Scalplock Lookout

As a writer I scrored my dream job. A few weeks ago, I was offered Scalplock lookout in Glacier National Park. I will be searching the landscape for fires, smoke and stories. Yesterday, I decided to skin up there on skis to see how much snow is up there after a big snow year in Montana.

Quite a bit of snow still lingers in the high country. It might be awhile before I get up to my summer post. I hope to be up there by the 4th of July weekend. I may have to go up there and help the snow thaw out by shoveling the trail. That would be fine by me. I am not wishing for flooding but part of me does hope the high country melts out quickly.

It was a bit of a slog yesterday. Normally, I skin up Big Mountain and ski a lot in the winter. But, this winter I holed up and wrote a book I have been thinking about it for the last 15 years. It was the most fulfilling winter I have ever had. Needless to say, this was only the third time I skinned up and skied all winter even after an amazing winter.

Always a good sign to spot wolverine tracks. Gulo-gulo, the glutton came down from the top of the mountaintop the night before while the snow was soft enough for it to sink. I first encountered its tracks half way up the switchbacks and then saw them near the spine of the ridge leading to the summit. Exciting, because I don't see their tracks very often. Biologist guestimate there is around 40 wolverines in GNP.

I think the views will be pretty inspiring and am excited to get up there.

Just a few of the views from the office window. Mountains of Inspiration on surround. I can almost hear the stories coming out of the landscape.

New Essay published yesterday in Sisyphus Magazine

This essay was published on 19 April 2018. This article appeared in the Issue called change.

I highly recommend the first essay in this issue called "Trinity." It is about the importance from moving beyond the small me/self to the community and beyond to the world. Let's move from the me movement to the WE movement. The issue ends with my essay, which has the same message of moving beyond the selfish motives of greed for me and thinking of the future generations of WE,

To find this article go to type http:// I have to break it up, otherwise it messes up the content and the user experiene of the blog.

followed by this link without any spaces after the http. . . .           

sisyphuslitmag.org/2018/03/mi-patria-my-country-tis-of-thee/

Mi Patria: My Country ‘Tis of Thee

By Benjamin Polley 

He came home from work, hungry and tired, covered in grime and smut. Sometimes his sons and daughters would run outside to give him bear hugs as he climbed out of his truck before he had the opportunity to shake off the feathery flakes covering his work clothes. The asbestos dust would trail him like a galaxy in the evening light as he walked in to sit at the kitchen table with his family. He had worked in the vermiculite mines for decades, and his cough grew worse even after they closed them down.

How have common men fallen prey to corporate interests so consistently when the GOP is in power? Probably it is because Americans inadvertently voted against our own interests, supported the destruction of the environment, strengthened the elevation of corporate interests at the expense of the vast majority of Americans, and pulled the rug out from underneath the struggling underclass. One corporate CEO puppet after another has been placed into the current cabinet. Many congressmen in both parties have allowed the corporate marketplace to influence their decision-making.

Some current politicians claim that regulations cost jobs and insist that they are helping the working class, but they are putting corporate interests above the working class, as well as threatening public health. Some Republicans believe in a market-based economy for environmental protection.

• Representative Michele Bachmann (R-Minnesota) wants to padlock the E.P.A.’s doors and said the E.P.A. should be called the “job-killing organization of America.”
• Former Governor Jon M. Huntsman, Jr. (R-Utah) believes environmental regulation should be shelved until the economy improves.
• Ted Cruz (R-Texas) has called the E.P.A. “radical” and believes they have imposed “illegal” limits on greenhouse gases from power plants.
• Marco Rubio said the E.P.A.’s plan to curb emissions would have a “devastating impact” on jobs. He also vowed to scale back the Clean Water Act.
• Ronald Reagan in 1981 said, “Trees [author’s italics] cause more pollution than automobiles do.” He also said, “A tree’s a tree. How many more do you need to look at?”

Senior Democrat Henry Waxman, on the Energy and Commerce Committee, calls this “the most anti-environmental Congress in history.”

“Not only are these positions irresponsible, they’re politically problematic,” said David Jenkins of Republicans for Environmental Protection, a group that believes conservation should be a core value of the party.

The looting and plundering of the land underneath us all in the name of progress is not a vision that has “we the people” in mind first and foremost.

America is distinctly a nation of laws, a system of checks and balances. America does not have a king who can rule by fiat. When you join the government, you do not swear loyalty to an individual, but to the Constitution and to the people. Corporations do not pledge allegiance to the Constitution, but rather to their the shareholders. Corporations are driven solely by the profit motive.

We the people—the workers and the children of the workers—seem to have few true representatives for our interests, our public servants having failed to serve public over corporate interests. The “us vs. them” argument sweeping this great land should not be about splitting up the people into patriots and non-patriots, which is what politicians and the media are doing. We the people is “us,” all citizens (conservative and liberal) because we are all in this together, striving to give our families a decent life of health, happiness, and freedom. For the corporate elite (them), everything is for sale, including a man’s lungs and a person’s patriotic feeling, if it can be used for a vote or a buck.

In my opinion, when a select few corporations come in and want to take public land for short-term profit, not the welfare of the country and people, this creates a boom-and-bust economy. Modern carpetbaggers come in and extract as much of the natural resources as they can; during this time the economy and surrounding cities grow. Once the resources are extracted, the economy and surrounding towns collapse. The people at the corporate top—of the vermiculite manufacturing plant, for instance—make a bunch of money and then leave poverty, illness, and a caved-in economy in their wake.  The corporate interests are unconcerned with the welfare of resource-rich towns full of working class patriots, who often voted for a representative whose campaign was funded by lobbyist/corporate interests, with hopes of jobs and “the good ol’ days and ways.” Alternately, the corporations, governmental agents, and lobbyists come for profits.

“They” came for one thing in Libby, Montana, where the local plant spewed asbestos from vermiculite mining over the small town for decades, sickening thousands of people and killing 200.

They came for one thing in Gauley Bridge, West Virginia, where silicosis from lack of proper health protection (masks) at the Hawks’ Nest Tunnel Disaster caused the death toll to rise to 764.

They came for one thing along the Cuyahoga River in Ohio that caught fire in 1969 due to industrial wastes.

They came for one thing in Pennsylvania where an explosion inside the Darr Mine caused 239 men and boys to lose their lives.

They came for one thing in Picher, Oklahoma, a once-booming lead and zinc mining town that is now a ghost town. This link is to a news story about the “superfund” site, so polluted that it tops  the E.P.A.s National Priorities List.

They came for one thing along the Tug Fork River in Kentucky, where 306 million gallons of mining waste contaminated water for 27,000 people, killing countless creatures.

Many of these places are among the top-ten worst environmental disasters in the history of this great country.

In witnessing the GOP and the new president beginning their assault on America’s public lands since their first days in office, I find their moves counter-patriotic. Since the November 2016 election, I have been grappling with what it means to be a patriot. Why isn’t caring for the environment or the land equated with being a patriot?

Is a patriot only one who supports a given president and congressional decisions? No, of course not. Many disgruntled, patriotic citizens didn’t like the last eight years of Obama. Yet going against the president has a distinct feel of being against the flag and counter to patriotism. Does being a patriot mean loyalty to a political party, to a given figurehead, to policy, or to something that transcends each of those? Perhaps the Constitution?

As Edward R. Murrow said, “We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. We must not walk in fear of one another. We must not be driven by fear into an age of unreason.”

The root word of patriotism is patris, or native land. Merriam-Webster defines patriotism as “devotion, love and support for one’s country” with a willingness to defend it.

George Orwell creates a distinction between “patriotism” and “nationalism”:

“By ‘patriotism’ I mean devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to be the best in the world but has no wish to force upon other people. Patriotism is of its nature defensive, both militarily and culturally. Nationalism, on the other hand, is inseparable from the desire for power. The abiding purpose of every nationalist is to secure more power and more prestige, not for himself but for the nation or other unit in which he has chosen to sink his own individuality.”

Patriotism should include the bedrock of democracy which is “the greatest good for the greatest number for the longest time.” By protecting open spaces, clean air, and clean water, we are preserving a future we can hand off to our children with a clear conscience, and we are living in a present where our land, air, and water are ours to protect from profit for a few.

Our nation and the world are at a crossroads. We can either continue down this destructive path of short-term gain called personal profit, or we can choose alternative energies and start thinking of the long-term and a future to believe in that is ours, we the people, and not theirs, they the corporations.

I once heard someone say a new kind of patriotism needs to emerge that is land-based with a focus on ecological knowledge, moral consideration, ethical principles, spiritual belief, and a profound affinity for the earth underfoot that includes us all. The world’s scientists overwhelmingly agree that our planet faces an environmental crisis of epic proportions.

 A debate continues: we can have either a reverence for life or an allegiance to industry or we can figure out a way to mesh the two together in our public’s best interests. It doesn’t have to be an either/or argument. It is not a jobs vs. environment argument as the GOP and uninformed prez would have many believe. Plenty of jobs, if not more, can be created from cleaner energy than from fossil fuels that leave our workers sick and their communities dirty and undesirable places to raise a family. In fact, clean energy is currently cheaper than fossil fuels.

As Terry Tempest Williams writes, “The natural world is dying, poisoned by the hands tied to corporate greed.” The natural world is not dying by the hands of the patriots.

Conservationists are patriots of the land, the American land. There are congressmen and even presidents who are conservationists. Theodore Roosevelt, during his presidency, protected approximately 230 million acres of public land, six national parks.

“The Clean Air Act passed in 1970 without a single nay vote. When Nixon passed it, he said this puts us way down the road that Theodore Roosevelt spoke so eloquently about and meets the goals of clean air, clean water, and open spaces for the future of American citizens,” says the Washington Post in a 2014 article. “In 1988 George. H.W. Bush ran on the environmental ticket and updated the Clean Air Act. The Senate passed the measure with an 89-11 vote. Mitch McConnell agreed with it by saying, ‘I had to choose between cleaner air and the status quo; I chose cleaner air.’”

The land, water, and air do not tiptoe along partisan lines, so why do we as a people allow ourselves to be badgered and divided this way? In 1997, several Republicans from the Northeast promoted the Environmental Protection Agency, which was birthed during the Nixon years.

• Senator Alfonse D’Amato (R-New York) compared smog to terrorism. “We are sponsoring a form of pollution terrorism by allowing this to take place.”
• Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) supports climate change legislation and curbs on carbon emissions.
• John Kasich, the Republican governor of Ohio, defied his own party by standing up for clean energy. He says clean air and clean energy is good for business and homeowners.  
• New York’s Democratic governor, Andrew Cuomo has banned fracking and set strict renewable energy standards.
• The state of Nevada had fewer than 67,000 acres of protected wilderness when Democratic Senator Harry Reid took office. When he left there were 3.4 million acres.  
• Former Governor Mitt Romney (R-Massachusetts) went in opposition to his party when he said, “I believe we should keep our air and our water clean.”

Part of the reason why Americans aren’t as vocal about the environment as they were 48 years ago is because the effects of pollution aren’t as visible and so closely tied to human activity as they were before the Clean Air Act was passed. Back then, Americans could see smog and people were newly aware of scientist/poet Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. “Silent Spring, a landlubber, is no slouch of a book: it launched the environmental movement; provoked the passage of the Clean Air Act (1963), the Wilderness Act (1964), the National Environmental Policy Act (1969), the Clean Water Act and the Endangered Species Act (both 1972); and led to the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency, in 1970.” The non-partisan Clean Air Act act eliminated the smog from the sky and ameliorated acid rain but didn’t manage to allay the greed that we see taking over the environmental and climate policies these last several months.

What is the cost of progress? Does progress equate with more coal miners dying of black lung disease again? Does progress equate with no E.P.A. to monitor dumping mining debris in streams, no researchers or federal workers monitoring the changing chemistry of those streams as they become inhospitable to aquatic life? The current administration’s view of progress will be rough on our America, to say the least.

Would a patriot outright reject internationally negotiated treaties like the Paris Climate Treaty and the Clean Power Plan that reduce the threat of global warming for our children and their children in favor of aggressive plans to increase domestic drilling for fossil fuels?

Would a patriot transfer our federally protected public lands to the state without time or money for states to create extensive new management plans? Would a patriot sell that land to the highest bidder if the state failed to manage efficiently? Would a patriot implement a broad array of actions to open up previously protected public lands like national forests, national monuments, national parks, wilderness areas, wilderness study areas, and wildlife refuges to oil and natural gas drilling, fracking, coal and other mining?

Is patriotism exhibited by gutting the Endangered Species Act, by rolling back the protections against pollutants in our air and water, by cutting funding for clean-ups of polluted sites? I say it isn’t. In my opinion, while some patriotic citizens will back whatever Trump and the GOP push through, their public interests are equally being debased by these carpetbaggers and wealthy elite. The aims of these few figureheads over the many in 2017 was to make a buck off the public lands, wildlife, and wilderness areas that belong to us all. Corporate coffers are already lined with gold, but our pockets, across party lines—working class, middle class, immigrants, and migrant workers—are not.
American’s public land belongs to all of us. We need to care for it responsibly, patriotically. People think public land belongs to the government, but it is essential to realize that the government is us. If we protect our land, our water, and our air, then we are protecting ourselves, our children, our communities and our nation.

I live in the great state of Montana, Big Sky Country, a land rich in beauty that brings people from all walks of life together, regardless of political party; a land filled with amber waves of grain and mountain’s majesty, where crystal clear rivers run through it, and where an abundance of wild things roam.

Every outdoorsman I know who truly loves this land called America, needs to take responsibility for the land, air and water, and defend it from moneyed interests who don’t care for it beyond their personal profit. They’ve forgotten who the we is in “we the people.”  Let us come together and remind them.

As a country, what do we want? As fellow citizens, what kind of patriots do we want to be? Do we want a faux patriotism—nationalism—that rewards the corporations, elite, and wealthy, or do we want a citizen-oriented patriotism that cares for the land, the air, the water, and the health of our people from sea to shining sea? Defending and taking care of the environment and public lands is not a Democratic or Republican issue. It is a patriotic, human issue. Pledge allegiance to that.
 
Mark Twain was once questioned about his loyalty. He responded, “My loyalty is to one’s country not to its institutions or its officeholders. The country is the real thing, the substantial thing, the eternal thing, the thing to watch over and care for. The institutions are extraneous. There it is mere clothing. Clothing can wear out, cease to be comfortable, cease to protect the body from winter, disease or death. To be loyal to rags, to shout for rags, to die for rags is the loyalty of unreason.”

Good Stewards: War On Weeds (July/Aug 2017) Bugle Magazine

THE NEVERENDING

story by Benjamin Alva Polley
illustrations by Shelly Sterner

Far deadlier in the long haul than predators, wild re and maybe even suburban sprawl, noxious weeds will turn 3 million acres into a wasteland for elk and other wildlife this year.
Tom Henderson of Bitterroot Out tters started spraying
weeds in the backcountry 25 years ago after habitat managers contacted him, knowing he had a string of mules up to the task. That rst effort opened his eyes to the war being waged to keep noxious plants from taking over the very places that have for decades fueled his dreams of hunting and adventure—and his livelihood.
The ght stretched from just beyond Henderson’s front door in Montana’s Bitterroot Valley up into national forest and the high-country cathedrals of the Selway-Bitterroot and Frank Church-River of No Return wildernesses beyond. He soon found himself looking for weeds everywhere he went, especially on his trips guiding hunters into the wilderness.
“When my cook is not tending to the biscuits, we are spraying weeds,” Henderson says. “We are always spraying weeds.”
The problem is widespread enough that he rarely needs to look far. Invasive weeds deploy ingenious ways to penetrate the backcountry. They latch onto vehicles, clothes, shoelaces, pets and livestock; weasel into hay bales, seeds or feed; drift down rivers and ride the wind. Unfortunately, none of this is unique to the Bitterroot. All across elk country, noxious weeds from foreign lands have impoverished a huge sweep of America’s best remaining wildlife habitat.
Unleashed from the ecosystems where they evolved with predators and competitors that held them in check, noxious weeds

PHOTO: RMEF

JUL/AUG 2017 • BUGLE • 103

become monsters. They overrun and undermine
the rich diversity of grasses and forbs that elk, deer and pronghorn depend on, replacing them with veritable junk food that is often downright poisonous to wildlife—and livestock, too. One University
of Montana study found that after focused weed treatment, native grass production rebounded
from 48 pounds per acre to 1,620 pounds. The U.S. government recognizes 4,000 exotic plants. All told, they cost the nation more than $24 billion in lost productivity annually, with another $10 billion spent directly on ghting weeds each year.
Invasive weeds now infest one out of every ve acres of western public land. Every day they take over another 4,600 acres of our nest public elk habitat. Add in private and state land and they will cripple 3 million acres of elk country this year. That’s like having weeds covering every foot of Yellowstone and Glacier national parks. Yet for every defeat there is a victory in this war as private and public lands stewards treat hundreds of thousands of acres every year to stop or at least slow the invasion.
Hal Pearce, U.S. Forest Service Region 2 Weed Coordinator, oversees Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota and eastern Wyoming. He advises people who feel devastated by invasive plants to size up the problem, make a plan and work toward a goal.
“It’s amazing that it looks so overwhelming, but suddenly three to four years later it is pretty manageable.”
He stresses the value of private landowners joining forces with state and federal land managers to present a united front.
“Partnerships with landowners and nonpro ts are so important because if we are only ghting invasives on federal land, then we have these huge seed banks, and the tide can only be held back for so long,” Pearce says. “We stand to lose a real treasure in

our ecosystems if we don’t build relationships.” RMEF embraces that view wholeheartedly
and has taken a leading role ghting weeds for the good of elk and other wildlife. Since 1989, RMEF has invested $7.3 million to help fund 765 stewardship projects in 22 states. That leveraged another $28.4 million from agencies and private landowners to treat more than half a million acres of vital elk country.
Tom Toman, RMEF director of science and planning says this is money well spent. These
exotic invaders often sprout earlier and go to seed before native competitors. Many secrete toxins from their roots or leaves to weaken or kill their native neighbors while leaving their own kind primed to reproduce. Noxious weeds also ramp up soil erosion, fouling streams critical for spawning trout, salmon and other native sh.
“Weeds are a bigger threat to wildlife habitat than even suburban sprawl,” Pearce says. Toman agrees and is proud that RMEF offers grants that agencies, organizations and individuals can apply for to ght weeds on both public and private lands.
“Many people think there is nothing we can do about it,” says Toman. “This isn’t true. There is hope through collaboration, education, early detection, prevention, biological control methods, burning, chemicals, grazing, hand-pulling, mechanical methods and replanting.”
Once a weed infestation is in full swing, the
best defense is a targeted, integrated approach drawn from the full quiver of methods. Yet the single most effective method is spotting and attacking new infestations before they get out of control. Elk hunters and other wildland wanderers can play a vital role
in this, knowing how to identify the bad guys, then quickly reporting them to weed managers. To aid in that effort, here are 10 weeds of serious concern to
elk managers:

104 • BUGLE • JUL/AUG 2017

PHOTO: RMEF

The Best Defense If you spot one of these weeds in the backcountry, take a photo and mark it on your GPS if possible. Then contact your county weed district or the local office of the Forest

You Skeletonweed

Service, Natural Resources Conservation Service, Bureau of Land Management or state wildlife agency and ask to speak to the range management specialist or noxious weed coordinator. It really does make a big difference.

Aptly named rush skeletonweed has quickly grown infamous as it gallops across Washington, Oregon, California, Idaho and now Montana.
“I feel like I am on top of a dike that springs a leak, and before you know it, I am plugging holes with all 10 fingers and all 10 toes,” says Bitterroot National Forest ecologist Gil Gail. This Eurasian native sprouts 20,000 seeds per plant. Like dandelion seeds, they’re built to ride the wind for miles. This has blown it deep into the backcountry far from any trail to places that can be nearly impossible to treat before an area becomes a trash-forage monoculture. Agencies, weed districts and groups like RMEF are joining forces in a bid to stop or at least slow its spread, attacking new infestations before they gain a foothold.
Spotted Knapweed
Knapweed hitchhiked with alfalfa seed shipments from Eurasia to America
in the 1800s. It now chokes out native plants across the West, grasping the dirt with a stout taproot and injecting its own herbicide into the soil to kill off its native neighbors. It gets a jump on other plants in early spring, then generates flowers and thousands of seeds straight into the fall after most plants have shriveled. Researchers have counted infestations with 2 million plants per acre, snuffing native forage so completely that biologists have seen declines in elk, mule deer, moose and pronghorn numbers in hard-hit locations. Yet beetles that attack the seeds and roots, combined with repeated annual treatments of herbicide, can K.O. knapweed and restore the vitality of infested landscapes.

Number of states reporting infestations: 19
Most effective treatment: Herbicides or biocontrols

Number of states reporting infestations: 47
Most effective treatment: Herbicides and biocontrols

JUL/AUG 2017 • BUGLE • 105

Yellow Starthistle
Covered in yellow flowers and wicked thorns, this invasive arrived in California as
a stowaway from the Mediterranean in the 1850s and quickly spread across five other western states. Starthistle barely needs water to survive, and takes advantage of drought and wildfire to infiltrate prime wildlife habitat, choking out native plants with impenetrable stands five feet tall. It’s also poisonous—paralyzing the lips, tongues and esophagus of livestock and wildlife alike, eventually leading to starvation. People, meanwhile, need chaps to walk through it, as starthistle can shred jeans in minutes. Most importantly, anyone
that tangles with starthistle either on foot or in a vehicle needs to inspect for seeds. They eagerly cling to fur, hair or clothing, and readily adhere to the tires and undercarriages of vehicles. They can also infiltrate hay not certified as weed-free.
Cheatgrass
This grass of Europe, Africa and Asia snuck into the U.S. in a wheat shipment in 1861. It’s now found in all 50 states and has overrun more than 100 million
acres in the West, disrupting and displacing the bunchgrass and sagebrush communities on which thousands of elk and mule deer rely. When most plants
have barely turned green, cheat is already done growing and is curing to a rusty
red, ready to vomit arrow-shaped seeds tailor-made to drive pets, livestock, wildlife and sock-wearing humans crazy. It has notoriously shallow roots that deplete soil organics
and kill off lichen, fungi and microbes that store water, slow erosion and stymie wildfire. By mid-summer, cheatgrass is so combustible that it’s often compared to gasoline. Research shows it has accelerated average fire rates in some areas from twice per century to almost once
a year. Yet there is hope: a bacterium native to North America that weakens cheatgrass root systems and allows native plants to compete has been greenlighted by regulators, and is now being tested as a bio-herbicidal spray. Here’s hoping it proves lethal to cheat.
Saltcedar (aka Tamarisk)
Imported from Eurasia in the 1800s for wood, shade and
erosion control, saltcedar proves useless for building or firewood,
grows too densely to shade anything but itself and guzzles
almost 5 million acre-feet of water annually from its preferred
habitats along river bottoms, desert springs and irrigation
waterways. In key arid elk states like Arizona, New Mexico and Utah,
that can mean the difference between flowing water surrounded by lush native vegetation or a bone-dry, alkaline streambed. Further diminishing forage quality for elk and other wildlife, fallen saltcedar leaves increase soil salinity and kill off microbes. Trees range from five to 25 feet, with roots penetrating 30 feet or more in search of water, and this exotic depletes riparian zones—elk’s most vital habitat in arid landscapes.

Number of states reporting infestations: 40
Most effective treatment: Herbicides or hand pulling

Number of states reporting infestations: 50
Most effective treatment: Herbicides or soil bacteria

Number of states reporting infestations: 23
Most effective treatment: Burning/cutting followed by herbicides

106 • BUGLE • JUL/AUG 2017

Leafy Spurge
In classic villain fashion, leafy spurge oozes toxic milk when pulled up by human hands or the mouths of wildlife and livestock. The liquid causes eye and skin irritation, blistering and even blindness. Just walking through it can make horses’ feet blister and lose hair. Ingesting spurge, meanwhile, bestows severe diarrhea and muscle weakness. And, as if all that isn’t bad enough, it grows an outrageously long and thick-skinned taproot, helping it shrug off drought, herbicide and fire. Leafy spurge
may be the toughest-to-kill weed on this list, perhaps because it appears to be a hybrid of two or more Old World spurges, a mongrel both hardy and adaptable. It runs wild in spring before most natives get a toehold. Then as it dries out, seedpods burst to fling seeds up to 20
feet. It specializes in overtaking riparian forage critical to elk and other species, creating a yellow, green then brown mosaic that has sullied broad landscapes throughout the Rockies and beyond.
Dalmatian and Yellow Toadflax
The quaint yellow blooms on Dalmatian and yellow toadflax resemble snapdragons, which helped them find their way from the Mediterranean into U.S. gardens in the 1800s. Yet beneath that attractive exterior lurks a plant filled with poisonous glucoside and as many as 500,000 seeds capable of leaving wildlife broke and breadless. Dalmatian toadflax averages three feet
tall while yellow toadflax, sometimes called butter and eggs, is often half that height. Large infestations of both plague most western states and have taken over more than 50,000 acres in Colorado alone.
Weed manager Hal Pearce says that yellow toadflax “is our biggest beast” on the White River National Forest, home to the world’s largest elk herd. Early detection at the sprout stage is key to defeating toadflax. Once a large root system is established and mature plants go to seed, it often requires 10 to 15 years of treatments to eliminate.
Scotch Broom
Now next to ubiquitous in the Pacific Northwest,
Scotch broom spells disaster for wildlife. It eliminates native
competitors by growing faster and more densely while also producing
tannins that make it unpalatable for wildlife. Each plant sheds thousands of seeds
that ride the wind or latch on to clothing and footwear. Vehicles are the most common distributor, sucking up the tiny seeds as they pass by, then sowing them down roadways. Scotch broom blankets meadows, powerline corridors and other openings, bad news for Roosevelt’s elk that depend on forest openings that can be few and far between in the Pacific Northwest. RMEF has partnered for many years with state and federal agencies to cut and spray this invasive, helping ensure the region’s limited sunlight can make it down to grasses and forbs below.

Number of states reporting infestations: More than 5 million acres in 36 states
Most effective treatment: Herbicides and biocontrols combined with sheep/goat grazing

Number of states reporting infestations: Dalmatian toadflax: 30
Yellow toadflax: 47
Most effective treatment: Herbicides or newer biocontrols such as toadflax stem weevils

Number of states reporting infestations: 26
Most effective treatment: Chop mechanically or manually and spray with herbicides

JUL/AUG 2017 • BUGLE • 107

Autumn Olive
Like saltcedar, this tree was once seen as a panacea for erosion control, upland bird habitat and shade-creation. But since it was imported from China, Japan and Korea in the 1830s, autumn olive has had a field day out-competing and displacing native plants by forming dense shade clusters with little growing below. It churns out 200,000 seeds every year and can adapt to a staggering variety of habitats as its
nitrogen-fixing root nodules allow it to grow in even the poorest soils. Once land managers realized what a scourge this tree could be,
they were disturbed to find cutting or burning only seems to egg it on to grow more vigorously. Autumn
olive has quickly become one of the most troublesome shrubs in the central and eastern United States, including vital elk habitat in Kentucky and Tennessee, where game managers say it is their weed of greatest concern.

Number of states reporting infestations: 38
Most effective treatment: Cutting followed by herbicides,
and hand pulling of new sprouts

Oxeye Daisy

Among this list of elk habitat destroyers, oxeye daisies may be the gentlest in their style of
attack, basically prettying places to death. Between June and August, oxeye daisy blooms with
15 to 30 small white flowers on stems a foot or two tall. Yet each bud can hold 200 seeds that
stay viable for decades. Some claim this European ornamental also has the mysterious ability
to ward off lightning. If that were only true, it might be handy, since this flower readily grows at elevations up to 11,000 feet. The problem for wildlife, though, comes in the dense fields of flowers
that oxeye daisies readily create—displacing native plants in meadows and along road and trail corridors. From an elk’s perspective, that creates a nutritional desert. Yet due to their visual appeal, oxeyes draw less aggressive treatment and are still peddled at many gardening stores. Reach instead for the similar Shasta daisy, which stands almost a foot taller and has larger flowers. While it hails from Spain and Portugal, it’s far less invasive.

Number of states reporting infestations: 50
Most effective treatment: Herbicides, biocontrol or hand pulling

Looking Forward
Tom Toman says one of the blessings of weeds is they have inspired scores of collaborative efforts that have brought diverse groups together at the conservation table.
“More people seem conscientious about weeds and are out looking for them today. It’s important to stay on top of this and use the latest science—like the new bacterium for cheatgrass. Herbicides are crucial in the ght, but we want to do everything we can to avoid destroying what we’re trying to save. We want to keep the biodiversity,” he says. “When it comes to weeds,

everybody wants immediate grati cation or a magic bullet. There isn’t one.”
Toman says people often ask him how long this weed war is going to take to win. His reply is simple.
“Forever. The ght is never over, but that doesn’t make it any less essential.”
Benjamin Alva Polley is a recent Bugle intern and graduate in Environmental Science and Natural Resource Journalism at the University of Montana. He has been published in a variety of popular magazines and is an associate editor of the White sh Review.

108 • BUGLE • JUL/AUG 2017

Kilimanjaro (continued)

              Yesterday we hiked up to camp Barafu. It took four and half hours as the oxygen is getting thin and it takes awhile for the lungs and heart to catch up that is why you don't want to push yourself too hard or too quick at high elevations. Once we hiked through all the alpine including talus fields and boulder fields we arrived at camp around 3 pm. We slept awhile before we had a briefing with our head guide Onyx. During the briefing, we decided what time later that night we would start our ascent from Base Camp at 15,000 ft and start heading up to the summit of Uhuru. First off, around 6 pm. we had a light dinner then went back to bed for awhile. It was decided that Deb and Moira would wake up at 10:30 pm. after a light snack and tea then they would pack up and begin hiking with their guide Coleman. Then Peter, Mike, Doug and I would begin hiking with our guides Benjamin, Omar and Pacha around 1:30 am. The reason for the two different hiking times is so we would all end up at the summit at sunrise for pictures.

              We woke up around 10:30 and opened the tent flap to see a string of headlamps heading up the mountain. Everybody and their brother started hiking before us. We passed by many of them. Kilimanjaro or Uhuru is the tallest peak on the entire continent of Africa at 19,340 feet or 5985 meters.  Kilimanjaro is a massif, which is made up of 3 volcanoes or volcanic cones: Kibo is the summit; Mawenzi at 16,893 feet (5,149 meters); and Shira at 13,000 feet (3,962 meters). Uhuru Peak is the highest summit on Kibo's crater.  At this elevation, we moved 'poly-poly' (slowly-slowly). The cool African air at this elevation felt arctic. We would ascend 4000 feet in 3 and half hours.

              During the early morning hours from roughly twelve, midnight until twelve mid-day Mt. Kilimanjaro is open to see. Then from noon until midnight, the mountain is obscured by clouds. During that brief window is when people begin the hike from base camp to the summit so they can arrive at or near sunrise to be at the top during a break in the weather to have a view.

               After several hours of hiking, we would stop to add more layers because the temperature plummeted the higher we climbed. At first light, we walked by the disappearing glaciers and slowly and steadily climbed to the summit. The summit is called Uhuru (which means freedom and independence in Swahili). At the summit, we stopped at the summit cairns and had our pictures taken. My head was beginning to hurt. I was losing my balance. I couldn't focus. One of our guides took a picture of us, and everyone is smiling at the camera. I am kneeling down in front and holding myself up from falling over and staring at the ground.

On the US-Canada Border, a Missing Link to Continental Wildlife Connectivity

My latest publication can be read at Sierra magazine.

https://sierraclub.org/sierra/green-life/us-canada-border-missing-link-continental-wildlife-connectivity

The Real Twitter Feed That We Have Lost Track Of

http://www.earthisland.org/journal/index.php/elist/eListRead/the_real_twitter_feed_that_we_have_lost_track_of/


Recent publication in Earth Island Journal about how complex bird language and animal communication is.

An interview with Jim Harrison by Benjamin Alva Polley

Jim Harrison: A Writer’s Life
In one of the last interviews before his death,
Jim Harrison invited us into his writing studio for a vivid, wide-ranging talk about art, loss, illness, and the arc of his life.
By Benjamin Polley
Photos by Erik Petersen Interview 

 
photo by Erik Petersen for Whitefish Review 

Jim Harrison was one of contemporary literature’s most versatile and prolific writers, publishing 39 books across many genres and drawing comparisons to Hemingway and Faulkner. He died in Arizona of natural causes on March 26, just a handful of months after giving Whitefish Review the following interview. 

One of Harrison’s best-known works, the novella Legends of the Fall (1979), was made into a Hollywood movie in 1994 starring BradPitt and helped elevate him as a writer when he was a younger man. While a celebrated writer in the States, he reached legendary status in France, where his books sell by the hundreds of thousands and his followers call him the “Mozart of the Plains.” 

When I met him one late day in November last year to ask him questions about his life and his work, he was 78 years old and obviously troubled by the effects of spinal surgery and shingles. His left eye was blind and wandered, the result of a childhood accident, but occasionally I found it staring directly at me. His wrinkled face looked like a broken-in baseball mitt. He emitted an energy that was jocular and jovial. 

I was traveling with photographer Erik Petersen and we were fortunate to spend three hours with Jim at his seasonal home along the Yellowstone River, outside of Livingston, Montana. His wife Linda had died of a rare lung disease a few weeks before our visit. They had been married for 55 years. 

 
photo by Erik Petersen for Whitefish Review 

Jim welcomed us into his writing studio where he sat at his writing desk. He was shirtless and wore grey fleece shorts. Brown hiking boots dangled from his feet.
Smoke rose from his ashtray where a cigarette had been recently stubbed out. A crushed empty box of smokes lay next to a full one.

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Books lined the back of his desk and yellow legal pads, full of scrawling, sat in front of him. 

Duke Ellington’s voice crackled from the vintage radio on a bookshelf next to bear claws, masks, animal skulls, and war clubs. A dried and wrinkled rattlesnake hung from a tack above the window. Pinned to a bulletin board behind his desk were Buddhist maxims, family photos, and a photo of a raven and a vulture sharing a carcass. 

Harrison was one of my all-time favorite writers and he was sitting before me. I felt excited, fortunate, intimidated, and a bit terrified. I had wanted to meet him for so many years. Months previous, I had sent some of the questions I planned to ask to his secretary in Michigan, who typed all of his books from the manuscripts he faxed. In person, our conversation flowed as naturally as the local rivers where Jim liked to fly fish. 

Erik Petersen: Hello Jim. We met a long time ago. I photographed you once before.
Benjamin Polley: How’s it going, Jim? I brought you a gift. [I hand him a fancy bottle of French wine.]
EP: I see you have downsized in bird dogs.
Jim Harrison: Yeah. Folly. She’s a retriever. She likes to hide in the tall grass. She’s a bright, little girl. She’s an English Cocker. But I might get another Setter for four hundred dollars. I am too old to get another dog. My wife got her. But my wife died a couple of weeks ago.
BP: Sorry to hear that.
JH: She was in her seventies. Folly is an English long hair Cocker.
She’s apartment-sized.
EP: Yeah, she has some energy. I watched her do a lap around the yard.
JH: I have been going to Patagonia, Arizona for twenty-five years. I like to bird hunt.
EP: For chukars or what?
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JH: No. Quail.
EP: I think you had one of those setters the last time I was here.  
JH: One dog was bit in the yard by a rattler.
BP: I remember reading about that in one your books.
JH: I declared war on the rattlers. I shot about 30 of them. Then I decided I can’t handle it. I got a snake man to come out and he trapped a thousand. There was a big den straight uphill from here. They all gathered here.
BP: Wow! Did you cook them up?
JH: No. I’ve eaten them before. I don’t think they are good. You put them on the grill and they squirm from the heat. Some Mexicans stopped by and they asked for them. They asked for salt. They said they can’t eat them without salt.

BP: You care if I ask you a few questions, Jim?
JH: Go for it. That is what you are here for.
EP: [motioning to the window shades] You care if I open these up and get some light in here?
JH: Yeah, you can flick the second switch against the wall behind you too. Did you drive all the way up from Missoula?
BP: Yes, I did this morning. It’s a beautiful drive.
EP: I live up in the Shields Valley.
JH: Oh, you do? That’s a nice place to live. Linda, my wife, liked to go out there in the fall when the poplars turned yellow.
EP: Yeah, it’s beautiful.
JH: We used to hunt down there. One year we got one moose, two elk, two deer. That’s a lot of meat. I will tell you the reason I don’t have a shirt on is because now for two years after I have postherpetic neuralgia. Because that is what you get after you have shingles. Now it’s all in my right scapula. Now, it hurts to wear T-shirts.

BP: Do the shingles itch? What does it feel like?
JH: It hurts. It’s like electric impulses keep zapping you. EP: It probably hurts when you sleep at night?
JH: It can. Now I need some Mexican salve. I get it from a doctor in Nogales. It’s made out of trees. All my doctors use it for burns and stuff. So I give a guy money and he goes across the line. Then I bought some marijuana salve. But it doesn’t work very well. I wanted it to work but you have to use quite a bit. My insurance won’t pay for it either.
EP: They probably won’t pay for the Mexican variety.
JH: They won’t pay for either. Because I was at Mayo to get over my spinal operation, which I never did successfully. Which is why I walk slowly and makes it hard to bird hunt because I have to use a cane. [He shows us his cane.]
BP: That is a beautiful one!
JH: Ironwood. Made by some Mexican Indians. I don’t know
where they got it.
BP: It grows down there, don’t it?
JH: Yeah.
BP: I worked in Big Bend National Park several years ago and ironwood grew there.
JH: My mother was raised by bird watchers and she counted 115 different bird species from our patio in three days, once. Which is amazing when you consider how many we have here.

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BP: Yeah, it’s a major migratory route through there.
JH: It’s lovely! When I see a bird, I need to hear it give a call. And the next time I see it, I will know. We saw an elegant trogon from the patio and they are like a paint-by number bird. Very beautiful! About four different colors. How did you get to work in Big Bend? 

BP: Well, I worked on trail crews in Glacier National Park and other national parks for thirteen years. And I worked down there one winter and it was beautiful!
JH: I could tell when I shook your hand that you have a long dark past of manual labor. My dad always said, “If you are a good shovel man, you will never go hungry.”
BP: Yep, I have worked the shovel a lot over the years.
JH: I know. I was a laborer in my younger career. Manual labor was very serene compared to being in an office. It kept your mind clear so in the evening you can write. You know that way you are not stuck in your head all day.
BP: You used to be a mason, right?
JH: Yeah, that is tough stuff. When I was younger I carted those
corner blocks. They are 85 pounds. I just twisted my fingers.
EP: Do you write everything out longhand? That is easier on your hands.
JH: Yeah, I typed Legends of the Fall with one finger at a time. BP: You wrote that in nine days, didn’t you?
JH: Yeah.
BP: That’s amazing!
JH: That’s not going to happen again. It was gorgeous! It was like taking dictation.

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BP: Wow!
JH: Lots of my books come through dreams. I actually dreamt Dalva.
BP: Oh really? Was it hard to get out of that head space of being in a female character?
JH: It was hard to get in her head and hard to get out. Not bad. You know we are all born female, cellular wise. I had five aunts, one mother, three sisters, a lot of female chickens, female dogs. So, it wasn’t too hard. I had to act a certain way. I would lose the voice of Dalva if I got too drunk the night before. I had to monitor my drinking. 

 
photo by Erik Petersen for Whitefish Review  

BP: How long did it take to write Dalva?
JH: A long time. A year or so.
BP: There seems to be a constant theme in your books that could resemble your life—such as in the characters Swanson, Tristan Ludlow, Brown Dog, and others that are main protagonists in your books.

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They always seem to be on the periphery of society. They usually are all rebels filled with the Dionysius spirit—intoxicated on Bacchus. They all march to a different drummer. What can you say about these characters and how they relate to you and your own life?
JH: What was that word besides Dionysius? What’s that other word?
BP: Bacchus. Spirit of revelry or fertility of life, intoxicated on life. Kind of like Pan.
JH: True, that is what it means. McGuane wrote a couple lines that you can either do what other people want you to, or you do what you want to do. That’s an easy call. [laughter]
BP: I read an interview with Tom Robbins years ago. The journalist asked him what writers he recommended. He mentioned all of these different authors and one book they were known for, but he said he reads everything that Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Jim Harrison ever wrote.
JH: Oh, that’s nice.


BP: Are there any books that you recommend that people should
read if they are going to consider themselves a writer?
JH: Rilke’s Letters to A Young Poet was the best book, I think. I read it several times when I was young. He was so austere. And he found a noble woman who would support him [laughter], which is good trick. Now are you guys studying literature or environmental?
BP: In journalism right now. I have been out of school a long time but came back again.
JH: Yeah, I like that. I think I quit college a total of ten times. I kept going back.
BP: You went to school with Tom McGuane and Richard Ford at Michigan State?

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JH: Yeah. Ford, McGuane and I went back and did a luncheon that cost them plenty. I don’t do anymore presentations. We spoke in front of a couple thousand people to talk about how writers emerge. My dad was on the faculty for a while. He was an agronomist and I was born on a farm, which was delightful—memory-wise. First thing you remember is throwing corn to the chickens and touching a cow’s nose. When I was four or five, my grandfather on that side was a Swedish immigrant. Him and his brothers, Nelson Gustafson Olaf, migrated out of Sweden to avoid the draft and came to America. My grandfather worked for the railroad and could carry two ties at once, which are about six hundred pounds. He would throw the softball out into the cornfield, way out in front of us to go look for it. Swedish fun, hah. [laughter] 

BP: Do you have any thoughts about why your books are more popular in France than they are in the States?
JH: [coughing fit] I really have no idea. I took a degree in comparative literature. You just don’t know why. I had one critic tell me it’s because unlike a lot of American authors, I don’t write about New York. They don’t need to hear about New York. They have Paris. I love Paris. I got to know it real well. It was the place to be.
BP: I know from several of your books and interviews that you try to meditate everyday. Do you still try to do that?
JH: Yeah. Look over there. [He points to the Zen Zafu pillows stacked under the shelves.] The trouble is, after that spinal surgery, I can’t sit in the lotus anymore. [He stands up to show us the incision.] It went from my neck to my tailbone.
BP: Oh, wow!
JH: When I had my surgery, I basically had it for my dog because I couldn’t walk her in the morning. I couldn’t walk at all when I had the surgery. The doctors said I wouldn’t recover very well. That’s when I had to go to Mayo for a month. Which is a suck hole. I mean, I hated it. The food was two cubes.
BP: How long ago was your spinal surgery? 126

Jim Harrison: A Writer’s Life
JH: It was four years ago. But now when I hunt, I just shuffle. Now I spend a lot of time sitting on logs for an hour when I go hunting. Which is nice. I still am out there. One day I shot a hundred doves, which is sort of unbelievable. She retrieved every one of them that I shot. That kind of dog is invaluable because you have trouble seeing doves in the grass.
BP: It seems like a lot of your dogs have been females?
JH: Yes, except once. I got a bear-hunting Airedale, which I called Hud. He was the only male dog we had. He was a real pain in the ass. He thought he could kick anybody’s ass in the world. He really was a bear dog. Usually most bear hunters use hounds. Bear dogs are a closing-in-dog because they are not afraid of bears and they won’t let the bear move. They are just that way.

BP: What advice do you have for young, aspiring writers coming up today?
JH: Read a great deal. You can’t learn to write unless you are well- read. Like I say to poets; You are responsible for reading all the world’s poetry because how else will you learn to be a poet? Just like a novelist, you must read the best novels of all. When I was in my teens, I read all of Dostoyevsky, which will darken your soul. [laughter] But that is essential. I don’t agree with these MFA programs. People should get out and travel at random everywhere. I don’t see the point of sitting around campus like a full can of worms all stuck together. [laughter] 

BP: Do you still stay in touch with Gary Snyder much?
JH: Yeah, but I haven’t had the heart to write him and tell him that my wife died. His wife died in 2006. She had cancer for twelve years. He nursed her for twelve years.
In Alabama they have dogs that are trained now to smell skin cancer. The doctors bring out the dogs and they can detect cancer by smell. They are interesting creatures. Snyder thinks people should have dogs because it reminds them of the wildness in their lives to be around an animal. [He points to a movie poster that has Gary Snyder and him on it.]
The movie I did with Gary Snyder, called The Practice of the Wild, 127

Interview by Benjamin Polley
was done at one of our friend’s ranch—Will Hearst. The ranch was 25 miles of empty California seashore. They have a conservation easement so that it can never be developed. So, I go there every Memorial Day on a five-day camping trip. And this year we had a tremendous time because they had two full-grown California Condors. So we opened the back doors and helped release California Condors. They have a nine-foot wingspan. Their wings are so feathered that when they take off you can feel it in your stomach. That was one of the high points in my bird watching.
BP: That would be awesome.
JH: It’s glorious! Occasionally, we do something right, not too
fucking often. BP: Yeah.
JH: I recently watched a movie about Upper Michigan. Before the Civil War there was fifty-mile long virgin forest. Massive white pines. But now they are like stump forests. It’s wilderness they are cutting off. It’s massive stumps. I saw a hole in one of them and wondered if I could crawl into it and sit straight up. That’s my church I went to. The only other person I took there was an Indian Chippewa woman whose only son was dying of AIDS. She said, “Do you have some sort of secret place?” I said, “I do.” So I took her out there. I put her in there for three hours. I could see the scat of mountain lions, bobcats, and black bears.
Wilderness like that still has secrets even though they logged it. Such a gorgeous ode to death. In this one area it has over 1000 acres of choke cherries and sugar plums. And the blooming of 1000 acres is just overwhelming. There’s nothing like it.
BP: Do you still make it back to Michigan? I know most of your books take place there.
JH: I had to sell my cabin for financial reasons. I had that cabin for 25 years.
BP: Is that the same cabin you had when you wrote Wolf?
JH: No. It is in that area. Just north of the Big Two-Hearted River, 128

Jim Harrison: A Writer’s Life
that Hemingway wrote about. My father was friends with Hemingway’s uncle and he said, “What’s Ernest doing in Europe, fucking around?” [laughter]
BP: I know you have been compared to Faulkner and Hemingway quite a bit. And you mentioned in one of the interviews, “Hemingway’s writing is like a wood stove that doesn’t put off much heat.”
JH: Yeah, he was just a tourist from Chicago. [laughter] I mean he wrote beautifully. Moveable Feast was a beautiful book. I went to Paris to see where he lived and walked and where Rilke lived and walked. It has such a literary past. You should go to Paris sometime and just walk.
BP: I want to.
JH: Don’t go where all the tourists go, though. I got an assignment once from Esquire to trout fish the Seine River. But, there aren’t any trout on the Seine River. It was pretty funny. I just like the idea of being in a little skiff floating down the Seine fly-fishing for brown trout. [laughter] I started fly-fishing when I was six because my Dad was such an ardent fisherman. And then I got my eye put out. Then I started misbehaving. So, I was getting up at 3:30 in the morning as a six-year- old with a little fly rod and off we’d go for the day catching some nice trout. And that was something I wasn’t suppose to do because I would get lost.


EP: Is writing easier now in your life because there are fewer distractions?
JH: I don’t know if there are any less distractions. I have been out here in this studio every morning since my wife’s death and I must say I haven’t got much done. Rene Char, a French poet says, “You have to be there when the bread comes fresh from the oven.” You just gotta keep doing it. It’s like being a photographer—you got to drive around until something catches your eye. Like [Russell] Chatham, when bird hunting, and I can remember him just standing there looking at the landscape. We’re supposed to write poetry to keep the gods alive.
BP: Have you been up to Snyder’s place? Kitkitdizze. 129

Interview by Benjamin Polley
JH: No, I never went up there. Allen gave him that land. Allen Ginsberg was the only one that was really good with his money. And he gave it all away. Allen was a very passionate man. I knew him real well. It’s funny. I went as a poet to this big poetry Festival at Stony Brook. There were 200 poets including international poets. Allen was there. I won the standing poetry contest, but I hurt my leg and couldn’t stand up. I had to use a cane for two days. Ten years later, I saw Allen Ginsberg in New York and he asked me, “How’s your leg doing?” Meaning he remembered. 

BP: Didn’t you meet Jack Kerouac?
JH: I met him at the “Five Spot” when I was eighteen. BP: I think you talk about that in Wolf.
JH: “The Five Spot” was a jazz club. Magnificent jazz there and you could sit at the bar and buy beer and I saw Kerouac and we started talking. On the Road just came out. He’d gotten a new corduroy suit that was already a fucking mess. [laughter] Cause he slept in it a couple times. [laughter] He was in great shape because he was an athlete. He was a fullback. He was a wonderful man, but he was living with his mom and drinking a case of beer a day.
BP: He was only in his fifties when he died, wasn’t he? JH: It was sad.
 
BP: Do you still try to take a walk everyday?
JH: Yes, but I can’t walk very well. Walking’s been critical to me all my life because it smooths out my mind. I go for a walk into here. [points to head]
BP: There was a great line you wrote, “The ancient rhythm of walking tends to delight the mind.”
JH: Yeah, it sure does. That was Thoreau’s idea. He wrote a book of essays, Walking. Kierkegaard, too. However your troubles are, a long walk will loosely smooth them out. Equilibrium junk that we have in

130

our body accredits away.
BP: Have you read any David James Duncan?
JH: Yeah, of course. He’s come over here with Chris Dombrowski, who is great poet. He was down here fishing. Chris couldn’t stand the Midwest or the university anymore. But it’s getting too crowded here. Which you don’t sense here on this road. But you do in town in the summer. But, I don’t give a shit. What can I do? [silence]
I talk to my wife sometimes, you know. Actually you would after 55 years, because, well, after she died, I was so depressed I was thinking of suicide, and then her voice came to me and said, “You have two daughters and three grandsons, so you can’t do it.” Because it is selfish, which is true, because survivors of suicide internally think it is their fault.
BP: I remember another time in your life when you were writing Letters to Yesenin that you were thinking about it then too.
JH: I was having a hard time. He [Yesenin] was a Russian. He was a cokehead who married Isadora Duncan, of all people.
[To Erik] Would you mind—in the bathroom up in the corner, there are some yellow paper cups, up in the corner to the right.
EP: Do you want a cup of water?
JH: No, I am gonna have some vodka.
EP: Do you want just one?
JH: Well, unless you guys want some vodka?
BP: It’s alright, Erik. I am good.


BP: Did your wife’s voice come to you when you were sitting here [in your writing studio] or in a dream?
JH: In my studio. I found in Dalva, Naomi was always talking to 131

Jim Harrison: A Writer’s Life

Interview by Benjamin Polley
her husband, which I find is frequently true. The more you hear their voice, you hear it as it exactly is, you know. Little spooky, now of course. I never wanted her to work because I wanted to bring home the bacon. I wanted to generate the income, which I couldn’t until I was 39. We had ten years we called, ‘The Macaroni Years.’ Because then I wrote Legends—and that got picked up by Hollywood. I was broke before that but [Jack] Nicholson knew and fronted me money to write Legends of the Fall. ‘Cause I was broke and in debt and couldn’t do anything. So he stepped up. We were down in Mexico. You can tell by the way he acts that he doesn’t sweat the small stuff. He is just looking
around with his sunglasses on. [laughter]
TheWhitefish Review always interested me. It’s not all choked on
this shit about what I did last summer and taking my kids to the mall. It has a different feeling to it totally. Don’t you think?
EP: Yeah, It does.
JH: My one son-in-law [Max Hjortsberg] is a poet and he has had some poems published in there. I think I got some poems coming out in there. Don’t I?
EP: I don’t know? In the Whitefish Review?
JH: Yeah. I asked my editor to send some. I can’t send them out by myself. It was such a raw experience when I was a younger poet. [Jim takes a sip from his tumbler of Vodka and has a coughing fit]. My flap in my esophagus doesn’t work properly. But, I am fucked if I am going to get surgery. That’s how Edward Abbey died is esophagus cancer. I knew him quite well before he died. He kept telling his wife to quit complaining about her stomachache and then she suddenly died of stomach cancer.
Are you guys married? BP: No.
EP: I am.
JH: Do you have kids?

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EP: We have a six- and a seven-year-old. Two boys.
JH: That’s lovely! I have a brother, a year older than me.
EP: Is it just the two of you?
JH: No, five kids. My sister and father died in a car wreck going deer hunting together.
BP: Which child were you in the configuration? 

 
photo by Erik Petersen for Whitefish Review


JH: Number two. My brother worked at the university. Then he started working at Harvard and then he went to Yale. He took over the University of Arkansas system. It was nice when he was at Harvard because he was at a library that had six million books. I could get any book I wanted. I could run around the stacked shelves. He was very good with me. He was the eagle scout and I got kicked out of the scouts.
BP: Didn’t your brother have a big role when you sent off your first manuscript of Wolf out to Simon & Schuster?

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JH: Yeah, it was lost in a mail strike. He was such an important figure in New Haven, they let him look through all the mail containers and he found the manuscript.
BP: Do you think there was a bit of serendipity there that helped place you on your career path?
JH: No, I wasn’t taking myself seriously then as a novelist and then it became my day job. It feels good that it started that way. Wolf did pretty good.
BP: It is actually one of my favorites because it reminds me of my life and how I wanted to live in a cabin and see a wild wolf and all that.
JH: Exactly!
BP: I love that book. It means a lot to me. I reread it once a year.
JH: Funny, I saw a wolf on the little two-track near my cabin. She was looking at me. Then I dreamt that she got hit by a car. Then I picked her up and she flowed into my mouth and flowed out my body and then... aah I don’t know if I ate the whole thing, but I jumped up out of bed and went so high I cut my head on the chandelier and I was howling and I ran outside naked. I went howling and all over the yard. My poor lab at the time was scared for days. [laughter] I started howling one day in the car and she jumped way in back. No more Rose.
BP: Rose was the one bit by a rattlesnake, right?
JH: Right. Exactly, yes, that was sad. Such a lovely creature. You can train any dog to do anything, you know? She was a very good bird dog even though she was a retriever. Her ass would wag one way for grouse and one way for woodcock. So I was always ready. [laughter]
You can teach them to do anything, you know. The bartender downtown was a dog lover, so when people weren’t hungry he says, “Jimmy go get your dog.” I go out and get her and I lift her up to the bar and she stands there and eats fries and a cheeseburger.

BP: Where are your masks from? [pointing to doorway] 134

Jim Harrison: A Writer’s Life
JH: Mexico. See that wolf mask right behind you? There is a little figurine of a girl across its nose.
BP: [looking out the window] There’s an owl outside in the tree.
JH: A great horned owl. There are three of them around here. My hired hand said, “No one will break into your cabin if they see those masks.” And no one has ever broken into my cabin. They broke into my house down on the border of Mexico. Some Mexican migrants. They took some warm clothes and canned foods.
BP: Do you think they were people coming across and needing help?
JH: Yeah, they come across and I meet them down by the creek and I talk to them and they ask, “Where is Chicago?” And I start to sigh because it is so tragic. Tragic!
BP: Yeah, I grew up in town that is 50% Mexican, outside of Chicago.
JH: Patagonia is like that too and in the grocery store. It is very touching. I like these people, such hard workers.
BP: Incredible! We could learn a lot from them. It’s too bad there is so much contention with that and wanting to force them back.
JH: Exactly. What time is it now?
BP: It is 5:15 right now.
JH: Oh, I am going to eat something and go to sleep pretty soon. I nap, then get up and work again.

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