When I first met Travis and Jami, it was my first year working in Glacier National Park. I was a laborer on trails, Travis was then Huckleberry Mountain Fire Lookout and Jami was the field director at Glacier Institute. They were what you could call 'punk/hippie kids'; ya know into alternative living like primitive skills workshops, hunting, hiking, canoeing, reading, writing, arts, crafts, playing musical instruments, star gazing, experimenting with plants, eager learning about native plants, tracking wildlife, birding, anarchy, activism, gardening, sweat lodges. You name it, they were doing it not just into it. The whole gammut.
Back ten years ago in 2002, they were young pups like myself, still wet behind the ears (mine are still dripping) and trying to figure things out about the world and how it works. They were going to Rabbit Sticks (a primitive skills workshop week or weekend in Idaho) every year with the legendary Digger (wildman of the Yaak) who still plays Cowboys and Indians. Even though he is the closest thing to be still living the old traditional ways. Lynx (a blond haired wild-woman from England) would come and teach workshops at Rabbit Sticks and at the Glacier Institute, where I first met both of them and did a Edible and Medicinal Native Plant class years before. Lynx, actually subsisted off the land with Digger and a few other wild people for several weeks harvesting plants and hunting. She, in fact lived off the land for 56 days and longer than any of the men, which all backed out days to weeks before. She actually tried weaning herself off of wild plants back onto store bought foods and got violently sick for the first few weeks and had to wean herself off native plants slower.
Well, I am off on a tangent like any professor or a person who likes to play with words seems to do and see how they string out of my mind onto the page. Way back then in 2002, Travis was whittling spoons, bowls and bow-drills out of wood. Nothing exceptional so to speak of, just whittling away like any novice would. But, now he is building expensive, hand-crafted quality furniture, saunas, yurts, houses, garages, shops, decks, cabins, straw-bale houses, timber-frame traditional labor intensive East-coast old school quality buildings with no screws or nails just wooden pegs, joinery, tendons and housing. He doesn't own a business in this style of building, yet, but is chasing after a dream. An expert, one could say, a wonderful wood worker who is still learning as he goes. He took a leap and he landed. He didn't start off a master, but went little by little, whittling away his time and energy and kept at it. Preservering--Persistent--Diligent and never giving up. He began somewhere like you and I must.
I am not inferring that if I would have picked up writing seriously and profusely when he did that I would have mastered the English Language or be the best writer in the world, but to be the best writer in the world one must work hard, long hours, have discipline and work all day long, everyday persistently and diligently. I can't be the best if I don't try and give it my best shot. All the best intentions in the world won't write books.
One has to put one word on the page followed by another one, on and on and on, making sense where the reader can follow the writer in a succession from beginning to end luring the reader on a journey through words, holding their attention the whole time. It is not easy. Writers have to work; cutting words, deleting others, crumpling up first drafts all the way to fifteen drafts and shooting them at the garbage like a basketball player, copy, paste, read and digest, think and spew out words in a cohesive manner following the rules of grammar and punctuation, which I am not saying I follow that to a t and not even close. Writing is like any job one must continuously wake in the morning and go to work regardless if one feels like it or not.
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"A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit." -Richard Bach-
"To become wondrously successful and to sustain that success in any profession, one must relinquish many pleasures and be ready to postpone gratification." -Maya Angelou-
"Every artist takes a silent vow of awareness." -Jim Harrison-
"The writer must believe that what [they] are doing is the most important thing in the world. And [they] must hold to this illusion even when [they] know it is not true." -John Steinbeck-
"So write. . . Not like a girl. Not like a boy. WRITE LIKE A MOTHER FUCKER!" -Cheryl Strayed
