Robert Wrigley - Moscow, ID
It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than it is for a 29' motorhome to go up a dirt road near the Idaho border. Yet, this is what we did today. The accomplishment of that was so thrilling - the dust, the bumps, trees and branches slashing at us - that when we got to the home of the poet Robert Wrigley, I locked the keys in the big tin can for fun. Oh, how we will laugh, I thought. In an hour or so I'll be finished with the interview. And to really make my visit memorable, I'll force the poet to endure an extra hour of Beth and me standing and waiting for a locksmith to arrive from Godknowswhere, Idaho. We're making memories, after all. What fun would it be if I just showed up and went away when I was done? Where's the gimmick in that? Instead, I'm thinking of ways to make sure all the poets on the trip get a story or two to tell. I can't always lock my keys inside like today, so some days I might spill an entire Pepsi onto the carpet, or release a baggie full of wasps that I smuggle in. Maybe at the end of the trip I'll just burn someone's house down. Stay tuned.
Robert Wrigley lives four miles outside of Moscow, Idaho, a rugged college town near the Washington border. Our newly named rolling tin can (Winnie Cooper) squeezes up a combination of gravel and dirt roads, through severe switchbacks to the top of a towering hill that looks south and back toward town. The view is extraordinary, three mountain ranges, one more than 100 miles away on the horizon. On a clear day you can see all the way to Oregon.
Wrigley greets us and shows us his studio, a 12 X 15 building he built himself. Inside it's full of books, pictures, and a gleaming white Fender Stratocaster that Wrigley won in a raffle. Wrigley played as a kid around St. Louis, but now just uses the guitar to help delay the inevitable work that awaits him at his desk, where his hard backed journal and mechanical pencil await.
Robert and I sit in the studio, and while I'm setting up a camera, he shows me a 1934 Webster's unabridged dictionary. It's on a wooden stand covered with a small towel. It's a prized possession. He points out that the book, being so old, is missing a lot of words in use normally now, and it's an idea that surprises me, but that seems to really please him.
He sits in a high backed office chair and I'm on the couch/futon and we talk easily. It's not hard to see how the natural world that populates Wrigley's work ended up there; we're in the midst of a mountain forest that teems with animal and plant life. He tells me about moose, coyotes, owls, snakes, and bear.
After we finish chatting, we go out of the studio to discover my wife sitting by the Winnebago, locked up nice and safe, the keys resting politely and disarmingly on the dash.
Wrigley takes us into the main house and we take turns calling locksmiths until we find one open on this sunny Saturday.
For 30 minutes we play with Opal, the 4 year old Australian Shepherd who is happy to see us. I silently fume at myself as we wait, but my wife is relaxed and Robert is a perfect host. He shows us some photos of another house he says has a better view than this one - though I can't imagine such a thing exists. He shows me another photo of a mutual friend.
When the locksmith arrives, we go down to greet the guy and his wife who apparently travels with him on his weekend calls. The locksmith tells me it'll be $20 and then inserts a small wedge into the space between the window and lower window jamb on the passenger side.
Then he pulls out an 18 inch "slim jim" and begins wriggling it in the opening till the lock pops. He reaches in, unlocks the other side and we're about ready to go. I'm pulling out $20 when I hear a gurgling. The locksmith's wife hears it too and looks at me. It sounds like hot water on metal, which of course it is. The locksmith's truck's radiator has had enough and is giving up its water and coolant like an open faucet on July 4th. I stand back, a little alarmed - such is my bravery - but the locksmith goes right up to the boiling radiator and gingerly loosens the cap. Once it's off, he goes back to the back of his truck, gets some more coolant, and begins feeding it in the radiator.
I think to myself that things couldn't get any better. I've been stuck in Robert Wrigley's driveway for an hour, and now my new friend is stuck too, and he's right behind me. We're here forever. I wonder if Robert has guest rooms for all of us. Maybe I'll just move in. I hope that the next poor sap who wants to interview Wrigley lets a few months pass. This shan't be forgotten.
I fetch a gallon of water from underneath Winnie Cooper and give it to the locksmith. The combination of a little time, the coolant, and some nice drinking water has calmed the locksmith's truck. He backs out and leaves us to say goodbye to Robert.
My wife and I shake Robert's hand. I apologize some more, just for good measure, and then we slowly back out of the long driveway. (This is the only way to get out; there is no turning around the big beast on this narrow and rocky path.) I lurch backwards, pushing one time toward the edge of a cliff which would kill me - but me alone - and then toward the rocky side, which would likely only scrape up the Winnebago, but probably crush my wife. My self-loathing - and you must know that I make Richard Nixon look like Anthony Robbins - is raging. But we get out of the driveway; my wife joins me. Gives me a shrug that lets me know that "Shit happens," and we angle slowly down Wrigley's mountain, aiming toward a road made of cement, running north, and headed to Spokane.
Highway 12
Highway 12 runs between Lolo, MT, in the westernmost part of the state, straight through the panhandle of Idaho, and into eastern Washington State. And we take that route today, leaving Montana around noon, and crossing the Snake River into Washington around 5. It's 200 miles, roughly, and the first 150 or so are the most beautiful miles I've ever driven.
Highway 12 follows the Lochsa River, a trickle for the most part this year, but at one time, a rager big enough to carve out its own bed and the path that Highway 12 follows.
For the first 150 miles, the highway is crowded on the left by the river, and on the right by quickly rising walls of rock and evergreen trees. A sign early on says, "Winding Road, 77 Miles." And it's not a joke. The road meanders through slow left and right turns for its entire distance. Cars run around 55-60 mph for the most part, but the big rolling tin can settles in around 45. And that's fast enough, because each turn brings another gorgeous tableau of water, rock, road, trees, and mountains.
We pull over at one of the scores of turnouts and make sandwiches. We stare out the window at the river going past.
We continue on, bending, releasing out of the corners, accelerating on the short straight stretches, eyes always cocked up, checking out the mountains that peer down on us. The cell phones are both out, otherwise we'd be calling everyone we know. So, how are things where you are?
By the time we hit the small town of Orofino, the landscape has changed. The mountains are hills now. We've left the last of the Rockies behind, for the most part, the towering Bitterroots - the mountains that most vexed Lewis and Clark - the last range for us to blast through at 8 miles per gallon. We stop in Orofino for groceries for the next couple of days. My wife gets a pumpkin, not quite as big as my head, but you get the idea.
We're in the Pacific time zone now. The sun is setting already at 5 pm. Highway 12 still bumps around in my brain as I exit onto 5th Street in Clarkston, Washington. We pull in at a campground that overlooks the Snake River and Granite Lake. By the time the sun has gone down, we're into our second bowl of chili.
Tomorrow is a work day, transcription day. The tapes are piling up. Then back on the road. Moscow, Idaho. Spokane and Liberty Lake, Washington. Four more days, three more interviews and the October leg will be over.
Sandra Alcosser - Lolo, MT
At 10 am, Sandra Alcosser pulls up beside our motorhome. We've parked at a small park and ride on a highway south of Missoula, MT, and about 5 miles from Sandra's home in the mountains between Florence and Lolo, Montana. She greets us both warmly and we pack our stuff into her wagon.
We head up a gravel road, then a dirt road, and then squeeze halfway between the trees and the ditch to let a neighbor go by. "That's Harve," Sandra says, waving at her neighbor's pickup truck. We press on up the dirt road. There are only 6 houses on this stretch, and Sandra's is at the end.
We turn into the tiny driveway and see her new dog, the lively Rio. Rio is glad to have the company, and despite my love of dogs, I ignore him for a bit and look around at the place. To the south, the land and the trees slope away, back down to where we started. Behind us, the mountains climb, but not so far. We're a long way up. Pine trees pop up everywhere. The sky is a collection of colors, dark clouds to the north and west, but above us blue, and the sun coming through and warming up the ground around the cabin.
We all go in, and it's gorgeous. The wood is warm, the furniture heavy and old - some of it from an old drugstore in Missoula. Sandra uses some of the furniture to hold books, but one piece is still mostly empty, waiting to be filled. They once held a collection of amber bottles of strychnine and belladonna, and I'm voting for their display instead!
Sandra sets us around her table with cookies, fruit, coffee, and delicious and cold blueberry-banana smoothies.
This is the first of the interviews that my wife has seen in person. I traveled in September by myself, and since we've been on the October leg, it's always been more convenient for her to drop me off and pick me up. I'm glad she's here today, because I know she loves this part of this country, and I'd want to show her this beautiful cabin anyway, but it feels odd. We're on this journey around the country together, but this book is my thing. My wife supports it, listens to me bitch about the work. She looks over the photos and gives me her advice, but she's never seen me teach, and I've never gone to watch her at work. Our work selves have always had their own space, and suddenly she's watching me and it's disorienting. What must she think of this talk of poems and place? How many times have my eyes glassed over at one of her work functions when she and her colleagues talked about advertising, network TV sales? At how many English department parties have we exchanged comical glances when I'd be locked in a life or death discussion about Ginsberg or Stevens while my wife would be motioning like she was starting the car and driving us home? We know couples who work together, who have the same work pals. But that's not us. When we're not working, we like to check RIGHT out. There's no chance a spontaneous chat about the all-important 18-49 demographic is going to come up, nor are we likely to discuss whether or not we think Robert Frost could be excised painlessly from the canon. We talk about dinner. Movies. The last Grisham. Our pals, families. It's not better or worse, it's just us.
Sandra feels strongly about place, the energy of New York versus Montana or San Diego (where she still runs the poetry program at San Diego State, a program she started). She's passionate about her work and about poetry in general. Over the years she's logged tens of thousands of miles working for the NEA, teaching drug addicts, running the Poets in the Park program in New York City, teaching and reading around the country.
She talks easily about her work and her role in its creation. I pose some sticky questions that have come up in my earlier interviews, and Sandra thinks about each question and answers them assuredly, deftly, with force and clarity.
It's all over too quickly. The three of us leave the cocoon of the cabin, and into the startling sunlight. Rio joins us, his puppy-ness overflowing. We hike up a small path behind Sandra's house, a path that literally could take us all through the rest of Montana and into Idaho. We shoot some shots of Sandra - and one of her with Rio - and head back down. We drive down the mountain, talking about Ireland, a place my wife and I visited this summer and a place Sandra is going later this year.
When we get back to the motorhome, Sandra hugs us both. We load my gear into the Winnebago and Sandra's wagon disappears away from us, onto the gravel road, and back up into the mountain.
The West: Some Thoughts
I’ve often told people in the East that I thought of myself as a Westerner. I love the West, I’d say. I’d tell them about going to college in Arizona, my love of the Oregon coast, and some story about smoking a cigar on a car hood in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho.
I never had to say much more than that. That was always strange enough for most people. In the circles I’ve lived in for many years now, the West is just some blank spots on the left side of the map. My pals in Maryland could no more pick Montana out on a map than I can drive past a Taco Bell without stopping in for a taste.
In the past week, we’ve been moving around in western South Dakota, Wyoming, and now Montana. Big empty states. Beautiful empty highways that are always snaking through badlands or hills, pastures, wheat fields, and then mountains. Twenty-four black Angus cows, steers, whatever, all lined up by a lone tree. Actual cowboys moving a herd of cattle down the side of the highway outside Aladdin, Wyoming, population 15. Endless and stoic power lines disappearing into the horizon in Crawford county.
As we left the badlands and high prairie grasslands of South Dakota, we started to get into hills through eastern Wyoming, and by the time we got to Buffalo, in the north central part of the state, we could see parts of the Rocky Mountains looming ahead of us.
From Buffalo to Butte, Montana, we climbed from 3000 feet to nearly 6500. It’s not the easiest thing in the world to encourage a 29 foot motorhome up to 6500 feet. It’s a lot like getting me out of a hammock. But we eased off the gas, hugged the right hand lane with some semis and moving vans, and ended up crossing the Continental Divide at a brisk 40 mph.
And every mile over the past few days has been stunning. The land out here just eats you up. In South Dakota, it’s the horizon that kills you. It’s everywhere. You look any direction and see the earth moving away from you. But now in Montana, there are hills and mountains on every side, the highest of them snowcapped, despite the fact that we’re in our third or fourth 70+ degree day in late October, breaking records all over.
We spent the day in Missoula, a pretty western college town with art galleries, ranchers, college students, artisans, and hippies. We spent some time at a Kinko’s, doing some work for this book, and nipped out for lunch at one of a hundred quaint cafes. One thing that has really struck me since being here this time is the very real and important role nature has in the lives of Westerners. In the east, the lack of rain or snow in a normal winter is weather talk. Here, it’s different. The environment is not just an abstract topic of discussion. The health and well being of the land, the watershed, the trees, all of it is crucial to the simple survival of the people, their homes, and the way of life. While talking with an old timer on a bench outside the café, I asked about the snow the past couple of winters. It’s been down, I know, and I was really just asking for something to say. In my head, I sort of expected something like, “Yeah, nice warm winters. It’s been great.” But instead, the old guy says, “Yeah, it’s been terrible. Not enough snow, so no runoff. The lakes are down, the rivers are down. The forests are dry and brittle. We had 400,000 acres of fires this summer.” They lost firefighters out here, right from Missoula. Lost homes. Lost animals. The beautiful and living land was scorched. Trees that have stood for a hundred years or more lost in a flash.
We wandered back to a small car we had rented in order to get around and do some errands, but I kept thinking about the conversation, and all the things I’d seen in the past few days.
People are tougher in the west. You see houses and farms up mountains, perched on cliffs or just butted at the end of long dirt roads. It gets cold out here, and the snow does come, and these folks are cut off from the world for a while. Ranch after ranch we passed with hundreds of hay bales already saved, covered, put aside for animals all winter. These hay stacks tower above the fields, some covered with tarps or wood. Each house has a wall of firewood at least 6 feet tall, sometimes 40 feet long. Firewood for a nice fire, perhaps, but usually for heat, and sometimes to get them through a hard stretch.
David Romtvedt – Buffalo, WY
Downtown Buffalo is dotted with galleries and coffee shops. It’s a cute little town within sight of the Bighorn Mountains to the west, and just past an endlessly beautiful 400 mile stretch of badlands and high prairie grasses.
At the post office, two men in identical outfits, cowboy boots, jeans, starched white shirts and baseball caps finger through their mail and talk about a guy they know who is coming back to live in Buffalo. “It’ll be good to see the old rascal,” one says.
Main Street is pretty much it, but it’s terrific. Chamber of Commerce, lots of parking. Friendly folks in front of their stores or homes, because here the small homes on North Main butt up against the furthest reaches of the central business area.
The weather is unseasonable, warm, headed to the 80s in late October, and everyone’s making use of it. At the Catholic Church in town a maintenance man rakes and then sweeps up some leaves that are slowly deserting the confused trees. It’s not uncommon for there to be snow here at this time of year, and the long and warm autumn has everything a little off-kilter.
I find David Romtvedt not at the front door waiting for my visit, but hollering to me from around the side, from a fence that encircles the two small and pretty homes he, his wife, and daughter call home. One they live in; the other is the guest house. (After my interview we stroll over to the guest house. It’s a miraculous little place with gorgeous hardwood floors, airy windows, soft, inviting beds, and on the front porch – inexplicably – a dozen pairs of fluffy slippers, duck slippers, cat slippers, one set in plaid.)
David and I sit on the back porch of the house they actually live in, and we talk in between petting Leo, a happy dog who does not quite understand why anyone would sit when there was a small orange football to be tugged, thrown, and chewed.
David’s work is full of this town and its environs. He lets the “prairie, mountain, and sky” of the place in all the time. And the poems that result are alive, vital, and steeped in place. In many ways, he’s a perfect poet for this project.
We talk about a few poets he knows who I’ve met, or plan to. He and I have already met online; he’s filled out a sort of pre-interview set of questions that I developed after my first month on the road, so I know a lot about what he has to say already. I follow up some of these points, but mostly we just chat out there.
When we’re done, we go out into the back yard and I shoot some 35mm shots of him in the typical ways, against a tree, sitting by some corn stalks that appear odd, more art than science, right in the middle of his back yard. Eleven stalks, I think.
As I’m leaving, he volunteers to walk me, mostly, I think, to see this 29 foot rolling home of mine. He, like many of the poets I’ve met, are intrigued by the practical elements of this project. How does one get to Wyoming, Washington, Wisconsin, Iowa, Idaho, Indiana and back?
Leo comes along, and when we get to the motorhome, Leo is the first to bound in. My wife is glad to see us all. David looks around. I try to explain that the place is bigger when the slide outs are fully extended, but he likes it anyway. Leo is up front by the driver’s seat and I’m thinking that he looks pretty comfortable. Does he know we’re going into Montana now? Does he want to go? Could he help with the driving? Does he know the way?
