The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 185: Tom McGuane On The Beauty of Not Knowing

Episode Date: September 9, 2019

Steven Rinella talks with the author Tom McGuane, Corinne Schneider, and Janis Putelis.Subjects discussed: What to write on your gravestone; Tom's lifelong bond with Jimmy Buffett and Jim Harrison; is Jack Nicholson kind of a prick?; living with Marlon Brando; The Missouri Breaks; shooting into coveys; the profile of a "Fudd"; the relationship between biodiversity and active ranch land; before Key West became Key West; America as a people; becoming nobody on a windy porch; and more. Connect with Steve and MeatEaterSteve on Instagram and TwitterMeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YoutubeShop MeatEater Merch Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Download the Hunt app from the iTunes or Google Play Store. Know where you stand with OnX. All right, Thomas McGuane, are you okay talking about really old work of yours? Oh, sure. I don't care what we talk about. Because when you look at all the things you've done and written, where does Rancho, where does the movie Rancho Deluxe, where do you stack that into? If you had a tombstone and they were going to list your accomplishments on your tombstone. Right. Would I put Rancho Deluxe there?

Would Rancho Deluxe make the tombstone? I've already written the text for the tombstone. It says, it's been a great life. I wish I understood it. Well, Rancho Deluxe was a happy accident in a way. I mean, it's never stopped playing, as I'm sure you're aware. But basically what happened was a producer bought 92 in the shade, and they couldn't get the financing together in the short term.

And they said, do you have, because they didn't have a script. They said, do you have anything ready to go? And I said, yes, I do. I have a screenplay ready to go. That wasn't true. I hadn't written anything. And he said, well, I'll be back in two weeks, and let's see what you've got.

So I went into my son's bedroom. He was about 10 years old at the time. And in two weeks, I had written Rancho Deluxe, and he flew in from L.A., and I said, here it is. He went back to my son's bedroom, and he came back out, and he said, this is great. We're going to make it. So it was a lucky thing from then on. And then there were people who just were amused by the idea.

Jeff Bridges was early in his career. sam watterson was early in his career my brother-in-law did the music uh other people came up to hang out like warren oats and harry dean stanton and other people we just had a lot of fun making that movie so i'm glad i have found an audience oh i recommend it to people all the time but i find that when i show it to people they need to have they need to have a little bit of pre-awareness yeah of the the west yeah and some of the conflicts and different personality right archetypes from the west well or else they wind up being a little baffled by it well that's good it's a litmus test yeah that's good because that was actually that was actually the impulse to

write it write it because i mean we're i was under when i got here in the 60s i was aware there was this kind of official version of montana life which was the same as the chamber of commerce version it was all big sky um cowboys and Indian stuff. And everybody I knew was poaching, selling the ill-gotten gains to buy dope and motorcycle parts. I thought, well, this is what I know to be going on. Why doesn't anybody talk about this? So that's kind of what I wanted to do. I haven't quite got over that, actually. why doesn't anybody talk about this so that's what i want that's kind of what i wanted to do

i haven't quite got over that actually i'm still very conscious between uh of the tension between what i know is a day-to-day person in montana for 52 years with the official version of life in montana and i've always felt that tension and i went and i like to use that to think up things I want to write about. You mentioned that your brother-in-law does the music, and your brother-in-law is Jimmy Buffett. Right. And he has a cameo.

By the way, he had a concert yesterday in Michigan. Oh, he did? 42,000 people came. Wow. By the way, I have to interject that I just came back from a book festival in France. Do you know how many readers came?

61,000. Wow. They were running trains from Paris to Saint-Malo and Brittany just to carry readers. Could that happen here? No. No. Yeah, that's really amazing. And in France, I know that your late friend, Jim Harrison,

would talk about how well his books would do in France. Do you have a lot of readers? Do you get a lot of readers in France? He and I both have more French readers than American readers. Really? Yeah. In fact, one of the publishers over there said, you literary people would be out of business

if it weren't for France. Semi-true. Harrison was there like 10 times a year. Yeah, he's always been honored over there. Yeah, and he had a huge following there. He was really kind of a rock star over there. Odd who they settled on. Not odd in jim's case

but like paul oster who's a sort of a not easily absorbed writer he's another rock star in france this i'm gonna come back to my question i didn't get to my thing yet about rancho deluxe but what because i you know i as i talk about often i grew up up in Michigan. Right. And we would, and you, for us, like kids that like to read. Right. And like to fish and hunt. Like we all idolized you guys. And we would think of you as like nuts on a dog, you and Jim Harrison. Right.

Where people would be like, who do you like to read? And people would say McGuane and Harrison. Has that, do you feel that that's just a thing that comes from like a Michigan perspective where you guys are so lumped in because you both kind of went to the same school there? Yeah. Or has that been your whole life

have you found that people will roll you guys together even though your writing is so different yeah no that's true uh i mean it's confusing i think you know i mean jim and i were pals from the time we were just out of our teens really you know i mean we just kind of grew up in some ways together, you know, pretty closely linked. We wrote letters each, at least every week to each other for almost a half century. I mean, we only stopped writing letters when he died. I mean, we did this. So we were mentally really involved in each other's consciousness, you know, to the degree that since Jim died, I've got this kind of, it's like a blank channel on my phone or some blank thing.

I don't know what to do with it because I filled it up for two-thirds of my life with these dialogue that we had going. Jim and I were very interested in the same things. Other than literature, we both hunted and fished constantly or just found some reason to be outdoors. He was a bird watcher. We didn't want to be in the house is the bottom line. And he was a terrible hunter and fisherman.

He was all in his head, really. I remember one time where he couldn't hit the barn with a bull fiddle. But if you ever shot something, he'd run out and grab it and say, it's mine. Oh, yeah? And one time, I said, now, Jim, I said, I just shot that grouse. You know it's not yours. He said, I know it is mine. And I said, well, okay, but how could we ever prove this?

I said, you did let off your gun, but I know you can't hit anything. He said, we're going to get a cheese grater and we're going to shred this bird and count pellets. And he said, what are you shooting? I said, I don't know. I'm shooting seven and a half. He said, well, I'm shooting eights and we'll be able to tell after we shred this bird. Did you ever find out? No, we didn't. I think as usual, I just handed the bird over. But he had this tremendous responsiveness to anything in the natural world.

I mean, he just ignited, you know, in the presence of any little thing that was going on he felt you felt that in a like he did in a genuine way not just in a literary way no it was very genuine like if he wasn't a writer he would still be doing that same thing yeah right i think that's right yeah that's where it hard a little bit hard to understand him as I get older and older, is it's hard to, he kind of, in some ways, set the stage a little bit for the literary madman. He kind of created, in some ways, he kind of created what we expected to see there yeah and it was always hard to tell like as i get older it's hard to tell to to what degree that that he did it because he got away with it you know like he did it because that became expected of him you know yeah there's a lot of that the wine and the food and yeah the women you know yeah i think that's right i mean there was a lot of that going on in that era you know hunter thompson was very much like you know yeah i think that's right i mean there was a lot of that going on in that era you know hunter thompson was very much like you know my son worked as hunter thompson's bodyguard briefly

oh yeah and i was around hunter a lot too and you you know you to spend a a day with hunter doing stuff or being around be very normal but the minute there was an audience around everything changed you know for the worse yeah uh jim was very audience aware too i think is that right yeah but um he was also you know he was he was a very genuine in other ways and the other thing about harrison he was not often recognized, is he was unbelievably intelligent. You could give him a tough European 500-page novel, and he'd read it overnight and remember everything in it. So that was probably the first thing I would think about with Jim. But he was also pretty curiously self-propelled.

I mean, he would come out to Montana for long, long stretches. Nobody ever knew he had a wife and children. I mean, he just did what he felt like doing. He was remarkably either independent or unilateral, however you want to look at it. I want to come back to my question about Rancho Deluxe. I worked as an arborist for several years in western Montana, and I met a guy, the last name of him was Glenda,

and he had been brought up on a ranch in the Bridger Range. And he one day was telling me, he said, he was reminiscing about being a kid. And he talked about how they were filming a movie once. And his dad sold someone. I can't remember if it was a bull or a steer. Oh, yeah. I know that know that yeah i know that bull and i know that family yeah right there's a big cheryl a yeah it was great great that was a great that bull was a great actor you know we put him in a motel room i don't know how we did that

oh no was that the one because i thought the one he was talking about. Yeah, you're right. Oh, he's talking about the one we shot? Maybe it was the one. I just can't remember. But he had no idea about the movie. He just knew a story about some people making a movie. Maybe it was the one that went into the hotel room.

Yeah. And then we thought, well, we've got him in the hotel room. What are we going to do with him? And then he charged the tv set and explode the tv exploded perfect for the film completely unplanned yeah and then the one the one that gets shot with the one gets it's so obvious like if you've seen animals you know you know when you're seeing something real it's like apocalypse now i made the mistake recently of showing my nine-year-old the end sequence of apocalypse now right where they kill a water buffalo right and i didn't remember it the way that it looked and it traumatized him a little bit yeah i bet but watching in rancho deluxe like that was a time

like that stuff doesn't wouldn't really happen anymore. No. That they would take a Sharps Buffalo rifle. And shoot something for the camera. Yeah. Well, we had stuff like that happen. I'm glad it doesn't happen anymore. I mean, we had some catastrophes.

We were making Missouri breaks with horses. We wanted horses to swim the Big Horn, and they got tangled up with old barbed wire on the bottom and horrible stuff. Yeah, and that was your film with Marlon Brando. Right. Did you work on that one? Yeah, I lived with Brando for a while.

That's a huge hit in Europe. The Missouri Breaks. Yeah, it's widely considered the best modern Western. Really? Just mad about it. I love it. Yeah, it's so off the wall. You know, I mean, it was very interesting.

I mean, Jack Nicholson's kind of a prick, but Brando was really a fabulous human being. I just enjoyed all the time I had with him because he just had almost a Harrison kind of big aura, you know, naturally speaking. And a very unusual person. I mean, when I was staying with him, these kids would come over to the house

to get him to repair their bicycles, and he had a little workshop, and he could do some electronics and fix their walkman. I mean, he's just a very ordinary guy. Never saw The Godfather. Never saw the movie. Really? That's how detached he was from the industry.

What did you not like about Jack Nicholson? Oh, he's just a prick, you know uh it's a great actor yeah he was very much overshadowed by brando brando did an interview in which he said it was he loved watching jack act he said because like watching a guy with one finger play a piano with one key. That didn't bode well. And then we cast the girl, this hot girl, you know, for the love interest thing. And she was just this gorgeous girl. And Nicholson's trying to be sort of interested in her, you know,

sort of get into the sort of mood for the movie. When they arrive in Montana, she announced that she was a lesbian and moved into a tent with her girlfriend. That's it. So anyway, you had to adapt. Man, that was such a, it seems like such an unusual time there

to be involved in the culture around here because i feel like this area hadn't really been discovered by broader america no it's true you know and i i feel some of that's my fault but you know i was i mean i was broke you know i was trying to figure out how to survive here and you can't i couldn't really survive writing literary fiction. I had a teaching gig at Berkeley one season, and I thought, oh, I don't want to do this because I love teaching, but I didn't want to write at the end of a teaching day. And so I had to make some choices,

and so I moved over and got a place for $28 a month on South 8th Street in Livingston and just started scrambling. I wrote for Sports Illustrated. I wrote novels. I wrote short stories. And then I wrote some movies. I heard an interview with you not long ago

where you were talking about that you like to hunt quail. Yeah, I like any kind of bird hunting, yeah. And you had an observation about quail hunting where, and I might get this wrong, but I think this is basically what you'd said, is that when there's a covey of quail and you kill one of them, you don't have the guilt that you might not otherwise have

because you think of the being as being the covey yeah and it the covey lives on well it's true first of all it's true but yeah but you so the same thing could be true of any population if you look at it at a metal level well that's you could kill a human and be like well but humanity lives on yeah well that's a great point actually and i'm you're a little jump ahead of me on that. But I think you're right. You know, Yvon Chouinard once said, he said, people are really, in the animal world, when they talk about hunters, they're very worried about the individual animal and not particularly worried about the species. Yeah. And that's key to what you guys are doing.

And I agree with that. However, every now and then I'll be out grouse hunting and two grouse will get up, like it's late November. I'll kill one of them. And the other one goes off for a long winter. And I sort of feel shitty. Oh, I can imagine, yeah. But for some reason, I mean, i have a covey of huns that i've

been shooting into for 30 years they're always the same size you know it's always 12 to 16 birds i'll kill three or four birds every year covey's always in the same place it's always the same size if they're grasshoppers for the babies that year. Did you used to hunt big game a little bit? Yeah, I did. And your interest in that faded? I don't know. I mean, I was getting to be a little bit of a trophy hunter, which was sort of against my principles.

But we ate a lot of game. I remember when my son and I, I was, for a while, was a single parent, and we were eating a lot of game. And didn't have any money. And I said to him one time, oh, I had a movie sale. Something happened. I had a bunch of money suddenly. And I said to him, I'm going to town to get some steaks. We're not going to eat this deer meat for a while.

And so I went in, I got these beautiful ribeyes, you know, and he was out playing in the yard, and I cooked up these ribeyes. And he came walking in the house, and he said, oh, my God, what's stinking up the house? I said, it's these steaks. He said, oh, God, throw them away. The whole house stinks. He ran around opening the windows to get this beef stink out

of the house so that kind of was a watershed moment for me i mean it's just uh that and the fact the over noticed fact that people don't seem to know where meat comes from. Yeah. And. I like how you say that's overnoticed. Yeah. And I remember one time we were down in Florida and my wife, I like to snook fish and my wife loves to eat snook, you know. And she said, she was going to the movies in the little community center.

She said, catch a snook tonight. We'll have a snook for dinner. So I went out and labored away and I hooked this big snook and i'm down on the dock and i'm getting ready to give him the wood shampoo and my wife's car lights come into the driveway and she gets out of the car and i said i got one i'm just going to bring him up to the house now and she said don't hurt him but if it had been a fillet she'd have been happy yeah when you say you became a trophy hunter for a while what do

you mean well i got like interested trying to find a big like you found yourself mule deer wanting to find a big mule deer yeah and uh did you find one yeah a huge one he there's five of them i killed the big one it looked like an elk lying out among the five-pointers. I mean, he had an orange crate on his head. And I knew I'd never kill a bigger one. And also, I questioned how good he was going to be to eat. And, but, I mean, I look back on it. I mean, I really miss those days of really being obsessed, you know, getting up in the morning and thinking which way the

wind is and how much snow there is and, you know, where I think they'll be that day or where I could stake out where they'll come out of the trees. I mean, where that whole scenario is running in your head, it's fun to be obsessed, you know, I mean, I like being obsessed and I kind of miss that part of it. And on strictly the meat level, I mean, probably last year's fawn would be the one to shoot. If you want some meat, there's not much of a quest involved there.

There's no, the sort of predatory adrenaline doesn't necessarily get engaged over that sort of thing. But probably one of the reasons I've drifted toward bird hunting so much is I really get engaged over that that sort of thing but probably one of the reasons i've drifted toward bird hunting so much is i really get obsessed with that i you know i've always i've had bird dogs my entire life and just watching each one's mind develop and how they get how they figure the game out and how we do this together um uh that that's a similar obsession and you try you travel a little bit to hunt right because i remember in an email you mentioned you were down in texas hunting quail yeah i've got a friend who lives over by mcallister who had a little uh quail camp down there um

a couple of trailers on a lot in West Texas, and then we find leases or places we can go. Yeah. I have a friend, Burt Jones. Do you remember Burt Jones, the quarterback for Indianapolis? No. He's a great player. You know him, Yanni?

I don't. Really? Yeah. I know. Yeah. He's a wonderful guy. Anyway, he's got a quail east out there in West Texas. West Texas is a great place to bird hunt because it's totally, first of all, there's a lot of habitat left in West Texas for these birds.

And it's completely dependent on weather. I mean, it'll go almost to zero where you couldn't find a quail with a helicopter. And a year later later they're hitting you in the head you know just depending on the rain and the particular distribution of weeds and things like that um so anyway i'm going to hunt with him this year and then broco and i went to a couple of places uh uh in georgia and um north florida fact, my cousins were all here. We had a big quail dinner the night before last. I brought a lot of them back.

But that whole quest thing, that shared thing, for 40 years I competed on cutting horses. And there's a little similar thing where you're trying to understand what that horse is figuring out, and you're trying to cooperate in that quest, and it's the same with bird dogs. You see that moment where they're wondering if they're kind of off track, and they look up at you,

and they're 100 yards out, and you go like, that communication thing, and then when, boom, when it works, and they've got them, and you know they're out in front, and it's your job now, and they've got them and you know they're out in front and it's your job now and they're kind of they're going to look back a little bit like this and i mean it's very the heat is rises yeah what is it real quick what does it mean to compete on a cutting horse oh that's a long story but i mean if you don't haven't seen a something, I mean, the rule book is 80 pages long. But it's basically sorting cattle in a competitive situation.

It's a very athletic, speedy, tough thing to figure out. You never get to the bottom of it. It's very tough. And sorting, just like they throw you in an arena with 100, and you have to cut out the two males? Right. You'd have to see it. We'd have to have a video to show you what was going on, you know, what correctness and what horses are doing, what the riders are doing.

But the analogy to bird hunting is that it doesn't work unless you have a pretty profound and sort of emotional relationship with that horse or that dog. I mean, I've seen really good dog handlers. If that dog got out 300 yards and you wanted to stop and turn and go someplace else, I know dog handlers go tap on the whistle and that dog will freeze and just chill and go someplace else. Whereas if you can blow the whistle all day long, that dog won't even hear you. And all it is is a tap. But the communication is so intricate at that level that,

and you have to work at it all the time for it to happen. So that's kind of supplanted my big game hunting thing. But I really value the impulse to hunt big game. I mean, we all talk about this all the time, but they need stakeholders. Yeah. And I was fishing in the Bahamas with Johnny Morris. You guys know who Johnny Morris is? Yeah, the founder of Bass Pro Shops. Yeah, he's got 200 million loyal customers.

He just won the Audubon Award. Very much more of an environmentally alert person than the Cabela's group were. It's one and the same now. Yeah, but... Yeah, because of the purchase, yeah. And, but their data tells them that the gun and hunting community is declining.

And I was talking to my friend and barber at Big Timber, and his son manages Cabela's in Missoula, and they're frustrated because they're not getting the volume of weaponry that they used to get before this changeover. It's because Johnny Morris knows the future really is fishing, not hunting. Yeah.

And, you know, we have a wonderful shop here in town, sporting goods store, called The Sport. Have you all ever been in The Sport? No. I haven't. Anyway, it's a real depot for gun sales and stuff like that. And until very recently, it was just, you know, all sporting things, you know, varmint rifles,

big game rifles, and shotguns, and all that stuff. Well, it's just the great presence of concealable weapons now and AK-47s. It's completely supplanted this sort of, not completely, they still carry a lot of stuff, but there's, I mean, it's a huge presence in that store in Big Timber. I mean.

Yeah, yeah. You know. So, you know, I know there's a lot of zealotry around the Second Amendment and a lot of zealotry around the Second Amendment and a lot of controversy about that, but all these people who are sort of gun nuts, I'm sort of a gun nut, but all these people who are sort of gun nuts, who are fanatical about our rights to have every kind of gun and have it in every place, church and school, every place, by the way, except the legislature and the banks.

Can't take guns there you take him to kindergarten but you can't take him to a bank yeah I've seen warning signs in entering sporting goods stores yeah about yeah you can't take him to the NRA convention yeah yeah in Las Vegas yeah so but but my point is not so much that, is that they're more interested in what often flies under the aegis of hunting weapons. They're more interested in protecting the rights to have as many of those as they want. They're not very interested in protecting the quarry or the wildlife that these are supposedly being sold to exploit.

So they're not battlers for public land access. They're not battlers for well-being, wildlife, any of that. They just want the guns. And I don't get that. A lot of people become pretty segmented when it comes to things that they're giving advocacy for. Yeah.

You know, like when someone's a crusader for something, they tend to fixate. Well, that's possible. Yeah. You know, like when someone's a crusader for something, they tend to fixate. Well, that's possible. They ought to notice the sort of boundaries there. I mean, it's like the smart play there. The smart play is to understand. Right. The smart play there is to understand.

And I think the people that were playing the real long game on that do understand that public participation in certain activities depends on viable resources and depends on access and then they understand that but some people um you know there's people like there's elements of the of the gun community that they even have a derogatory term for people that focus too much on hunting where you become a fighter that exists a f FUD would be someone who views firearm ownership through the lens of hunting would be a FUD. F-U-D?

I guess, yeah, I'm gathering Elmer FUD. Oh. Oh. Yeah. Have you found... Well, you can't fix stupid. Have you found in your career... There's probably a double-edged sword to your involvement throughout your life with hunting, the implicit, explicit involvement with firearm ownership and fishing where it's made up so much of what you write about.

Yeah. And so much of your understanding of the world. Right. understanding of the world right but then you out of necessity and perhaps personal preference you've worked with many people who would be regarded you know like people in los angeles or hollywood right people in new york who would have an innate suspicion of those things so on one hand you're probably uh penalized in some way because of the things you've been involved in but on the other hand you wouldn't be here if it weren't for those things because those are the things that make up

your work when I hear that like in my line of work personally when I hear that some media enterprise or whatever doesn't want to work with us because of the hunting thing or because of the gun thing I'm always like oh

what a bummer but i'm like beholden if it wasn't for those things i wouldn't talk i wouldn't have any reason to be in the conversation anyways yeah because this is all i've ever talked about yeah right right right how have you ever felt that uh have you ever felt that in a way that was painful to you well you know uh know, I'm at the American Academy, and I go back there for those meetings, and one of my good friends is Joy Williams, and Joy Williams wrote the most eloquent anti-hunting book ever.

She's the best anti-hunting writer out there. No, she's fantastically good, and she just feels it very strongly. I mean, I don't quibble at all with the genuineness of her rage against the idea of killing animals and the old the old head of uh the uh uh humane society once said you know why would you want to kill something that wished to live you know it's a big question. Yeah. How do you get around it? I mean, you can't skip it, you know. And I'm not sure you get by by saying an incremental portion of the meat I eat,

I kill myself, you know. I mean, I'm a big McDonald's guy. Oh, is that right? Yeah. Yeah, I like junk food. I like good food. I like junk food i like good food i like junk food but uh um so the but when i'm back in the bubble you know i know there are things that's just going to be warfare if we want to have to talk about it

i'm under contract to the new yorker i wouldn't send them a hunting story i don't i barely would send them a fishing story you send them a lot of story with a lot of cattle ranchers. Yeah. Oh, listen, I'm aware of the contradictory nature of it. There's no doubt about it. Do you feel that they would not publish a story that had a protagonist or antagonist who was a hunter? Yeah. I don't know, but probably not.

But I mean, one of the things that drives me, and one reason I'm fairly comfortable with the ranching culture, is that some pretty profound studies have indicated that when a ranch goes out of business for any reason, if it goes out of business for any reason, no matter what other trajectory it goes to, biodiversity drops sharply.

Okay? So even though most of my friends at this point in my life are right-wing ranchers, for reasons I can never quite understand. But my county went 93% for Donald Trump. Uh, they're doing, I don't want them to go out of business, you know, and also, uh, also I know that their reasons for voting and thinking the way they do are a lot more subtle than are ascribed to them. A lot of them I know had problems with Obama, not because he was black, but because he was an elitist and talked like a Harvard guy. They had real issues with his way of expressing himself. He reminded them of the kind of people that are trying to run them out of here.

They didn't care if he's black. It didn't mean anything to them. Yeah. I think there is a simplified way. I found that time and again where there's a very, but people on both sides do it. When you try to boil people's motivations down to something that you know is unfair. Yeah. But it helps with

the rhetoric yeah i just got a friend of mine just forward uh forwarded uh a really brilliant piece actually it was in the washington post that rahm emanuel wrote rom fish is here and it was the idea that the only way to beat trump is the the best way to beat Trump is to not try to out-Trump him. And that the idea that the squad is going to somehow or another distort the election is just craziness because moderates have always dominated presidential elections. But it is tempting to fight fire with fire you know I mean I find this age culturally politically to be unbelievably obnoxious mm-hmm you know I was just I just came

back from this tour book tour in Europe and I mean they want to know why we machine-gun our kids and why we do all these awful things. And it used to be, you go to France, there's quite a little bit of hostility between the Americans and French people, even among intellectuals and cultural elites. It's not true anymore. They just feel sorry for us.

They think that we are taking what was the greatest experiment in democracy in the history of the world and ruining it. And they can't figure out why we're doing that. They mean that because they, you think they mean that just because of the aesthetics. Like the name calling and the divisiveness. Right. Like that aspect of American politics.

That level of discourse of the kind of wall building and the country built on the idea of free trade wanting to launch all these tariffs. I mean, this doesn't make sense to them. It looks like we've flipped out. And knowing that that approach has tremendous support here. It's kind of alarming. But if you live in a very conservative community,

you know that that's just part of what people are. That's just part of what people are. It's not as sweeping an indictment as it looks like it is. Hey, folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And boy, my goodness, we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes and our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join our Northern brothers get irritated. Well, if you're sick of, you know,

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feel out of place but do you feel out of place being in a, I mean, being, you've been involved in ranching. Yeah. But you sit outside of ranchers in general. Just being a writer is bad enough. I mean, no, I was, I feel pretty comfortable. You know, I spent 10 years roping steers in the Northern Rodeo Association. Yeah, no, I know. And, you know, they think I'm, they just view my progressivism as just another quirk you know some guy's got a drinking problem i've got a

progressivism problem what are the because there's a there's a three you sit on the you're in the fly fishing hall of fame right the academy of arts and letters yeah and then there's a there's a schizophrenic yeah no there's a but what's the you're in some horse hall of fame yeah cutting horse hall of fame yeah i don't know i mean i just saw this thing uh i read this quote it was just so great dostoevsky visited charles dickens uh and uh charles dickens said, I'm really two people. He said, I'm the person who creates all these positive characters. I'm also the guy that creates Scrooge. And he said, there's two of me that does these two things.

And Dostoevsky said, only two? So. I read an interview with you where you were talking to, So he said, only two? I read an interview with you where you were talking to, I think he's like a literary reviewer. I can't remember his name, but like a literary figure. And you were talking about a thing that you like, you were explaining a thing you liked about horses and you think you liked about fishing is they

had ritualistic qualities to them yeah i think that's right yeah can you explain that a little bit uh i think it's partly that and as some i mean i my my problem my father used to accuse me this is i'm just interested in so many things you know that it's a problem i could see that yeah and and uh but those are things that really concentrate me. You know, I mean, and pretty quickly too. I mean, this afternoon I'm going to string up a fly rod. And the minute I set foot in the river, all the kind of conflicts and sort of multiplicity of my brain life are going to go away. I'm just going to go away. I'm just going to, I mean, I'm going to get focused.

And part of the things that enables you to focus, you don't have to reinvent the wheel every time you go hunting or you go fishing. There is ritualized behavior that has a quasi-religious dimension to it. And since I don't have any other kind of religion, I like to access that thing, that pattern of doing things. It's the right way to do things. Yeah. And hunting's full of that. And so is fishing.

Give an example of a of a activity that you had fine I mean an activity within the activity an activity within fishing or an activity within hunting that would be the type of ritualistic behavior you're talking about let me think if I come up with that well I'm not sure I can I'd have have to brood on that for a while. What you're saying, I think, so that I understand correctly, it's not so much the rituals that man or humans have come up

for these activities, but more so the rituals that just come about of doing the activity. Well, I think probably that. I mean, some of it is habit form. There's some of the things, you know, that my father and my grandfather were hunters. There are right ways to do things.

There are right ways around guns and dogs and things that you're supposed to do, how you're supposed to take care of things. And you really feel it when you're around people who haven't had that kind of approach to it. They don't have to inherit it genetically, but they have to honor these kinds of practices about the way you do things.

And I guess that's ritualized. No, that's a funny observation. Not funny, but I do notice that. I hadn't thought to put it in those words, but when you're with someone, I spend a lot of time around people who have began hunting later in life they began fishing later in life and it does that they have in

their behavior or in the way they do things you realize there's nothing really wrote yeah there's nothing that they do it because that's how they were shown to do it and always did it yeah And I find too, now that I'm a parent, I oftentimes encounter other parents with young kids who, for whatever reason, are parenting with all new strategies that they learned or read about or heard about, rather than sort of the activities that you would have seen the way your grandparents behaved, and there was a way your parents behaved, and the expectations of children. And these things sort of march on.

And then I'll meet people who parent totally outside of whatever inertia has gathered up. Right. Yeah, that's great. That's interesting. And they're like, oh, no, we're trying a new type of parenting. Yeah. And it strikes me in the same way that you see the same thing in certain like just tying a fishing hook on. Yeah.

Like there's the person that does it fishing hook on yeah like there's the person that does it all the time and there's a person that seems to be dabbling yeah right like the dabbles in it right right um i just had a thought of a version of that i have a a good friend i won't name him because he's so well known but oh go ahead but, you know, I've fished for steelhead for a long time and there's a lot of stuff about fishing through a run. And if you catch a fish, you know, you need to go all the way back to the top of the run, let

whoever else is the run fish on. Like surfing. Yeah. And I was, I was in a Tierra del Fuego with this friend of mine and we hit this really great run on the Sea Run River. I said, you go ahead and fish through it, and I'll fish in behind you, and you catch a fish, blah, blah, blah. So he fished all the way down.

He gets to the bottom of the run, catches a nice fish, like a 16-pound Sea Run brown trout. And he circles all the way back, and he gets in front of me to do it again. And I remember fishing when I was living and going to school, steelhead fishing in Northern California. I mean, they'd have these lineups. It was really strict. Everybody in the lineup was a phenomenal caster.

They're all great fishermen. If you went down and caught a fish and circled up and got in front of him, it'd be time for an obituary. I mean, I looked at it and I thought, is that rude or is he stupid or greedy? I mean, I couldn't figure it out. He just doesn't know. I mean, I thought, I had the moment of being this sort of out-of-body experience.

Am I with a lunatic? I like reading your short stories a lot. Yeah. If I had to pick one thing of all the kinds of work you do from novels right short stories non-fiction essays you know i like your short stories the most okay personally i do too but why are your characters in your fiction so different and at wit's end and kind of disheveled in their personal lives then when you read you about you and your friends in your life it's it's like a completely different worldview well Well, I'm suppressing the truth. Well, I don't know, but I mean, I think that,

especially short-fisher, it depends on a sort of a crisis atmosphere. I mean, an effective short story, a lot should be at stake. It should not be the quotidian day-to-day lives of people, unless it's a Ray Carver story. So, I mean, narrative, fictional narrative is kind of driven by conflict in a way. And as Henry James said, it only has one responsibility, and that is to be interesting. It's not the same level of interest

that you have in Nonfiction, you know where it's fact driven or information driven or something like that. It's a very different kind of atmosphere So it calls on different things I think then that sort of stuff you would describe in your life as a hunter or fisherman or all those other things Although those could be part of it. I I'm reading this some Just got this book called Fishing in Paradise. It's got a title something like that, but it's about a guy who lived in Sweden

during the period, he's a fishing fanatic, and it was during the period when the Swedish dream of a sort of utopian society, that's the title, Fishing in Utopia, when the utopia dream in Scandinavia was still intact before the big waves of immigration, all the things that have changed that happened. And he's gone back as a fisherman, but he's really an observer of what has happened to this utopian fantasy of the Swedish people

and how it's changing everything. So the idea, I find this a very appealing idea, the idea of finding a way these things that we do impinge on other things that are less recreational, for example, than what we're talking about, or less focused, solipsistically focused on the things we want to provide for ourselves as individualized characters

known as the great hunter or the great fisherman or something like that. In other words, a little bit broader view of how these activities illuminate other things. So anyway, I just got this book, and I've just started reading it. It's a very interesting kind of way to do it in your characters also have an incredibly dim view of marriage you have a dim view of marriage and it's funny

because the thing that makes it okay I guess yeah is you the man is typically at the at fault well that's interesting I mean I like the idea of a faulty men you know that kind of feels to me I don't know why anybody gets married anymore I mean it seems like a slightly defunct institution. You think so? Well, I mean, what is it? I mean, it's sort of documentation for something you do anyway. And I have a checkered married history. I mean, my history is that I've been married three times, but I've now been married for 42 years to the same person.

So it's kind of a little bit of an odd thing. And one of the marriages was for like eight months. What goes on in an eight-month marriage? Lust, I guess. I don't know. Or an accident, or rebounding, or doing all those kinds of things. The background of growing up in an Irish Catholic household, which you're supposed to do. I mean, I would never have gotten married a second time under the current sort of cultural convictions.

But on the other hand, I've been in this really happy marriage for more than half my life. 42 years, that's a long time. And so I just don't see why it needs that kind of imprimatur you know of officialness uh not bad i mean if people feel more committed you know um then they should do it and i did it you know um but i don't think it has a lot of meaning anymore and you know statistically almost most marriages end in divorce so what does that say about it yeah that in and of itself what does that say about it it's a non-enduring institution no I think it was I feel that

it's helpful it it's helpful because it makes you take yourself seriously. Yeah. Oh, I see. That's what I felt. Yeah. I felt like all of a sudden it makes you take some part of yourself more seriously than you might otherwise. Well, that's a good reason to do it. And I feel like it also is like you're putting certain things to rest. Yeah.

You know? Chasing girls, right? Yeah, the time you spend. I remember a buddy of mine was talking about he got married, and the next day he felt like he needed one of those old top hats from the 1950s so he could like head out to work like he felt like he should be grabbing his briefcase and putting his hat on right and getting on to the business of life yeah now that he's married and he said that was the first time he ever felt that way. There was some other reason to go.

He needs counseling. Yeah. He had this other reason to go work. Did he fall out of his high chair? What happened? But yeah. Have you ever been married? No, I haven't.

And you're 35? Yes. And you're beautiful. What's going wrong here? Because you don't believe in the institution. No, it's not that it's uh you know i think for me a lot of things just need to feel right yeah and they need to feel healthy yeah um and you know just being aware of well you can't apply all these criteria you have to shoot from the hip Corinne if you're gonna continue let's put your headset on I gave you one I think there are a

couple of situations where I could have almost been at that place and then you know things fell apart has anyone asked you to get married and you said no? No, no, that hasn't happened. Yeah, I don't, you know, I don't think that we're ever at an arrived at place. I really, you know, if I look back at my life, past couple of years, the decade before, there's always been a core of myself that kind of knows, but a lot of other things may shift around. Do you wish you would ever get married?

Is that something you'd look forward to? I want a family. I would like a family. But I think that before that happens, I do want to feel that the person I'm with is committed to teaming up with me in doing that. Have you ever considered a starter hubby? A starter hubby.

No, no, I'm not sure if I have. I think I have maybe some feelings similarly to what you have around marriage as an institution. Right. And I think that, or I've come to a place now with the experiences that I've had that I think to be in partnership with someone is a choice that you make every day. Yeah. And that you renew that every day for as long as the both of you do. No. No. Then you're wasting all kinds of time. Why?

Because that's part of it. Do you feel like you stay in something and force yourself to be in it? Part of the beauty of it is this. Part of the beauty of it is, and not the whole thing, I'm not trying to trivialize marriage, but a nice thing about marriage

is that you make a set of decisions. You have a lot of time to think about those decisions, right? There's a hundred ways to get out of it. And you add it all up in your head and you decide that this is what I'll do. And then at that moment, you stop pretending that you didn't make that decision. It becomes like the thing that you did and the thing that you now do. And decision. It becomes like the thing that you did and the thing that you now do, and then you turn yourself to the other shit in life. And you don't wake up every day being like,

am I really committed to this person? You just decide that that's where you're at. And then that part of that question is gone and all the energy you'd apply to that question, you apply to other stuff. I don't think that most people go through the precursor that you described they all do they should yeah i agree okay i gotta tell i gotta tell you my approach to my very successful 41 or 42 year marriage

you can all learn from this please fall completely silent I want a reverent silence. You ready? I was lying on the floor of a bar in Key West with a cocktail in my hand. And my soon-to-be wife walked by and she had this heavy Alabama accent. And I heard her talking and I said, raised my glass and I said, will you marry me and take me to your southern mansion? and I heard her talking and I said, raised my glass and I said,

will you marry me and take me to your southern mansion? And she said, well, I don't have a mansion, but sure, I'll marry you. And we've been together for 42 years. Really? That's how much forethought went into this. So, like I say, I've thought them through before.

They failed. I never meant to move to Montana. Everything that ever happened to me was an accident. So this ratiocinative approach is going to blow up like an exploding cigar. Procrastinative approach. Right? It's like... It's going to blow up like an exploding cigar. Right? It's like if you intellectually make a decision to be a certain way into the future, then

what if a disconnect arises between what you decide intellectually you're going to be with who you organically feel you become based on your experiences day by day yeah well i like to think okay let me put it this way if i got out of it i like to think that i would do it as carefully and with as much thought as i got into it that's great sure the cre the key to the whole thing is uh comedy i mean uh if you if you like to laugh i do my wife likes to laugh we laugh all day long at one thing or another and when we quit going to cuttings we had people say to us because we had little living quarters in our trailer, they said, we don't know how to go to these rodeos anymore because we could always hear the laughter

out of your trailer at the first of daylight. And so that's really, you know, because you have inevitably, I mean, I don't know how early on you are in your marriage, but they're full of conflict one way or another. Oh, hell yeah, man. All the time. Do you feel like kids were a burden or a stress

on like, were you able to keep that level of laughter or was it a little bit of a low spot as you sort of had to deal with kids together? Well, it adds to the potential. It adds to the potential for conflict. So it tests your other resources, you know, I mean, because you see, you feel differently about what they should do.

It's unusual because I had children and my wife had children when we got married, and they became a sort of amalgamated family, and that worked out great. But Lori's daughter was like five years old. She's 50 now, but she was five years old when we first got together. Actually, my stepdaughter is the one I'm the closest to. So it's all so unpredictable. I mean, if I've learned anything in life, it's that. It's so unpredictable. And it's a great mistake to imagine that it is predictable, because then you start imposing this kind of template of what you imagine to be your control over future events, which is non-existent.

It's not the same as analyzing the stock market. I mean, it's much more myriad in its… But you just have to be good on your feet. You have to have a sense of humor have to be good on your feet you have to have a sense of humor and be really good on your feet and you have to have a highly qualified ego what do you mean by that? you have to lose that part of yourself that operates out

in the world where you really need to win a lot oh yeah I got you and to work over the long term you really need to win a lot. Oh, yeah, I got you. And you have to, for it to work over long-term, you have to have a really highly developed, you have to train yourself in this. You have to have a highly developed sense of fairness. You just have to think about fairness all the time in those kinds of things.

Have you given up on, or did you ever tally wins and losses in marriage uh i'm i do that do you yeah and i try them to quit but i do do it yeah i don't think i've done that you mean like other people's marriages no no no i mean i'll be like well i gave in on something oh that was important to me and I'm like okay never mind and I remember that and then I'm very aware of it the next time oh like your old one

yeah and I'll be like well you know I'll be like well yeah but I you need professional help it's not going to work for you I gave up on the one thing so I feel like I should up on the one thing so I feel like I should get this thing cuz I you won the oh I think you do do that actually a little bit what makes the one is somebody's not to you we'll make

formal deals to be like I'll stop talking about this yeah if if I get this win yeah no seriously not bring it back up. It's called negotiating. The one I hate is when you say, when you finally make a point, you're right about something, and the other person says, fine. I hate fine. You wanted more of a

you know what, you're right. I once told this woman who was in some kind of a relationship, I said, when the guy tells you that you're amazing? You're right. It's like, I once told this woman who was in some kind of a relationship, I said, you know, when the guy tells you that you're amazing, it's over. So. Are you familiar with Jerry Mills and the idea? He popularized this idea about how to describe Southern literature. Oh.

That he said, like. The dead mule theory. Yeah, the dead mule theory. Yeah. And he's like, how do you tell? oh he said like the dead mule theory yeah the dead mule theory yeah and he's like how do you tell like that was like his defining and he wrote this very spirited essay about the test the litmus test of southern literature right it has a dead mule in it In reading your work, I find that quite often there are activities around irrigation. Always. Oh, there was a lot of that. Someone's irrigating, carrying irrigating equipment. I was the irrigator, and I hated it. Boy. equipment i was the irrigator and i hated it boy it's really something the degree to which uh when

you're describing like someone driving down a highway a thing that they're likely to notice is some aspect of irrigation of some i've never met anybody that likes that job yeah nailed it it's just the worst job. It is the worst job. In fact, about five years ago, I managed to lease the hay fields to somebody who liked to irrigate. I mean, if you have a ranch, everybody wants the grass, and nobody wants the irrigation. And so if you're phasing out out as i've been for probably 10 years

you're always trying to find somebody wants some component of what you've been doing oh i'll take the grass or you know and nobody wants to fix the fence i may have all these little rules get cowboys i fix fence but i don't build fence um you know i you know i like working cattle but i don't want to irrigate yeah and we did a lot of that ourselves for so long but the part that I really resented was the irrigation I mean we had one point flood irrigation huh flood irrigation yeah we had we had a gated pipe eventually which helped a little bit but we ran a lot of cattle at one time.

I had a lot of land leased north of Roundup and we ran yearling steers out there. Well, you were that heavy into running cattle that you release in pasture land? Yeah, I had 30,000 acres leased. Were you riding then too? Not much, not much. Yeah, i was kind of i mean there's very intense for a period of time and then you ship but then you a lot of free time and

oh so you like i didn't know you really really threw down and became that like you were a rancher yeah yeah pretty much well i you know i mean i remember i first made some money i bought a place in uh uh, in, uh, Paradise Valley. It wasn't very big, but we had, we always kept a lot of roping steers around cause we're always rodeoing. And then we, then we would lease some ground and I didn't really know what to do with a ranch. I mean, I was in my twenties.

I'd never had that background and, and, uh, and had a hired man. And, uh, I knew this guy, Nevada rancher, old-time Nevada rancher. He said, the main thing is to go to bed at 8 o'clock, get up at 4, and then whoever works for you will feel guilty all day long. They'll do anything you ask them to do. Then the guy who used to live in this rancher

would get up at 4 and go in the kitchen and turn the light on so the neighbors would think that he was at work. He'd go back to bed until about 8.30. Did you enjoy being in the cattle business? Did I what? Did you enjoy being in the cattle business? I was infatuated with the whole thing

because I had a girlfriend in high school who was originally from Wyoming, and her dad gave me summer jobs. So I started going to Wyoming when I was like 16 years old tried to be a cowboy so I wanted to you know I from that point on any time I was not actually in school I was out here and I'm well over that you know but it was I really enjoyed really loved it you know I was really caught up in that and uh kept a lot of horses went to ropings between here and California and

really loved the culture I still kind of like it where I really like it is where it really is intact you know down in west Texas is where it is. I mean, those real full-time cowboys down there, they'll die poor, but they have incredible skills, inherited skills, and great reverence for their heritage, you know, and it makes them indifferent to the fact that they'll never own anything. Just what they've got. They've got a trailer, stock trailer, a couple of horses,

a couple of saddles, four ropes. And they're great. And they have a kind of a new era in that ranches down there really can't keep full-time help. It's not economical to do that. So once a year they'll hire these guys. They come out

with horse trailers, unload all their horses, gather all the ranch, doctor all the cattle, brand everybody, and they're gone. You get a bill. So that's kept them going for another burst. Yeah. I think one of the things that makes it that other writers who write about the West and who write about people who work the land um the reason

they can't that i don't think they'll ever be able to catch you is because you have to read your work and read it and read it and read it to find an unbelievable moment i'm sensitive to the stuff where if i'm reading about someone, when I find that they do something or some part of their life or something they're doing at work feels phony, it really just puts me off. I was watching a show with my wife. She was watching a show, and there was a guy who was supposedly a carpenter working in this drama. And they had a carpenter in the home doing some carpentry work. And as the camera's on him, it's clear that not only is he not a carpenter, but no one involved on the set. That's great the writer like no one had any idea what this individual

would be doing in a moment of him pretending to be a carpenter right and it's that's like those glimpses are painful yeah but in reading your stuff there's one exception i'll tell you about later in reading your stuff um no one ever does anything that's not just totally believable another person who's really good i feel is cormac mccarthy but it's so fantastical yeah yeah and it's and it becomes show-offy where cormac mccarthy likes to show you things he learned about in exhaustive research and integrate them in, and it's show-offy. Yeah. But your stuff about what people are working

or what they're out doing or what business they're involved in or how they made money, how they lost money, what they did yesterday, every time I read it, I'm like, yes. Oh, good. Well, that's great. That is a compliment. I hope it stays true. Oh, it is like, and I read it, I'm like, yes. Oh, good. Well, that's great. That is a compliment. I hope it stays true. Oh, it is like, and I always wonder,

it's like part of the interest in why they meet you too, is I always wonder, be like, how does he know all that stuff? Where it's not made up. Like the story is made up, but the parts of the story are all so perfect. That's great. Well, you know, I've always, one of the things I feel maybe separates what I want to do or the people that I admire want to do in writing is that I always felt that your writing should come from the zeitgeist, you know, the life you lead. I mean, if you think of Fitzgerald

or Faulkner or Hemingway, they're kind of writing out of their lives. Well, I read Lit Hub all the time, you know, in the morning. And those people are saying, well, I'm researching something about life in an ISIS concentration camp. I've never been there. Or I remember this book, I got kind of in trouble over this book. It won the National Book Award. It was called Letters from Ecuador. It was this kind of modernist book. It was totally boring. And it was, I got into trouble

because I did an interview and there were five finalists for the National Book Award and they're all five avant-garde women living in New York City. And I said to somebody in an interview with the New Yorker, I said, it's a York City. And I said to somebody in an interview with the New Yorker, I said, it's a big country.

Didn't they find somebody who had any ability out there in the 50 states? It was just these five women. Anyway, everybody blew up. It was a night, that son of a bitch. Anyway, it was horrible. It lasted for a long time. It was a scandal.

Because there was a gender component to it. There was a gender component to it. There was a gender component to it. And the woman who wrote the award-winning book, which nobody wants to read, it's unreadable, her name is, I'll think of it now, but the name of the book is Letter from Ecuador. And she said that she wrote this book, and a lot of it takes place

in Ecuador. She's very proud of the fact that she'd never been there. Yeah. And so we get kind of, right now, because I keep track of a lot of new writers, you know, I like reading up and coming writers. It persuades me that this game will last, you know, because there's so many good writers coming along. 90% of the really good young writers now are women. And like Otessa Mosfegger, one of my favorites, they're just some wonderful women writers. The reason is, they're not as oppressed by political correctness as the men are. And they're very, I mean, they just lay about themselves

with a broad sword. I mean, they say anything they want to say. And as a result, it's kind of invasive, kind of, and it's really tense and full of interesting stuff. Whereas the men are so afraid of saying something wrong about people who are overweight or, you know, unattractive people. There's a kind of timidity about literary fiction by young men that the women don't

have to deal with. And as a result, the men are not very interesting at this point in time. Yeah, you see it in comedy too. Yeah, I'm sure. Yeah, female comics cut loose. Absolutely. Hey, folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in canada and boy my goodness do we hear from the canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes and our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join

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you mentioned earlier key west you met your wife in key west yeah you were one of the areas like this kind of fixation we had, when I say we, like my brothers and I and guys we hung out with, when we were kind of in our 20s, we liked to fish a lot. And we became really aware that we'd missed the boat on Key West. Oh, yeah. Like something had happened in the culture of fishing and literature and whatnot something had happened in key west and it had died yeah can you talk a little bit about your

experiences in key west and what brought you down there and the fishing and what you feel um what you feel died well uh yeah i can a little a little bit. I mean, I went down there. It was a really virginal situation. I went down there for three reasons. One was I was sort of a bookish boy, and I was aware of its literary history. Secondly, it was a run-down, cheap place to live. I mean, Deval Street, which is one shop after another,

and it was boarded up when I moved down there. If your parents came to visit, there was really no place to take them to dinner. There was one place, the A&B Lobster House. It was terrible. And I had the only skiff there. Yeah, I read that once. Yeah.

I think it was in one of your essays. Yeah. You mentioned that at the time, you had the only flat skiff in key west right what year was that 68 i think 69 something like that and um so it was a kind of uh it was partly a sort of a hippie brigadoon you know i mean because it was a cheap place to live it felt like it wasn't in the United States and it was you know half the people there were spoke Spanish or they were conks and spoke you know spoke this kind of Creole conk talk and it was very interesting place I mean I was just loved it so much it was such a great place to be. And then in addition

to that, I had a friend who was an outstanding traditional guide who would give me a couple of his clients that he didn't want to fish, usually because they didn't know how to fish. Anyway, that was guiding those people gave me a minimal living. And then I had a little contract with Sports Illustrated. I think I had to do six pieces a year for them. Between that and my two days a week deal, I had a bare bones living and I could rent a place cheaply and just live my life. And it was just a great place to be.

And I know a lot of people who were there then. I still know them. And we all agree that it was like the thing that the best part of our lives could never be replicated anywhere. There's nothing like it ever anywhere. It never will be again. And that's the feeling that I don't have exclusively. I mean, everybody I know who's there, I just heard from, I had a friend,

he's kind of an artist, and he was smuggling dope. Everybody's smuggling dope. It was smuggling sailboats and acoustic guitars was sort of the basic equipment for life in key west and there were some very courageous uh guys that were going to south america you know and bringing bring back loads of pot and it was considered um you know it wasn't considered a grave thing if you if you get caught yeah um and i had two good friends that were bringing back a load of dope from carlahana the 110 foot coast guard cutter pulled alongside of them and and so they took a chainsaw and they put a hole in the bottom of the boat and sank it and the

coast guard boarded and put a pump on it pumped pumped it back out, and they were two great guys. They were wonderful carpenters. So they went up to Eglin Air Force Base, which was sort of a minimum security prison. They had to make roll top desks for the warden and all the politicians up there, and said, you know, go back to what you were doing. Well, one of those guys now, he just, you know,

because now he's a felon, so he had to do other things. So he moved to the Bahamas. He's got this fantastic fishing lodge in the Bahamas. He's got two great restaurants and a bookstore and a tackle shop in the US that he runs from afar. He said, well, if I'm a felon, I got to do the best I can. There are a couple of guys like that who sort of remained named over in the Missouri. You know, they couldn't guide anymore because they were felons.

So they just opened a big business and they have homes in Belize and they were forced by this limitation on their options to do something even more creative. But your main draw to Key West was the fishing, right? I mean, what about fishing? Unbelievable fishing.

I mean, you have the Gulf, It's the head of the Gulf Stream. So you have this phenomenal depth of species there. You have the Gulf of Mexico, which is a whole different kind of fishery. You have the Gulf Stream. You have the Atlantic fishery. It's very intricate, fascinating to try to figure out. We didn't have GPS.

We didn't have cell phones. we didn't have gps we didn't have cell phones we didn't have online tide information uh and you had to convert everything like you get a you you get a government tide book that miami would be your closest information you had to convert everything and like what the delays are yeah yeah and the delays were very different from the gulf side the atlantic side it only might be a mile or two apart completely different tides a difference of hours hours oh okay yeah huh do uh throughout throughout your life of because you've been around you've explored so much do you have this do you have this ongoing feeling that that um places are ending all the time well yeah but do you feel like the American West

is like has ended well it's very you know no not really I mean I probably that what I struggle with understanding in my fiction is to try to figure out how it's moving on because when I got to Key West in the 60s, there were people moving out because they thought it was ruined. When I left there in 78, or quit going there in 78, I thought, I was sure it was done. And I know all these people that have moved there since then just think it's been the greatest time of their lives. And that's going to happen here too. This is not going to be

you know the imagery or the vision we have in montana is not the same as it once was i mean it was when i got here in the 60s not much had changed i mean my neighbors were all old family ranchers you know they were uh they were not polarized you know i was a hippie i'd show long, you know, they were not polarized. You know, I was a hippie. I had so long hair. You know, they would just, why do you get your hair long? Well, girls like it. You know, oh, well, that's a good idea. And, you know, some of my rancher neighbors were born in the 1800s.

Yeah. You know, a guy born in 1895 and 1968, still ranching. Then it got kind of polarized, us against them, insiders, outsters, natives, non-natives. That went on for a while. And we're kind of evolving out of that now because there's so many, what do they call it, attrition rate in Montana. The turnover rate has been very high.

I'm not sure it's as high as it used to be, but it was always very high. People always arriving and departing. That was part of it. Do you feel as a writer that you're more interested in tracking the change than you are in lamenting or rooting for? Yeah. Yep.

Like you feel like you can just, you could almost stand back and like passively observe as long as you hit it, hit the nail on the head. Well, I mean, I want to, there's a great book by Lewis Hyde that's just being reviewed right now about the art of forgetting, you know, you can't be, you can't be chained by the past or your own past in many ways. You really don't have much to say about what's going on.

I mean, one of the magic things about literature is that it really is the only thing that can kind of capture the atmosphere of a given moment. You can look at the movies of the 20s. You can read the newspapers of a given moment. You can look at the movies of the 20s. You can read the newspapers of the 1920s. You're never going to get the feeling for the 20s that you're going to get from reading The Great Gatsby. That's the only thing that can really, literature still is the only thing that can really capture

what it was like to be there at that time. And it's no good to be there at that time lamenting some other era. Well, that's hard to do I mean it's going by you like clay pigeons yeah trying to catch up with it just what you know whatever it is not easy you don't write from the past too much not much no maybe I've kind of, you know, feel I've benefited from the ability to kind of start over, you know. I mean, I wasn't very interested in living the life I kind of grew up with. I mean, I had a great life as a kid, you know, but I didn't want to stay in the Midwest, you know, or stay in the southern Midwest. There seemed to be much going on there.

And also, I had a kind of a divided childhood because all my family lived on the Massachusetts coast, you know, and I loved it out there. And my mother never wanted to leave there. So in the spring of the year, she'd just load us kids up and we'd load us up in the car and drive us back to my grandmother's falling down triple-decker Irish ghetto house in Fall River, Massachusetts. And I thought that was the greatest, you know. Go fish for striped bass with my cousins who just left. I've been fly fishing with my cousin

Fred for 65 years. We just left. I've been fly fishing with my cousin Fred for 65 years. We just left. We're still doing it. You guys just fishing? Probably don't need to say a whole lot to each other. We just fish all the time. We go anywhere we can go. Yeah.

Yeah. Did you fish? I heard mentioned that you were going to fish with Rachel Maddow. Do you fish and tell? Rachel's a mad fisherman. Yeah, yeah. I met her once and I was surprised.

I went to an event. It was her and Tucker Carlson on stage. They'd known each other and worked together and were friends. They're friends with her? And they were bound by an interest in fishing. And they got up and they were on stage together talking about that and i was very surprised that she was an angler that's it fascinating well tucker carlson comes to the same place we go to anyway uh last year we we were

going to go stripe fishing stripe bass fishing together i'm a big admirer of hers and um and then uh nbc grounded her just said you know you can't go off for a few days it's just she said unless we actually she wrote back she said unless we get real indictments i can't go oh i got you so and uh what's the story you have where i can't remember the name of it right now you have a story where two guys go hunting birds right and and in the end uh one of them he goes off over the hill and kills himself yeah i hear that story i hear so much about that story that thing has really had an ongoing life what's that story called it's called there's two of those hunting stories one's called sportsman this one's called uh flight yeah yeah i had to read the end a handful of times to make sure that in fact he had gone off and shot himself right yeah because he gives his hunting partner

he he kind of in a very unceremonial way yeah explains a little bit about his dogs yeah take care of the dog yeah the care schedule yeah when she goes into heat yeah what she eats yeah and then he wanders off over a hill which is a little bit misleading because they had seen a covey birds go over the hill yeah but he goes over the hill and there's a gunshot yeah Yeah. Well, you know. And I'm going to be like, hold on, what? And I'm like, oh, no, he absolutely killed himself. Yeah. Did that come from anything in your personal life? Not really.

A couple of things kind of, you know, I don't expect to head out in the rapture, you know. But I always thought the closest thing to rapture that I know is to step into a cubby cubby rise there's really nothing like it there's so much life somebody beating hearts so many eyes so much expectation it all goes up like a big celestial corsage yeah and I thought if I was, if I was going to sort of moor it out by my own hand, that would be kind of a nice way to go. And I heard one, my cousin just told me, he had an old friend, was terminally ill and was going to end that day. He either knew that was his last day or they were going to pull the pain med plugs or something, but he knew it was over.

And there's an old friend of his that lives in Rhode Island, and so he's very cheerful about it. He had a great life. He had a good run. He said, yeah, I'm fine. I'm fine with this. Well, they said, what do you want?

He said, well, this was actually still in the winter. He said, just build a big fire. He said, I want my lap robe. I want my bird dog. I want my cat. That's it. He just, off he went. He's fine with it.

Were you friends with Richard Brodigan? Yeah, very good friends. Tell a little about that. I mean, were you involved? I mean, were you, there's kind of like this famous story about a bunch of guys that were hunting and he was supposed to show up. Yeah. And didn't show up. The thing that I remember the most was, I thought he was doing great.

I talked him into giving up drinking for a period. And he's just transformative. I mean, physically changed. He had this big sort of projected belly, you know, and he's drinking all the time and starting at daybreak practically. And then he spent this whole summer being this happy, thin guy to give readings around the neighborhood. But he was determined to resume drinking as soon as possible. Especially, he liked to go to Japan and stay drunk the whole time he was in Japan. That was his big deal. And I'm not sure, maybe that's part of bonding culture or something in Japan. So he came to my house

and he brought this black Japanese funerary urn. Are you Japanese or Chinese? Half Chinese. You what? Half Chinese. Half Chinese. So you know what a funerary urn is?

Is that Japanese or Chinese? I believe that it's Japanese, and that's where the ashes would be. Yeah. Beautiful black ceramic thing. He brought it over to my house and he said, I want you to hang on to this. And he said, someone will call you for it. Fine, Richard. I put it there. I had two fly rods, one of which I gave to Rip Torn. Oh yeah.

And not too long after that, I get a call from his daughter, I think it was from his daughter saying, Richard's committed suicide. Will you send the've sent the urn no shit yeah he even told her where to find it yeah huh you know why i asked you about that we're driving up here driving around looking for your house um yanni in here uh yanni and i were talking about our friend doug who's out here with a couple buddies buddies of his from Wisconsin. Right now, they're here in Montana, and they're just driving around fishing. And Yannis mentioned to me that part of their plan while they're driving around fishing is to read trout fishing in America. Oh, yeah.

And I said to Yannis, well, you know, it doesn't really have anything to do with trout fishing. And he said, they know. Oh, that's great. What a great reply. Hey, Richard's daughter just sent me a new edition of it. I might be able to even see it. I saw it the other day of Trout Fishing in America with Billy Collins' introduction. Oh, okay.

Isn't that cool? Yeah. Well, it was a magical book i mean whatever it was i don't know what it was i've read it two or three times yeah it's just a great book yeah one of the most requested books in the entire american library system it's right up there with huckleberry finn or something huh you know there's a couple more questions for you there's a thing that i've read where you've written it a couple times or said in interviews um that fishing is the second most published subject after mathematics yeah what does that mean though i have no idea there's way too much stuff about fishing out there.

I hate to throw another little wad out there. No, I thought about that when I came in and looked at your bookshelves, and I remembered that. I can't remember if you wrote it or said it in an interview, but you'd written that it was the second most published subject next to mathematics. I don't know why. It's just because for the sort of outdoor activities,

especially the ones with any kind of a predatorial component, it's the most contemplative. So that may be what leads to it. I have a book that I tried to get. It was called Blood Knots. It's an unbelievable book by an English writer. It's a good name for a fishing book. Yeah.

He was the dance critic of the observer oh really and he wrote this stunning book about fishing um and uh i mean it's just a great book and i got all sorts of people to help promote it i had all these all these renowned people write blurbs and stuff for it it really didn published very poorly. It didn't really go anywhere. But it was one of these books like the book about the Swedish utopia vis-a-vis angling. And this guy grew up, he comes from it starts out, his dad was teaching him to fish and he never could understand why his mother would get up in the morning and

apply salves to his father's body. And then they'd get dressed and go fishing. And he couldn't understand what that was about. And then as he learned to fish, he started quizzing his dad about these things. It turned out his dad was in a tank battle. And the Nazi tank hit it with an anti-tank weapon of some kind. The thing burst into flame and he was one of the first guys to get a total plastic surgery treatment after the

Second World War well that kind of folds in as he's learning to fish then he has a he has a hero at school who's like one of those super male figures that young guys kind of identify with when they're in kids in school he's a falconer he's a great fisherman. He followed him through life. They often fish together. The hero guy joins the Royal Irish Constabulary in Northern Ireland during the Troubles. These guys all went to this ancient Catholic college in England. It was like a 600-year-old college. They grew up in this

intense Catholic atmosphere. He joins the RUR, or what it was called, and he's captured by the IRA. And they tortured him for two weeks. They brought fake priests in to do the last rites. And then they killed him. And then years afterwards, this guy guy fishing runs into some of those ira guys and they said well i can tell you this about your friend he was a real soldier he never broke oh yeah but this is all interwoven with a with hardcore serious fishing yeah and

and i began to think you know this is pretty seamless you know none of this would have happened if he hadn't been a fisherman. So, what's his name, Harry, anyway, there's a wonderful writer, he died long ago, wrote about fishing, Starlight Angling Club was one of his books. They were so intermeshed with life, you know. So maybe that's why there's so much fishing stuff out there i don't know do you feel that if you ended the world now and let it start back over again and the world gets going again would um would so many writers that fish be fly fishermen or do you think you could let it start over again and it would wind up that so many writers that fish be fly fishermen or do you think you could let it start over again

and it would wind up that so many writers that fish were spin fishermen what a question i don't uh no i don't know uh i mean the mentality of trying to catch a fish with a fly is so very different i mean with spin fishermen basically it's basically attacking fish. Yeah. I like that. And fly fishing is you kind of have to make a deal. You know, one English fly fishing writer said, what do you do? What's this all about? And he said, well, you make a cast,

and then you await results. That's a whole other thing than you know what i'm saying i mean i like about i like all i like i like any kind of fishing you had a line in one of your fishing stories where you're talking about a fly presenting a fly to a fish you'd said that it's like a highway exit that's labeled free beer. Right? And most motorists are just going to blow past. Right.

Some motorists are going to think like, oh, that's a ruse. And they're going to ambush me and kill me. I didn't remember saying this. But some guys are just going to get off. For the free beer. Some guys are going to take, then those are the fish you catch yeah I you know I had a magic moment I was last year I was fishing on the new fork of the green in Wyoming I

was fishing with dry flies the big big dry flies there a lot of gray drakes on the water fire it out there's floating along floating along. It's dancing along. We're all filled with hope. This big brown trout comes up. It stalls. He says, this is bullshit. And he swims away. As he swims away, it's all going downstream. He's developing doubts.

I can see him go through this thing and he goes, I think I'll eat it. I recently had, we were at my mother's home. And my mother lives in the house I was brought up in. And my kid, who's nine, he looks under the pontoon boat. She's got a pontoon boat moored up to her dock. And he looks under the pontoon boat, She's got a pontoon boat moored up to her dock. He looks under the pontoon boat and there's a big large mouth. I feel it.

Hovering in the shadows. He takes his beach seine and eventually gets a big what we call a horn-nosed chub. Those chubs with the nails. The males get a knobby nose on them. And I free hook it on there for them. So there's no weight, just this chub.

And I tell them to flick it up under there, you know. And the way that fish, just the total conviction with which that fish took that chub like no hesitation or doubt like something like that though is a little bit magical to watch yeah that fish is like i'll take it yeah i buy it yeah and it's interesting because you know it's almost startling you know those fish that live around docks and stuff in florida you know they've had so many people try to catch them i mean you can slide a live shrimp down their face like this they're not gonna eat let it fall uh one more for you i noticed on the way in there's turkeys hanging around here yeah are they living here year round or are they migrating up and down? No, a lot of them are around here. Really?

Yeah, they get very tame. It's amazing. Because they hone in on, I imagine they're only making their living because they can winter up around animals, livestock, right? I think that's part of it. We had one living on, rusty,

living on the porch all winter long. And he went off with his pack. Used to be when we would grain our horses out of a trough, we'd take a bucket of grain, put it in this long wooden trough, and I'd go out there, the horses would be lined up, and there'd be turkeys lined up between the horses. Do you hunt the turkeys? Do I hunt turkeys?

It wouldn't be very sporting here. I have gone turkey hunting. I haven't been successful at it, but I've gone turkey hunting when I've been visiting my in-laws in Alabama. And that's very, that seems very interesting to me. But I mean, this would be a case of going out and plugging one. I mean, these are Miriam's turkeys.

They were established. They're a New Mexico turkey originally. They're like Huns. They just found a biota that they could move right into uh you remember earlier i was praising you for just how believable everything in your in your work is we're going to move on to something unbelievable yeah i just want to ask you about the one thing that i was like uh-uh that's not correct what was it you know your story

canyon ferry yeah there's a guy that's taken like his he's taking a kid out ice fishing on canyon ferry lake yeah but it's the winter time and he has a coffee can full of crawlers oh i really didn't like that yeah they'd freeze wouldn't they i just he wouldn't have that guy yeah he wouldn't have that guy wouldn't have that he couldn't buy him like that yeah that might be true. I feel like if you ever do a revised version, he needs to have a styrofoam container that he bought at Bob Ward's, a styrofoam container.

To insulate them from the cold. That was the only thing I've ever read. And this sounds like an insult, but it's a compliment. How many books have you written? I don't know, 15 or something, I guess. And how many short stories? i don't know 15 or something i guess and how many how many short stories i don't know a lot but i just collected them in excess of like you know dozens and dozens yeah and you've written an entire book of essays about horses yeah i know

multiple fishing old yeah i just want to point out that in all that and that's pretty good that i'll take it if that's the worst one time when i was like no oh it was painful but it just i think that it it reveals how um just the how well versed you've become in your life of just everything having to do with america yeah no i'm you know it's funny uh i have a friend uh who's uh who just married he just married a girl from prague he's a guy that I fish and sail with a lot. And she has some kind of a problem coming and going out of the country. I mean, you can't just get married now

and automatically resolve this problem. So they're out of the country now. They're wandering around. They've been on the Croatian coast. They're doing stuff. But I can tell how homesick he is for america and he's a real ex-hippie you know he's not nostalgic about america but i lived over i lived in ireland one time i lived in spain i lived in italy but i was always trying to find what's going on in

america you know and uh and also i i got sort of educated in the early idea that there was such a thing as american literature that wasn't the same as English literature. That was actually, when I was going to college, that was a relatively new idea. It wasn't always in the air. And programs like American Studies, all those kinds of things, the whole idea that there is such a thing, we're not just a disparate, we are a kind of a people. And that's not been for sure forever. And so I'm kind of, now that I see it kind of imperiled,

I'm just really interested in what it is, what this country is, what it is to be an American. And when I just was overseas, I really noticed that. I said, what's going on? I've got to get the Billings Gazette. I'm down in Brittany, you know, pawing my cell phone. What's going to happen to the Billings Gazette today?

It's kind of ignorant in a way to look at that. But I don't long to be an expatriate, as some people did at one time. Never did want to be one. And whenever I'm not here, I want to know what's going on. And I would like to kind of claw my way to a sort of a template or an overview of what this country actually is,

since it's changing so quickly my wife had a job for a while where it would have been possible to go and take a position overseas and when she brought this up to me i told her that i was just too american to live somewhere else yeah which i felt was felt was, I wouldn't be able to pull it off. Yeah, I wouldn't be able to pull it off either. And you notice it if you get translated a lot, because they really have a lot of problems with our language.

You know what I mean? For example, they couldn't translate the title Cloudburst, which is my collected stories. Yeah. French couldn't translate that. Thereburst, which is my collected stories. Yeah. French couldn't translate that. There isn't a Cloudburst. There isn't a term for that. What did they go with?

I can't remember. Or whatever they went with, what's it translated to? Anybody here speak French? No. They went with Quand le ciel se déclenir. When I was in France, I said, is that a nice tale? Oh, yeah, it's very nice. Thank you.

Is there anything that you wish you'd gotten asked about that you didn't get asked about? Today? Yeah, anything you want to wedge in there? No, but this has been really fun. I could do this for a long time because it's kind of intuitive. I'm do this for a long time. Because it's kind of intuitive. I'm enjoying this. I guess I was concerned that there would be

more of a template for what we were going to go toward. That hasn't happened. Maybe I missed out. What would that have been? I think you fucked up. I'm not sure. But that's what I like that approach to anything. I mean, that's the, I like that approach to anything.

I mean, that's the way I write, you know. Something arrests my attention. I have no idea what's going to happen. Yeah. I had an image one time. We rented a house down on the Gulf Coast one year. I went down ahead of time. I didn't know anybody in this town.

It seemed very strange to me. The people seemed fairly strange. I had the rental house, you know, and the renter, the realtor gave me the keys. And I went out to look at the Gulf of Mexico and the wind blew the door shut. Now I'm on the porch. I can't get back into the house. I don't know anybody. Somebody drove me there. And I mean, I felt this kind of deracinated panic. You know, suddenly I became nobody on this windy porch. So that's all I had to go on. I had just had that image. I said, well, I wonder where this goes.

And that life's kind of like that, I think. And that's what most fiction writers admit at some point in time, most of them, not all of them, that writing is really improvisatory. I mean, that's what Cheever said over and over again. In fact, my experience is if you really know where it's going, it's probably not going to be any good. You don't write the end first?

No, no, hell no. But I revise a lot. I'm a rewriter. I do a lot of drafts. But I don't know where it's going. Maybe I want to be a reader. When I'm writing, I want to be a reader with a little bit of an advantage.

Yeah, yeah. Which is... When I used to do magazine stories, which is totally different, but pieces of reporting or whatever, I would start with a place I wanted to get. Yeah. Like a really cool scene or something that was impactful

and then picture writing the rest of the article in a way that would warrant such an impactful ending. Yeah. Did you actually follow through with that? No, that's just how I would start. Yeah. I'd be like, if only I could write something so good that it could end with this and have it make sense.

Yeah. I wrote a note down. I wrote this note of dialogue down. I'm going to try to do something with it eventually. And just in quotes, it just said, you asshole, did you dictate this? I don't know where that's going. But it has energy, you know? Well, this is the perfect way to get out of the interview.

Stay tuned as you read the life's work of Tom McWane and watch for that line, and you'll have a feeling of coming full circle back to this. But seriously, thank you for coming on and talking with us. I appreciate it. I appreciate it. And I am kind of a fan of what you do. Keep it as loose as it has been.

Oh. And the only way you can be sure of that is when you realize how many enemies you've acquired. There's a couple out there. Yeah, I'm sure. All right. Well, thank you again. Appreciate it.

Okay. My pleasure. Thank you. again appreciate it okay my pleasure you Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. You might not be able to join our raffles and sweepstakes and all that because of raffle and sweepstakes law, but hear this. OnX Hunt is now in Canada. It is now at your fingertips, you Canadians. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season.

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