The Accidental Life

by Terry McDonell

  Peltier had been convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison for the 1975 killing of two FBI agents, in what would be known as the “Incident at Oglala.” Peter’s work to free Peltier would become an enduring commitment, but for Rocky Mountain Magazine he wanted to write about trouble among the Indians themselves, a range war developing between the Hopi and the Navajo over land use and water rights in Arizona. Was I interested in that? It was one of those moments all editors fear: a great writer pitching a story about…water rights?

  Peter told me that Hopi translated to “peaceful ones” and that they were a traditional people living in an area called Black Mesa, a plateau rising six thousand feet above the surrounding grasslands. The Hopi referred to this place as sacred, the center of the universe, although they were entirely surrounded by the much larger Navajo reservation, and the Navajo were about as traditional as ATVs and slot machines.

  “How many words are you thinking?” I asked.

  “Long,” he said.

  “Five or six thousand words?”

  “More like ten…”

  Two weeks later, he filed fifteen thousand, twice as many as I had ever run in any magazine. I combed through the piece with a careful line edit, bringing it down to twelve thousand, cutting only one complete section—about the brutality of the Navajo Police. My problem with that section had less to do with length than reporting; it didn’t have denials from the police. Peter resisted every change with patience and grew finicky only when it became necessary, realizing that he could not wait me out because of the deadline. But he would not agree to lose the section on the Navajo Police, for which his primary source was Carpenter, the “half-baked detribalized Mohawk” he had been traveling with.

  “You have to trust your writers,” Peter said.

  I could hear the humor in his voice. He was an amused Buddhist, and I think Peter regarded me then as he regarded most editors—as a failed writer. And as a serious Buddhist, he thought of himself as a teacher—perhaps not when it came to his editors at Viking and the New Yorker, but certainly with me in a little house in Denver crawling over his fifteen thousand words on the Hopi. I had never edited a writer who knew so much about so much beyond his own writing and it was easy to become his student, especially after I fact-checked the passages about the Navajo Police. They were brutal.

  When we were finished with the edit, I made some notes for the short bio of Peter that would run with the piece. I found those notes years later in my worn copy of The Snow Leopard: “Novelist, journalist, editor, activist, naturalist, explorer, anthropologist, zoologist, ornithologist, ichthyologist, entomologist, oceanographer, fisherman, waterman, charter boat captain, shark hunter, linguist, adventurer, scientist, LSD pioneer, Vietnam war protester, radical, Buddhist,” and so on, finally getting to “shaman,” underlined at the bottom of the page. It seemed as if what I had written was for a sixth-grade report, trying too hard not to miss anything—a list impossibly naïve in its comprehensiveness. Peter wasn’t there at all. When I checked the old magazine, I saw that the bio I had run said simply that Peter was “the author of The Snow Leopard.”

  When the Hopi piece went to press (fourteen thousand words), Peter was still on the road.

  —

  PETER TRAVELED WITH UNIVERSAL NOTEBOOKS, taking notes on the right-hand pages, leaving the left blank until he used them for his first run at usable copy—usually in the evening after a day of reporting. It was an efficient system that made him productive on the road. The notebooks were artifacts too, and I think they meant as much to him as the research they held, although he insisted that this was a silly idea.

  He lost one of those notebooks once, at the San Francisco airport, while returning from reporting in Klamath National Forest in Northern California. Those were the days of pay phones, and Peter had left the notebook at one in the main terminal—for only a few minutes, but when he realized what he had done and quickly returned, it was gone. Hans Teensma, who was the art director at Outside, had driven Peter to the airport and was seeing him off. They went on the search together. Then as now, there was no effective Lost and Found at any airport, so that took about five minutes before they started reverse-engineering the trash-disposal procedure. They found rooms full of sorted garbage but Peter, forlorn and increasingly resigned to the loss, had a flight to catch.

  Hans continued the search, with no luck. Driving home that night empty-handed, he figured that only a crazy person would look at one of Peter’s notebooks and not understand that someone had put a lot of work into it. They might not want to go to any trouble to find the owner, but something like that would be very difficult to just throw away. Hans returned to the airport the next afternoon and tracked down the notebook in the janitors’ changing room. One of them had picked it up and just stuck it on a shelf before he went home.

  Hans called Peter, and then Peter called me to tell me what a brilliant and wonderful thing Hans had done. Hans and I worked together again at Rocky Mountain Magazine and then lost touch, but for all the years that followed Peter and I would talk about how Hans had gone back to the airport and found that notebook. Peter always implied some kind of tangential credit for me, the way he often did with his friends when something they’d had very little to do with went right in the world. It was a way for us to talk about the value of work and friendship.

  —

  OUR CONVERSATIONS, especially when I’d reach him driving one of his numerous loops through the deep West, never started with where Peter was but where he was going next. All the travel, all the reporting were central to his work. “I like to hear and smell the countryside, the land my characters inhabit,” he said, when he talked about writing. “I don’t want these characters to step off the page, I want them to step out of the landscape.” And they did. His detail was so unblinking that he put you inside those landscapes too, no matter how uncomfortable it was to be there with him.

  In my copy of The Snow Leopard, where I found those bio notes, I had underlined the second paragraph of the first chapter, in which Peter’s expedition stages out of the Nepalese village of Pokhara—where the last road ends.

  We are glad to go. These edges of Pokhara might be tropical outskirts anywhere—vacant children, listless adults, bent dogs and thin chickens in a litter of sagging shacks and rubble, mud, weeds, stagnant ditches, bad sweet smells, vivid bright broken plastic bits, and dirty fruit peelings awaiting the carrion pig; for want of better fare, both pigs and dogs consume the human excrement that lies everywhere along the paths. In fair weather, all this flux is tolerable, but now at the dreg end of the rainy season, the mire of life seems leached into the sallow skins of these thin beings, who squat and soap themselves and wring their clothes each morning in the rain puddles.

  Peter’s writing is full of such passages, somehow beautiful in their harshness. He was a realist that way, writing about life as he searched it out, but then spending time with him, you saw something else, something his friend Kurt Vonnegut described as “charm completely devoid of narcissism, like animals have.”

  −ENDIT−

  Learning Curve (406)

  AS MY CONFIDENCE INCREASED, I began to say that the definition of a good editor was a person with no friends. I was talking about dealing with writers, editing them with “a firm hand and terrifying clarity.” That always got a laugh, but it was posturing. To be a good editor you need friends, or at least writers who like you enough that you can talk them into doing what you want them to do. At least that was a lot of the job for me.

  I found that you only irritate good writers if you try to flatter them into working for you. I had this problem with a lot of writers because I loved their work so much. Joan Didion was flawlessly gracious, but not a fan of ass kissing.

  With Hunter Thompson and George Plimpton, I began to think that I had to try to be somehow as interesting to them as they were to me. That was how Hunter and George worked with the Hells Angels or the Detroit Lions or politicians or circus midgets or whome
ver. George invited everyone he wrote about to his parties. Hunter wrote careful, hilarious letters and schemed relentlessly to make himself interesting to his biggest subjects, like Muhammad Ali and Bill Clinton. It was obvious. But I also found that just paying Hunter more money made me more interesting to him.

  Even after the money was set, I learned never to suggest that another writer was coming on strong. I remember once mentioning to Tom McGuane that a couple of writers who were teaching in the writing program at the University of Montana in Missoula were turning out some sharp and tricky essays about the West. “I’ve done a lot of things in my life I’m not proud of,” Tom said, seemingly without guile. “But I ain’t never taught no creative writing.”

  Telling this story is not fair to McGuane, who is both generous and hilarious, but going into dialect as he did then was deadly. After Tom used that same line on a newspaper reporter doing a profile of him, Never teaching no creative writing became a badge of professionalism in the movie business, and among hard-core freelancers in New York. It cracked me up, and was one of the jokes that led to a kinship with this or that writer as we built out our working relationship—and our respective mythologies about working together.

  −ENDIT−

  Boy Howdy! (1,197)

  Gonna get me a pony

  and an ounce of cocaine

  goin’ out to Montana

  to fuck Tom McGuane

  —ANONYMOUS

  IF YOU WERE A WRITER from Montana, or had a place there, you somehow earned immediate status in both New York and L.A. After I moved there in 1980, I sometimes wondered why we were all so proud of it, but I loved the eccentric solidarity and the many writing and movie connections. Some were brief; others grew out of love affairs and rivalries that lasted until someone died. And even before anyone was dead (Richard Brautigan, suicide at forty-nine, 1984), Montana was a literary force field of those connections doubling back on themselves. I think in the beginning only Tom McGuane saw the celebrity overload on the horizon. Or maybe he just saw it coming when he looked in the mirror.

  Tim Cahill moved to Livingston to write a book about McGuane but became his neighbor instead. He found a place outside town up Swingley Route at Poison Creek. Swingley Road, as it is called now, was a bouncy track of unpaved road that still runs up the edge of the Absarokas to the Boulder River and Big Timber. Poison Creek wasn’t poison but the name spoke to the problematic past of ranching cattle up there. Cahill had been there for six months when I drove up from Denver, where Rocky Mountain Magazine had just launched.

  Cahill’s wife, Susan McBride, had progressive rheumatoid arthritis and just moving around the house was difficult for her. The Montana weather didn’t help, especially compared to how it had been on the acre or so they had left behind in Northern California, but you never heard about that. When you talked to Susan, she talked about you.

  She had been a beauty and carried herself like a wounded hero—which she was to all of us. She was a poet too, with a fast mouth that could turn even short conversations into games of meaning. If you wanted to talk about love, say, or getting high or drinking, Susan was your girl. She drank every day, usually from early afternoon into the night. She called Cahill “Cahill,” and he bought her Jim Beam in half gallons and called her “McBride.” The rest of us called her Susan.

  —

  IT WAS SPRING, and still cool in the evenings, and I arrived to find that she and Cahill had organized a dinner with Tom McGuane and some other writers, including Gatz Hjortsberg, and the painter Russell Chatham. The actor Peter Fonda and his wife, Becky, were there too, and we sat around outside watching the sky fade into one of those glories that explains the motto on Montana license plates. When the woman I had brought with me from Denver complimented Susan on the sunset, she said it went with the territory and took off on one of her tears about writing and journalism and where we were all headed and where she fit into things—her status in the tribe, as it were, because it was the West, after all.

  “Boy howdy!” she’d say after making a point.

  So sure, she said, she might be a big drinker but she was never confused about it, like some others she could mention. Boy howdy! on that. And by the way, she was enjoying the best possible weather in her head. We could all go racing from summit to summit or across the moors or wherever, and so what if she couldn’t walk a mile down the road even if she had been sober. But there was never any self-pity in her Boy howdy! Susan would give you a wink and lift you with it. The wilder the better, she’d say, but she was never going to make it into the backcountry, the high windy places we all wrote about, the places where rock and water and sky hammer your eyes. Boy howdy, never going there. Better to look for trouble in town, forget the cliffs behind the house, more interesting to find a seat at the bar at the Mint or the Murray or the Wrangler. Or like that time in Mexico, the rest of us going fishing, leaving her on the porch with enough ice.

  “The nature of wildness eludes me not,” she said slowly. “And I don’t have to jump out of no stinkin’ airplanes…” She and Cahill both loved the “stinkin’ badges” line from The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, and everyone laughed. We all knew that Cahill had written a piece for Outside about what it was like to skydive for the first time.

  —

  EVERYBODY LOVED CAHILL, especially Susan except sometimes she gave him a hard time, and this night was one of those times. She rattled the ice in her glass at him for another drink and started talking about what a genius McGuane was, starting with a line Tom had written somewhere about a debutante “committing experience” with shrimpers in Key West. Boy howdy! to committing experience.

  “You’re the best writer,” she said looking at Tom and, ignoring his deflections, marched through an argument praising his novels Ninety-two in the Shade and Panama, which was just out and was drawing attacks for McGuane’s having “gone Hollywood.” Boy howdy! And fuck that! And by the way, Hollywood was a good place to go to get the money, something some other writers she could name had a little trouble doing.

  Cahill just shrugged, but McGuane didn’t like this, and neither did anyone else. It opened a bad drawer. No one ever talked about who was the best writer. That was for New Yorker writers to talk about in New York. Out here in the Writerly West, McGuane’s surmounting success was either not discussed or was written off in jokes about his luck—if Tom were broke and stumbling around some fallow sugarcane field like the bums did in Florida, he’d probably fall and hit his head on a priceless conquistador breastplate.

  The sky was darkening and we all kept drinking.

  When Susan didn’t let up, Cahill said she was right. So did Gatz and Chatham. Yes, Tom was the best writer. You could see it upset everyone, but maybe it relieved them too—like finally saying you’re sorry to someone at your high school reunion. We kept drinking and Susan kept pushing, like some kind of reverse AA facilitator, asking questions and riffing. She was a writer too, but nobody read the poetry she wrote except Cahill. How did everyone feel about that? Fonda chimed in that Tom was better than he was at everything, which was interesting on some aberrant level because his wife, Becky, had been Tom’s first wife.

  Quoting Panama again, Susan said our little western barbecue was getting too Cuban for words. She was right, of course, and it went deeper into the night. More drinking. Someone got sick under the big yard light, throwing convulsive shadows up the dirt driveway. Nobody drove home. There we were, some of us lying drunk on our backs in the dirt, passed out or just staring up at bright stars in the cold Montana sky.

  −ENDIT−

  Tom McGuane (3,603)

  WHEN MCGUANE MOVED TO LIVINGSTON in 1968, he said it was because he didn’t want his sporting life (hunting and fishing) to be “expeditionary” anymore, which meant he wanted it in his own backyard. Livingston was perfect, a railroad and ranching town on the Yellowstone River at the bottom of the Paradise Valley—a tough but friendly place that still had counter checks, unlocked doors and Dan Bailey’s famous ma
il-order fly-tying business.

  Tom’s career was forming up, and he was married to Portia Rebecca Crockett, who had money of her own. They made friends easily and everybody loved Becky, who was petite and sexy, with old-fashioned manners. Becky described Tom’s “beautiful, long back” as something he passed to their infant son, whom everyone called Young Thomas. Big Tom was strong-looking, and he sometimes explained himself by saying he didn’t want to have “writer hands,” a slap at his own MFA in playwriting from Yale and his Wallace Stegner Fellowship to Stanford, where he finished his first novel, The Sporting Club, the movie sale of which bankrolled what he named “the Raw Deal Ranch,” just outside of Livingston.

  Writing and fishing friends followed, with some—Hjortsberg, whom he had met at Yale, Brautigan, and Chatham, from Northern California—moving nearby. Jim Harrison visited often, driving in from Michigan. With McGuane and Becky as de facto gatekeepers, the Paradise Valley was increasingly visible as a hideout for creative work and good times. The locals welcomed everyone and were not yet cynical.

  —

  “SURE,” the operator said, “Tom,”…sounding like she knew him, when I called Livingston information. I was working on the start-up of Outside magazine out of the Rolling Stone offices in San Francisco, where I had landed the job by saying I would get interesting novelists to write about the natural world and whatever intrepid, enlightened young men and women were doing out there in it. This meant covering “adventure travel” and the new “extreme sports.” We had a statement of purpose proclaiming a commitment to the people, activities, literature, art and politics of the outdoors…which I rattled off to Tom on the phone that morning.

  “You probably don’t want anything about hunting,” he said.

  He was right, but I said hunting would be fine, wonderful really, “whatever you want to write about.” Getting him in the magazine would send out a literary signal. I had read his novels and the journalism he had done for Sports Illustrated and figured whatever he wrote would be ambitious. The problem would be that hunting was looked upon with horror by most of my new colleagues, as well as by the readership the Rolling Stone circulation department had identified as the ideal demographic for Outside.