The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 432: Hit 'Em Where They Ain't with Ian Frazier

Episode Date: April 17, 2023

Steve Rinella talks with Ian Frazier, Ryan Callaghan, Brody Henderson, Phil Taylor, and Corinne Schneider. Steve Rinella talks with Ian Frazier, Ryan Callaghan, Brody Henderson, Phil Taylor, and Corinne Schneider. Topics include: Frazier's bajillion books and articles in The New Yorker; the Lakota word, ichipasisi; Steve's piece about fishing in the turbine, which led to his big break; the "weights in fish" guys plead guilty; a correction on a correction about Dale Hollow Lake; rewards for turning in bands and the million dollar phesant; a note to the hater; how many pythons are really out there; circumpolar distribution; globigerina ooze; Steelhead Joe; the Chukchi hunters; seal liver with angel hair pasta; not wanting to live near other writers; hog distribution maps overlaid with voting maps; the Bronx; the in between-ness of a place; steamboat explosions; and more. Connect with Steve and MeatEater Steve on Instagram and Twitter MeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube Shop MeatEater Merch See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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First Light. Go farther, stay longer. Okay, joined today by fabulous author Ian Frazier. Author of probably arguably, when I make lists of my favorite books of all time, usually at the top of the list is the book Great Plains. Well, I'm glad to hear that. I taught you a word with that book. You did. Remember the word Ichipasisi?

Oh yeah. But I can't remember what it meant. It's a Lakota word. It means going along a stream, crossing back and forth. Yeah. It is a very useful word. You can say, I went down that stream. I went down that creek, Ichipasisi.

And later I checked with Lakota people and they said it actually means sewing, but. Oh, no kidding. Yeah. But the guy was using it. The guy I was talking to was using it as a way he was telling me how to get to City Bulls cabin. It is like weaving back and forth with a sewing needle. Right. It's like you're, yeah, it is a sewing motion, but.

Author of, I don't even know how many things. So award-winning writer, humor. How many books do you have we have a zillion written down but it's not a zillion it's like it's slightly less it's about i would say a million billion trillion author of a lot of fantastic books uh including travels in In Siberia? Yes. It's a great book. Thank you. And culminates in a very spirited argument that Stalin jokes are not okay. Stalin jokes are not okay? I don't remember writing that. You did.

I did. Okay. Well, the thing is, you had a big influence on that book. I did. Because I wrote that, the New Yorker paid a lot of expenses for it. So I owed them a lot of that book. So I gave them the book and they kind of condensed part of it. And he said, don't do that.

And I think they did a good job condensing it. But that decided me. It's very hard when you have a book and then you have a magazine excerpt to do justice to both of them. And the next time I'm not doing, not doing more, any more condensing, but that was, you don't remember that was your verdict on it? No, I can't believe I had any advice. You did have advice. The best thing you ever said to me, you said a lot of great things to me. The best thing you ever said to me, I can't say. Why can't you say that? I tell the story all the time. I wouldn't tell it publicly. I tell the story all the time. I wouldn't tell it publicly.

I tell it privately all the time. Okay. I'll tell you later what you said. Okay. Was it financial advice? No, no, no, no. Okay. After you wrote your book about the Pine Ridge Reservation, we were, a book called On the

Res, which is a phenomenal history of the Pine Ridge Reservation and the, and the, and the wars against the Sioux and confinement to reservation and what happened on the reservation. Um, you offered a summation of, of, uh, you offered a summation of your findings and it was, I just wanted to say it publicly. Okay. Well, you can tell me later. No, I'll tell you later. I don't remember what it was. You said another great thing to me one day. Cause, uh, so Ian Frazier, I'm going to, his friends call him Sandy.

I'm going to be using the word Sandy. Uh, is from Ohio. Yes, I am. Um, you said. And you're from Michigan. Yeah. And you said to me, not long after we met, you said, whenever I think of Michigan, I think of people who say fuckers.

All right. Well, I would tell you a story of Michigan related story about gray planes because of great planes was on the best seller list for 10 weeks. Yeah. New York times bestseller. That's a, that's a hard thing to pull off. And it was bumped off the bestseller list for 10 weeks. Yeah. New York Times bestseller list. That's a hard thing to pull off. And it was bumped off the bestseller list. And the book that bumped it off, that moved it,

that replaced it on the bestseller list was Bo by Bo Schembechler. Oh. Michigan coach for about 50 years. He bumped you. He bumped me. And we were, of course, very opposed to Michigan football because we were Ohio State fans. I want to tell you another thing

you said to me. Then we're going to come back to all your work. But here's another thing you said to me one time. When I got out of graduate school, I want to preface this by saying I don't mean any offense

to the individual we're going to talk about. When I got out of graduate school, I was largely motivated by uh i never told you this largely motivated by great plains and what a phenomenal job you did with that book about the american great plains i was i was like i want to and other things too but i wanted to go i was going to go back i went to graduate school in montana i was going to go back. I went to graduate school in Montana. I was going to go back to Michigan.

My dad just died, so I had access to his truck. He didn't need it anymore. And I was going to go back to Michigan and drive all around. I was going to do like a history of the Great Lakes where I grew up. Right. And I knew certain weird things about the Great Lakes. Have I talked about this before? I don't know.

I don't think so. I knew certain things about the Great Lakes that I didn't think anybody knew. Like, for instance, after, after, who's the founder of the, Joseph Smith, founder of the Mormon Church. Yeah.

So Joseph Smith was hanged by a mob in Carthage, Illinois. Is that right? There was a power struggle between his followers, and there was two emerging forces came out of this. Brigham Young and a guy named James Jesse Strange, I think was his name. One of them was like, I'm going to head out to the Great Salt Lake to flee persecution. And one of them was like, I'm going to head to Beaver Island in Lake Michigan with my followers to flee persecution.

Strange. So Brigham Young went on to like very successfully you know establish you know zion right and brigham young goes up to this little dinky ass island in late michigan no strange strange yeah goes up to this dinky ass island in late michigan like starts trying to intercept ships and and act like they were in his waters and tax them. Like he was a sovereign nation. Yeah. And he winds up getting shot by his own followers next to a wood pile along the beach.

And that was the end of his whole experiment. They'd had it with him. Another thing I knew about the Great Lakes was that I thought was interesting is at one time in Niagara Falls, a guy, a zoo went out of business and a guy bought all the shit from the zoo, all the animals, and put them on a

barge and sold tickets to watch him run the barge over the falls. I'd heard of that. Yeah. But I grew up on the great. That nowadays would get you kicked off social media. If you posted real. But a lot of people would watch it first.

They would. You would not. You'd get all kinds. You'd never dig out of that hole. A third of the crowd's going, well, I mean, listen, he's going to do it anyway. The apathy. Just. the apathy just oh so i was like armed with these things you know and then this book comes out by this guy named jerry dennis

and his hook for his book is that some dude bought a boat i don't know like some guy buys a boat out in the ocean somewhere in the either way he's got to get on a boat and sail off the great lakes so that's his sort of angle so it's a travelogue about the great lakes but in it some bitch talks about no offense jerry Mormon split talks about the, the menagerie of critters going over the falls. That took the wind out of your sails. Oh, it did. And just as the book was coming out, I called Sandy and I said, man, there's a book coming out by a guy named Jerry Dennis.

And I wrote him or email out to her. I conveyed this to him. And it's really just taking the wind out of my sails on this whole project. And he left me a voicemail. You left me a voicemail some days later. And it said, you know, I've been thinking since you called. And I can't think of one good book ever written by a guy named Jerry. And I started to think like, jerry lewis write good books

uh we're gonna get into this whole body of work are you guys gonna talk about like people are probably wondering how you guys even know each other we know each other from the so we met here's how we met you probably don't even know this well let's see i probably don't even know this. Well, let's see. I probably don't. When I was going to, when I was in graduate school in the writing program, you came in as like a visiting writer. Oh, yeah, yeah. Of course. I remember that well. And then you, so I used to, so I wouldn't be sitting here if it wasn't, I wouldn't be sitting here if it wasn't for you. And you and a handful, like, like Mr. Heaton from Reese Puffer High School.

Right. Yeah. And then, you know, probably not because of him, but then largely because you, because ISIS submit to magazines by just sending shit in the mail, which didn't work out well. No one has time to look at all that stuff. And you vouched for me and fronted my work at Outside Magazine. Well, can I tell my version of this? Is it different than that? It's great.

It's a little bit more nuanced. Oh, okay. I taught at University of Montana for two weeks. So my contact with the students in the MFA program was not large. I was just there very briefly and you submitted a piece. And I mean, this is just a personal thing of mine, but I think if you can avoid an MFA program, avoid it. Yeah. Well, you didn't, you didn't tell that because you were talking to MFA people. Well, no. And because they were paying me. So I was just doing what was asked of me. But spiritually, I'm not a big fan of MFA programs. So you gave me this piece and it was incredibly good. It was about the weather in Michigan, in northern Michigan. And I mean, it was just, it just blew me away. And I said, you quit. Leave this program.

You can make a living at this right now. Don't do this. Go and I could, I can, you know, talk to people. You could get pieces published right now. This is really good. And you quite sensibly finished. I've given people so much bad advice over the years, but you, you sensibly, you finished. And then you wrote, uh, somewhat later, you wrote a piece about fishing in the outflow from a dam. In Sault Ste.

Marie, Michigan. Where you went up into the tunnel coming out of the generator. Sleeping there. And sleeping. You had your boat hooked up to something along the side. I mean, it was like. There was a stud, a concrete anchor driven into the roof, and you could tie off on it. And what were you fishing for?

Whitefish or something? Whitefish, yeah. Because you had to compete in that spot with old men that would get up real early. So we would leave the bar on occasion and take our boat and park it in the good spot. In the dam. Oh, yeah. We're there sleeping. Inside the generator of the dam.

Yeah, we'd be sleeping in sleeping bags, too, in the morning the morning old men would get up and we'd be in the tube and so the the fish would come up steelhead white fish would come up to feed on these insects because this it was a big there was a diversion in the river they like manually like mechanically diverted a big chain of the St. Mary's River, ran it all through town, and then down a slope, and then it powered this big hydroelectric dam. And that thing, that river would be so full of

insect life that when it flowed back into the St. Mary's, all this larva and mayflies and whatever are coming out of these turbines. And you could just sit there and turbines watch fish just sitting there feeding in these in the outwash of the turbine so my my my brother and his buddy who lived there before i moved up there they had an idea to just go in the middle of the night and get the good because i you couldn't understand it but certain turbines produced really well. And they would get their turbine by just going in the morning.

So then old men would think they got it because they didn't know, and they'd pull up and realize you're sleeping in the thing. Yeah, it was great. It was great. I can't claim the discovery, but I wrote about the experience. So you gave that piece to Dee McNamara, who taught at U of M. And Dee said, this is a fabulous piece. And she sent it to me. And I sent it to Mary Turner at Outside.

And I said, this guy is great. And that was your first piece in Outside, as I recall. Dude, that was, I was happier that, you know, usually people- I saved your message on my machine. You called me after they bought it

and it was the happiest message I've ever got on my machine. It's 4,000 bucks. Like, impersonate him. You did a great job. No, I just talked to Mary Turner. I talked to Mary Turner.

She loved the piece. She's going to pay me $4,000. Dude, it was such a huge amount of money. This is like, he was hanging shower doors or something at the time. No, I was doing cabinet. I was installing closet shelving.

And then working in the tree service business. Yeah. Oh, my God, that was a lot of money. I remember being in the bar that night. I could have just died that night. Being in the bar that night and certain friends were happy. Certain friends were just so tore up. They couldn't even look at me.

They were so jealous. I had all this money. I bought a truck topper. Went and stayed several days at a hot spring. Your closet shelving, was it just MDF? Like pre-painted MDF? Yeah, I used to have to drive over to Spokane and pick it up. Yeah.

So for those of you who don't know, as far as your interior finishes go, this is not, this would be the bottom of the skilled labor room. No, no, no. Bottom, no, no, no. Because I installed the bottom. The bottom is wire. A good job for us was the melamine, the wood. Bottom is wire.

Melamine. Yeah. All right. If you remember back a few episodes, we had on some anthropologists and archaeologists, and we talked about a project in which me and some other folks from the Meat Eater crew went out and butchered a bison using stone tools we used particularly clovis points clovis projectile points stone flakes and we like gutted skin butchered boned out an entire bison in collaboration with researchers from

kent state university um smu southern methodist university and oregon state university in collaboration with researchers from Kent State University, SMU, Southern Methodist University, and Oregon State University, as all part of this broader study about developing a toolkit, so to speak, for how to interpret what happened at Ice Age kill sites, where all you have left is bone and stone. So we were using stone tools to butcher an animal. And then the researchers would be able to like, look at what happened to these bones, what happened to these stones and use it as clues, right? To put together the puzzles of what was going on

when hunters during the ice age were chopping up bison and woolly mammoths and whatnot. That is now an episode that we've put together for YouTube. So look for that real soon on the Meat Eater YouTube channel. Oh, you'll appreciate this because this is from Ohio. Do you follow Ohio news? A little bit, yeah. Are you familiar with the walleye cheating scandal?

Oh, of course. Who didn't know about that? My God. So I'll tell you something you might not know. Okay. Did you see any of the videos where he cut the walleyes open and got the weights out? No, I haven't seen about that. My God. So, well, I'll tell you something you might not know. Okay. Did you see any of the videos where he cut the wall eyes open and got the weights out? No, I haven't seen that. Oh, well, we own the knife that was used.

The pliers. Well, it's a Leatherman tool. Yes, that is. Well, I think it's actually just pliers. I have to go check it again. It's a Leatherman. But don't Leatherman make only... With a broken blade.

Oh, okay. No, it's what we own, the implement used to cut the walleyes open to discover the lead weights. In addition to the shirt of the man wielding that weapon. We're talking about valuable shit. We own that stuff. So, that case is trickling along. We're into the news segment. They pleaded guilty to felony cheating and missed.

This is an interesting one. Misdemeanor animal ownership. Presumably meaning they were owning the walleyes. Yeah. I would think that would be like over the limit or something. Mr. Maynard, animal ownership. So Jacob Runyon, 43, and Chase Kaminsky, who's in, which of these fellas is in all that trouble for trying to go to the bowling alley with $100 counterfeit? With their kid. With their kid, exactly.

Which I think plays into the plea deal heavily. I think it's Chase. Chase. He got in a bunch of trouble. He's got like violating a restraining order, bowling with counterfeit money. He's encouraging his kid to do that. I mean, that's like...

I thought none of that stuff was supposed to influence this stuff. That's why I didn't want to like... I don't think it does because there's a thing in America called... It's not double jeopardy It's called habeas corpus What is it that you can't bring up

All the bad stuff you did I'm not sure of the legal term but that's what I'm getting Dude if I rewrote the constitution I would lead with fixing that You'd be like well this guy Oh Well it does go right when you establish Somebody's character as a reliable witness Like if a prosecutor Could get one of these fellows on the stand and be like, so you're saying that the fish just ate lead weights and walleye fillets and you just caught the fish, right?

Sure. That, that could happen. We can't prove it can't, but for you to be a reliable witness, what's your track record in lying and what's your right and so they could go back oh so you can dig it up yes now the why i think it does play in is just the fact that in order to pay your legal counsel and go through a long drawn out trial process of trying to defend yourself by saying, listen, although we cannot biologically prove that walleye eat lead weights and walleye fillets all the time. I could prove that they don't eat walleye fillets. So, um, that's going to cost a bunch of money. He's already on the hook, bad pun,

for having to clear up his other legal troubles too. So I'm thinking he's just looking at the overall cost of... Fighting it. Yeah, keeping his head above water. Another bad pun, maybe. But, yeah. They pled guilty to these things okay um they were initially indicted on cheating attempted grand theft possession of criminal tools tells that mean illegal and

i love illegal animal ownership but when they appeared yesterday in coyuyahoga County Court, both men pleaded guilty to two of those charges in exchange for the remaining charges being dropped. Now, Jason Fisher, who's been on this show, is glad they pleaded out. Fisher organized a tournament at which Runyon and Kaminsky were caught and appeared in the... I'm reading from our own reporting, I should point out. Right, go to TheMeatEater.com. Jordan point out. Right. Go to the meat eater.com. Jordan Siller's piece on the meat eater.com. Um, this is the one time I'm not like guilty of, of not adequately sorting or sourcing where I'm getting something from because Jordan's been on the damn show.

So, uh, Jason goes on to say It was nice to see they pled guilty As opposed to no contest They admitted to doing everything That the state said they did It's good for the fishermen and the community as a whole To put this to bed He points out, this is an interesting perspective

That Jason Fisher has Jason Fisher says he's almost kind of glad They're not going to jail Because then taxpayers would have to pay for them to live in jail. He'd rather they just took their boat away and never let them do any walleye tournaments again. So he doesn't have to think of himself footing the bill to pay them to give them their food, which is an interesting perspective on prison time. Usually you put people in prison because you want to stick it to them, but he wants to stick it to them by not putting them in prison. And let's be fair, they're doing a great job at sticking it to themselves.

Yeah, because then you wound up. You'd think if you got caught cheating on a walleye tournament, you would not take $100 counterfeit bills to the bowling alley. I don't know. Do you know what I mean? I wouldn't. If I do something a little bit bad, I play it cool for a while. You know what I mean? I wouldn't If I do something a little bit bad I like play it cool for a while

You know what I mean? You don't double down? No Layer it on We have a correction on a correction Can you explain how We're at a point where there's a correction on a correction? Okay

So Shortly after the podcast The Liberal Redneck Was recorded Oh Trey, yep We're talking about the There's a podcast called The Liberal Redneck, Trey wrote in that he did a little bit more digging and he determined that what he had said on air was incorrect.

He had said that the only thing going for his hometown was they held the smallmouth bass world record. Right. But then he said they got beat and even that was taken from them. Right. And so before it aired, Phil recorded a little correction and you know, because we're

going to get so many. How did you do that, Phil? It was just a quick little like, hey, Phil here, Trey texted and said, here's a little correction back to the show. You installed that in the episode? Yes. Can I hear it real quick little like, hey, Phil here. Trey texted and said a little correction. Back to the show. You installed that in the episode? Yes. Can I hear it real quick? Hey, everyone.

Phil here with a quick note. Immediately after the show, Trey did some research and found out that Celina and Dale Hollow Lake still hold the record for the smallmouth bass. According to him, he, quote, assumed the universe had taken that from us as well. My bad. Thanks, Trey, and back to the show So then what happened Now we're in a situation where there's a correction On a correction, because a gentleman wrote in

Who is this person? He lives nearby Kyle He has this to say Mr. Crowder was not Incorrect in saying that the record was taken away. What he would have been incorrect in saying is that it was taken away from the lake. Right.

You're thinking to yourself, what? Well, I'll tell you. The record was removed from the individual. But the previous record, which would have been the record by default was also caught in dale hollow lake so even if the record had been permanently redacted dale hollow would still hold the world small mouth record two of the top three this is a hard sentence to understand two of the top oh two of the top three and six of the top ten largest small mouth have... Damn.

You know, this person, well... There's a reason, like, when you have... Let me just tell this person, if you're listening. Never start a sentence with a numeral. You always spell it out at the start of a sentence. Up to 11. Yeah. In some places, they'll make you spell anything under 10 every time.

Mm-hmm. I think that's a good rule. Two of the top three and six of the top 10 largest smallmouth caught have come from Dale Hollow per Bass, B-A-s-s senior editor ken duke the current record now confirmed to have been caught in kentucky waters on the kentucky and tennessee shared water body that is dale hollow was wrought with drama oh so this gets thicker yet this is what trey alluded to before so tennessee and kentucky share this lake the current record came out of dale hollow lake but not but out of the kentucky

waters the fish caught by david hayes of litchfield kentucky was weighed first on scales that were not certified after being told this fish if certified would be the new world record, the fish was rushed to Cedar Hill Marina, which housed the closest set of certified scales. Six weeks after the fish had been confirmed, David Barlow, a guide on Dale Hollow, filed an affidavit stating that he had handled the fish, shoving multiple pieces of hardware and or weights into its gullet to increase the weight. Plot thickens. Why did he admit to that? I don't know. Couldn't live with himself.

I don't know. Maybe they waterboarded him. The IGFA denounced the world record because of the affidavit. Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife Resources followed suit. Tennessee Wildlife and Resource Agency held on, though, and in their investigation found that Barlow was not

even at the marina on the day the fish had been weighed. So he was lying about doing something bad. Lying about doing something bad. That's when he puts his own personal integrity. Like he's weighing in his head. What matters more, my personal integrity or that son of a bitch having the bass record? He's like, I'd rather have.

Right. that son of a bitch having the bass record yeah he's like i'd rather have right i'll forfeit personal integrity to have him not have the satisfaction of the bass record is how barlow apparently according to this piece of journalism so he hadn't been there this accommodation this in combination with the measurements of this fish, the resulting estimated weight of recorded measurements and the official weight on the certified scales resulted in the record being reinstated by both IGFA and the Kentucky State Department. The fish now holds the IGFA world record,

the KDFWR state record, and the TWRA state record. So the International Game and Fish Association and then Kentucky and Tennessee's wildlife departments. If you're thinking to yourself, by God, would I like to get a look at that fish? There's a replica of it at the Cabela's Outpost store in Bowling Green, Kentucky. If you want to pay your respects to the angler,

the ramp where he launched that day has been memorialized as the David L. Hayes Bow Ramp. Go! I love it. At any point,

did they say how big the fish was? You know. That's Corinne's point. It's not as big as the story. No, that's called bad producing right there. Corinne will dig herself out. 11 pounds, 15 ounces. High highs and low lows for Corinne. 11 pounds, 15 ounces. High highs and low lows for Corinne.

11 pounds, 15 ounces. Let's just call it 12. That's a nice smallmouth bass. That's a big smallmouth. Because pound for pound. Go ahead. No, no, you. If you caught a bass that big,

would you turn it into fish sandwiches? Or do you, you got any urge to have a world record? I'd have kept it. I'd have kept it. I'd have kept it. Assuming it's legal to keep it. Yeah. And then pound for pound,

some people say that's the hardest fight in freshwater fish is the smallmouth bass. That thing would have put up a tussle. Plus they're just awesome looking. Red eyes. Tiger stripes. Way cooler than largemouths We reported on I don't know if that counts

That might be overselling it We talked about South Carolina's Harvest the Tag Coyote Program And when So South Carolina As previously discussed on this show Is running a program right now to encourage the harvest of coyotes. I'll point out that our guest Ian Frazier had an S, had a book one time called Coyote v. Acme.

Yes. In which you laid out the legal case that, that Wiley Coyote would have against Acme. Yes. Where he buys his stuff to kill Roadrunner. Right. I mean, it's, it's, uh,, you know, it's product malfeasance. I mean, they're selling this guy and they're selling it over and over, you know? Yeah.

One of those things everybody thinks about, but nobody took the time to write. Well, and then he also wrote a thing, I believe that you argued that if you really wanted to have a good relationship, you'd date your mother. Well, that was one of my very very early pieces when I was like 25 years old does this fall under the bad advice category it was it was advice I think taken by nobody nobody I knew and it wasn't my mother wasn't crazy about it either but uh so Southolina is running a program to encourage uh coyote harvest in order to um you know in order to orchestrate on predator control in the interest of recovering some game species they have been tagging coyotes and cutting them loose and if you get one of the coyotes

that's tagged you get a lifetime hunting license and they thought through it enough to be that you could also um is it confer is that the word i'm looking for where you give something to somebody maybe transfer you transfer it to somebody else meaning if i got one of these coyotes i could give it to my daughter who's who's 10 and then she's got a lifetime hunt license a guy heard this and was talent wrote in to tell us how in South Dakota, they used to tag pheasants and turn them out. And if you shot a tagged pheasant, you'd be rewarded with a Cabela's gift card. And he just wanted to let us know that he one time was looking at a breasted out pheasant in a ditch

and realized it had the band on it. So whoever hunted it probably didn't get the news. And his coworker took the band down and got a $5,000 gift card out of the ditch. Are you aware of the million dollar pheasant? No. No. So same deal. And this is a full tourism deal.

Pheasantomics in South Dakota is fascinating to me. The, um, so they banded a hundred birds, released them. 36 birds were turned in and, um, of those hundred birds, they had the insurance company randomly select one of those numbers, store it in an electronic device in a safe somewhere, and then, you know, if somebody turned in that magic number, they could win a million bucks. Really? Yep. Wow.

Is that, like, the state's money um you know how these contests work is you because if it's state tourism dollars you pony up a bunch of cash that is like a deposit eventually and you get it. The money comes from like this insurance payout scenario as I understand it. But. You think that's true? I know it's true. But did anybody win the million?

I'm not sure if anybody ever won the million. Because it kind of seems like they're gambling, like, eh, one in a hundred, it probably will never happen. You know, but you didn't, we don't know if anybody won. Right. Yeah, but there were, you know, 36 of the bands turned in, and of those 36, none of them were million-dollar birds. What makes a little bit of sense, what you're talking about, is I was at a fundraiser in Wyoming one time, and they were giving away A truck

If you could roll A set of dice and get five of a kind Which isn't gonna happen It's not gonna happen Okay Maybe if you're playing Yahtzee with your grandma But not if you're playing Yahtzee For a truck

So I was there And I was like emceeing the fundraiser Maybe if you're playing Yahtzee with your grandma, but not if you're playing Yahtzee for a truck. So I was there and I was like emceeing the fundraiser. It was a nonprofit fundraiser. And they had a guy from the insurance company down there. And the guy weighed all the dice. He came in and analyzed the dice. And he measured out where you had to stand and where the dice had to wind up so that it had to be like a legit roll and he was a supervising he's like an insurance man supervisor because no one's going to roll it

right so they had bought some sort of policy that on the what what are the odds that you'd roll five of a kind that'd be a quick internet search if i can remember my basic high school it's like a yahtzee roll right like five dice five of a kind is like a one in like like uh and then there's like an exponential sort of addition you have to do. It's like five times five times five. Well, I'll just let someone else do it on the computer. One in 7,776. So it doesn't sound that crazy. So you had a...

No, but it is. Better odds than drawing a sheep tag. One in 7,000? 7,776. Yep. You had to first win a chance to roll the dice. Ooh, that makes it, yeah, much harder. So everybody's all excited about getting to be the dice roller.

And then when you get to be the dice roller, you got a one in 7,000 some odd chance of winning the thing. So they insured this somehow. And of course the guy, you know. Yeah. Just, you know, shake a day in Western bars is a big deal, right? Sure, yeah. And it's the guy, you know. Yeah. Just, you know, a shake a day in Western bars is a big deal. Right. And it's the same thing.

It's like you have 50 cents, you get a chance, whatever the pot is. And it used to be the pot of all these people losing 50 cents to the shake a day would get really high. And then the state capped it for, because it's gambling. So I think a legal pot is $500 or less or $800 or less now in the state of Montana. I can't remember which, but while I was back in my bartending days, I had several people win shake a day pots, right? I mean, eventually it does hit. You can imagine that whoever wins that at a bar does not then just go leave and make a deposit. One little asshole kid did.

Okay, so I bartended at an old man's, working man's bar, okay? And everybody, when a normal patron would win by rounds for the whole bar. All the bartenders got a big tip, and then he'd buy a couple of rounds for the whole bar. All the bartenders got a big tip. And then he'd buy a couple of rounds for everybody and then maybe take some winnings home.

If it was like a regular who happens to be like in their 20s, none of the money ever made at home. They went and paid rent with it. Well, they drank it. They forgot how to pay rent with it. Oh, the kid that left. You're talking about the kid that left. But the kid,

one kid comes in, watches some other people roll, and it was like Halloween night, something obnoxious, and goes, oh, I want to do that. And he's like staring at the dice, and part of me, honest to God, wanted to be like, okay, see ya. Because I just knew how it was going to go

down. And he scooped up the money and ran out of the bar. Never to be seen again. It was not the way you're supposed to play the game. I like to think he invested all that money and he's a very successful businessman now. Curing cancer. 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. Whew, our northern brothers get irritated. Well, if you're sick of, you know, sucking a high-end titty there, OnX is now in Canada. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season. The Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps, waypoints, and tracking.

That's right. We're always talking about OnX here on the Meat Eater Podcast. Now you guys in the Great White North can be part of it, be part of the excitement. You can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service. That's a sweet function. As part of your membership, you'll gain access to exclusive pricing on products and services hand-picked by the OnX Hunt

team. Some of our favorites are First Light, Schnee's, Vortex Federal, and more. As a special offer, you can get a free three months to try OnX out if you visit onxmaps.com

slash meet. onxmaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX Club, y'all. More feedback. This is the last up-top information we've got to cover for today. So,

what was the name of the show when we talked about down in Florida? Oh, Spittin' and Struttin'. Yeah. If you refer back to the episode Spittin' and Struttin', we had a guest on who was explaining to me how someone he knows hates me because a person from the USGS said how Python eradication programs are not effective in Florida, and he hates me for not arguing with him okay that individual that former guest who spoke on burmese python

the burmese python explosion in florida wrote in so i have a note to the hater i didn't catch his name but as someone shared i was uh i looked at his instagram page um he has a well it doesn't matter so bob reed wrote in to say this is the researcher from usgs who works on population dynamic issues with invasive Burmese pythons in South Florida. He said, sorry to hear that a dude in Florida hates you because I said there's no evidence that the python control programs are having a significant effect on populations at landscape scales. He doesn't say however, could there's an implied however he goes on to say we just published a big scientific review of pythons in florida the conclusion from the removal program section remains the same no available evidence of python suppression across the landscape despite removal of over 13 000 pythons He said,

It's hard for people to comprehend just how cryptic they are and therefore how many are out there for every one you catch. As for panthers, he says, yeah, they hammer whitetails. They did. We reported on this in the past, but I'm going to re-talk about it. As for you folks in Florida who think that your deer hunting has gone to shit due to Panther recovery, if that is how you weight values, if that is how you weightthers, hating Panthers, whatever. Just like an objective reality is Panthers hammer whitetails. Okay.

They did some work. They did some known fate survival data, meaning they put 241 collars out on adult deer. In the Florida Panther National Wildlife Refuge in Big Cypress National Preserve in Florida. From 2015 to 2018, they put collars on 241

whitetail deer. 156 females, 85 males. Now, follow along here. Okay? They then wait for there to be a mortality signal On the deer And they immediately go out and investigate

What happened to the deer They had 134 Mortalities Now Sandy take a guess 134 mortalities Take a guess at what number of those were killed by panthers

100% Do a lower one Because when I give you the answer I want it to be more astounding I hate when people do that man I always do that to my kids Guess how much money I found Million

No $7 Forget that part edit that out phil okay out of 134 mortalities 110 were predation now people that go and say like oh hunters get them all not even listen to this predators non-human predators I always like to point out that human predators are predators. Non-human predators killed 110 out of 134. 87% of that 110 were panthers. Okay. He says a much greater rate than reported by studies conducted before the Panther genetic restoration effort, which was initiated in 1995.

One deer, okay, 134 mortalities. When we originally talked about this study, we originally talked about, that was a long time ago. We talked about this study because we talked about the state of Florida trying to say to hunters, if you see a deer with a collar, don't shoot it because it has a collar and don't not shoot it because it has a collar. Try to act normal because we're trying to find out what kills deer. So if you're like, oh my God, it's got a collar, shoot it. You're messing up the study. And if you say like, if you're like me and you said, I'm not going to shoot a deer with a collar.

Cause that means another person has touched it and it's soiled. Um, I want to be the first person to touch it. You're messing up the study. So if people were true to that and really just shot deer if they would have shot it, 134 deer out on the landscape with collars, one was killed legally by a hunter, two were killed by poachers. Just gives you an insane, like,

like who is killing deer in Florida? It ain't people. And of the three killed by people two of my poachers it's it's very like isolated it's it's it's it's like uh it's borderline and no it's beyond anecdotal it's not anecdotal conclusive it's just like holy cow so when you're in florida like i just was two weeks talking to, and everyone you meet says the deer hunting went to shit because of panthers, and everyone I talk to, I'm like, oh, there's got to be more to the story. I can't really, you know.

Damn. Hmm. What do you think about all that, Callahan? we can follow that callahan i mean the the idea that people won't think that agencies have to know right like oh you know how many panthers are out there you know how many pythons are out there it's just it's nonsensical most people told me i know oh but they don't. It was mostly, I know. If you want to know, ask me. Don't ask them. Yeah.

Yeah. So like the Python bowl that Florida kind of promotes, uh, I was talking to a biologist down there and, and he's like, yeah, you know where every single Python is caught. It's on this two mile stretch road that kicks off into like big Cyprus. Yep.

I was on that road. Um, he's like, you know why they're not caught anywhere else? Cause there's no roads. He's like, but do you really think that that's where all the pythons are is on that road? Yeah. You know, he's like everything else is so miserable to go through for most of the year, if not all of the year, it's like, people just don't go in there. It takes a very special person who likes to suffer from the bugs and the heat and the humidity

and the things that sting and stick you to go in there and look for something. He's like, a lot of times when we have tagged pythons, we'll be standing right on top of the signal and it can take a frustratingly long time to find the snake that you're literally standing on, that you have a beacon attached to because they, that's what

they do. Did you ever see the picture of the python eating the deer? Yeah. Which is amazing. I mean, the deer was, I think, bigger than the python. Yeah, it was a crazy photo.

It was a really amazing photo. And there's that python that ate a gator, and then that gator clawed its way back out of the python and killed it. Oh, I love that. Yeah. That's great. That's a don't give up story. When he got back to his friends, they're like, where you been?

He's like, don't even get me started. Don't take a nap. Start there. On a recent episode, now we're getting into our guest subject expertise, but do you remember your, your, do you remember writing about your antipodes? Oh, sure. Yeah. It was like the second piece I did. Somehow we were talking about digging down.

I don't know how this even came up. You were talking about. My kid's book. No, you were talking about animals found at the same latitude all the way around circumpolar circumpolar like polar bears and there's others the blue muscle okay there's a bunch of species globally that have what's called circumpolar distribution meaning you take a latitude band like the blue muscle is one i know i don't know what the hell the latitude band is but you take this latitude band

and you can wrap that latitude band around the entire globe and they're always present. Polar bears have circumpolar distribution, but it's like the top of the ball. So it's zero to, I don't know. Above the Arctic circle. Yeah, like a very narrow band.

It'd be like the top of it. It'd be like if you were a head. If you imagine the Earth as a head and the polar bear's distribution as a really small yarmulke. That's like him. White yarmulke. Yeah, that's him. And other species have different bands. And that, I don't know why, that got me talking about the concept of the, it's not a concept, the term antipodes.

Antipodes, right. And I'm familiar with antipodes because of the writing of our guest today, Ian Frazier. And I was saying that I think that you're saying that where you grew up in Ohio. Okay, this is where you made your mistake. Okay, go on. The thing is, I had just started at the New Yorker magazine. I was writing for the talk of the town. And I got this idea, what is on the other side of the world from Manhattan?

Oh. Because I was doing it for that magazine. And so it's not that different. I mean, you know, it's 400 miles different in the Indian Ocean from Ohio, the antipodes of like Cleveland, Ohio, or the antipodes of Manhattan. But yeah, it was just that if you drilled straight down through, you would come out in this

really unfrequented part of the world. And it's like 100 yards or something deep in this stuff called, and you were talking about it, like some kind of muck. It's called Glab globigerina ooze i don't have jar that from the studio and it's i would like a jar of it to be honest and they it's the like calcium uh residue from these tiny single you know very very small uh sea creatures that have shells.

And when they die, their shells fall to the bottom and they become this ooze. But so that's the Antipodes story. And it is in the Indian ocean. But what, but in your piece, weren't you talking about towns in America? Yes. Yeah. Because that was how it first came to me because, uh, Canton, Ohio, I had heard was named after Canton, China. And then there's Pekin, Illinois, which supposedly is named after Peking as it was called then.

But not because that was their antipodes. I think maybe they thought it was their antipodes. You want to know what the antipode of this place is right here we're sitting in? How do you know? Can you just look it up now? Sure. Yeah, it up now? Sure. Yeah. It's geo,

geodatos.net. You can just type in, search for your antipode. Really? God, they ruined everything on you. Porto Francais in the Southern, French Southern territories,

an island like South of Africa, South. That's where we'd come out if we drill the hole straight down that's what it says all right here's my next question we don't need to spend much more time on the antipodes i have you wouldn't believe how often your writing um has been discussed on this show. I've talked a lot about, I'm going to remind you of something you wrote that I want you to tell the broader story. Okay.

You were profiling, I talked about this. You were profiling a steelhead guide. Right. I don't remember his name. I remember it hit people would joke when you call him melanoma Joe. Yeah.

He guided just in, uh, uh, board shorts i'm gonna like it's good there's a spoiler alert here and then i want you to talk a little bit about this unbeknownst to you while you're profiling him he's contemplating suicide and you're on a river trip with him right and. And one night you like, you get up to take a leak or something. Right. And you didn't know what to make of it at the time

because you didn't know what you would later know. But you see him down at the river's edge in the dark at night staring into the river. And you made some comment in your piece of reporting, you made some comment about you were getting sort of a preview right of him as a ghost right right yeah it was like seeing a ghost i mean i got up out of the tent and uh he's standing there and there was no reason for i mean it was way late it was on the deschutes river, nobody around, you know,

for miles and miles. And I, and I see him standing there and I, I couldn't even believe I wasn't, it couldn't even be, I thought it wasn't him. And I just looked and I kept looking at him and it was like, he then kind of came back into focus and saw me. And he said something like, ah, when you get old, you got to get up and pee all the time, right? And, you know, he made some kind of nice comment like that, just a friendly comment. And it was like, it was normal again. But then I got back in my sleeping bag and I thought, what was he doing out there? That was, I mean, that was just weird that he was standing there. I then wrote the piece. Again, this was for Outside. I then wrote the piece again, this was for outside magazine. I wrote the piece, they sent a photographer, they took all the photos they needed for the piece.

But what, what was the, when you pitched the profile of a steelhead guide, like what were you, why were you interested in the guy? Cause he was unbelievably good. And he was really, like I had gone to, he guided out of Sisters, Oregon. And I went to that guide shop and I said, I want to, you know, fish with this guy. And they said, you will never get a reservation. You know, this guy's booked up for five years. And that made me think, well, this guy must be really good. And then a guy I know, a good writer named Abe Stre Streep fished with him and said, yeah, he's as good as, you know, he's really great. You should do something about him. And so I then persisted

and then I finally did, but that was, it actually came by way of outside because they had heard about this guy too. So, so then, you know, I did, uh, set up this trip and it was, uh, like through three, four day river trip and that, you know, we caught finally, we did catch steelhead. And then they took these pictures that I signed off on the piece. It was ready to go. And then he, uh, he committed suicide. And so I went back. I can't remember. How did he kill him?

He killed himself at a boat launch, didn't he? No, he killed himself in his car. And I went to the place where he killed himself. And I mean, they're lonesome places out here, but that was one of the most lonesome, I mean, in Oregon around there. It was, it was a place where people had shot skeet and there were shotgun shells all over the place. It was just like this open patch out in the forest. And he had just parked there and he had, he had made a few little signs in the bushes around there. He had like left a pack of cigarettes in a bush, in the crotch of a branch in a bush. It was just, it was a spooky thing and it was really sad. And I felt really bad for the guy because he was a, he was a brilliant guy. He was

a great guy. Did he shoot himself? No, he hooked up a hose from the- From the fly shop. And the fly, do you remember that detail? Oh yeah, that's a great detail. He took a hose that the fly shop had used just, I think maybe just to wash down its parking lot or something. And he used that hose to hook the exhaust up to his window. And the, the fly shop is where he was booking all of, so he kind of had this slow descent as far as from reputability, right?

Right. So, um, he had gotten crossways with, with this fly shop, um, for, you know, a number of, uh, I'm sure what Brody could attest to as very normal reasons. Yeah, just petty. I Brody could attest to as very normal reasons. Yeah, just petty. One thing that happened to him was he was guiding clients that this fly shop really liked. And while he was guiding, his truck was repossessed.

So suddenly he gets there and his truck is gone. It's been repossessed. And the people he was guiding apparently didn't mind. They thought it was kind of interesting. You're SOL if you're a guide without a truck. Yeah, you really need to have the truck. But so then I then went back and re-reported the whole thing and rewrote the piece. Yeah, it's The Last Days of Steelhead Joe.

You can still read it outside online. What are some of the things you found out and looked at differently after you went back and worked on it more? Well, these conversations I'd had with him, like that moment when he was know, well, I mean, I don't know exactly what he was thinking, but it looked like he might have done it maybe even at that point or something. I don't know, he was somebody like, and you must have this happen in what you do, where you will become extremely close to somebody that you see only for a few days. Yeah, yeah. You know, like that happens when you're writing, like you'll find out about somebody, you'll get really very sympathetic with them and also very maybe conflicted about, I mean joe was um he really was not well prepared you know he had one spay rod on this trip you know and he wouldn't let me bring my fly rod he said you're gonna spay cast or nothing and i had never spay cast before and do you know how to spay cat

no does that do you you must know those yes yeah i? No. Does that, do you? I bet Cal does. Yes. Yeah. I'm, I'm, uh. These guys are both fishing guides. Yeah. Catch fish at all costs type of guys. So the spay rod, uh, doesn't see a whole lot of light these days, but.

Well, it's really, I did learn it and he taught it to me. And that was, that was amazing. I mean, his empathy and his ability to, to like, and, and not to make you feel bad. You know, he was like, if you have a history with coaches where coaches will tell you stuff and then you got off on the wrong foot with a coach and you just don't like to be told stuff anymore. He was very able to get past that. And he was just a kind and good man, but he was really depressive. And he was a descendantant he was a direct descendant of thomas jefferson for real yep you checked it out i it was checked out yeah outside would have checked that out yeah his last name was randolph and the randolphs i think jefferson's daughter married a Randolph. So that, I mean, the Randolph is an old name from Virginia, so.

He, um, how this, there's so many parts of his story that are so applicable to conversations, get certain guides and shops, um, for anybody who's ever done that or attempted to do that as a living. So I just, I really found it crazy how you found him because there's bits and pieces of his story that are hard to find in one person, but they're easily found in every guiding circle in America. So he's a former athlete.

Right. Wasn't a born and bred steelhead person. Right. Came out, learned it, acquires this huge client list, you know, that are specifically requesting him, which is like a benchmark in the guide world. Yeah. requesting him, which is like a benchmark in the guide world. Right, yeah. He hits this other super unattainable benchmark in the guiding world, which is he finds a super wealthy, very attractive client and marries her. Oh, yeah. That's like a dream thing for guides.

That's what keeps you guys going in the morning. There's always that chance. It's a very common thing. Is it really? Oh, yeah, man. Like a sugar mama. Like that it happens or the guides want it to happen. I know of one instance where it happened.

It's a story. Like it is, like I said, it's a story that is applicable in every guide circle in probably the world. But to find it all wrapped up in one person is like amazing. Yeah. I had done a profile of another guide, uh, who guides out of stat or, uh, yeah, he guides out of Staten Island and I fish, uh, I haven't fished with him for a while, but we fish right in New York Harbor sometimes. And then we fish all along down the Jersey Shore, places that Bruce Springsteen has sung about, and for bluefish and stripers. And I had already done that some years before. So I had already done a guide profile.

But the thing is, as a kid, I fished by myself. And I was very much brought up fishing by myself. In fact, I have fished from when I was a kid and did not need a license until I am an old man and do not need a license. That's awesome. And I came up as somebody fishing by himself. And when I had to fish with guides, it was a big adjustment because I didn't like, because I was just old, old or too old to go, you know, and plus places like the Deschutes, you have to have a guide basically.

But, um, but so I became very, uh, when I found a guide, I really liked it. It was a big, it was a big deal. But what, what if. I, I, I got to finish the, the, the, okay. But this is a rise and fall story. So it also includes all these little bits and pieces again, found that are ubiquitous in the guide community. Right. So he's at the top of his game and then he starts, starts losing.

Right. In, in ways that are again, very relatable and all the guide circles. Divorce. Right right money mismanagement crossways with his uh guide shops right starts taking some illegal trips on the side i think was part of it too yeah i mean the thing this is a familiar story to you absolutely to anybody who guides he had a license to guide through the guide shop, through the tackle shop. And when they fired him, he did not have a guide. He did not have a license to guide. And so then he got a license to do float trips, but that wasn't the same.

And so he was actually guiding with a float trip license. Got it. And that was, you know, and he got caught doing that and he was going to be going to trial and he would have lost his ability to guide in Oregon for five years or something like that. So he was really up against it at that point. So when you did your trip, was he a licensed fishing guide? No.

Wait a minute. Yes. I think he still was when we did our trip because I booked that through that shop. So yeah, I think he still was when we did our trip because I booked that through that shop. So, yeah, I think he still was. To me, the whole picture was like, this is like an under the table trip. It just had the feel of that to me because all the things that you said. Yeah, but you can't do that with a writer because you're going to get busted. I don't think he cared.

Oh. He didn't tell me, I don't think. I had no inkling of that at the time. If you booked it through a shop, it wasn't under the table. I'm pretty sure it was before he got fired. I mean, probably the people from the shop are listening and they'll clear this up. But that's why all those points made it just like so captivating. Like that's the type of thing that happens.

Well, I feel like there should be somebody who specializes in mental health of guides because it is an enormously difficult profession. And it's, I mean, I sympathize with it because I'm a freelance writer and it's just up and down and are you going to get paid or, you know, how is it going to go? And also, you know, the emotional cost of finding ways to connect with every. Right. You got a new client every day typically, right? And you got to make those connections in order to have just good basic communication.

That's the beauty of having the same clients year after year, though. You don't got to, like, you figure them out after a couple of years of guiding the same people over and over again. Yeah. Yeah, Brody got to where you didn't really take new clients.

No. No. Which again, is like one of those things that people on the climb up are trying to get to. That's part of the narrative. Yeah. Yanni one day, so we have another colleague, Yannis, who also guided. And one day he and I were sitting in, we'd just come out of a McDonald's drive-thru here in town.

I don't know, I can't remember what the hell we were doing. Either way, here was a guide boat drives by. Like obviously a guide boat. A like obviously a guide boat a kid pulling a you know drift boat and i said oh yanni that probably brings back memories and makes you a little jealous seeing that guy heading out and yanni said no heading out fish the same damn river with some guy you don't feel like talking to not Not at all. Did you ever read 95 in the Shade? Oh, yeah. McGuane's thing?

No, man. 92. Sorry, 92 in the Shade. I don't know if I did. He's been on the show, though. Has he really? But that is a really good book about guiding. I mean, it's a kind of almost a melodrama in a way, but it's a wonderful book.

I just got back from Florida, hanging out with a bunch of, uh, South Florida fishing guides. Uh-huh. And it's just, it's so funny. Like when I first read that book with the, the politics of guiding in a new spot or guiding for new people and the drugs and all this. Especially in South Florida, man, like you don't mess with other people. And it's nonsensical to me.

Like I was having this debate on like how territorial people are and all the things. Like it's just wild. But yeah, go ahead. I know guides down there that will not let their clients like turn on their phone because they don't want to mark in spots. Sure. You know what I mean?

Yeah. And having that spot get out and then another guide's there the next day, you know, it's like, it's cutthroat. 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. Whew. Our northern brothers get irritated.

Well, if you're sick of, you know, sucking high and titty there, OnX is now in Canada. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season. The Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps, waypoints, and tracking. That's right. We're always talking about OnX here on the Meat Eater Podcast.

Now you guys in the Great White North can be part of it, be part of the excitement. You can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service. That's a sweet function. As part of your membership, you'll gain access to exclusive pricing on products and services handpicked by the OnX Hunt team. Some of our favorites are First Light, Schnee's, Vortex Federal, and more.

As a special offer, you can get a free three months to try OnX out if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. onxmaps.com slash meet. OnXMaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX Club, y'all. When you were working on travels in Siberia, you wound up spending a bunch of time with, I don't even know what, what do you, so. I remember talking to you about this at the time.

Like you spent some days out on hunting trips. I spent days with Chukchi guys. Yeah. Tell about that experience. Well, I went. Because you told a really funny story to me about a seal hunting trip you went on. I don't remember the funny part of it, unfortunately. It was funny to me.

Okay. It was miserable for you. I went. part of it unfortunately it was funny to me okay it was miserable for you i went um like like yeah lay out like who the who those people are and what you were doing there and well i went to nome a bunch of times with the intention of flying over to chukotka which is the part of the russian far east that is across from alaska it's across the Bering Strait. And Nome has really terrible weather. So I was up in Nome maybe five times for every time I actually flew.

Maybe not five, but it was a bunch of times. And finally I got to go over there. I didn't do it. I messed something up because I didn't. Can you set the book up a little bit too? I mean, like you essentially, I mean, you spent seven years working, traveling there on and off. And you essentially like you've i mean you spent seven years working traveling there

on and off and essentially like you've you've learned russian to work on the book i learned some russian i uh i didn't i didn't get real good at it but yeah i learned some russian i drove with two guides uh not uh angling guides obviously from uh saint pet. Petersburg to Vladivostok. And that trip was like 15,000 kilometers. We took side trips and stuff like that. But that was sort of the center part of the book was that cross-country trip. But I also took other smaller trips. And one of the smaller trips that I took was from Alaska to Chukotka. I need to throw in one more tidbit before you go

i know i told you to go but now i'm i'm wishing i've done it in different orders two really funny things i mean the book is like it plays it's heart-wrenching but there's two funny parts probably more funny parts in the book but you observe one day that you uh you observe a car coming down the road and it's towing another car yeah and instead of and what they're using for a toe strap is a safety belt you observe a car coming down the road and it's towing another car. Yeah. And instead of, and what they're using for a toe strap is a safety belt. Yeah. A seatbelt.

And you had the line where you said, and all the time I spent in Russia, that was the only time I ever saw a seatbelt used for anything. When was this? Was this after the wall came down or? Yeah, yeah. I drove across siberia in 2001 oh okay and i got to the pacific after seven weeks of travel on september 11th 2001 so i'm there and i have a i had a sat satellite phone and I have a message, just a text message from my wife saying we are okay. And I hadn't heard anything about it.

I didn't know anything about it. So then I found out, but, uh, just to go back to talking about those, because I remember telling you about this and you being fascinated by these guys. They were the best hunters I had ever seen, these Chukchi guys. And I had hunted with you by that time. But are they, so they are, they have to be like linguistically related to the Inuit cultures in the far north, right? Yeah, I mean, linguistically they are connected. Some people in that part of Russia have relatives like on St. Lawrence Island. And if you saw, if you remember from the news, not that long ago,

they started, Russia started going out and recruiting soldiers in these really far-flung villages because they didn't want to be recruiting in Petersburg and Moscow and getting people all upset. And so they went out and all these people, these, you know, who were living out in the far parts of Russia, they were feeling the pressure of recruiting. And these two guys took a little aluminum boat and went from, uh, Chukotka, I think to St. Lawrence Island and then to Alaska. But they got out of it by just going across the straight. And that happens. I mean, people do cross the straight. Sometimes they come from, uh, Chukotka to St. Lawrence Island, just to see relatives. They do that, uh, in the summer. And, uh, so I was up there and I,

we just went out, uh, to a salmon camp, which is a really cool place where you just hang around your nets, fill up with salmon, you pull in the salmon you know but not commercial this isn't no this is native people who can who who can do that i guess they have special permission to do it but they take a lot of salmon and they put them in big tubs and salt them down and the main thing that they need is salt and the salt back then was coming from the u.s but all the stuff that they had, they had Evan rude motors, you know, they had American rifles, they had American nets, you know, I mean, that was where they got their supplies, but they, they build little cairns of rocks on places where a seal is likely to be swimming around. And they just sit there for a really long time with their guns propped on these

cairns and they wait for a seal to pop up and they shoot the seal in the head that's the part that you can see and i was in a boat with a guy who hit a seal in the head with no scope i mean it's just you know uh what is it just open sights or whatever you call it and uh it's just, you know, what is it? Just open sites or whatever you call it. And it was just a phenomenal shot at some distance. And the water is really blue and it's extremely cold. So you don't want to fall out of the boat. You're going to die. But just to see that seal hit and then this big plume of blood in that blue water. And he brought the seal in and uh butchered it out and his wife uh made the seal

liver with angel hair pasta and it was excellent it was an excellent dinner uh did uh there's another funny thing you talk about that and i don't know if you ever figured it out um this actually is funny where when you told me the story about when i said it was a funny story about the day you went is you really wanted you were out and you were talking about how badly you wanted to go home oh yeah yeah and you're motoring along in a boat and you talk about how all of a sudden this duck flies overhead and spins around and lands in some bay and and all he wanted to do was get back, and you saw them all watch that duck,

and you're like, please no, please no, please no. And all of a sudden he said, that boat turns. Yeah, it was. And you're like, oh my God, really? It was an eider duck, and eider down is real valuable. So it was like, you're like headed back, and real valuable. So, yeah, they want to have it. So it was like, you're like headed back. Then you're like, oh, son of a gun.

Really? I've got to go over there? No, they would stay out all day. And they spoke good Russian. I mean, they spoke Chukchi, but they spoke Russian. And they had been educated in Petersburg. The guy had been head of his reindeer brigade under communism. You know, they had had different reindeer collectives.

And so he was really well educated. He knew a lot of poetry by heart. But he was like an American native guy. And at that time, the native people there that I saw were doing better than the Russian Russians. Is that right? Because they just had stopped for a long period there, had stopped doing trips to Russia. You know, they had stopped to the Far East. They had stopped supplying those really remote cities.

So I could have bought an apartment there for a thousand bucks, a beautiful duplex in Providenia, Russia. Really? Yeah. What I was saying about a funny story you do tell in that book is you're camping somewhere alongside of a road, and you're in your tent, and you wake up at night, and there's a bunch of drunk guys that have somehow also pulled out at the turnout.

You're camped on a turnout. Right, right. And you know enough Russian to know that they're debating doing something to your tent, but you don't recognize the verb. The noun is palatka. And the accusative,

that is, it was obviously in the accusative case. So they were saying, you know, what are we going to do to the Palatka? This I could keep hearing. And one guy's saying, don't do anything to it. Cut it out. No, come on. We're just going to do blah, blah, blah. And I assumed they were going to tear it down and just leave me lying there in my sleeping bed. And my guides, of course, were gone because my guides managed to meet women all the way across the Russian Federation.

And they would disappear in the evening. And I'd just be there and there'd be drunks driving around. And I would go to sleep and they would bring women for me to meet. And they would say, oh, we told them that we had an American and she's an elementary school teacher. And I would get out. I'd be in my pajamas. I'd talk briefly and I would go back to bed. I didn't drink in Russia and I didn't do anything else like that because.

Are you totally not drinking right now? Yeah. I haven't had a drink in 16 years. Yeah. Almost 16 years. I remember when you were quitting drinking. Yeah. I remember you telling me you were sick of the hangovers.

I was sick of the hangovers and I was just, it was just, I drunk enough. I was tired of it. And never got back into it. Never got back in. No. Do you feel like an urge or no? No. Not anymore.

Do you drink NA stuff? I do. And I get made, people make fun of me for it. Sure. I mean, ordering a non-alcoholic beer in Russia is like, you have to be insane, you know? So, yeah, but it was, I mean, I felt I needed my wits about me there. So I didn't, I didn't drink. And people had told me, my Russian friends had said, you know, oh, you'll be killed. They'll, you know, this is a terrible idea. And I think it was less dangerous than they had made it out to be. But I didn't really, I was blind with kind of romantic notions of what Russia was like and what Siberia was like.

So I didn't, you know, like the recent thing that has happened, I mean, the invasion, it was just, to me, I thought Putin was just funny. You know, he's not just funny. He's not funny. But I thought he was funny. I mean, you can go online, find him singing, I Found My Thrill on Blueberry Hill. Fishing big old yellow perch with no shirt on. Fishing northerns with no shirt on. Northerns. He's into northerns. Yeah. You wouldn't be able to do that book now, man. No. I mean, I might be able to go there, but I don't think I would. I, who knows getting back,

getting out. I don't know. I wouldn't try it now. It does sound like a lot of that romanticism did line up for you though, once you made it out there. Well, I mean, I went to places that a famous traveler from my family's town where my family lived in Ohio, Norwalk, Ohio. This guy named George Kennan went there in the 1880s after the assassination of the czar in 1881 there were all these people shipped to siberia in order for this clamp down to be effective and it wasn't really effective but they shipped a lot of people there and george kennan went there to see how those people were doing that had been exiled and the czars were disorganized and liberal or whatever enough that they did still permit that kind of travel.

But Kennan had a minder, some kind of police minder with him a lot of the time. But he actually I think maybe he was pretty much on his own because they liked Kennan. uh, book about Siberia, uh, called, uh, Siberia and the prison exile system, which, uh, Anton Chekhov read and made his own trip. So this guy from Ohio inspired one of the greatest writers of all time, Anton Chekhov to go to Sakhalin Island. So, uh, which is, uh, I think South of Kamchatka, but it's another island like that we're recording when I said something about don't make don't make Stalin jokes or is that pre-recording I don't know like we're I'm if I know Phil we were recording earlier I made a comment when you looked you looked when I said that that you had that there was a part of the book where you argue about that Stalin,

like how people make Stalin references. And you get into the, toward the end of your book, Travels in Siberia, you get into the Gulag system. Just all the, I mean, I don't know if you still remember some of the stats, but I mean, just like the horrible atrocities.

It was a horrible, yeah, they were death camps. I mean, they, the horrible atrocities. It was a horrible, yeah, they were death camps. I mean, there were people that, there were degrees of horribleness, but the people that mined gold in Magadan, you know, I mean, Russia, nobody was honoring anything. Russia had to buy stuff with gold because they had already defaulted on their debts when the Soviets took over. And the gold mining operation in Magadan was a murderous thing.

Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, millions of people killed. Yeah. I mean, from the beginning of the Russian, from the Russian revolution through like the end of the Soviet Union. I mean, people estimate 60 million or 70 million. That includes, you know, like what we lost

475,000 people in World War II, which is a real serious thing. If you think about, like, in terms of now what our population is, that would be a serious thing. Like the U.S. lost that. The U.S. lost that.

For reference, 57,000 in Vietnam. Right. And four, what was the number? 470, I think it was like 475,000 in the Second World War. It was under, I believe, under 500,000. The Russians lost 20 million in that war. So that when I would say to Russians, well, we helped you, you know,

they were like, oh, geez, you know, like we held their coats while they fought the Nazis, you know, like, I mean, they don't think they don't take it seriously, even though we did supply a lot of their air force. A lot of their air force was made in Detroit and then shipped up here to Helena, where they painted the Soviet markings on the planes and then flown up to Alaska and pilots from Alaska would fly it over to the Russian pilots who would pick it up on the other side and fly it back to the Western Front. So we did participate very much in helping them, but they don't – they didn't – the people I talked to were very unimpressed by that uh there's a piece you wrote i don't know you wrote this a long time ago but i've always loved it is uh you were living up in did you live you live in big fork montana yes yeah

um and when you're living in big fork montana you liked you liked uh the amount of reporting in the local newspapers that would occur about bears. Yeah. And you wrote a piece of, you wrote a piece of reporting about how bears are reported on. Yeah. It was called bear news. Yeah. And I remember in it, you made the observation about when a bear committed a senseless

killing yeah the grizzly dude committed a senseless killing of a human did you ever read that book night of the grizzlies yeah oh yeah no that was the same guy that wrote give a boy a gun about claude dallas right i don't his name is olson and he wrote Jack Olson. Jack Olson. Yeah. Yeah. He, I, I did, I think Jack Olson. I'm not, I'm not familiar. So the Night of the Grizzlies.

I'm familiar with Night of the Grizzlies. Yeah, Night of the Grizzlies. Do you, do you remember the story well enough to tell the story? Yeah, it was two night, well, you may remember it better, but two bears after there not having been any bear attacks for years on the same night in very different, widely separated parts

of the park, uh, killed a camper. Each bear killed a camper. Two bears killed two women and no one had been killed by a bear in that park. And I don't know how long it happened. The same damn night. Right. It was this, yeah, it was a very, it's, uh, my wife and I were married in Big Fork and we gave that, uh, book as a gift to our wedding guests.

And we just were thinking, wow, this is a good book. And we didn't think it was kind of counterproductive in terms of Montana tourism. The Todd Strasser is your give a boy a gun. Oh, Jack Olson didn't write a book about Claude Dallas? Um, not that I'm seeing here. But, uh, tourism plays heavily in wildlife news in the greater, uh, Glacier National Park. Uh-huh. White fish tourist ecosystem up there.

So yes, the, um, bear news is a, is a real thing. And there's a lot of suppressed news from a lot of, a lot of folks, uh, inside the park as I understand it. So. Walk me through that part of your life when you, so you came to Big Fork and how did you get going on the idea that you'd write a book about the American Great Plains and

travel all over the Great Plains and live in a van? Well, I, I came to, uh, I left, uh, New York City and moved out and I didn't know anybody in Montana. I didn't know one person. And I moved up to near Kalispell. For what reason? I just wanted to change everything. When was this? That was like 1982. And so I just made a huge change. And I just moved out.

And I wanted to just do something bigger. and I didn't know quite what to do. I was writing short pieces and they're very addictive short pieces because, you know, you get an idea, you do it, you get paid, you then get another idea, you do it. And so I wanted to try to do something bigger. So I moved out. And you were like, at that time you were focused pretty much, I mean, you were focused on humor pieces. I wrote a lot of humor pieces back then. And also I wrote, uh, for the talk of the town of the New Yorker and I had done a few long pieces. Uh, I did a profile of a guy who had a tackle shop in New York city. And that guy was an old-time colleague of Dan Bailey,

of, you know, Missoula Dan Bailey's. Dan Bailey, is that Livingston or Missoula? That's Livingston, right? Oh, okay. Yeah. And so that guy was coming out here a lot. The guy that had that tackle shop would come out here and fish. And so he had told me a bunch of stuff about places to go. So I just came out here. The reason I, I went up to a big fork, uh, I'm not even sure.

I kind of just liked it up there. And it seemed like there were too many writers down. Did people think you were doing a really- Livingston was filled up. Did you, did people think you were doing a bad, like a career mistake to leave the city? I mystified people. It mystified people. It mystified people. The editor of the New Yorker, William Shawn, was this genius editor and he was this phobic, you know. He was afraid of a lot of different things.

And I told him I was moving to Northwest Montana and he said, do they have stores there? And I said something like, well, it might be kind of hard to buy specialty items. And I realized he meant, can you get food there? I mean, it was, he was from Chicago. He should have known a little bit,

but it was seen as an eccentric thing to do. And I came out and I tried to write a novel. And it was not a good novel. And then when I, when that. Do you care sharing what the novel's about? Did you write it? I wrote a good bit of it. The novel was about my town in Ohio.

And when the town, which is a suburban, mostly white town, and when the town decided to have, or when the school that I went to, which was a private school, decided to expand its, uh, it was, uh, very, uh, revealing of what my town was like, you know, you don't even know that you're in a monoculture, you know, when you're in some small towns in the Midwest, I mean, uh, uh, most small towns, but anyway, it was about that. And it just did the, I don have the the fiction gift i'm afraid so what is your you mentioned big fort because there weren't you why you've mentioned a lot of places like you're you don't like to live by writers i like to just one time wrote off to me you dismissed the whole state of maine which i take shit for today because it was a foolish thing to do you were like you were like, I can't go to Maine.

I know. It's like writers there. Yeah, I was going to ask you if you brush shoulders with any Montaigne, like McGuane or Harrison. I never did. Because you didn't want to be around them. Well, I mean, I will go public on record that I admire Tom McGuane beyond anything. I mean, I find so many things that I'm thinking, uh, are things that McGuane wrote or just ways of putting things. And I know all his work and I used to be able to recite Rancho Deluxe like word for word. I would go into a bar

and say, I could tell you the entire movie Rancho Deluxe. And people would bet me that i couldn't and they would give up after about maybe seven minutes you're like i need 79 minutes you know we uh we went and we didn't really use it for anything but we went and set up that exact at chico hot springs oh yeah with that we went and set up that exact scene one day like everybody's sitting in the place instead of cowboy hats we had fur hats on but yeah yeah but but so you know i kind of felt that that that part of montana was already pretty pretty crowded and i didn't know much about big fork i didn't know anything about it and uh, that is Edward Abbey wrote out of the North Fork there, spitting distance from Big Fork. Yeah, that I didn't know about at the time.

You wouldn't have gone there if you knew this. I probably would have. Well, the thing is, if you know where every writer has been, you'll end up going nowhere because writers are everywhere. Right, exactly, exactly. They do get around. But then when that novel kind of didn't work out in a big way, I called up Mr. Sean, the New Yorker editor, and I said, because I had driven around out there just for fun. Out on the Great Plains?

Yeah. I would just go over the divide and go out and just drive all the way like to Williston or, you know, uh, a lot in Montana. And I had taken my friend, Jamaica Kincaid out there. And that was really fun because she's West Indian and had never really seen the American West. And we would go into places and, you know, she's taller than I am. And, uh, I'm not that tall, but she's like an inch or so taller. And people would just, wow, you know, because that was uncommon then to see like a black woman in like Cutbank, Montana, you know. And so I had had a lot of interesting things, you know, driving around. And I told, when this novel didn't work out, I decided I would do a book about the Great Plains. And I called up Mr. Sean and I said, I want to write about the Great Plains.

And I would do it as if I was profiling a person. Like this is a place, but I would profile it as a person. And I explained some of the stuff that would be in it, like the, like the buffalo or, you know, the battle of the little bighorn or stuff like that. And Sean listened. He didn't say anything. And then when I had finished my explanation, he said, would it be funny? Well, I don't know. Maybe a couple parts.

50 million buffalo wiped out. I don't know. Maybe a couple parts. 50 million buffalo wiped out. I don't know. Is that funny? But so then I ended up doing it, but that took me a long time. That took me years and years to do. Did it? Yeah. I drove around out there for summer, summers after summers.

I got married out there. I wouldn't have stayed if I hadn't gotten married. Did you fish Flathead Lake while you're living in Big Fork? Yeah, I did. It was kokanee. I didn't do gotten married. Did you fish Flathead Lake while you're living in Big Fork? Yeah, I did. It was kokanee. I didn't do very good. Have you fished it? Oh, yeah.

The kokanee are all gone now. Yeah. Are they gone? That dates the fishery. Wow. They're trying to eradicate the lake trout now, too. Yeah. What are you fishing for up there, then?

Lake trout. Lake trout? It's a lake trout. So why are they trying to eradicate it? Because there's a native species of char called the bull trout. Oh, wow. That they're trying to lower the lake trout population and bring the bull trout back. And the kokanee story up there, like when you were there, that was a huge tourism

story too, because they'd spawn all the way up to McDonald Lake. Absolutely. And then all the, you know, all the way up to McDonald Lake. Absolutely. And then all the, um, you know, all the, all the pretty animals would come in. It was a great time for tourists. Yeah. And the bull trout would get real fat off Kokanee too.

Uh-huh. And then there was a theory that because of the, the water, part of the water column that Kokanee occupied and the part of the water column that kokanee occupied. And the part of the water column that lake trout, if they introduced them, would occupy. Hold on, keep back up. I got confused. This is a fisheries management introduction.

Oh, this was baked into the, like it was an intentional introduction. Yes. Based on this assumption. Yes. I see. And then you have these micey shrimp that feed everything and how they would come up with the warmth of the day that all these species would just magically like intermingle. It was a choreographed dance. Exactly. Exactly.

Except no one was going to the dance. Yeah. That's just a fun aside for you. But anyway, no more kokanee and flathead. Well, that was something where people would come up and they'd bring their own like canneries, you know, they'd have, uh, motor homes and they'd can, you know, it was like a unit of, uh, exchange among people like cans of kokanee salmon. And I mean, it was a huge deal, but I, I didn't know that they were no longer in the lake.

That's amazing. And that up there, uh, where they would spawn the eagles that were up there and it was just amazing birds. I mean, snowy owls and stuff. It was really incredible. I didn't see a snowy owl up there, but. Tell folks about your, the piece you wrote about wild hogs. Yeah. I really enjoyed watching your wild hog episode. Uh, yeah, I just, I did a piece about wild hogs because, uh, uh, they, they really are like, there's no other animal really like them, you know, that every man's hand is against them. Like they're places with no seasons.

I think almost every place you can hunt them all year round. It's good. Well, here, here's an interesting twist that this might've happened after you wrote your piece about wild hogs. Is there an interesting twist now where in order to prevent the spread of wild hogs, they are banning the hunting of wild hogs. And one might be like, well, that doesn't make any sense. But what they have found is the spread of wild hogs in a lot of places is facilitated by hog hunters. Who bring hogs in, you're saying.

Because they're like, man, we had such a good time hunting hogs down in Texas that we brought a few home. Right. And we're going to cut them loose in our neck of the woods, and then we'll be good time hunting hogs down in Texas that we brought a few home. Right. And we're going to cut them loose in our neck of the woods, and then we'll be able to hunt hogs. And so Missouri, Arkansas, other areas, when they look at the spread, they were looking and they're like, man, a leading spread vector is aspiring hog hunters. Yeah.

So to make it that you can't hunt hogs just to get out ahead of it. But yeah, there is no, from the hunting world, any conversation about humane treatment, any conversation about ethics, anything like that, it goes out the window, hogs. Right, yeah. Because they're just a reviled, right? I mean, you get into it.

They're reviled and a hated critter. But I think, you know, that makes the, there's something kind of holy about that, you know, like that you're just a total outlaw. And when you see the stuff they do, it's just incredible. Like the way they will root or the way they will, they get up next to phone poles that have been painted with creosote and they want to get that creosote tar all over them, you know, and then you'll see these things, they're just all tarry and God, I mean, they'll, uh,

there's just, uh, the damage that they do, the, the, uh, you know, you'll find these little items about how they tear up the way they tear up people's yards and the way they tear up, you know, peanut fields. And it's just, and the only thing that's limiting them, I mean, we don't, I think, have them in New York state yet, or in, I don't think we have them in New Jersey, but, uh, there's not much that limits them. I mean, they're, they can go anywhere pretty much if there there's gotta be water. I think according to the USDA, is it 34 states according to the USDA?

It's a very high number. I think it was 39. I, when I did it, it was 34 and I think it went up since then. But, but, uh. I was working with a farmer in Arkansas earlier this year and they, they started with traps on their farm that, uh, would just be triggered by the pigs walking in. And

they kind of came to the conclusion that this wasn't working well enough, um, because they'd also have cameras set up around the, the traps and they'd see like one pig would get caught and 15 others would squeal around the thing and run away. So they custom built some remotely operated traps. So now a pig can't set it off by itself, but the camera goes on and you can remotely trigger the trap. He told me they did a family trip to the Bahamas one time and he caught 20 pigs in a trap. Wow.

So the goal. So you pick your moment. Yep. The goal now is to get the whole sounder of pigs in, then remotely operate the trap. Uh-huh. And they're, they're catching tons of pigs throughout the year. But it is zero fun. There is no, it is just more work for this family.

And it takes like three, four hours to go in, dispatch all the pigs, remove the pigs, clean everything up. And, and it ends up just all being gator food in the, in the bayou, which is a horrible waste of meat that they recognize. But at the same time, they're like, and tomorrow or next week, we'll do it all over again. It just doesn't stop. But they're estimating their crop damage, um, somewhere in the neighborhood of $300,000 annually.

Wow. Yeah. Yeah. And it's just, he's like, there's a lot of people who, uh, recreationally hunt pigs. Like, and because of that, we're doing this. Yeah. Like it, and it does, there's no end in sight. Yeah.

Yeah. It's a wild thing. Yeah. I talked to a guy from a, uh, organization that studies, uh, wildlife disease vectors and he traps hogs, uh, and test them. And he said that he, if he had hogs in an enclosure, he said that, uh, he said he was very careful never to look over the enclosure down at the hogs. And I said, well, why, why don't you want to look over? And he said, cause they'll jump up and bite you in the face.

So these are pretty fierce, fierce animals. I mean, they're just, they're so smart too. and bite you in the face. These are pretty fierce, fierce animals. I mean, they're just, they're so smart too. They're just, and they're so, they're just so cynical. They have a very cynical attitude, I think. I saw a contest down in Georgia where they were using hog, you know, dogs that ran pigs. Yeah. And it was, it was like a rodeo where they had these to see which, uh, pigs could,

uh, dogs could bay a hog the fastest and stuff like that. And the dogs are all wearing Kevlar and, you know, and they had these big pens of wild pigs that they had caught for this event. And the wild pigs are just lying back in there. Just like, yeah,

not too bothered by the prospect. This is going to happen. event. And the wild pigs are just lying back in there just like, yeah. Not too bothered by the prospects. So this is going to happen. So what? Something else will happen. They just, they have their eyelids are always at half mass. You know, they're just like, yeah, okay. I mean, this is going to happen to me. They didn't, they just weren't involved at all. They were ready to go along. And all the time, the dogs were just like manic on speed. 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

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Welcome to the OnX Club, y'all. That hog piece, I don't know if you remember the details on it, but in the end of the hog piece, you got into looking at hog distribution maps. Oh, yeah, I got in trouble for that a little bit. Did you? Well, I mean, it really pissed off the people that I had reported, done the reporting with. hog distribution maps oh yeah i got in trouble for that a little bit did you well i mean it really pissed off the people that i had reported done the reporting with you got to looking at hog well let's keep this apolitical as possible okay you got to looking at hog distribution maps

and you got to looking at voting maps right i matched the two and you found you overlaid them and found that you can map partisan politics in the American South and other places. All over the country. Based on, even in the areas of California. And you can look at hog density and know where they're going to tip on a presidential election. Right. If a county has hogs, it is a red county. That got you in trouble? Well, the guy, the hog expert who I worked with, I think, didn't like the article.

And he was an unbelievable guy. He was a really good scientist. And able to, like, you know, if a hog was bait up, he could throw the hog. He'd get behind the hog and, like, pull its legs out from under it and, uh, put it on the ground, you know, just like himself going at a hog. I mean, that seems some of these hogs are really big. And that was back in the days of Hogzilla. He wasn't a wild hog though. He was a tame, he was a farm race hog and Hog Zelda, which was a sow. Uh, in terms of writing about people who get mad at you, do you want to know the advice you gave me?

God, Steve, I don't remember this. Okay. You told me if you include a line about how good looking they are, if you say someone's ruggedly handsome, you can say anything you want about them. They'll never get mad at you. They will only get so mad, and it's really true. It's kind of like the compliment sandwich, right?

You're like, if you got to say something bad about someone you hung out with while you're working on your piece, just talk about that they're good looking. Right. It's like when they read it, they'll come away feeling better about the piece. Right. It's quite true. It's like pulling the hind legs out of a hog, right? Right. They can't.

They still got two legs on the ground. All right. You only got it half wrong. Right. There's another piece of advice you gave me, and I've repeated this a hundred times. In book publishing, you need to write a, generally, generally speaking,

people will write a proposal, and they will sell this proposal. Proteal's where I'm going with this and they will sell this proposal. Brody knows where I'm going with this. They will sell this proposal to a publisher who will then give you an advance on royalties. So you write, I'm going to write a book about wild pigs. Okay. And you're like, it'll look like this. Here's my perspective outline.

Here's like one of the chapters might look like, here's my whole plan. Publisher will say, that sounds like a phenomenal idea. Great idea. We'll give you X, we'll give you a $10 for the book. You will give you three. Now we'll give you three after you write it and we'll give you four on the day that it publishes. And then that's like a brief outline of how book publishing goes. And I told you that I was working on a proposal, the first proposal I wrote. And you told me, um, to the effect of, man, if I ever wrote a book proposal and they bought that book, the first thing I do is throw away

the proposal. I was down on proposals. Yeah. I quote that all the time. Well, that, that you didn't follow that advice. So I don't think. I write proposals all damn time. Your first you didn't follow that advice, so I don't think. I write proposals all damn time. Your first book, wasn't your first book the Escoffier book?

Was that the first book? Yeah, I wrote a proposal for that. Don't you kind of see all of this as coming from that book? I mean the- Yeah, but all of everything comes from everything, man. Yeah, that's a stopping point. It was a really, I mean, because you're finding stuff to eat in the outdoors throughout that book. Yeah.

I remember you even got pigeon eggs from like an air conditioning unit somewhere. We were talking about that the other night because I had a buddy of mine. What? I did. I had a buddy of mine over for dinner. So when I, you know, I talk about leaving, finishing school. Yeah. And going to the Great Lakes.

Right. And I wanted to write about the Great Lakes. And I kind of lost the thread of it and missed being out west real bad mm-hmm and hadn't even really moved out of where I was living and went back and that's when I got started on scavengers guide to oak cuisine right okay I was living in Missoula at the time and there night my buddy Dave was over and my buddy Dave was over, and my buddy Dave was remembering about when I was going to collect pigeons under the Higgins Street Bridge. Okay, yeah.

And we had gotten hollered at by some policemen down there for having an extension ladder under the bridge. Okay? Yeah. So Dave was reminiscing about he had kids, and he was talking the other night about how he didn't want to go back with me because he didn't want to get in trouble having kids. So we're just talking about collecting. That's all.

Okay. But we developed a strategy. Pigeons would, around that town, they like to build nests between air conditioning units. Yeah. Yeah. And buildings. Yeah. There's like a little, the air conditioning units yeah yeah and buildings yeah there's like a little the air conditioning units are set out six to eight inches and they like to get there so we

made a blocker with a pizza box and a stick and we made a landing net type thing where you could put a blocker on one side a landing net on the other side, and then bang on the air conditioning unit and the pigeons would go into the net. And then I would keep these pigeons in my apartment trying to get the eggs from them because I wanted to raise my own squab, which was, Skopje has 34 squab preparations. I think I even gave you the word squab. You might have. That when we went on that hunting trip in the Missouri breaks. Yep.

And there were all those pigeons up there in those bluffs. And we'd go hunting for them. Yeah. And I said that I had, that I had eaten those. I had eaten them and they were called squab, you know. Baby pigeons. Yeah. Which is a far cry from adult, from an adult pigeon from, in a culinary, from a culinary

standpoint. Totally different color flesh, totally different eating experience. So I had reared, you know, through a lot of attempts, eventually reared my own squab, which became a big part of that book. Did you eat him? Mm-hmm. Did you name him? Some of them.

Yeah, I remember having one little red, because he had one little red because he had a little red, he had a little red zip strip around his ankle. What are you working on now? What have you been working on lately? I just finished a book about the Bronx. Oh, really? Yep. Is there any fishing in it?

You also got to talk about your book, The Fish's Eye. Okay, The Fish's Eye is a book exclusively, I think. Then I want to hear about the book about the Bronx. But first, tell me about The Fish's Eye. The Fish's Eye is a book exclusively, I think. Then I want to hear about the book about the Bronx. But first, tell me about The Fish's Eye. The Fish's Eye is just a bunch of different pieces that I did over many years about fishing. And some of it, it's all over the place. Some of it, uh, a lot of it is, it's mostly fly fishing and I'm kind of

more a match the hatch type of person. You know, I, I don't do, I, I haven't fished with bait in a long time. Uh, and I haven't, and I don't really spin fish very much anymore. I fish for shad, but I use, you know, weighted fly line and leaders. You know, I fly fish for shad. Do you still fish with John McPhee? Is he still alive?

I do. Oh, yes, John's alive. We talked about that recently, didn't we? Mm-hmm. And I said I was sure he was alive. John is a great fisherman and he's 92.

92? Well you can see how I thought he might not be alive. Well he is old. Remember that radio show used to have that game called Dead or Alive? And you'd call a listener would call in to play and they'd give a name and the only point of the game was you had to know if they were

you had to guess if they were dead or alive. Listen I'm not trying to hack on John. I'm a big fan johnny fee 92 is a lot of time that's a lot of years most people don't do that i know and he's still fishing you could forgive me for thinking that maybe like the inevitable i forgive you for maybe the inevitable overcame him john is gonna be around for a long time he is uh he outfishes i mean he outfished me the last time i fished he still fishes oh my god he's a really good fisherman does a lot of fishing and coming into the country he does he does a hell of a lot and then he's got the whole book about american shad called founding fish he is the best shad fisherman i mean he studied them he knows

everything about him was it you or john mcPhee who equated cleaning and American Shad to fixing a watch? That was him. Oh. I think that was him. That's a great line. Well, you know, the thing about American Shad, if you do not fillet it and you're eating it when you're hungry, it's going to be a nightmare. It's very frustrating. Because you're taking little pieces of meat out from all this

complicated bone structure. It's like a walleye pipe bone structure, sort of, you know, they have two sets of ribs and it's very, very intricate. I might've said taken, like taking a watch apart. It's very hard to take, but people that can fillet shed are much in demand at this time of year. Do you fish as much now as you used to? Do I?

Yeah. No. And that's been a problem. I mean, by way of that, I can say, you know, I do a lot of exploring on foot. I do a lot of walking. And that has kind of replaced, in a way, it replaced fishing for me. I got very much into taking plastic bags out of trees. I remember that.

And with a buddy, I invented a bag snagging device for which we got a patent. And that was our thing. I need one of those because there's a couple of kites hanging in trees in my neighborhood right now. He wrote about this. And when I read what he wrote about plastic shopping bags and trees, once you start looking, a new evil you need to be aware of is birthday balloons. Birthday balloons? There is not a place.

You could go to the wildest ass place. Like hunting elk up in the mountains? There's one laying on the ground. There is no place you can go anymore. Well, you were talking about. Without a birthday balloon laying there. Burmese pythons. And I went way out in all those places where there are no roads.

When I did a piece about Burmese pythons for Smithsonian. Yeah. And we're out there. There's no vehicle traffic out there. And the only trash you see out there is birthday balloons and other types of balloons. But yeah, those are everywhere. But that I got very much into finding, you know, places and they're all over the city. They used to be less so now.

And going with this bag snagger, we could reach up fairly high and take bags out. And that was a hunter gatherer kind of thrill, especially getting a bag from a really high tree. We had extensions that we could put on the pole. Trophy, trophy bag. Oh man. We had once, we kept stuff that we took out. You know, like we took a lawn chair out from, uh, down by after the big floods of the Mississippi floods, we went to St. Genevieve, Missouri. And there was stuff in trees that have floated there that didn't have to be carried by the wind. And the stuff that floated and there were like small rooms up in trees, you know. And this was because the water was so deep.

And so we took, you know, like tractor tires and all kinds of huge stuff. Lots of items of clothing. Uh, it used to be that you took a lot of cassette tape out of trees, which is hellaciously difficult to get out. And now you don't anymore because people don't have cassettes anymore. So in Jersey, they just banned plastic bags, uh, outright for shopping. Yeah. And, uh, that really reduces it. You know, in Ireland, they, uh, they call bags and trees, witches knickers. And after a long period of having these bags and trees, they outlawed them and they don't have bags and trees anymore. I am told so. Man. So that's more what I got into rather than, I still do fish. I fish in the Delaware.

I fish for smallmouth. The thought of an 11 pound smallmouth is staggering. Six. No, 11. What am I saying? Six. That's real common. Yeah, 11 pound smallmouth.

They got some big ones in the Susquehanna. You're not far from that. Yeah. I haven't fished the Susquehanna. It's good. Yeah. Wow. So did you write a proposal for your Bronx book?

I explained it. I did you write a proposal for your Bronx book? I explained it. I didn't write a proposal. You're like, I want to be clear. I'm turning in an explanation of the book, but this is not a proposal. Yeah, I was down on proposals. I thought that they got you thinking already. Sometimes when you read a book, the first page is the proposal. Like I see the guy's already thinking in these terms. I want to think more fluidly about something. But the Bronx is the only part of New York City that an archipelago. So you have Manhattan, you have Staten Island, and you have Long Island, which is Queens and Brooklyn.

And then there are a lot of other islands around there. And the Bronx is the continent. And that's where, in fact, America is sort of, you know, from a geographic point of view, that's where America begins. And the, something in, I think it was a piece you did about that guy who raises white, or who has whitetails on his farm in Wisconsin in the Driftless area, which is a beautiful country. I need to point out, he does not raise them. I know. Sorry. He doesn't raise them. I don't mean to say that.

He assists in their existence through land stewardship. But I think it was he who said that he was interested in how a place affects the people in it and how the people in a place affect the place. And to me, that's what I'm trying, what I have tried to do with the Bronx, that it's a human geography. And the Bronx kind of was reeling and burned, and it was famous for burning when it was, you know, on Howard Cosell on the, it was in a World Series game. And the Goodyear blimp had a picture of Yankee Stadium, and then it kind of panned a little bit to one side, and there was a burning building. And Howard Cosell said the Bronx is burning, supposedly. Oh, that's what that came from?

Yeah. And that era, you know, thousands and thousands of buildings burned in the Bronx. From arson? It was not so much arson as that you had very old buildings and you had the baby boom. And you had a lot of kids living there, and kids were just beating on the buildings. And it was redlined. So all that place was redlined.

I don't know what that means. Redlined means you can't get a loan to fix the building. You can't get a loan for anything. Kind of like condemned? It's not exactly condemned. It's just like a warning to potential lenders that this is, according to the government, you can't, this is a dangerous place to lend and you cannot get insurance in this place.

And so the buildings were just sitting there and they didn't get fixed up and it was just a whole bunch of factors came together. But sort of part of the plot of my book is that as that happened, kids in the Bronx in their teens invented hip hop and hip hop was invented in the Bronx. And that story of how to, how it was invented and who invented it and the people who did it, uh, is just, to me, it was just really fascinating. So to me, the Bronx is a place in between and that the in-betweenness of a place can get it really torn up and over, uh, overrun in a way and people, you don't, you don't pay attention to the place that you drive through. You know, one thing that you do is you go to that you on your show do is that you go to specific places and you see how people have made that place live, you know, and that each place is different

and that we haven't really thought in those terms. We've thought in great big generalities about places. And now I think you have to think much more specifically about what a place is. And the people who saved the Bronx were people who thought of the Bronx as this specific place where they grew up. They were proud to be here. They weren't going anywhere and they saved the Bronx. The people who lived in the Bronx saved it.

And so it's a story that I don't think a lot of people know. People have, I write about places where people have a preconceived idea of what it's like. You know, the Great Plains, people would say from New York, oh, I flew over that. There's nothing there. You know, there's a lot there. You think there's nothing there? There's a lot there. You know, or people will say, oh, Siberia, you know, it's cold, it's prisons.

Well, yeah, but there's a lot other, there's a lot more going on there. And I kind of like to treat to treat a place as almost as if it was a person and you don't want to, um, generalize in a stupid way about it. You know, you don't want to generalize about any part of, you know, the world because, uh, each place is different and the people in the places are different. When will that book come out? I hope next year. Is it with your normal publisher?

Yeah, same publisher. What are you going to do next now that you finished that? I don't know. I haven't really decided. I wanted to do a book about steamboat explosions. See, this reaction makes me think I should do a book about steamboat explosions. See, this reaction makes

me think I should do a book about steamboats. Because they blew up all the time. And you can

find stories of steamboats in the middle of Mississippi that blew up and people were ended up on either sides of

the river. Oh, really? I mean, huge explosions where people would just, you know, and the, you know, there's a

lot of cool stuff about steamboat explosions. You should write that proposal. I would never do a proposal. What I'll do is I'll say, go to Stephen Rinella's podcast. And this is where it started. Go to this blank mark and you'll hear my pitch. But yeah, I mean, the problem with explosions is they happen, and then there's the plot kind of has to start up again.

You know, it's a little bit tricky as a plot device, explosions. So steamboats that blew up and blew people to both sides of the river. Absolutely. There's a very funny book, unintentionally funny book, that came out in like 1857 called Disasters on the Western Rivers. And it has woodcuts of steamboats blowing up. And it'll say, you know, the explosion of the St. Mary's. And then there'll be this blam of all the steamboat parts flying. And then you turn a page and it'll be like, you know, the explosion of the city of Memphis.

And there'll be another woodcut, a steamboat blowing up. What's the book called? It's called Disasters on the Western Rivers. And it came out in like 1857 or something. You can write a book about guides called the same thing. Yep. That'd be really cool. That would be good.

The illustrations of those explosions always include some person silhouetted by the flames. Exactly. Which I appreciate. Yeah. It's a very consistent thing. It's really true. What about a bird watcher's guide to picking out trophy bags from trees? Well, I was going to do a bags and trees book.

I even had some. Coffee table book. Somebody was offering to do that, but yeah, I didn't, somehow we didn't end up doing that. And that was because we were a little bit early when we were doing it. If we did it now, we would do something online. And I think we would get a lot of people that would be interested in it. But you age out of that. It's- Picking bags. It's really hard work. You're holding something up like that and stuff falls down on you. And I had one time I saw this thing up in a tree and it was really nasty looking and

it was a terry cloth towel and it was kind of bagged out a little bit and it was hanging from one branch to another kind of hammock like, and I thought, ooh, that thing's full of water. And so I have my snagger has a hook on the end, and I went up and hooked into that terrycloth towel, and a rat ran right down the pole directly at me. And I was like, wow. I was going to have to pull 100 feet. I mean, and the guy, my friend Tim, who I was doing it with, said he looked at me, and he thought I had been electrocuted. He thought I had cut into a wire. And I mean, but to have a rat

looking right at you, running down the pole. And the thing is he, he got pretty close and before I could drop it. And then he jumped to a tree and then he jumped to the roof of a, like a store nearby. But I mean, rats, that was a high roof of like a store nearby. But I mean, rats, that was a high, it was a long jump. They can really fly. They're amazing. So you have a necessary gear chapter. Right. And then you have some cautionary tales.

Wildlife conflicts. Wildlife conflicts. Electricity, wildlife conflicts. Yeah. It's great. I have to clear up our, who wrote A Boy With A Gun. Give a Boy A Gun. So, Give a Boy A Gun, a true story of law and disorder in the American West.

That's the Claude Dallas story. Jack Olson. Told you. Give a Boy A Gun, not Jack Olson. Strasser Todd. What's that Give a boy gun about? It's an epistolary tale for young adults by Todd Strasser, first published in 2000. Dude, how many young adults out there are going to see a book that says an epistolary tale for young adults and pick that up?

You know, I don't know. I'm no marketer, but crying out loud. Well, back in the days of kids being in libraries all the time, I probably would have been like, give a boy a gun. Great. No, the name would have hooked them because they wanted a gun. But then the epistolary part, they would have lost them.

Yeah, I'd be like, pistols, cool. Hey, give a piece of advice for give a piece of it writerly, because you used to give me a lot of writer's advice. Before that, can I ask a question to both of you? of advice for um give a piece of it writerly because you used to give me a lot of writers advice what can before that can i ask question both of you did the whole um like don't write in a way where you start by explaining what you're gonna write then you write what you're gonna write and then explain what is that no i think that was one of my own annoyances okay all right where you start by, how do I put it?

You start by explaining what you're going to write. You kind of explain what you're going to write. Then you write it and then you explain what you just wrote. Yeah. I mean, does that make any sense? No. It is a common structure. Yeah.

You know, it's a common structure of sermons, for example. You know, say, this is what I'm going to be telling you about. And then they tell you, and then they tell you what they told you about. So it's not, it's not uncommon, but no, you're saying advice about. Give some writerly advice for aspiring writers. Hit them where they ain't. What's that mean? Well, you know, isn't that hitting advice?

Like in baseball, you know, isn't that hitting advice? Like in baseball, you know? I mean, when I moved to Missoula, I mean, this is a long way around of saying this, but when I moved to Missoula, there's a central building there on campus, and it has a big high spire. Maybe you remember this. No, no, yeah, yeah. They all should know. Was it something to do with the Mansfields or something? I don't know. I know what you're talking about. It might something to do with the man's fields or something i don't know i know it might have to do with the man's fields on the oval

yeah okay and when we got there that week somebody nobody knew who climbed up on that spire and impaled a pumpkin on this spire how they did it was absolutely a mystery. You know, you just, but it was a risky thing to do. And that like, I mean, I was careful talking to young writers because I don't want to tell them to go out and do something dangerous. But if you pay attention to what people are writing about and what people are thinking about, it will run to a type. There's certain kinds of things that just everybody's sort of thinking the same thing. And that's the way it is with just human beings. And see the thing that

people aren't thinking about. In a way, for me, the Bronx is an example. Nobody's thinking about the Bronx. Or, you know, people are, but it wasn't like a subject of people to me as a light bulb. But the other thing is do something that other people are afraid to do. Because if you do that, you have got a book already, you know? I mean, Neil Armstrong steps on the moon, he's got a book, you know? If you're, you know, if you do something that other people don't do, you might not even write about that thing. It would just put you in a frame of mind where you could, you had authority where you felt you had something to tell people. You know, if you do something that people are like drive across Siberia,

most people would say, don't do that. Why do that? But if you do it, then you have something to write about. So that's sort of a of just a simple nonfiction way of doing it. How people write fiction is another question. I don't – I have written one nonfiction. I have written one novel. And it was called The Cursing Mommy's Book of Days. I had this character called The Cursing Mommy who starts out to make like chili and she's telling me how she makes the chili and then everything goes wrong and she's just cursing like crazy and uh this was about how she kind of it was a year in her life and it was you know it was an attempt i don't

really feel that fiction is my is my uh thing but but for non-fiction it's a question of looking and seeing what other people are doing and what other people aren't doing and telling something that you feel like really people should know i mean and you look for stuff like that so i don't know what would your writerly advice be i don't know uh i got a there's a work ethic like you're not a preachy person but there's a work ethic. Like you're not a preachy person, but there's a work ethic component. And I don't know, you might not remember this story. Just as you mentored me, you were mentoring some other guy after me. And somehow you had gotten something lined up for them. You'd gotten a writing piece lined up for them.

I don't remember. And they told you they couldn't do it because they had to go on family vacation yeah and you were done with that person now that's you were just so like dismayed and blown away i i don't remember who what the specific person would have been, but that's like. It was like, that's it. Yeah. If somebody says, well, I also have to do such and such. No, you don't.

You don't also have to do anything else. I can't remember you telling me that. You were just like, so ended that mentorship. Yeah. We're going to do trivia next. You're going to stick around. Okay. Do you know about what I'm talking about?

I haven't listened to a trivia show of yours yet. You see that where it says, where's the visitors thing? Bottom. Bottom ranks. We've had eight wins by trivia guests. Really? Wow. Okay. I think you might. You havevia Guess. Really? Wow. Okay.

I think you might, you have a very good chance of doing. Okay, well, I'll take a shot. Okay. For those of you listening, you want to check it out,

the writer Ian Frazier, author of a bunch of books. The ones that, for our audience, I would say The Fish's Eye, Great Plains, and then it's, I think Travels in Siberia. Great Plains, Fish's Eye, Travels in Siberia. Okay. Is that all right?

Yeah. Is that insulting? No, not at all. They're Eye Travels in Siberia. Okay. Is that all right? Yeah, that's good. Is that insulting? No, not at all. They're all adventure books in a way. I put Great Plains on, like, anytime I have to do, like, greatest books of all time, favorite books of all time.

Well, I'm happy to hear that. I mean, it's just, oh, it's good. It's like, I mean mean it changed my worldview man it really did i'm i'm honored i know you wrote a long time ago you wrote a ton of stuff since then and maybe it's annoying to hear about some book you wrote a long time it doesn't bother me to hear about stuff i wrote a long time ago no it doesn't it doesn't but uh know, you think you have to do, you want to do the next thing too. So, um, it, it, uh, sometimes you just, there will be the one thing that you do and that, that might be, that might be it. But, but, uh, but yeah, I'm, I'm always, I'm looking for the next thing and I,

I feel, I feel good about steamboat explosions. No, I'm feeling good'm always, I'm looking for the next thing. And I, I feel, I feel good about steamboat explosions. No, I'm feeling good about it too. Yeah. So what'd you say the Bronx book's going to be called? It's going to be called paradise Bronx. Okay. And then the other one will be called disasters on Western rivers.

It might be. No, it might be actually. I love that title. Disasters on the Western river. Yeah. You can start a rock band with the same name. Yeah.

All right, stay tuned. You'll see, what always comes up the next day, right? Two days, Wednesdays. Oh. So if you're listening with this hot off the press, it's Monday. Join in Wednesday for the trivia show in which Ian Frazier maybe wins. Probably not. Probably not. Probably not.

Maybe. Trying to build up suspense. I want to keep down expectations. So I'll see you all at the trivia show. Thanks for joining me. Oh, ride on Ride on, let it ride on I want to see your gray hair shine like silver in the sun

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