown was they held the wall the small mouth basks yep, world record, right, but then he said they got beat and even that was taken.
00:22:55
Speaker 6: From them, right.
00:22:57
Speaker 7: And so before it aired, Phil recorded a little correction and.
00:23:05
Speaker 6: You know, because we're going to get that Phil.
00:23:08
Speaker 2: Uh.
00:23:09
Speaker 5: He was just a quick little like, hey Phil here, Trey texted and said that you're a little correction back to this.
00:23:13
Speaker 1: You installed that in the episode, Yes, got here it real quick.
00:23:17
Speaker 5: Hey everyone, Phil here with a quick note. Immediately after the show, Trey did some research and found out that Selina and Dale hollow Lake still hold the record for the small mouth bass. According to him, he quote assumed the universe had taken that from us as well. My bad, Thanks Trey, and back to the show.
00:23:38
Speaker 1: So that what happened. Now we're in a situation where there was a correction on a correction because a gentleman wrote in who's this person?
00:23:44
Speaker 6: He lives nearby Kyle due name.
00:23:47
Speaker 1: Kyle writes in he has this to say. Mister Crowder was not incorrect in saying that the record was taken away. What he would have been incorrect in saying is that it was taken away from the lake. Right you're thinking yourself, what, well, I'll tell you the record was removed from the individual, but the previous record, which would have been the record by default, was also caught in dale Hollow Lake. So even if the record had been permanently redacted, Dale Hollow would still hold the world small mouth record. Two of the top three. This is a hard sentence to understand. Two of the top oh two of the top three, and six of the top ten largest small mouth have damn, you know this person, Well, there's a reason like when you have Let me just tell this person, if you're listening, never start a sentence with a numeral, you always spell it out yeah started.
00:24:52
Speaker 6: A sentence up to eleven.
00:24:54
Speaker 1: Yea in some places will make you spell anything under ten every time. Two of the top three and six of the top ten largest small mouth caught have come from Dale Hollow, per Bass Bass Senior Editor Ken Duke. The current record, now confirmed to have been caught in Kentucky waters on the Kentucky and Tennessee shared water body that is Dale Hollow, was wrought with drama. Oh so this gets thicker.
00:25:30
Speaker 6: Yet this is what trail alluded to before.
00:25:33
Speaker 1: So Tennessee and Kentucky share this lake. The current record came out of Dale Hollow Lake, but out of the Kentucky waters. The fish, caught by David Hayes Litchfield, Kentucky, was weighed first on scales that were not certified. After being told this fish, if certified, would be the new world record, the fish was rushed to Cedar Hill Marina, which housed the closest set of certified scales. Six weeks after the fish had been confirmed, David Barlow, a guide on Dale Hollow, filed an affidavit stating that he had handled the fish, shoving multiple pieces of hardware and or weights into its gullet to increase the weight plot dickens, Why did he admit to that?
00:26:24
Speaker 6: I don't know.
00:26:24
Speaker 3: Couldn't live with himself. I don't know.
00:26:27
Speaker 1: Maybe they waterboarded them. The IGFA denounced the world record because of the affidavit. Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife Resources followed suit. Tennessee Wildlife and Resource Agency held on though, and in their investigation found that Barlow was not even at the marina on the day of the fish had been weighed, So he was lying about doing something bad. Hm about do something bad. That's when he puts his own personal integrity, like he's weighing in his head. What matters more my personal integrity or that son of a bitch having the bass record? Yeah, he's like, I'd rather have right, I'll forfeit personal integrity to have him not have the satisfaction of the bass record is how Barlow apparently according to this piece of journalism, so he hadn't been there. This A combinates this in combination with the measurements of this fish. The resulting estimated way of recorded measurements and the official way on the certified scales resulted in the record being reinstated by both IGFA in the Kentucky State Department. The fish now holds the IGFA World Record, the kdfw R State Record, and the TWR A State record.
00:27:57
Speaker 7: So the International Game and Fish so Siation and then Kentucky and Tennessee's Wildlife departments.
00:28:06
Speaker 1: If you're thinking yourself, by God, would I like to get a look at that fish? There's a replica of it at the Kabella's out Post store in Bowling Green, Kentucky. If you want to pay your respects to the angler. The ramp where he launched that day has been memorialized as the David L. Hays bor Go. I love it.
00:28:36
Speaker 2: Any point did they say how big the fish was?
00:28:40
Speaker 1: You know that the story? Now that's called bad producing right there, Crenel, dig yourself.
00:28:50
Speaker 3: Out high highs.
00:28:52
Speaker 1: And let's just called twelve. That's a nice moment. That's bad because that go ahead.
00:29:01
Speaker 3: No, no, you if you've caught a bass that big, would you turn it into a levon fish sandwiches? Or do you you got any urge to have a world record?
00:29:13
Speaker 1: How kept it? How to kept it?
00:29:17
Speaker 3: Assuming it's legal to keep it?
00:29:19
Speaker 1: Yeah? And then pound for pounds? Some people say it's the hardest, hardest fight in freshwater fish is the small mouth bass. That thing would have put up a tussle.
00:29:30
Speaker 4: Plus you're just awesome looking red eyes, tiger stripes.
00:29:34
Speaker 1: Way cooler and large mouse. Uh. We reported on I don't know if that counts. That might be over selling it. We talked about South Carolina is harvest the tag coyote program and win so South Carolina has previously discussed on this show is running a program right now to encourage the harvest of coyotes. I'll point out that our guests Ian Fraser had had a book one time called Coyote v acme Yes, in which you laid out the legal case that Wiley coyote would have against acme Yes, where he buys his stuff to kill road runner. Right. I mean it's.
00:30:14
Speaker 2: You know, it's product malfeasance. I mean, they're selling this guy, and they're selling it over and over.
00:30:20
Speaker 7: You know.
00:30:21
Speaker 4: Yeah, one of those things everybody thinks about, but nobody took the time to write.
00:30:24
Speaker 1: Well, you know, and then he also wrote a thing I believe that you argued that if you really wanted to have a good relationship, you date your mother.
00:30:32
Speaker 2: Well, that was one of my very very early pieces when I was like twenty five years old.
00:30:39
Speaker 4: Does this fall under the bad advice category?
00:30:41
Speaker 2: It was advice I think taken by nobody, nobody I knew, and it wasn't My mother wasn't crazy about it either.
00:30:48
Speaker 1: But so South Carolina is running a program to encourage coyote harvest in order to, you know, in order to org straight on predator control in the interest of recovering some game species. They have been tagging kylets and cutting them loose, and if you get one of the kyotes that's tagged, you get a lifetime hunting license. And they thought through it enough to be that you could also is it confers out the word I'm looking for where you give.
00:31:20
Speaker 6: Something to sorry, maybe transfer.
00:31:23
Speaker 1: You transferred to somebody else, Meaning if I got one of these kyots, I could give it to my daughter who's who's ten, and then she's got a lifetime hunt license. A guy heard this and was talent wrote in to tell us how in South Dakota they used to tag pheasants and turn them out, and if you shot a tagged pheasant you'd be rewarded with Akabella's gift card. And he just wanted to let us know that he one time was looking at a breasted out pheasant in a ditch and realized that had the band on it.
00:31:58
Speaker 6: So whoever hunted it and.
00:31:59
Speaker 1: It is coworker took the band down and got a five thousand dollars gift card out of the ditch.
00:32:04
Speaker 4: Are you aware of the million dollar pheasant?
00:32:06
Speaker 1: No?
00:32:07
Speaker 4: No, so the same deal and this is a full tourism deal. Fesonomics in South Dakota is fascinating to me. The so they banded one hundred birds, released them. Thirty six birds were turned in, and of those one hundred birds, they had the insurance company randomly select one of those numbers, store it an electronic device in a safe somewhere, and then you know, if somebody turned in that magic number, they could win a million bucks.
00:32:49
Speaker 1: Really yep?
00:32:50
Speaker 6: Wow? Is that is that like the state's money?
00:32:59
Speaker 4: You know how these.
00:33:01
Speaker 7: Is?
00:33:02
Speaker 1: You?
00:33:03
Speaker 6: Because tourism dollars pony.
00:33:06
Speaker 4: Up a bunch of cash that is like a deposit eventually and you get it that the money comes from like this insurance payout scenario, as I understand.
00:33:20
Speaker 1: It, But did you think that's true?
00:33:23
Speaker 4: But I know it's true, But.
00:33:25
Speaker 3: Did anybody did anybody win the million.
00:33:28
Speaker 4: I'm not sure if anybody ever won the million.
00:33:30
Speaker 3: Because it kind of seems like they're gambling, like, yeah, I wanted one hundred, it probably will never happen, you know, but you didn't. We don't know if anybody won, right.
00:33:39
Speaker 4: Yeah, but there were, you know, thirty six of the bands turned in, and of those thirty six, none of them were million dollar birds.
00:33:48
Speaker 1: So what makes a little bit of sense what you're talking about is I was at a fundraiser in Wyoming one time, and they were giving away a truck if you could roll a set of dice and get five of a kind, which isn't gonna happen. It's not gonna happen.
00:34:07
Speaker 4: Okay, maybe if you're playing Yazzi with your grandma, but not if you're playing Yazzi for your truck.
00:34:13
Speaker 1: So I was there and I was like m seeing. The fundraiser was a nonprofit fundraiser, and they had a guy from the insurance company down there, and the guy weighed all the dice. He came in and analyzed the dice and he measured out where you had to stand and where the dice had to wind up so that it had to be like a legit roll, and he was a supervising. He was like an insurance man supervisor, because no one's gonna roll it, right, So they had bought some sort of policy that on the what are the odds that you'd roll five of a kind? That'd be a quick internet search.
00:34:58
Speaker 5: If I can remember my sick high school probability.
00:35:03
Speaker 3: It's like a yachtzi roll, right, like five dice five of a kind.
00:35:07
Speaker 5: Is like a one in like like, and then there's like an exponential sort of addition you have to do. It's like five times five times five.
00:35:13
Speaker 1: We just let someone else do it on the computer.
00:35:16
Speaker 4: One in seven thousand, seven hundred and seventy six. So it doesn't sound that crazy. So you had no but it is better odds and drawn a sheep tag one in seven thousand, seven hundred and seventy six.
00:35:31
Speaker 1: Yeap. You had to first win a chance to roll the dice.
00:35:36
Speaker 4: Ooh, that makes it.
00:35:37
Speaker 1: Yeah, So everybody's all excited about getting to be the dice roller. And then when you get to be the dice roll, you got a one in seven thousand somehow chance the rolling of win the thing. So they insured this somehow, and of course the guy, you know.
00:35:50
Speaker 4: Yeah, just you know, Shake a Day in western bars is a big deal, and it's the same thing. It's like you they're fifty cents, you get a chance, whatever the pot is, and it used to be the pot of all these people losing fifty cents to the Shake a Day would get really high and then the state capt it for because it's gambling. So I think a legal pot is five hundred dollars or less or eight hundred dollars or less now in the state of Montane, I can't remember which. But while I was back in my bartending days, I had several people win Shake a Day pots, right, I mean it eventually it does hit.
00:36:30
Speaker 1: You can imagine that whoever wins that at a bar does not then just go leave and make a deposit.
00:36:36
Speaker 4: One little asshole kid did, Okay, So I bartended working Man's Bar, okay, and everybody when when a normal patron would win by around all the bartenders got a big tip, you know, and then everybody and then he'd buy a couple of rounds for everybody and then maybe take some winnings home. Yeah, if it was like a regular who happens to be like in their twenties. None of the money maver made at home, they went and.
00:37:07
Speaker 1: Paid rent with it. Well, they they drank it.
00:37:10
Speaker 4: They they forgot how the left.
00:37:13
Speaker 3: You're talking about the kid that left.
00:37:14
Speaker 4: But the kid one kid comes in watches some other people roll and it was like Halloween nights, something obnoxious and goes, oh, I want to do that, And he's like staring at the dice, and part of me, honest to God, wanted to be like, Okay, see you because I just knew how it was going to go down. And he scooped up the money and ran out of the bar, never to be seen again. It was not the way you're supposed to play the game.
00:37:40
Speaker 1: I like think he invested all that money. He's a very successful businessman.
00:37:43
Speaker 4: Now curing cancer.
00:37:55
Speaker 1: More feedback. This this is the last. This is the last, the last up top information we got to cover for today. So what was the name of the show where we talked about down in Florida, Oh, Spitting and Strutton. Yeah, if you refer back to the episode Spitting and Strutton, we had a guest down who was explaining to me how someone he knows hates me because a person from the USGS said how Python eradication programs are not effective in Florida, and he hates me for not arguing with him. Okay, that individual, that former guest who spoke on Burmese Python the Burmese Python explosion in Florida wrote in, so I have a note to the hater. I didn't catch his name, but as someone shared, I was, I looked at his Instagram page. He has a Well, it doesn't matter. So Bob Reid wrote in to say, this is the researcher from the USGS who works on population ynamic issues with invasive Burmese pythons in South Florida. He said, sorry to hear that a dude in Florida hates you because I said there's no evidence that the Python control programs are having a significant effect on populations at landscape scales. He doesn't say, however, but you could. There's an implied However. He goes on to say, we just published a big scientific review of pythons in Florida. The conclusion from the removal program section remains the same, no available evidence of Python suppression across the landscape despite removal of over thirteen thousand pythons. He said it's hard for people to comprehend just how cryptic they are and therefore how many are out there for everyone you catch. As for panthers, he says, yes, yeah, they hammer white tails. They did. We reported on this in the past, but I'm going to re talk about it. As for you folks in Florida who think that your deer hunting has gone shit due to panther recovery, if that is your if that is how you weight values, okay, if that is how you weight values, you are like if we look at just the isolate the question our this is that this is not that you that this has nothing to do with loving panthers, hating panthers whatever, Just like like an objective reality is panthers hammer white tails. Okay. They did some work. They did some known fate survival data, meaning they put two and forty one collars out on adult deer in the Florida Panther National Wildlife Refuge in Big Cyprus National Preserve in Florida from twenty twenty fifteen to twenty eighteen. They put collars on two hundred and forty one white tail deer, one hundred and fifty six females eighty five males. No follow along here. Okay. They then wait for there to be a mortality signal on the deer, and they immediately go out and investigate what happened to the deer. They had one hundred and thirty four mortalities. Now, Sandy, take a guess. One hundred and thirty four mortalities. Take a guess at what number of those were killed by panthers? Do a lower one. I want I give you the answer. I wanted to be more astounded. I hate when people do that. Man, obviously that's my kids. Guess how much money I found million? No, out of seven dollars, forget that part, edit that out, Phil, Okay, out of one hundred and thirty four mortalities, one hundred and ten were predation. Now, people that go and say like, oh, hunters, get them all, not even listen to this. Predators, non human predators. I always like to point out that, like human predators are predators. Non human predators killed one hundred and ten out of one hundred and thirty four, eighty seven percent of that one hundred and ten were panthers. Okay, he says, a much greater rate than reported by studies conducted before the panther genetic restoration effort, which was initiated in nineteen ninety five. One deer okay, one hundred and thirty four mortalities. When we originally talked about this study, we originally talked about God's a long time ago. We talked about the study because we talked about the state of Florida trying to say to hunters, if you see a deer or the collar, don't shoot it because it has a collar, and don't not shoot it because it has a collar. Try to act normal because they're trying to find out what kills deer. So if you're like, oh my god, it's got a collar, shoot it, you're messing up the study. And if you say, like, if you're like me and you said, I'm not gonna shoot a deer with a collar because that means another person has touched it and it's soiled. I want to be the first person to touch it, you're messing up the study. So if people were true to that and really just shot deer, if they would have shot it, one hundred and thirty four deer out on the landscape with collars. One was killed legally by a hunter, two were killed by poachers just gives you an insane like like, who is killing deer in Florida? It ain't people. And of the three killed by people, two of a poachers. It's it's very like isolated. It's it's it's it's like, uh, it's borderline, and it's beyond anecdotal. It's not anecdotal conclusive. It's just like, holy cow. So when you're in Florida, like I just was two weeks talking to people, and everyone you meet says the deer hunting went to ship because the panthers and everyone I talked to, I'm like, oh, there's gotta be more to the story. I can't really you know, damn.
00:44:33
Speaker 6: Mm hmm hmm.
00:44:37
Speaker 1: You bought all that cal ann.
00:44:40
Speaker 4: I mean, the the idea that people won't think that agencies have to know, right, like, oh, you know how many panthers are out there? You know how many pythons are out there. It's just it's nonsensical.
00:44:54
Speaker 1: Most people told me, I know, oh, but they don't. It was mostly I know, if you want to know, ask me, don't ask them. Yeah.
00:45:05
Speaker 4: Yeah, So like the python bowl that Florida kind of promotes. I was talking to a biologist down there and he's like, yeah, you know where every single python is caught. It's on this two mile stretch of road that kicks off into like big Cypress.
00:45:20
Speaker 1: Yep, I was on that road.
00:45:22
Speaker 4: He's like, you know why they're not caught anywhere else because there's no roads. He's like, but do you really think that that's where all the pythons are is on that road?
00:45:31
Speaker 1: Yeah? You know.
00:45:32
Speaker 4: He's like, everything else is so miserable to go through for most of the year, if not all of the year. He's like, people just don't go in there. He takes a very special person who likes to suffer from the bugs and the heat and the humidity and the things that sting and stick yet to go in there and look for something. He's like, a lot of times when we have tagged pythons, we'll be standing right on top of the signal and it can take a frustration eatingly long time to find the snake that you're literally standing on that you have a beacon attached to, because they that's what they do.
00:46:09
Speaker 2: Did you ever see the picture of the python eating the deer, which is amazing. I mean the deer was I think bigger than the python.
00:46:18
Speaker 1: That was a crazy photo.
00:46:18
Speaker 2: It was really amazing.
00:46:20
Speaker 1: And there's that python ada gator and then gator clawed its way back out and killed it.
00:46:25
Speaker 4: Oh I love that. That's great.
00:46:28
Speaker 1: And when he got back, when he got back to his friends, like where you been, Like, don't even get me start.
00:46:36
Speaker 4: Don't take a nap.
00:46:37
Speaker 1: Let's start there on a recent episode. Now we're getting into our guest subject expertise. But do you remember your your Do you remember writing about your antipodies? Oh?
00:46:49
Speaker 2: Sure, yeah, it was like the second piece I did.
00:46:51
Speaker 1: Somehow we were talking about digging down. I don't know how this even came up.
00:46:56
Speaker 2: You were talking about No, you were talking about animals found at the same latitude all the way around the circumpolar circumpolar like polar bears, and there's others.
00:47:06
Speaker 1: The blue muscle. Okay, there's a bunch of species globally that have what's called circumpolar distribution, meaning you take a latitude band, like the blue muscle is one. I know, I don't know what the hell the latitude band is. But you take this latitude band and you can wrap that latitude band around the entire globe and they're always present. Polar bears have circumpolar distribution, but it's like the top of the ball, so it's zero to I don't know, above the Arctic. Yeah, like a very narrow band. It'd be like the top of it. It'd be like if if you were ahead, if you imagine the Earth is the head and the polar bears distribution as a really small yamica, that's like, yeah, that's him and other species have different bands and that I don't know why that got me talking about that got to be talked about the concept of the It's not a concept the term antipities antipoties, right, And I'm familiar with the antipodies because of the writing of our guest today, Ian Fraser, And I was saying that I think that you were saying that where you grew up in Ohio.
00:48:17
Speaker 2: Okay, this is where you made your mistake, Okay, go on. The thing is I had just started at the New Yorker magazine. I was writing for the Talk of the Town, and I got this idea, what is on the other side of the world from Manhattan, Oh, because I was doing it for that magazine, and so it's not that different. I mean, you know, it's four hundred miles different in the Indian Ocean from Ohio the antipodies of like Cleveland, Ohio, or the antipodies of Manhattan. But yeah, it was just that if you drilled straight down through you would come out in this really unfrequented part of the world. And it's it's like one hundred yards or something deep in this stuff called and you were talking about it like some kind of muck. It's called Glaba Jurina ooze O I at for the studio, and it's I would like a jar of it, to be honest. And they it's the like calcium residue from these tiny single you know, very very small uh, sea creatures that have shells and when they die, their shells fall to the bottom and they become this ooze. But so that's the antipody story, and it is in the Indian Ocean. But what But in your piece, weren't you talking about towns in America? Yes, yeah, because that was how it first came to me. Because Canton, Ohio, I had heard, was named after Canton, China.
00:49:44
Speaker 1: Uh.
00:49:44
Speaker 2: And then there's Peak in Illinois, which supposedly is named after Peaking as it was called them.
00:49:50
Speaker 1: But not because that was their antipodies.
00:49:52
Speaker 2: I think maybe they thought it was their antipathy.
00:49:54
Speaker 3: You want to know what, uh, the antipity of this place is right here we're sitting in.
00:49:59
Speaker 1: How do you know? Can you just look it up now? Sure?
00:50:02
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's Geode geodatos dot net. You can just type in search for your antipody.
00:50:10
Speaker 1: Really, God, the ruined everything.
00:50:12
Speaker 3: France in the southern French southern territories, an island like south of Africa.
00:50:19
Speaker 1: South. That's where we'd come out if we drill the hole straight down.
00:50:23
Speaker 3: That's what it says.
00:50:24
Speaker 1: All right, here's my next question. We don't need to spend much more time on the antipodies I have. You wouldn't believe how often your writing has been discussed on this show. I've talked a lot about I'm gonna remind you of something you wrote that I want you to tell the broader story. Okay, you were profiling I talked with this. You were profiling a steelhead guide.
00:50:54
Speaker 2: Right.
00:50:55
Speaker 1: I don't remember his name, but I remember it hit. People would jokingly call him Melanoma Joe. Yeah, he guided in h board shorts. I'm gonna like, let's go, there's a spoiler alert here, and then I want you to talk a little bit about this. Unbeknownst to you while you're profiling him, he's contemplating suicide. And you're on a river trip with him, right, and one night you're like, you get up to take a leak or something, right, And you didn't know what to make of it at the times. You didn't know what you would later know. But you see him down at the river's edge in the dark at night, staring into the river, and you made some comment in your peace of reporting, you made some comment about you were getting sort of a preview right of him as.
00:51:46
Speaker 2: A ghost, right right, Yeah, it was like seeing a ghost. I mean I got up out of the tent and uh, he's standing there. And there was no reason for it. I mean, it was way late. It was on the Dashoots River, nobody around, you know, for miles and miles and I and I see him standing there and I couldn't even believe it wasn't it couldn't even be. I thought it wasn't him, and I just looked and I kept looking at him, and it was like he then kind of came back into focus and saw me. And he said something like when you get old, you got to get up and pee all the time, right, And you know, he made some kind of nice comment like that, just a friendly comment, and it was like it was normal again. But then I got back in my sleeping bag and I thought, what was he doing out there? That was I mean, that was just weird that he was standing there. I then wrote the piece again, this was for Outside magazine. I wrote the piece. They sent a photographer. They took all the photos they needed for the piece.
00:52:48
Speaker 1: But what was the when you pitched a profile of a steelhead guide?
00:52:51
Speaker 7: Like?
00:52:52
Speaker 1: What were you? Why were you interested in the guy?
00:52:54
Speaker 2: Because he was unbelievably good and he was really like I had gone to he Guided out of Sisters, Oregon, and I went to that guide shop and I said, I want to, you know, fish with this guy, and they said, you will never get a reservation. You know, this guy's booked up for five years. And then that made me think, well, this guy must be really good. And then a guy I know, a good writer named Ade Streep, fished with him and said, yeah, he's as good as you know. He's really great. You should do something about him.
00:53:26
Speaker 1: And so I then persisted and then I finally did. But that was it actually came by.
00:53:31
Speaker 2: Way of outside got it because they had heard about this guy too, So so then you know, I did set up this trip and it was like through three four day river trip and that you know, we caught finally we did catch steel It, and then they took these pictures. I signed off on the piece, was ready to go, and then he committed suicide, and so I went back.
00:53:59
Speaker 1: I can't remember how did he kill He kills if had a bolt launch, didn't he.
00:54:01
Speaker 2: No, he killed himself in his car. And I went to the place where he killed himself. And I mean, there are lonesome places out here, but that was one of the most lonesome. I mean in Oregon. Around there, it was a place where people had shot skeet and there were shotgun shells all over the place. It was just like this open patch out in the forest. And he had just parked there, and he had he had made a few little signs in the bushes around there. He had like left a pack of cigarettes in a bush, in the crotch of a branch in a bush. It was just it was a spooky thing and it was really sad, and I felt really bad for the guy because he was a brilliant guy.
00:54:41
Speaker 1: He was a great guy. Did he shoot himself? No, He hooked up a hose from the from the fly shout and do you remember that?
00:54:50
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, tale, that's a great detail.
00:54:52
Speaker 2: He took a hose that the fly shop had used just I think maybe just to worsh down its parking lot or something, and he used that hose to hook the exhaust up to his window.
00:55:02
Speaker 4: And the fly shop is where he was booking all of it. So he kind of had this slow descent as far as from reputability, right right, So he had gotten crossways with with this fly shop for you know a number of I'm sure what, well, he very normal reason.
00:55:23
Speaker 2: One thing that happened to him was he was guiding clients that this fly shop really liked, and while he was guiding, his truck was repossessed.
00:55:34
Speaker 1: So suddenly gets there and his truck is gone.
00:55:36
Speaker 2: It's been repossessed. And the guy and the people he was guiding apparently didn't mind. They thought it was kind of interesting.
00:55:42
Speaker 3: But your so o, l if you're a guide without a truck.
00:55:45
Speaker 2: Yeah, he really really need to have the truck. But so then I then went back and reported the re reported the whole thing, and and rewrote the piece.
00:55:56
Speaker 3: And yeah, it's the Last Days of Steelhead.
00:55:58
Speaker 1: Joe.
00:55:59
Speaker 3: You can still read it outside online.
00:56:01
Speaker 1: What are some of the things you found What are some things you found out and looked at differently after you went back and worked on it more.
00:56:07
Speaker 2: Well, these conversations I'd had with him, like that moment when he was standing out there, I mean it was a brief exchange, but that fell into place because the guy was really thinking, you know, well, I mean I don't know exactly what he was thinking, but but it looked like he might have done it maybe even at that point or something. I don't know what he was thinking, but just that he was a really he was somebody like and you must have this happen in what you do, where you will become extremely close to somebody that you see only for a few days. Yeah, you know, like that happens when you're writing, Like you'll find out about somebody, you'll get really very sympathetic with them. And also or he maybe conflicted about it.
00:56:59
Speaker 1: I mean, Joe was.
00:57:02
Speaker 2: He really was not well prepared. You know, he had one spae rod on this trip, you know, and he wouldn't let me bring my fly rod. He said, you're gonna spay cast or nothing, And I had never spay cast before. And do you know how to spay cast?
00:57:18
Speaker 1: Does that?
00:57:19
Speaker 2: Do you?
00:57:19
Speaker 1: You?
00:57:19
Speaker 2: Mus?
00:57:21
Speaker 4: Yes? Yeah, I'm I'm uh.
00:57:24
Speaker 1: These guys are both fishing guys.
00:57:25
Speaker 4: Cat catch fish at all cost type of guys. So the spey rod doesn't see a whole lot of light these days.
00:57:31
Speaker 2: But well it's really I did learn it and he taught it to me, and that was that was amazing. I mean, his empathy and his ability to to like and and not to make you feel bad.
00:57:43
Speaker 1: You know.
00:57:44
Speaker 2: He was like if you have a history with coaches where coaches will tell you stuff and then you got off on the wrong foot with a coach and you just don't like to be told stuff anymore. He was very able to get past that, and he was just a kind and good man. But he was really depressive. And he was a descendant. He was a direct descendant of Thomas Jefferson for real. Yep, you checked it out. It was checked out. Yeah, outside would have checked that out.
00:58:11
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:58:11
Speaker 2: His last name was Randolph, and the randolphs. I think Jefferson's daughter married a Randolph, so that I mean the Randolph is an old name from Virginia. So he.
00:58:25
Speaker 1: How this.
00:58:28
Speaker 4: There's so many parts of his story that are so applicable to conversations, got certain guides in shops for anybody who's ever done that or attempted to do that as a living. So I just I really found it crazy how you found him, because there's bits and pieces of his story that are hard to find in one person, but they're easily found in every circle in America. So he's a former athlete, wasn't a born and bred steelhead person, came out, learned it, acquires this huge client list you know, that are specifically requesting him, which is like a benchmark in the guide world. He hits this other super unattainable benchmark in the guiding world, which is he finds a super wealthy, very attractive client and marries her. Right, that's like a dream thing for guides.
00:59:36
Speaker 1: That that's what keeps you guys going in the morning.
00:59:38
Speaker 4: There's always that chance.
00:59:40
Speaker 1: It's a very common theme is really oh yeah, man, I'm happens or the guides wanted to happen.
00:59:49
Speaker 3: I know one instance where it happened.
00:59:52
Speaker 4: It's a story like it is, like I said, It's a story that is applicable in every guide circle in probably the world. But to find it all wrapped up in one person is like amazing.
01:00:05
Speaker 2: I had done a profile of another guide who guides out of stat Are. Yeah, he guides out of Staten Island and I fish. I haven't fished with him for a while, but we fish right in New York Harver sometimes and then we fish all along down the Jersey shore places that Bruce Springsteen has sung about and for bluefish and stripers. And I had already done that some years before, so I had already done a guide profile. But the thing is I as a kid, I fished by myself, and I was very much brought up fishing by myself. Effect I have fished from when I was a kid and did not need a license until I am an old man and do not need a license.
01:00:51
Speaker 1: That's awesome.
01:00:52
Speaker 2: And I came up as somebody fishing by himself, and when I had to fish with guides, it was a big adjustment because I didn't like because I was just old old or too old to go, you know. And plus plays like the to Shoots you have to have a guide basically. But but so I became very when I found a guide I really liked. It was a big It was a big deal.
01:01:16
Speaker 4: But what what if I got to finish the Okay, But this is a rise and fall story, so it also includes all these little bits and pieces again found that are ubiquitous in the guide community.
01:01:30
Speaker 1: Right.
01:01:30
Speaker 4: So he's at the top of his game, and then he starts starts losing and in ways that are again very relatable in all the guide circles. Divorce, money, mismanagement, crossways with his guide shops, right, starts taking some illegal trips on the side. I think was part of it too.
01:01:53
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean the thing that is a familiar story to you, absolutely to anybody who guides.
01:01:58
Speaker 2: He had a license to guide through the guide shop, through the tackle shop, and when they fired him, he did not have a guide.
01:02:07
Speaker 1: He did not have a license to guide.
01:02:09
Speaker 2: And so then he got a license to do float trips, but that wasn't the same, and so he was actually guiding with a float trip license, got it, and that was you know, and he got caught doing that and he was going to be going to trial and he would have lost his ability to guide in Oregon for five years.
01:02:28
Speaker 1: Or something like that.
01:02:29
Speaker 2: So he was really up against it.
01:02:31
Speaker 4: So when you did your trip, was he I think he was fishing guide?
01:02:35
Speaker 2: Uh no, wait a minute, Yes, I think he still was when we did our trip because I booked that through that shop. So yeah, I think he still want to me.
01:02:42
Speaker 4: The like the whole picture was like, this is like an under the table trip. It just had the feel of that to me because.
01:02:50
Speaker 1: He can't do that a writer, because you're going to get busted.
01:02:53
Speaker 4: He didn't think he cared.
01:02:54
Speaker 1: Oh he didn't tell me. I don't think I had no inkling of that at the time.
01:02:58
Speaker 3: If you booked it through a shot, it wasn't it wasn't under the table.
01:03:02
Speaker 2: I'm pretty sure it was before he got fired. I mean, probably the people from the shop are listening and they'll they'll clear this up.
01:03:08
Speaker 4: But that's why all those points made it just like so's exiting thing that happens.
01:03:12
Speaker 2: Well, I feel like there should be somebody who specializes in mental health of guides because it is an enormously difficult profession and and it's I mean, I sympathize with it because I'm a freelance writer and it's just up and down and are you going to get paid or you know what, how how is it going to go?
01:03:30
Speaker 4: And also you know the emotional cost of finding ways to connect with every right, you got a new client every day, rightly, right, and you got to make those connections in order to have just good basic communications.
01:03:43
Speaker 3: And the beauty of having the same clients year after year. You don't got it like you figure them out after a couple of years of gutting the same people over and over again.
01:03:51
Speaker 1: And yeah, yeah, Brody got to where you didn't really take new clients.
01:03:54
Speaker 4: No, no, which again is like one of those things that people on the I'm up trying to get to.
01:04:01
Speaker 1: That's part of the narrative. Yeah, Yanni. One day, so we have another colleague, Giannis, who also guided, and one day he and I were sitting in we just come out of McDonald's drive through here in town or no, I can't remember what the hell were you doing. Either way, Here's a guideboat drives by, like obviously a guideboat kid pulling a you know, drift boat. And I said, oh, Yanni, that probably brings back memories and makes you a little jealous seeing that guy heading out And Yanni said, no, heading out fish the same damn river with some guy you don't feel like talking to, not at all.
01:04:41
Speaker 2: But did you ever read ninety five in the Shade, Dwayne?
01:04:47
Speaker 1: If I did, he's been on the show, though, has he really?
01:04:50
Speaker 2: But that is a really good book about guiding. I mean it's a kind of almost a melodrama in a way, but it's a it's a wonderful book.
01:04:59
Speaker 4: I got back from Florida hanging out with a bunch of uh South Florida fishing guides, uh huh. And it's just it's so funny, like when I first read that book with the the politics of guiding in a new spot or guiding for new people.
01:05:16
Speaker 3: And especially in South Florida, man, like you don't mess with other people, and.
01:05:21
Speaker 4: It's nonsensical to me, Like I was having this this debate on like the how territorial people are and all the things like it. It's just just wild. But yeah, they go ahead.
01:05:32
Speaker 3: That's I know guys down there that will not let their clients like turn on their phone because they don't want to mark in spots.
01:05:39
Speaker 1: Sure you know what I mean?
01:05:40
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, and having that spot get out and then another guide's there the next day. You know, it's like it's cutthroat.
01:05:57
Speaker 1: When you were working on travels in Siberia. You want to spend it a bunch of time with I don't know what what what do you?
01:06:08
Speaker 2: So I remember talking to you about this at the time.
01:06:11
Speaker 1: Like you spent some days out on hunting trips.
01:06:13
Speaker 2: I spent days with chuk Chi guy.
01:06:16
Speaker 1: Yeah, tell about that experience. I went. You told a really funny story to me about a seal hunting trip you went on.
01:06:23
Speaker 2: I don't remember the funny part of it. Unfortunately, it was funny to me, Okay, it was miserable for you. I went like like, yeah, layout like who who those people are and.
01:06:34
Speaker 1: What you were doing there?
01:06:35
Speaker 2: And well, I went to Nome a bunch of times with the intention of flying over to Chakotka, which is the part of the Russian Far East that is across from Alaska. It's across the Bearing Strait, and Gnome has really terrible weather. So I was up in Nome maybe five times for every time I actually flew when the Maybe not five, but it was a bunch of times, and finally I got to go over.
01:07:00
Speaker 1: I didn't do it. I gotta I mess something up because I didn't. He set the book up a little bit too. I mean like you essentially, I mean you spent seven years working traveling there on and off, and essentially, like you've you've learned Russian to work on the book. I learned some Russian.
01:07:15
Speaker 2: I didn't I didn't get real good at it, but yeah, I learned some Russian. I drove with two guides, not angling guides, obviously, from Saint Petersburg to Vladivostar, and that trip was like fifteen thousand kilometers. We took side trips and stuff like that, but that was sort of the center part of the book was that across country trip. But I also took other smaller trips. And one of the smaller trips that I took was from Alaska to Chikotka.
01:07:48
Speaker 1: I need to throw in one more tidbit before you go. I know I told you to go, but now I'm wish i'd done it in different orders. Two really funny things. I mean, the book is good, place is heart wrenching, but there's two parts, probably more funny parts in the book. But you observe one day that you observe a car coming down the road and it's towing another car. Yeah, and instead of and what they're using for a toastrap? Is a safety belt a seat belt? And you had the line and you said, and all the time I spent in Russia, that was the only time I ever saw a seat belt used for anything? When was this?
01:08:27
Speaker 3: Was this after the wall came down?
01:08:29
Speaker 1: Or yeah?
01:08:29
Speaker 7: Yeah.
01:08:30
Speaker 2: I drove across Siberia in two thousand and one, Oh okay, and I got to the Pacific after seven weeks of travel on September eleventh, two thousand and one.
01:08:43
Speaker 1: Oh okay.
01:08:45
Speaker 2: So I'm there and I have a I had a satellite phone, and I have a message, just a text message from my wife saying we are okay. And I hadn't heard anything about it. I didn't know anything about it, so then I found out. But just to go back to talking about those because I remember telling you about this, and you're being fascinated by these guys. They were the best hunters I had ever seen, these chuck Chi guys, and I had hunted with.
01:09:13
Speaker 1: You by that time. But are they so? They are they have to like linguistically related to the Inuit cultures in the far north right.
01:09:23
Speaker 2: It's I mean linguistically they are connected. Some people in that part of Russia have relatives like on Saint Lawrence Island. And if you saw, if you remember from the news, not that long ago they started Russia started going out and recruiting soldiers in these really far flung villages because they didn't want to be recruiting in Petersburg and Moscow and getting people all upset. And so they went out and all these people, these you know, who were living out in the far parts of Russia, they were feeling the pressure of recruiting. And these two guys took a little aluminum boat and went from Chakoka, I think, to Saint Lawrence Island and then to Alaska. But they got out of it by just going across the strait. And that happens. I mean, people do cross the strait sometimes they come from Chakoka to Saint Lawrence Island just to see relatives.
01:10:16
Speaker 1: They do that in the summer.
01:10:18
Speaker 2: And so I was up there and we just went out to a salmon camp, which is a really cool place where you just hang around your nets, fill up with salmon, you pull in the salmon.
01:10:30
Speaker 1: You know, but not commercial is commercial Native people who can do that.
01:10:35
Speaker 2: I guess they have special permission to do it, but they take a lot of salmon, and they put them in big tubs and salt them down. And the main thing that they need is salt, and the salt back then was coming from the US. But all the stuff that they had they had Evan rude motors, you know, they had American rifles, they had American nets, you know. I mean that was where they got their supplies. But they they build little cairns of rocks on places where a seal is likely to be swimming around, and they just sit there for a really long time with their guns propped on these cairns, and they wait for a seal to pop up, and they shoot the seal in the head. That's the part that you can see. And I was in a boat with a guy who hit a seal in the head with no scope. I mean, it's just you know what is it just open sites or god? And it was just phenomenal shot at some distance and the water is really blue and it's extremely.
01:11:36
Speaker 1: Cold, so you don't want to fall out of the boat.
01:11:38
Speaker 2: You're gonna die. But just to see that seal hit and then this big plume of blood in that blue water, and he brought the seal in and butchered it. Out and his wife made the seal liver with angel hair pasta, and it was excellent. It was an excellent dinner.
01:12:02
Speaker 1: Uh did uh. This is another funny thing you talk about that I don't know if you ever figured it out. This actually is funny. Where when when you told me the story about when I said it was a funny story about the day you went is you really wanted You were out and you were talking about how bad you wanted to go home. Oh yeah, and you're molting along in a boat and you talked about all of a sudden, this duck flies overhead and spins around and lands in some bay, and all you wanted to do is get back. And you saw him all watch that duck, and you're like, please, no, please, no please. And also he said that boat turns. It was.
01:12:42
Speaker 2: Oh my god, really it was an eider duck and eider down is real valuable.
01:12:49
Speaker 1: So I was like, you're like headed back, but you're like.
01:12:55
Speaker 2: They would stay out all day and and they and they spoke good Russian. I mean they chukchi, but they spoke Russian. And they had been educated in Petersburg. The guy had been head of his reindeer brigade. Under communism, you know, they had like different reindeer collectives, and so he was really well educated. He knew a lot of poetry by heart, and you know, but he was he was like America, and he was like an American native guy. And at that time, the native people there that I saw were doing better than the Russian Russians because they just had stopped for a long period there, had stopped doing trips to Russia, you know, they had stopped to the Far East, they had stopped supplying those really remote cities. So all I could have bought an apartment there for a thousand bucks, a beautiful duplex in Providenia, Russia.
01:13:50
Speaker 1: Really. Yeah, what I was saying about a funny thing, A funny story you do tell in that book is you're camping somewhere alongside of a road and you're in your tent and you and you wake up at night there's a bunch of drunk guys of somehow like also pulled out at the turnout. You're like, can't the turnout right? And you know enough Russian to know that they're debating doing something to your tent, but you don't recognize that. But you didn't recognize the verb.
01:14:21
Speaker 2: The noun is palatka, and theyre and and the accusative that is it was obviously in the accusative case in the So they were saying, you know, what are we going to do to the palatka? This I could keep hearing, and when guys saying, don't do anything to it, kind of that, don't come on, We're just gonna do blah blah blah, and I assumed they were going to tear it down and just leave me lying there and sleeping. And my guides, of course, were gone, because my guides managed to meet women all the way across the Russian Federation, and they would they would disappear in the evening and I'd just be there and there'd be drunks driving around, and I would go to sleep, and they would bring women for me to meet, and they would say, oh, we told them that we had an American and she's an elementary school teacher. And I would get out, I'd be in my pajamas, I'd talk briefly, and I would go back to bed.
01:15:23
Speaker 1: I didn't I didn't drink in Russia, and I didn't do anything else like that, Because are you totally not drinking right now?
01:15:30
Speaker 2: Yeah, I haven't had a drink at sixteen years.
01:15:32
Speaker 1: I remember when you were quitting drinking. Yeah, I remember you telling me you're sick of the hangovers. I was sick of the hangovers, and I was just it was just I drunk enough. I was tired of it and never got back into it, never got back in. No do you feel like an urge or no? No anymore? Do you drink na stuff? I do?
01:15:51
Speaker 2: And I get made people make fun of me for it. Sure, I mean ordering a non alcoholic beer in Russia's like, ah, like you have to be in see you know? So uh yeah, but it was I mean I felt I needed my wits about me there, so I didn't. I didn't drink. And people had told me. My Russian friends had said, you know, oh you'll be killed. They'll you know, this is a terrible idea, and I think it was less dangerous than they had made it out to be.
01:16:22
Speaker 1: But I didn't really.
01:16:24
Speaker 2: I was blind with kind of romantic notions of what Russia was like and what Siberia was like, So I didn't, you know, like the recent thing that has happened, I mean, the invasion, It was just to me, I thought Putin was just funny. You know, he's not just funny. He's not funny, but I thought he was funny. I mean, you can go online find him singing. I found my thrill on Blueberry Hill.
01:16:50
Speaker 1: Fishing big old yellow perch and no shirt on fishing northern and northerns.
01:16:54
Speaker 2: He's into northerns.
01:16:56
Speaker 1: Yeah, you and Bible to do that book?
01:16:58
Speaker 2: Now, man, No, I mean I might be able to go there, but I don't think I would. Who knows getting back, getting out? I don't know.
01:17:06
Speaker 1: I wouldn't try it.
01:17:07
Speaker 4: Now, it does sound like a lot of that romanticism did line up for you though, once you made it out there.
01:17:14
Speaker 1: Well, I mean I.
01:17:15
Speaker 2: Went to places that a famous traveler from my family's town where my family lived in Ohio, Norwalk, Ohio, this guy named George Kennon went there in the eighteen eighties. After the assassination of the Tzar in eighteen eighty one, there were all these people shipped to Siberia in order for this clamp down to be effective, and it wasn't really effective, but they shipped a lot of people there, and George Kennan went there to see how those people were doing that had been exiled, and the Tsars were disorganized and liberal or whatever enough that they did still permit that kind of travel. But Kennon had a minder, some kind of police minder with him a lot of the time. But he actually, I think maybe he was pretty much on his own because they they liked Kennon and he did this amazing book about Siberia called Siberia and the Prison Exile System, which Anton Chekhov read and made his own trip. So this guy from Ohio inspired one of the greatest writers of all time, Anton Chekhov, to go to Sakalen Island, So, which is I think south of Kamchaka, but it's another island.
01:18:31
Speaker 1: Like that. Were we recording when I said something about don't make don't make Stalin jokes or was that pre recording? I don't know, Hey, if I know, Phil, we were recording earlier. I made a comment and you looked, you looked when I said that that you had that. There was a part of the book where you argue about that Stalin, like how people make Stalin references. And you get into the towards the end of your book Travels in Siberia, you get into the Gulag system, right, just all the I mean, I don't know if you still remember some of the staffs. I mean, just like the horrible atrocities.
01:19:07
Speaker 2: It was a horrible Yeah, they were death cams. I mean they there were people that there were degrees of horribleness. But the people that mined gold in Magadan, you know, I mean Russia, nobody was honoring anything. Russia had to buy stuff with gold because they had already defaulted on their debts when the Soviets took over, and the gold mining operation in Magadan was a murderous thing.
01:19:35
Speaker 1: Absolutely, yeah. I mean millions of people killed.
01:19:39
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean from the beginning of the Russian from the Russian Revolution through like the end of the Soviet Union. I mean people estimate sixty million or seventy million. That includes you know, like what we lost four hundred and seventy five thousand people in World War Two, which is a real serious thing. If you think about, like in terms of now what our population is, that would be a serious.
01:20:01
Speaker 1: The US lost that the US lost that for reference, fifty seven thousand in Vietnam, right and.
01:20:07
Speaker 2: Right, four hundred and seventy I think it was like four hundred and seventy five thousand in the Second World War, it was under I believe under five hundred thousand. The Russians lost twenty million in that war, so that when I would say to Russians, well, we helped you, you know, like we held their coats while they fought the Nazis, you know, like I mean, they don't think. They don't take it seriously. Even though we did supply a lot of their air force.
01:20:36
Speaker 1: A lot of their air force.
01:20:37
Speaker 2: Was made in Detroit and then shipped up here to Helena where they painted the Soviet markings on the planes and then flown up to Alaska and pilots from Alaska would fly it over to the Russian pilots who would pick it up on the other side and fly it back to the to the Western Front. So we did participate, hate very much in helping them, but they don't.
01:21:02
Speaker 1: They didn't. The people I talked to were very unimpressed by that. Uh, there's a piece you wrote. I don't know you wrote this long time ago, but I've always loved it. Is Uh, you were living up in did you live You live in big Fork, Montana. Yeah, And when you were living in big Fork, Montana, you liked you liked the amount of reporting in the local newspapers that would occur about bears. Yeah, and you wrote a piece of You wrote a piece of reporting about how bears are reported on. Yeah. It was called bear News. Yeah, and I remember in it you made the observation about when a bear committed a senseless killing. Yeah, that grizzly committed a senseless killing over human. Did you ever read that book Night of the Grizzlies. Oh? Yeah, that was the same guy that wrote Give a Boy a Gun about Claude Dallas. Right. I know his name is Olsen and he wrote sports jack Olson, Jack Olsen. Yeah, yeah he did. I think Jack Olsen, I'm not I'm not familiar. So do you remember the story well enough to tell me it's to night? Well you may remember it better.
01:22:22
Speaker 2: But two bears after they're not having been any bear attacks for years, on the same night, in very different, widely separated parts of the park, uh killed a camper, Each bear killed a camp.
01:22:35
Speaker 1: Two bears killed two women and no one had been killed by a bear park and having the same damn night.
01:22:40
Speaker 2: Right, it was this, Yeah, it was a very It's My wife and I were married in Big four and we gave that book as a gift to our wedding guests, and we didn't really we just been thinking, Wow, this is a good book, and we didn't think it was kind of under productive in terms of Montana tourism.
01:23:02
Speaker 5: But but.
01:23:04
Speaker 4: The Todd Strasser is your give a boy a gun.
01:23:10
Speaker 1: Oh, Jack Olsen didn't write a book about Claude Dallas. Nothing, I'm ce in here.
01:23:20
Speaker 4: But uh, tourism plays heavily in wildlife news in the Greater Glacier National Park white fish tourist ecosystem up there. So yes, the bear news is a is a real thing, and there's a lot of suppressed news from a lot of a lot of folks inside the park, as I understand it.
01:23:45
Speaker 1: So walk me through that part of your life when you So you came to Big Fork and how did you get going on the idea that you would write a book about the American Great planes and travel all over the Great Plains and live in a van.
01:24:00
Speaker 2: Well, I came to I left New York City and moved out, and I didn't know anybody in Montana. I didn't know one person, and I moved up to near Kallispell. For what reason, I just wanted to change everything.
01:24:17
Speaker 1: When was this.
01:24:18
Speaker 2: That was like nineteen eighty two, and so I just made a huge change and I just moved out. And I wanted to I wanted to just do something bigger, and I didn't know quite what to do. I was writing short pieces, and they're very addictive short pieces, because you know, you get an idea, you do it, you get paid, You then get another idea, you do it. And so I wanted to try to do something bigger.
01:24:48
Speaker 1: So I moved Never like at that time, you were focused pretty much. I mean you were focused on humor pieces.
01:24:53
Speaker 2: I wrote a lot of humor pieces back then, and also I wrote for the Talk of the Town of the New Yorker, and I had done a few long pieces. I did a profile of a guy who had a tackle shop in New York City, and that guy was an old time colleague of Dan Bailey of you know Missoid.
01:25:14
Speaker 1: Bailey's Dan Bailey is that living Ston or Missoula?
01:25:18
Speaker 2: That's Livingstone, right, Okay? Yeah, And and so that guy was coming out here a lot, The guy that had that tackle shop would come out here and fish. And so he had told me a bunch of stuff about places to go. So I just came out here. The reason I went up to Big Fok, I'm not even sure. I kind of just liked it up there, and it seemed like there were too many writers down.
01:25:40
Speaker 3: Did people think you were doing a living was filled up?
01:25:43
Speaker 1: Did you did people think you were doing a bad like a career mistake to leave the city?
01:25:49
Speaker 2: Mystified people, mystified people. The editor of the New Yorker, William Shawn, was this genius editor, and he was this phobic, you know, he was afraid of a lot of different things. And I told him I was moving to Northwest Montana, and he said, uh, do they have stores there? And I said something like, well, it might be kind of hard to buy, specially items for me. I and and I realized he meant, can you get food there?
01:26:19
Speaker 1: I mean it was this.
01:26:22
Speaker 2: He was from Chicago. He should have known a little bit, but it was seen as an eccentric thing to do. And I came out and I tried to write a novel, and uh uh it was not a good novel.
01:26:36
Speaker 1: And then when I when, then, do you care sharing with novels about the novel? I wrote a good bit of it.
01:26:43
Speaker 2: The novel was about my town in Ohio and when the town, which is a suburban, mostly white town, and when the town decided to have or when the school that I went to, which was a private school, decided to expand its student body and bring in black students from Cleveland, and that kind of cultural moment, which was interesting, and uh, you know, it was very revealing of what my town was like. You know, you don't even know that you're in a mono culture, you know, when you're in some small towns in the Midwest. I mean, ah, most small towns. But anyway, it was about that, and it just did the I don't have the fiction gift, I'm afraid.
01:27:31
Speaker 1: So what is your You mentioned Big Four because there weren't what you've mentioned A lot of places like you're you don't like to live by writers. I like to just one time wrote off to me. You dismissed the whole state of Maine, which I take ship for today because it was a foolish thing to do. I know you were you were like, I can't go to Maine. I know writers there.
01:27:53
Speaker 3: I'm going to ask you if you if you brush shoulders with any montete like mcguaine. I never I never did because you didn't want to be around them.
01:28:02
Speaker 2: Well, I mean, I will go public on record that I admired Tom mcguain beyond anything. I mean, I find so many things that I'm thinking are things that mcgwaine wrote, or just ways of putting things.
01:28:16
Speaker 1: And I know all his work.
01:28:17
Speaker 2: And I used to be able to recite Rancho Deluxe, like word for word. I would go into a bar and say I could tell you the entire movie Rancho Deluxe, and people would bet me that I couldn't, and they would give up after about maybe seven minutes.
01:28:34
Speaker 4: You're like, I need seventy nine minutes.
01:28:37
Speaker 1: You know. We we went and we didn't really use it for anything, but we went and set up that exact at Chico Hotsprings. Oh yeah, that's we wouldn't set up that exact scene one day, like everybody's sitting in the place cowboy hats. We had fur hats on. But yeah, yeah.
01:28:54
Speaker 2: But but so, you know, I kind of felt that that that part of my Tanna was already pretty pretty crowded. And I didn't know much about Big Fork. I didn't know anything about it, and uh, well.
01:29:07
Speaker 4: That is Edward Abbey wrote, Out of the North Fork there spitting distance from Big Fork.
01:29:14
Speaker 2: Yeah, that I didn't know about it.
01:29:16
Speaker 1: That's gone. Well. The thing is, if you know where every writer has been, you'll end up going nowhere because exactly exactly, but they do get around.
01:29:26
Speaker 2: But then when that novel kind of didn't work out in a big way, uh, I called up, uh, mister Seawan, the New York editor, and I said, because I had driven around out there just for fun. Yeah, I would just go over the divide and go out and just drive all the way like to Williston or you know, uh a lot in Montana. And I had taken my friend Jamaicican Caid out there and that was really fun because she's West Indian and had never really seen the American West. And we would go into places and you know, she's taller than I am, and I'm not that tall, but she's like an inch or so taller and.
01:30:09
Speaker 1: And people would just wow, you know, because that was.
01:30:12
Speaker 2: Uncommon then to see like a black woman in a in like cutback Montana, you know. And so why had had a lot of interesting things, you know, driving around, And I told when this novel didn't work out, I decided I would do a book about the great planes and I called up mister Shawn, and I said, I want to write about the great Planes, and I would do it as if I was profiling a person, you know, like this is a place, but I would profile it as a person. And I said, and I explained some of the stuff that would be in it, you know, and like the buffalo or you know, the battle of the Little Big Horn or stuff like that. And Sean listened. He didn't say anything. And then when I had finished my explanation, he said, what is be funny?
01:31:05
Speaker 1: Well, I don't know.
01:31:07
Speaker 2: Maybe fifty million buffalo wiped out. I don't know, is that funny? But so then I ended up doing it, But that took me a long time. It took me years and years to do, did it?
01:31:18
Speaker 1: Yeah?
01:31:19
Speaker 2: I drove around out there for summer summers. After summers, I got married out there. I wouldn't have stayed if I hadn't gotten married.
01:31:26
Speaker 3: Did you fish flat Head Lake while you're living in Big Port?
01:31:29
Speaker 1: Yeah? I did.
01:31:30
Speaker 2: It was cocainy.
01:31:31
Speaker 1: I didn't do very good. Have you fished it? Oh?
01:31:34
Speaker 7: Yeah?
01:31:35
Speaker 3: The cocaine are all gone now.
01:31:36
Speaker 1: Yeah.
01:31:36
Speaker 3: They're trying to eradicate the lake trout now too.
01:31:41
Speaker 1: Yeah.
01:31:41
Speaker 2: What are they What are you fishing for up there?
01:31:44
Speaker 4: Then lake trout are trying to.
01:31:46
Speaker 3: Eradicate because there's a native species of char called the bull trout. Oh wow, they're trying. They're trying to lower the lake trout population and bring bring the bull trout back.
01:31:59
Speaker 4: And the cocony story up there, Like when you were there, that was a huge tourism story too. They'd spawn all the way up to McDonald Lake and then all the you know, all the all the pretty animals would come in. It was a great time for tourists. And the bull trout would get real fat off coconey too. And then there was a theory that because of the the water part of the water column that the coconey occupied and the part of the water column that lake trout if they introduced them would occupy.
01:32:34
Speaker 1: Well, keep back. I got confused.
01:32:37
Speaker 4: This is a fisheries management introduction.
01:32:41
Speaker 1: All this was baked into the inn like it was an intentional introduction. Yes, based on this assumption.
01:32:46
Speaker 4: Yes, I see. And then you have these miicy shrimp that feed everything, and how they would come up with the warmth of the day that all these species would just magically like intermingle.
01:32:57
Speaker 1: It was a choreographed dance exactly exactly like I said, but no one was going to the dance.
01:33:06
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's just a fun aside for you. But anyway, no more coconin and flathead.
01:33:11
Speaker 2: Well that was something where people would come up and they'd bring their own like canneries. You know, they'd have motor homes and they can you know, it was like a unit of exchange among people, like cans of cocainey salmon, and I mean it was a huge deal. But I didn't know that they were no longer in the lake. That's amazing, ye. And that up there where they would spawn the eagles that were up there, and it was just amazing birds, I mean snowy owls and stuff. It was really incredible. I didn't see a snowy owl up there.
01:33:44
Speaker 1: But tell folks about your the piece you wrote about wild hogs. Yeah, I really.
01:33:50
Speaker 2: Enjoyed watching your wild hog episode. Yeah, I just I did a piece about wild hogs because, uh, they really are like there's no other animal really like them. You know that every man's hand is against them, like their places with no seasons, I think almost every place you can hunt them all year round.
01:34:13
Speaker 1: Here's an interesting twist that this might have happened after you wrote your piece about wild hogs. Is there an interesting twists now where in order to prevent the spread of wild hogs, they are banning the hunting of wild hogs. And one might be like, well, it doesn't make any sense, But what they have found is the spread of wild hogs and a lot of places is facilitated by hog hunters who bring hogs in. You're saying, because they're like, man, we had such a good time hunting hogs down in Texas that we brought a few home, right, and we're gonna cut them loose in our neck of the woods and then we'll be able to hunt hogs. And so Missouri, Arkansas, other areas when they look at the spread, they were looking and they're like, man, a leading spread vector is aspiring hog hunters. Yeah. Yeah, so to make it that you can't hunt hogs, just to get out ahead of it. But yeah, there is no from the hunting world, any conversation about humane treatment, any conversation about ethics, anything like that. It goes out the window. Hogs r yeah, because they're they're just a reviled right, I mean, you get into it they're reviled and a hated critter man.
01:35:38
Speaker 2: But I think you know that makes the there's something kind of holy about that, you know, like that you're just a total outlaw, you know. I mean, And and when you see the stuff they do, it's just incredible. Like the way they will root or the way they will they get up next to phone poles that have been painted with creoso and they want to get that creoso tar all over them, you know. And then you'll see these things. They're just all tari and God.
01:36:13
Speaker 1: I mean, they'll there's just.
01:36:18
Speaker 2: The damage that they do. The you know, you'll find these little items about how they tear up, the way they tear up people's yards, and the way they tear up you know, peanut fields, and it's just and the only thing that's limiting them. I mean, we don't I think, have them in New York State yet, or I don't think we have them in New Jersey. But there's not much that limits them. I mean, they can go anywhere pretty much if there's got to be water.
01:36:48
Speaker 1: I think, according to the USDA, is at thirty four states. According to the USDA, I think I think it was thirty nine when I did it. It was thirty four, and I think it went up since then.
01:36:57
Speaker 4: But I was working with the farmer in Arkansas earlier this year and they started with traps on their farm that would just be triggered by the pigs walking in, and they kind of came to the conclusion that this wasn't working well enough because they'd also have cameras set up around the the traps and they'd see like one pigould get caught and the fifteen others would squeal around the thing and run away. So they custom built some remotely operated traps, so now a pig can't set it off by itself, but the camera goes on and you can remotely trigger the trap. He told me they did a family trip to the Bahamas one time and he caught twenty pigs in a trap.
01:37:50
Speaker 1: Wow.
01:37:50
Speaker 7: So the.
01:37:52
Speaker 4: Yeah, the goal now is to get the whole sounder of pigs in then remotely operate the trap. And they're they're catching tons of pigs throughout the year. But it is zero fun, there is no It is just more work for this family and it takes like three four hours to go in, dispatch all the pigs, remove the pigs, clean everything up, and and it ends up just all being gator food in the in the bayou, which is a horrible way to meet that they recognize. But at the same time they're like, and tomorrow or next week, we'll do it all over again. It just doesn't stop. But they're estimating their crop damage somewhere in the neighborhood of three hundred thousand dollars annually.
01:38:42
Speaker 1: Wow. Yeah. Yeah.
01:38:45
Speaker 4: And it's just he's like, there's a lot of people who recreationally hunt pigs, like and because of that, we're doing this like it and it does there's no end in sight.
01:38:56
Speaker 1: Yeah.
01:38:56
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's a wild thing.
01:39:00
Speaker 7: Yeah.
01:39:00
Speaker 2: I talked to a guy from a organization that studies wildlife disease vectors and he traps hogs and tests them, and he said that he if he had hogs in an enclosure, he said that, he said he was very careful never to look over the enclosure down at the hogs. And I said, why why don't you want to look over And he said, because they'll jump up and bite you in the face. So these are pretty fierce, fierce animals. I mean, they're just they're so smart too, they're just and they're so they're just so cynical. They have a very cynical attitude. I think I saw a contest down in Georgia where they were using hog you know, dogs that ran pigs, and it was it was like a rodeo where they had these to see which pigs could dogs could beay a hog the fastest and stuff like that. And the dogs are all wearing kevlar and you know, and they had these big pins of wild pigs that they had caught for this event, and the wild pigs are just lying back in They're just like.
01:40:08
Speaker 3: Yeah, they were just it was not too bothered by the process.
01:40:13
Speaker 2: This is going to happen, so what something else will happen. They just they had their eyelids are always at half mass. You know, They're just like, yeah, okay, I mean this is going to happen to me. They didn't like, they just weren't.
01:40:27
Speaker 1: Involved at all.
01:40:28
Speaker 2: They were ready to go along.
01:40:30
Speaker 1: And all the time the dogs was the dogs were just like mannic on speed. That hog piece. I don't know if you remember the details on it, but in the end of the hog piece, you gotten looking at hog distribution maps.
01:40:55
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, I got in trouble for that A little bit, did you. Well, I mean it really pissed off the people that I had reported done the reporting with.
01:41:02
Speaker 1: You got to look in at hog well, let's keep this a political as possible, Okay, You got to look in at hog distribution maps, and you got to looking at voting maps. Right. I matched the two, and you find you overlaid them and found that you can map partisan politics in the American South and other places all over the country based on even in the areas of California, and you can look at hog density and know where they're going to tip on a presidential election.
01:41:33
Speaker 2: If a county has hogs, it is a rip county.
01:41:37
Speaker 1: That got you in trouble.
01:41:38
Speaker 2: Well, the guy, the hog expert, who I worked with, I think didn't didn't like the article. And he was a unbelievable guy. He was a really good scientist and able to like, you know, if a hog was bade up, he could throw the hog. He'd get behind the hog and like pull its legs out from under it and put it on the ground, you know, just like himself.
01:42:00
Speaker 1: Going out a hog.
01:42:01
Speaker 2: I mean that seems some of these hogs are really big. And that was back in the days of hog Zilla.
01:42:07
Speaker 1: It wasn't a wild hog.
01:42:09
Speaker 2: It was a tame He was a farm raised hog. And hog Zelda, which was a soal.
01:42:16
Speaker 1: In terms of writing about people who get mad at you, do you want to know the advice you gave.
01:42:21
Speaker 2: Me, God, Steve, I don't remember this, Okay.
01:42:27
Speaker 1: If you include a line about how good looking they are, if you say someone's ruggedly handsome, yeah, you can say any want them bomb the never get mad at you.
01:42:39
Speaker 2: They will only get so mad. And it's really true.
01:42:42
Speaker 3: It's kind of like the compliment sandwich.
01:42:44
Speaker 1: Right. You're like, if you got to say something bad about someone you hung out with while you're working on your piece, just talk about that they're good looking. Right. It's like when they read it, they'll they'll they'll they'll come away feel better about the piece. Right, It's it's quite true.
01:42:56
Speaker 4: It's like pulling the hind legs out of a hog, right, all right, they can't. They're still got two legs on the ground. All right, you only got it half wrong.
01:43:03
Speaker 1: Right. There's another piece of advice you gave me, and I've repeated this one hundred times. In book publishing, you need to write a generally generally speaking, people will write a proposal, and they will sell this proposal protials where I'm going with this. They will sell this proposal to a publisher who will then give you an advance on royalties. So you write, I'm going to write a book about wild picks, okay, And you're like, it a look like this, here's my perspective outline, here's like one of the chapters might look like here's my whole plan. Publisher will say that sounds like a phenomenal idea, a great idea. We'll give you ex will give you ten dollars for the book. You will give you three. Now, we'll give you three after you write it, and we'll give you four on the day that it publishes. And then that's like a brief outline of how a book publishing goes. And I told you that I was working on a proposal the first proposal I wrote, and you told me to the effect of, man if I ever wrote a book proposal and they bought that book, the first thing I do is throw away the proposal.
01:44:10
Speaker 2: I was down on the puzzles.
01:44:12
Speaker 1: Yeah, I quote that all the time.
01:44:14
Speaker 2: Well that that you didn't follow that advice, So I don't think.
01:44:17
Speaker 1: All right, proposals all damn time.
01:44:20
Speaker 2: Your first book wasn't your first book, The Escoffier book was that the thing I wrote. Don't you kind of see all of this is coming from that book?
01:44:27
Speaker 1: I mean, yeah, but all of everything comes from everything, man. Yeah, that's a that's a stopping point.
01:44:31
Speaker 2: It was a really I mean, because you're you're finding stuff to eat in the outdoors throughout that book.
01:44:36
Speaker 1: Yeah.
01:44:37
Speaker 2: I remember you even got pigeon eggs from like an air conditioning unit.
01:44:41
Speaker 1: Some We're talking about that the other night because I had a buddy of mine I did. I had a buddy mine ohere for dinner or so when I you know, I talk about leaving finishing school and going to the Great Lakes, right, and I wanted to write about the Great Lakes, and I kind of lost the thread of it and missed being out west real bad and hadn't even really moved out where I was living, and went back and that's when I got started on Scavenger's Guide to Oak Cuisine. Right. I was living in Missoula at the time. And the other night, my buddy Dave was over and my buddy Dave was remembering about when I was going to collect pigeons under the Higgins Street bridge, and we had gotten hollered at by some policemen down there for having an extension ladder under the bridge. Okay, so Dave was reminiscent about he had kids, and he was talking the other night about how he didn't want to go back with me because he didn't want to get in trouble having kids. So we're just talking about collecting, that's all, uh huh okay. But we developed a strategy. Pigeons would around that town. They liked to build nests between air conditioning units and buildings. Yeah, there's like a little the air conditioning units are set out six to eight inches and they like to get there. So we made a blocker with a pizza box and a stick, and we made a landing net type thing where you could put a blocker on one side, a landing net on the other side, and then bang on the air conditioning unit and the pigeons would go into the net and then we would I would keep these pigeons in my apartment trying to get the eggs from them. So I wanted to raise my own squab, which was Scofia has thirty four squab preparations. I think I even gave you the words squab.
01:46:35
Speaker 2: Might that when we went in that hunting trip in the Missouri breaks, Yep, And there were all those pigeons up there in those bluffs and we go hunting for them.
01:46:43
Speaker 1: Yeah, And I said that I had that I had eaten those. I had eaten them, and they were called squab, you know, baby pigeons. Yeah, which is a far cry from adult from an adult pigeon, from in a culinary from a culinary standpoint, totally different colored flesh, totally different eating experience. So I'd reared, you know, through a lot of attempts, eventually reared my own squab, which became a big part of that book. Did you eat him?
01:47:12
Speaker 3: Do you name him?
01:47:13
Speaker 1: Some of them? Remember having one a little red? He had a little red. He had a little red zip strip around his ankle. What are you working on now? What have you been working on lately? I just finished a book about the bronx. Oh really, yep? Is there any fishing in it? You also got to talk about your book, The Fish's Eye.
01:47:34
Speaker 2: Okay, The Fish's Eye is a book exclusively Why I.
01:47:38
Speaker 1: Read the book about the bronx, but first time about the Fish's Eye.
01:47:40
Speaker 2: The Fish's Eye is just a bunch of different pieces that I did over many years about fishing, and uh, some of it it's all over the place. Some of it is out here, some of it is in uh I like the Yellowstone or uh, A.
01:48:00
Speaker 1: Lot of it is.
01:48:00
Speaker 2: It's mostly fly fishing. And I'm kind of more a match the hatch type of person. You know, I don't do I haven't fished with bait in a long time. Uh, And I haven't And I don't really spin fish very much anymore. I fish for shad, but I use you know, weighted fly line and leaders. You know, I fly fish for shad.
01:48:26
Speaker 1: And so official John McPhee, he's still alive. I do.
01:48:29
Speaker 2: Yes, John's alive.
01:48:32
Speaker 1: Yes. We talked about that reason, didn't.
01:48:33
Speaker 6: We mm hmm, And I said I was sure he was alive.
01:48:36
Speaker 1: John is a great fisherman and he's ninety two ninety two. Well, you see how I thought he might not be alive. Remember that radio show used to have that game called dead or Alive, and you call you'd like a listener call in to play, and they'd given name and the only point of the game is you had to know if they were, you had to guess they were dead or alive. Listen, I'm not trying to hack on John, Okay, I'm as is a lot of time, that's a lot of years. Most people don't do that, I know. And he's forgets me. You could forgive me for thinking that maybe, like the unit ipe, I forgive you for maybe the inevitable overcame him. John is gonna be around for a long time. He is Uh.
01:49:17
Speaker 2: He outfishes. I mean he outfished me the last time I fished.
01:49:20
Speaker 1: Still fishes. Oh my god.
01:49:22
Speaker 2: He's a really good fish.
01:49:23
Speaker 3: Does a lot of fishing and coming into the country he does.
01:49:26
Speaker 2: He and then he's got the whole book about American shad. He is the best shad fisherman. I mean, he studied them. He knows everything about him.
01:49:34
Speaker 1: Was it you were John McPhee who equated cleaning an American shad to fixing a watch? That was him? I think that.
01:49:45
Speaker 2: Well, you know the thing about American shad. If you do not fill ay it, uh, and you're eating it when you're hungry, it's.
01:49:55
Speaker 1: Going to be a nightmare.
01:49:56
Speaker 2: It's very frustrating because you're taking little pieces of me eat out from all this complicated bone structure. It's like a Walleye pipe bone structure sort of. You know, they have two sets of risk and it's very very intricate. I might have said taken like taking a watch apart. It's very hard to take. But people that can filly shed are much in demand at this time of year.
01:50:18
Speaker 1: Do you fish as much Nile as you used to do? I? No, and that's been a problem.
01:50:23
Speaker 4: I mean.
01:50:25
Speaker 2: By way of that, I can say, you know, I do a lot of exploring on foot. I do a lot of walking and and that has kind of replaced in a way, it replaced fishing for me. I got very much into taking plastic bags out of trees, remember that, and I with a buddy I invented a bag snagging device for which we got a patent, and that.
01:50:50
Speaker 1: Was our thing.
01:50:51
Speaker 3: I need one of those because there's a couple.
01:50:57
Speaker 1: And one. I read what he wrote about plastic shopping bags, eggs and trees. Once you start looking, oh yeah, it's a new evil you need to be aware of. Is birthday balloons? Birthday balloon There is not a place you could go to the wildest likenting elk up in the mountains.
01:51:14
Speaker 3: There's one land, there's.
01:51:15
Speaker 1: No place you can go anymore.
01:51:17
Speaker 2: Well, you were talking about a birthday balloon land the Burmese pythons, and I went way out in all those places where there are no roads when I did a piece about Burmese pythons for Smithsonian. Yeah, and we're out there. There's no vehicle traffic out there.
01:51:32
Speaker 7: Uh.
01:51:33
Speaker 2: And the only trash you see out there is birthday balloons, nop and other types of balloons. But yeah, those are everywhere. But that I got very much into finding, you know, places, and they're all over the city. They used to be less so now. And going with this bag snider, we could reach up fairly high and take bags out and that was a hunter gatherer kind of thrill, especially getting a bag from a really high tree. We had tensions that we could.
01:52:01
Speaker 4: Put on the bowl trophy trophy bag.
01:52:03
Speaker 1: Oh man.
01:52:03
Speaker 2: We had once we kept stuff that we took out, you know, like we took a lawn chair out from down by. After the big floods of the Mississippi floods, we went to Saint Genevieve, Missouri, and there was stuff in trees that have floated there that didn't have to be carried by the wind and the stuff that floated and drive. There were like small rooms up in trees, you know, and this was because the water was so deep. And uh so we took you know, like tractor tires and all kinds of huge stuff, lots of items of clothing. It used to be that you took a lot of cassette tape out of trees, which is elaciously difficult to get out. And now you don't anymore because people don't have cassettes anymore. So in Jersey they just banned plastic bags right for shopping. Yeah, and that really reduces it.
01:53:00
Speaker 7: You know.
01:53:00
Speaker 2: In Ireland they they call bags and trees witches nickers, and after a long period of having these bags and trees, they outlawed them, and they don't have bags and trees anymore. I am told so man.
01:53:15
Speaker 1: So that's more what I got into, rather than I still do fish.
01:53:18
Speaker 2: I fish in the Delaware. I fish for small mouth. The thought of an eleven pounds small mouth is staggering.
01:53:23
Speaker 1: Six, No, eleven, that's real common.
01:53:28
Speaker 3: They got some big ones in the Susquehanna. You're not far from that.
01:53:30
Speaker 2: Yeah, I haven't fished the Susquehanna.
01:53:32
Speaker 1: That's good. Yeah. Wow. So did you write a proposal for your Bronx book?
01:53:38
Speaker 2: I explained it.
01:53:41
Speaker 1: I didn't write a proposal, but so so, like I want to be clear, I'm turning in an explanation of the book both I was.
01:53:50
Speaker 2: Yeah, I was down on proposals. I thought that they got you thinking already. Is sometimes when you read a book, the first page is the proposal. You know, like I see the guys already thinking in these terms.
01:54:00
Speaker 1: I want you to.
01:54:01
Speaker 2: I want to think more fluidly about something. But this the Bronx is the only part of New York City that is the continent. New York City is an archipelago. So you have Manhattan, you have Staten Island, and you have Long Island, which is Queens and Brooklyn, and then there are a lot of other islands around there. And the Bronx is the continent. And that's where, in fact, America is sort of you know, from a geographic point of view, that's where America begins.
01:54:35
Speaker 7: And the.
01:54:37
Speaker 2: Something in I think it was the piece you did about that guy who raises white or who has white tails on his farm in Wisconsin in the Driftless area, which is beautiful country.
01:54:48
Speaker 1: I need to point out he does not raise them. I know.
01:54:50
Speaker 2: Sorry, he doesn't raise them. I don't mean to say that he assists.
01:54:56
Speaker 1: He'll assists in their existence through land.
01:54:59
Speaker 2: Right, But I think it was he who said that he was interested in how a place affects the people in it, and how the people in a place affect the place. And to me, that's what I'm trying, what I have tried to do with the Bronx, that it's a human geography. And this was a place that was beat on mercilessly during the era of our country after World War Two, when we built highways everywhere, so they just flattened the Bronx with highways and tore down lots of neighborhoods and the Bronx kind of was reeling and burned, and it was famous for burning when it was, you know, on Howard Cosell and the it was in a World Series game and the Goodyear blimp had a picture of Yankee Stadium and then it kind of panned a little bit to one side and there was a burning building and Howard Cosell said, the Bronx is burning.
01:55:59
Speaker 1: Supposed that's what that came wrong.
01:56:01
Speaker 2: Yeah, and that era, you know, thousands of thousands of buildings burned in the Bronx and from Arson. It was not so much arson as that you had very old buildings and you had the baby boom, and you had a lot of kids living there, and kids were just beating on the buildings. You couldn't and it was redline. So all that place was redline. You couldn't get Red line means you can't get a loan to fix the building. You can't get a loan.
01:56:29
Speaker 1: Condemned.
01:56:30
Speaker 2: It's not exactly condemned, it's just like a warning to potential lenders that this is according to the government, you can't uh, this is a dangerous place to lend, and you cannot get insurance in this place. And so the buildings were just sitting there and they didn't get fixed up, and it was just a whole bunch of factors came together. But sort of part of the plot of my book is that as that happened, kids in the Bronx in their teens invented hip hop, and hip hop was invented in the Bronx, and that story of how it was invented and who invented it and the people who did it is just to me, it was just really fascinating. So to me, the Bronx is a place in between, and that the in betweenness of a place can get it really torn up and over overrunning away and people. You don't you don't pay attention to the place that you drive through.
01:57:26
Speaker 1: You know.
01:57:27
Speaker 2: One thing that you do is you go to that you on your show do is that you go to specific places and you see how people have made that place live, you know, and that each place is different, and that we haven't really thought in those terms. We thought in great, big generalities about places, and now I think you have to think much more specifically about what a place is. And the people who saved the Bronx were people who thought of the Bronx as this specific place where they grew up. They were proud to be here, they weren't going anywhere, and they saved the Bronx. The people who lived in the Bronx saved it. And so it's a story that I don't think a lot of people know. People have I write about places where people have a preconceived idea of what it's like, you know, the Great Plains. People would say from New York, Oh, I flew over that there's nothing there. You know, there's a lot there. You think there's nothing there, there's a lot there, you know. Or people will say, oh, Siberia, you know, it's cold, it's prisons. Well yeah, but there's a lot other there's a lot more going on there. And I kind of like to treat a place as almost as if it was a person. And you don't want to generalize in a stupid way about it. You know, you don't want to generalize about any part of you know, the world, because each place is different and the people in the places are different.
01:58:58
Speaker 1: So well, will that book come out? I hope next year? Is it with your normal publishers? Yeah, same publisher What are you gonna do next now that you finish that? I don't know.
01:59:10
Speaker 2: I haven't really decided. I wanted to do a book about steamboat explosions. See this reaction makes you think I should do it because they blew up all the time, and you can find stories of steamboats in the middle of Mississippi that blew up and people were ended up on either sides of the river.
01:59:32
Speaker 1: Oh, I mean huge explosions where people would just.
01:59:35
Speaker 2: You know, and the you know, there's a lot of cool stuff about steamboat.
01:59:38
Speaker 1: Explosions should write that proposal.
01:59:40
Speaker 2: I would. What I'll do is I'll say, go to uh Stephen Ranella's podcast and this is where it started. But uh yeah, I mean the problem with explosions is they happen, and then there's the plot kind of has to start up again.
02:00:04
Speaker 1: You know.
02:00:04
Speaker 2: It's a little bit tricky as a plot device.
02:00:06
Speaker 1: Explosions blew up and blue people to both sides of the river.
02:00:11
Speaker 2: Absolutely. There's a very funny book, unintentionally funny book that came out in like eighteen fifty seven called Disasters on the Western Rivers and it has woodcuts of steamboats blowing up, and it'll say, you know, the explosion of the Saint Mary's and then there'd be this blamd of all steamboat parts flying. And then you turn a page and it'll be like, you know, the explosion of the City of Memphis, and there'll be another woodcut of a steamboat blowing up.
02:00:39
Speaker 1: What's the book call.
02:00:40
Speaker 2: It's called Disasters on the Western Rivers and it came out in like eighteen fifty seven or something.
02:00:46
Speaker 1: If you write a book about guide's called the same thing.
02:00:49
Speaker 4: Yep, that'd be really cool that the illustrations of those explosions always include some person silhouetted by the flames, which I appreciate that it's.
02:01:02
Speaker 1: Consistent, it's really true.
02:01:04
Speaker 4: What about a bird watcher's guide to picking out trophy bags from trees?
02:01:11
Speaker 2: Well, I was going to do a bags in Trees book, I even hobby table book. Somebody was offering to do that, but uh yeah, I didn't. Somehow we didn't end up doing that, and that was because we were a little bit early when we were doing it. If we did it now, we would do something online and I think we would get a lot of people that would be interested in it. But you know, you age out of that. It's it's really hard work. You're holding something up like that, stuff falls down on you. And I had one time I saw this thing up in a tree and it was really nasty looking, and it was a terry cloth towel and it was kind of bagged out a little bit, and it was hanging from one branch to another, kind of hammock like, and I thought, that thing's full of water. And so I have my snagger as a hook on the end, and I went up and hooked into that terry cloth towel and a rat ran.
02:02:08
Speaker 1: At me and it was like, wow, I was gonna have one hundred feet.
02:02:13
Speaker 2: I mean the guy, my friend Tim, who I was doing it with, said he looked at me and he thought I had been electrocuted.
02:02:20
Speaker 1: A wire.
02:02:21
Speaker 2: And I mean, but to have a rat looking right at you running down the pole, and the thing is he he got pretty close and before I could drop it, and then he jumped to a tree and then he jumped to the.
02:02:34
Speaker 1: Roof of like a store in yourbody.
02:02:38
Speaker 2: But I mean, rats, that was a high. It was a long jump.
02:02:40
Speaker 1: They can really fly. They're amazing.
02:02:43
Speaker 4: So you have a necessary gear chapter, and you have some cautionary tales wildlife con electricity, wildlife con.
02:02:53
Speaker 1: It's great.
02:02:53
Speaker 4: I have to clear up are who wrote a Boy with a gun?
02:02:59
Speaker 1: Give a boy gun?
02:03:00
Speaker 4: So give a boy a gun? A true story of law and disorder in the American West.
02:03:07
Speaker 1: That's the Claude Dallas story.
02:03:09
Speaker 4: Jack Olson told you give a boy a gun? Not jack Olson.
02:03:16
Speaker 1: The Strasser Todd What's that give a boy Gun about?
02:03:20
Speaker 4: It's an epistolary tale for young adults by Todd Strasser, first published in two thousands.
02:03:26
Speaker 1: Stool Dude, How many young adults out there are going to see a book that says an epistolary tale for young adults and pick that up. You know, I don't know, I'm no marketer, but crying out loud, well.
02:03:38
Speaker 4: Back in the days of kids being in libraries all the time, yeah, that probably would have been like give a boy a gun, great, Oh yeah.
02:03:43
Speaker 1: They would have know the name would have hooked him because they wanted a gun. Yeah, but then the epistolary part they would have lost them. Yeah, it'd be like pistols cool, Hey, give a piece of advice, for give a piece of a writer, because he used to give me a lot of writer's advice. What can for that?
02:04:00
Speaker 3: Can I ask questions? Both of you did the whole Like, don't write in a way where you start by explaining what you're gonna write, then you write what you're gonna write, and then explain what is that?
02:04:13
Speaker 1: No, I think that that was one of my own annoyances. Okay, all right, Where you start by how do I put it?
02:04:20
Speaker 3: You start by explaining what you're gonna write.
02:04:23
Speaker 1: You kind of explain what you're gonna write and write, and then you explain what you just wrote.
02:04:28
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, it's a common structure. You know, it's a common structure of sermons for example. You know, so this is what I'm gonna be telling you about. And then they tell you and then they tell you what they told you about. So it's not it's not uncommon. But no, you're saying advice about.
02:04:45
Speaker 1: Give some writerly advice for aspiring writers.
02:04:49
Speaker 2: Uh, hit them where they ain't well, you know, isn't that hitting advice like in base?
02:05:00
Speaker 7: You know?
02:05:01
Speaker 2: I mean when I moved to Missoula. I mean, this is a long way around of saying this, but when I moved to Missoula, there's a central building there on campus and it has a big high spire maybe you remember.
02:05:14
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, and something with the Mansfields or something. I don't know, it might have to do with the Mansfields.
02:05:22
Speaker 2: Yeah, And when we got there that week, somebody nobody knew who climbed up on that spire and impaled a pumpkin on this spire. How they did it was absolutely a mystery, you know, you just but it was a risky thing to do, and that like, I mean, I I was careful talking to young writers because I don't want to tell them to go out and do something dangerous. But if you pay attention to what people are writing about and what people are thinking about, it will run to a type. There's certain kinds of things that just everybody's sort of thinking the same thing. And that's the way it is with just human beings. And see the thing that people aren't thinking about in the way, for me, the bronx is an example. Nobody's thinking about the bronx, and or you know, people are, but it wasn't like a subject of people to means a light movement. But the other thing is do something that other people are afraid to do, because if you do that, you have got a book already, you know. I mean Neil Armstrong steps on the Moon, he's got a book. You know, if you're you know, if you do something that other people don't do, you might not even write about that thing. It would just put you in a frame of mind where you could you had authority, where you felt you had something to tell people. You know, if you do something that people are like drive across Siberia, most people would say, don't do that, why do that? But if you do it, then you have something to write about. So that's sort of just a simple nonfiction way of doing it. How people write fiction is another question. I don't I have written one nonfiction. I have written one novel, and it was called The Cursing Mommy's Book of Days. I had this character called the Cursing Mommy who starts out to make like chilli and she's telling me how she makes a chili and then everything goes wrong and she's just cursing like crazy. And this was about how she kind of it was a year in her life, and it was, you know, it was an attempt. I don't really feel that fiction is my is my thing, but but for nonfiction, it's a question of looking and seeing what other people are doing and what other people aren't doing and telling something that you feel like really people should know, I mean, and you'd look for stuff like that. So I don't know what would your writerly advice be.
02:07:48
Speaker 1: So I don't know. I got a there's a work ethic like you you're not a preachy person, but there's a work ethic component. And I don't know. You might not remember the story. Uh, just as you mentored me, you had you were mentoring some other guy after me, and somehow you had gotten something lined up for them. You'd gotten a writing piece lined up for him, and they told you they couldn't do it because they had to go on family vacation. Yeah, and you were done with that person. Now that's you were just so like dismayed and blown away.
02:08:34
Speaker 2: I don't remember who what the specific person would have been, but that was like, that's it. Yeah. If somebody says, well, I also have to do such, I said, no, you don't. You don't also have to do anything else.
02:08:46
Speaker 1: I can't. I remember you tell me that you were just like so endo that mentorship. Yeah. Uh, we're gonna do trivia next, You're gonna stick around. Okay, h do you know about what I'm talking about?
02:09:03
Speaker 2: I haven't. I haven't listened to a trivia show of yours yet.
02:09:06
Speaker 1: You see that where it says, uh, where's the visitors thing? At bottom? We've had eight wins by trivia guests.
02:09:16
Speaker 5: Really.
02:09:17
Speaker 1: Wow, Okay, I think you might. You have he has you have a very good chance of doing.
02:09:22
Speaker 2: Okay, well I'll take as take a shot.
02:09:24
Speaker 1: Okay, for those of you listen, you want to check it out. The writer Ian Fraser, author of a bunch of books, the Ones for for our Audience, I would say the Fish's Eye Great Planes, and then it's I think travels in Siberia, great planes, Fish's Eye travels. And is that all right? That's insulting?
02:09:59
Speaker 7: No, not.
02:10:00
Speaker 1: They're all adventure books in a way. I put that. I put great Planes on like anytime I have to do, like like the greatest books of all time, my favorite books of all time. Well, I'm I'm happy to hear that. I mean, it's just oh, it's good. It's like, I mean, it changed my worldview, man, it really did.
02:10:22
Speaker 2: I'm honored.
02:10:23
Speaker 1: I know you wrote a long time ago. You wrote a ton of stuff since then, and maybe it's annoying to hear about some book you wrote a long time. It doesn't bother me to hear about stuff I wrote a long time ago.
02:10:31
Speaker 2: No, it doesn't, it doesn't. But uh, you know, you think you have to do you want to do the next thing too, so sure it's uh, sometimes you just there will be the one thing that you do and that that might be that might be it. But but uh, but yeah, I'm always I'm looking for the next thing. And I feel I feel good about steamboat explosions.
02:11:00
Speaker 1: No, I'm feeling good about what did you say, the Bronx book's gonna be.
02:11:03
Speaker 2: Called it's going to be called Paradise Bronx.
02:11:06
Speaker 1: Okay, and then the other one will be called Disasters on Western Rivers.
02:11:10
Speaker 2: Dars, No, it might be Actually I love that title, Disasters on the Western River.
02:11:17
Speaker 1: You start a rock band with the same name. Yeah, alright, stay tuned, you'll see what always comes out the next day, right.
02:11:24
Speaker 4: Trivie days Wednesdays, So.
02:11:26
Speaker 1: If you're listening with this hot off the press, it's Monday joining Wednesday for the Trivia Show, in which Ian Fraser maybe wins, probably not, probably not. Maybe try to build up suspense.
02:11:42
Speaker 2: I want to keep down expectations.
02:11:44
Speaker 1: So see you all at the Trivia show. Thanks for joining.
02:11:58
Speaker 7: Seal out Shine like Silver in the Sun.
02:12:07
Speaker 1: Ride, Ride, Ride on alone, Sweetheart. We're done beat this damp horse to death.
02:12:20
Speaker 6: Taking a new one and ride.
02:12:26
Speaker 2: We're done beat this damn horseday, So take a new one and ride on
Presented By
Featured Gear
While you're listening
Wildlife Management
Elk Season Is Now Jail Season: Oregon Poacher Hit with Creative Sentence
An Oregon man will spend the next three elk seasons in jail after a judge handed down a creative sentence for what law enforcement officials dubbed a “wildlife crime spree.”
Walker Erickson, 28, of Pendleton, pleaded guilty to 22 charges stemming from an 18-month period in which he poached six deer...
Jordan Sillars
Aug 30, 2023
Read More
Play Now
Scout
Where Do Deer Sleep?
Deer spend most daylight hours lying in their bed, so it’s no wonder why so many hunters talk about whitetail bedding, specifically buck bedding. It’s a deer’s home, essentially—the place they’re most secure and protected. Because of this, they’re often located in areas that humans aren’t likely to...
Beau Martonik
May 19, 2022
Read More
Play Now
Habitat
Breach It and They Will Come
An idea once considered radical—removing dams on rivers to restore fisheries—is becoming mainstream as scores of conservation efforts are paying off with restored river habitats and rejuvenated fisheries across North America.
In 1981, when the environmental group Earth First! wanted a publicity...
Ben Long
Jun 15, 2019
Read More
Play Now
Save this episode
Conversation