Ep. 802: The Life And Death of Jim Harrison

Steven Rinella https://www.instagram.com/stevenrinella/?hl=en talks with author Todd Goddard https://www.toddgoddard.net/. Topics discussed: The first literary biography of Jim Harrison, Devouring Time: Jim Harrison, A Writer's Life https://www.blackstonepublishing.com/products/book-du1b; a brilliant writer and a person full of flaws; blinded as a kid in one eye; a fly fishing snob who hated snobs; how writing poetry would lift Jim out of depression; respecting nature and not hunting or fishing more than you need; Legends Of The Fall, Wolf, True North, and more of Jim's books; contradictory and complicated; a brilliant food essay; and more. Connect with Steve https://www.themeateater.com/authors/steven-rinella and The MeatEater Podcast Network https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterPodcastNetwork Steve on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/stevenrinella and Twitter https://twitter.com/stevenrinella?lang=en MeatEater on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/meateater, Facebook https://www.facebook.com/StevenRinellaMeatEater/, Twitter https://twitter.com/MeatEaterTV?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor, and YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterPodcastNetwork See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:32Steven Rinella?

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• 1:12Steven Rinella?

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• 1:49Steven Rinella?

  This is the Meat Eater Podcast, coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwearless.

• 1:55Speaker 03

  We're the Meat Eater Podcast.

• 1:58Steven Rinella?

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• 2:24Steven Rinella?

  All right, ladies and gentlemen, we're joined today by, with no headphones on.

• 2:31Steven Rinella?

  I've been pushing Phil on it.

• 2:34Speaker 04

  I'm in full support, the headphones, just for the audience at home. This is a conversation we've had on, or off mic a lot, but the headphones help guests, especially ones who aren't used to talking into microphones. It helps them hear their own voice and stay close to the microphone, or else I'll have to yell at them from across the room.

• 2:49Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, because it makes you, like, I always said, it makes you feel like God's talking to you. So it's gonna be different now without these headphones on. Joined today by Todd Goddard, who just published a new book about a biography of Jim Harrison. So any hunting and fishing type person who likes to read a lot is, of course, familiar with Jim Harrison.

• 3:08Steven Rinella?

  If you go, if you're curious, like, who the hell's Jim Harrison? The greatest point of contact would be, what was that? Why'd you make a 10 signal?

• 3:16Speaker 05

  Facing the book toward that camera.

• 3:18Steven Rinella?

  People, if you're trying to go like, you know, I can Jim Harrison, you go, you know, Legends of the Fall, and people are like, oh, yeah. But that's even, that's just barely scratching the surface. I'm partial to the old stuff. So, like Wolf, Brown Dog, he's got a book of, he's got a phenomenal book of essays called Just Before Dark, which is some of the most beautiful, brilliant hunting and fishing writing, combined with some of the most obnoxious and arrogant food writing. What are the other? Oh, and then literature essays. So Just Before Dark is like a complete, like, Jim Harrison was writing about hunting and fishing and Sports Illustrated back in the 70s, and it's like collects all

• 4:01Steven Rinella?

  that. It's just really brilliant stuff on hunting and fishing. He also has all these characters that hunt and fish, and he has characters that are filled with like environmental rage. Wolf, one of my favorites, is a false memoir. It's like a guy who is wandering around in Michigan's Upper Peninsula in the Huron Mountains, trying to catch a glimpse of a wolf. Later in life, he started doing these more complex... Uh, I don't wanna call them like less angry, more complex works like Dalva, The Road Home.

• 4:36Steven Rinella?

  God, he's got a million. How many books does he have, Todd?

• 4:39Speaker 03

  He has 12 novels, nine collections of novellas, something like 18 books of poetry, couple book collections of essays, like Just Before Dark, a children's book called The Boy Who Ran Into the Woods.

• 4:54Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 4:55Speaker 03

  So just an outrageously, uh, uh, an outrageous amount of output.

• 5:00Steven Rinella?

  Huge, but yeah.

• 5:01Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 5:01Steven Rinella?

  Like everything ranging from like outdoor stuff, much of it's tinged with like a kind of a little bit of a infantile kind of a male fantasy kind of stuff is tied in there, but like, like a absolutely brilliant writer, like, like a technically brilliant writer. Um, one of the, one of the great writers who's colored by the war, the outdoors, the worlds of hunting and fishing, very complex, kind of frustrating person, full of flaws, which we'll get into, but again, a brilliant writer and, and Todd, our, our guest,

• 5:39Steven Rinella?

  this is his first book and he's a literary professor at Utah Valley University and born in Philadelphia. And like, what age did you start reading, or not McQuain, we'll talk about McQuain.

• 5:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, we could.

• 5:53Steven Rinella?

  Right. What age did you start reading Harrison, man? Like, how did you get on to Harrison?

• 5:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, I probably started reading Harrison back in my early twenties, honestly. And I think it began, like it begins with lots of people with Legends of the Fall. I think I had a friend of mine turn me on to Legends, uh, and when I began college

• 6:10Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 6:11Speaker 03

  Uh, in New York and, uh, just immediately gravitated right to him. I mean, he hooked me from the start. And from there, you know, I just went back and started, did a deep dive in Harrison. And I remember, you know, I was trying to get hold of every book Jim was writing.

• 6:25Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 6:25Speaker 03

  Back to Wolf. To Warlock, to Farmer, or Farmer to Warlock, to, you know, all the way up until what Jim had written in the mid nineties or so.

• 6:36Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 6:36Speaker 03

  And then really tried to catch up with anything new that was coming out with him, you know, ever after. And I think I went from his fiction then to his poetry and then to his essays.

• 6:47Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 6:48Speaker 03

  And, um, and just got completely hooked to by his food and wine writing, by his outdoors essays, his hunting and fishing essays. And sort of was off and running and then got a few chances to teach him in graduate school. Uh, taught him a few times at Utah Valley University.

• 7:03Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 7:03Speaker 03

  Uh, and tried to incorporate him whenever I could into a class and, uh, uh, and then, you know, just kept rereading him over the years, um, until I finally sort of got into a position to write this book.

• 7:14Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, man, like one thing I haven't gotten into his is, um, short of, uh,

• 7:20Steven Rinella?

  outside of like Robert Service, I'm not a, like, I'm not a poem guy. Cremation of Sam McGee is like, like a genius, you know? But I'm not a poem guy. I, like, I never got into his stuff. Like his, his, I never read his books of poems. But, um, I started out like, we were all, when we were young, like in college from Michigan, we were all way into Wolf. Like way into Wolf and then way into Brown Dog and other stuff, like the Michigan stuff, you know, like pissed off dudes that hunted and fished a lot. Um, that was our deal.

• 7:51Speaker 03

  Right.

• 7:52Steven Rinella?

  Like big time. And then later I kind of like discovered the essays and then I got really, you know, I got for a long time, I was real interested in food and I liked all this food stuff. But for me, it was like,

• 8:03Steven Rinella?

  he, yeah, his, his hunting and fishing stuff, um, and his environmental awareness is what drew us in. It was weird though, because like you mentioned that he, uh,

• 8:16Steven Rinella?

  he wasn't a big game hunter, man. Like he would write a lot about eating venison. He didn't write about eating roadkill stuff. But he didn't like any kind of. He talked about he saw a bear skinned out one time and it looked too much like a dude hanging there, you know, he was like pretty particular about what he participated in.

• 8:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's fine. He loved to eat big game, but he wasn't a big game hunter. I mean, he hunted deer when he was younger, you know, and occasionally hunted deer even even into his 30s and early 40s. But he, you know, it's a great story of Jim was out hunting with a friend of his from Livingston, Montana, and Jim had settled outside of Livingston, Montana later around 2000, living in the Paradise Valley, and he went out.

• 9:03Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, we should hit that real quick. Hit like where he was born, where he spent time, and then where he died.

• 9:10Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, definitely. So Jim was born in Grayling, Michigan, grew up in Reed City and grew up in Hazlet, outside of Lansing, and then settled with his family in Lake Lillina in Michigan, Lake Lillina Peninsula. And then really lived there for most of his life until around 2000. So he's born in 1937. Around 2000, he moves, relocates out to Montana where his daughters were living at the time, settles in the Paradise Valley outside of Livingston, Montana, and ended up buying a small casita down in Patagonia, Arizona. And so the family would, you know, spend half the year in Montana and spend

• 9:54Speaker 03

  the winter in Patagonia, Arizona. And that's sort of the general, you know, those are Jim's main places.

• 10:01Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, and you hunted a lot of quail down there.

• 10:04Speaker 03

  Hunted a ton of, a ton of murns quail down in Patagonia. And of course, famously, he had a cabin up in the Upper Peninsula, which he, in Grand Marais, just outside of Grand Marais, Michigan. And so those are like his big spots, right? So when Jim moves out to Livingston around 2000, you know, he would go out, occasionally he would go out bird hunting for hunts and different things like that, Hungarian partridge. But occasionally he'd go for big game, but there's a story of Jim going out one time with a friend of his from Livingston, a guy named Dan Laren, and he.

• 10:38Speaker 03

  They were hunting antelope and or pronghorn and they get finally into a position where Jim can take a shot and he he passes the gun to Dan and says you you take the shot. Right. And and of course, he he would want to eat the meat, he'd want he'd want he'd want the animal, but he couldn't actually pull the trigger and execute. And I think it comes back to the, you know, the reason you were suggesting partly is he couldn't. He couldn't handle killing animals that were mammals, frankly. And he thought they looked too much like their insides, their parts looked too much like humans. And I think he, among other reasons, but I think that was definitely one of them.

• 11:17Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. He was something of a fly fishing snob. He wrote a great piece about ice fishing one time, but was definitely like a fly snob, you know. But he hated snobs.

• 11:27Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 11:27Steven Rinella?

  Hated snobs, but was a little bit of a fly fishing snob, one of his many contradictions.

• 11:33Speaker 03

  I think that's right. Yeah, I think that's right. Yeah, he was a little bit of a fly fishing snob.

• 11:38Steven Rinella?

  But man, he hated arrogance, you know, outside of his own, you know.

• 11:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, he for for an arrogant guy, one of his many contradictions, right? For an arrogant guy, he couldn't stand arrogance in other people, right? But he was, yeah, he was a little bit snobby about fly fishing, but you know, that came later. Yeah, I think he grew up bait fishing and stuff like that and fly fishing too. But really later in life, he really, I think McWayne was very instrumental in introducing him to fly fishing and really Jim was was already doing it, but really showed him the ropes.

• 12:09Steven Rinella?

  Well, you know, we were talking about his hangout zones. We kind of missed like he also like he's one of these dudes, if you look at like Aldo Leopold.

• 12:16Speaker 03

  Right.

• 12:17Steven Rinella?

  Aldo Leopold is embraced by Wisconsin. And Aldo Leopold is embraced by New Mexico.

• 12:26Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 12:26Steven Rinella?

  Okay, these are like, and there's other places embracing because Aldo Leopold, what like Aldo Leopold taught in Madison and kind of wrote about Wisconsin. Spent a bunch of time in New Mexico. So these guys that has he's like, these guys have a bunch of homes, you know, or multiple homes.

• 12:43Speaker 03

  Right.

• 12:43Steven Rinella?

  Harrison also for for a big part of the country, Harrison was also like a Key West guy.

• 12:49Speaker 03

  Right.

• 12:50Steven Rinella?

  Right. Because he was. When dudes were figuring out down there like catching permit and catching bonefish on flies and stuff in the seventies when that was kind of coming into a thing and tarping and stuff. Like he was there. So it's just yet another place around the country, northern Michigan, Arizona, absolutely Montana, Key West, or all these places that sort of hold a little bit of a, like they kind of hold the Harrison mystique, you know?

• 13:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, he's like, he's like Leopold, but he's also like Hemingway in that regard, right? Hemingway has his places, right?

• 13:25Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 13:26Speaker 03

  Michigan is his place. Key West is definitely one of his places.

• 13:28Steven Rinella?

  Cuba's his place.

• 13:29Speaker 03

  Cuba's his place. France is his place. Spain is his place. Italy is his place.

• 13:34Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 13:34Speaker 03

  He's claimed by all of these different geographic locations and settled in Idaho eventually, right? And Harrison's very much the same way, right? He's got these very strong sort of local identifications, right? Patagonia, Montana, definitely first and foremost Michigan, but also Key West.

• 13:52Steven Rinella?

  One of the things that grabbed it like when I say us, I'm talking about just like me and my like circle of people and when we just grew up like, you know, like definitely didn't like grew up like not well off. Okay. And grew up kind of not, we grew up not real clear on how the whole like college world worked. Like most of my buddies were definitely like first time people and their families and went to college, you know? My dad didn't finish high school, right? So it was like, we didn't under, the guys I grew up around, we didn't like understand that world of like education. We didn't understand the world of that you'd become a writer. We didn't know about writers. Do you know what I mean? It was like,

• 14:35Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 14:36Steven Rinella?

  Everybody was like, oh, I'm gonna be a game warden. And you know, you just didn't know, even though we were definitely afraid of game wards, people thought, oh, I'll be a game warden when I grow up. But all of a sudden, like, here's this dude. Who grew up like north of us and the thing in Michigan is every, no matter where you are, the real rednecks are just north of you. Do you know what I'm saying?

• 14:57Speaker 03

  Right, yeah.

• 14:57Steven Rinella?

  So I've talked about this before, like if you lived in like where I grew up in Twin Lake, the real rednecks were in Holton, just north. But if you talk to a dude in Holton, the real rednecks are just north in Hesperia. And it like advances up the state. And so here's this guy like two or three clicks north. The people in France are buying his books. It's kind of like, how does that happen? Do you know what I mean? Like, how is this dude like known and celebrated in France from some redneck ass town north of us? Do you mean like, how like, how did he? How did that click? You know, his dad was what? His dad was an extension agent.

• 15:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, he was an agricultural agent. You're right. I mean, Jim is an anomaly, right? He's an extremely unusual in that regard. I mean, his, the one thing I'd say is that is he came from a family of readers. So his dad was an agricultural agent, you know, went to farm school at MSU. He was still an agricultural, you know, primarily an agricultural.

• 15:57Steven Rinella?

  Was that the first generation in his family to go to college would have been his old man?

• 16:01Speaker 03

  It was, it was his dad. Yeah, his dad. And his dad was driven, I think, from an, you know, from an early age. I think he was extremely motivated by sort of agricultural research and saw himself as something like an agricultural missionary.

• 16:13Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 16:15Speaker 03

  Coming out of sort of the Dust Bowl era, right? Where farms were, you know, had certain practices that led to environmental sort of devastation of their farms and Dust, Dust Bowls.

• 16:26Steven Rinella?

  Got it. So that, that he had that, he grew up around that land ethic?

• 16:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, so he grew up around that land ethic. He was a big Steinbeck fan, right? And, and, and he came from a family of primarily non-readers. And so where Jim's dad and his, his dad's name was Winfield, you know, got this sort of motivation. Winfield.

• 16:46Steven Rinella?

  Oh, yeah. Caught that.

• 16:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, Winfield and. Where he got this sort of motivation to educate himself and read is is not entirely clear. He didn't necessarily get it from his family, but he had, he was driven. And I think he was driven largely by wanting to learn as much as he could about agriculture. But he also read Steinbeck and he read literature and he was really interested in reading. And Jim's mother, too, was an avid reader. And I think they instilled that in all of their children. But the thing is, they didn't know any writers either, right? They, they didn't know, Jim's brother David Harrison once told me, he said, we didn't know writers, we didn't know writers, we didn't know anyone who knew any writers, not let alone us, right?

• 17:25Steven Rinella?

  Their stage is removed.

• 17:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, their stage is removed. So, you know, being a writer as, as an occupation, as a living, as a calling, as it was for Jim, was just unheard of to his parents, you know?

• 17:37Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 17:38Speaker 03

  And when, so when Jim came home at age 16 and said, I want to be a poet, they just had no idea what to do with him, right? But how does a guy like Jim go, you know, from that background to being sort of read broadly and celebrated in Paris? I mean, that's, that's a difficult question, right?

• 17:54Steven Rinella?

  How does he? That's kind of, I remember doing a book one time, you know, someone asked a question, you know, and it was kind of like, the whole question was the whole point of the book.

• 18:03Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 18:04Steven Rinella?

  And be like, well, I mean, I just spent, I mean, it's, I just spent 250 pages explaining that, like.

• 18:11Speaker 03

  Right, yeah, right, yeah, exactly. I mean, the short-

• 18:14Steven Rinella?

  I can't just tell you.

• 18:15Speaker 03

  I mean, the short answer is he, he was incredibly motivated and worked, you know, I love this description by McWayne. McWayne called, and I'm talking about Tom McWayne, who is one of Jim's really close friends.

• 18:26Steven Rinella?

  He's been, I don't know, he's been on the show a million years ago.

• 18:29Speaker 05

  Yeah, like, six years ago.

• 18:32Steven Rinella?

  Dude, he was old then, and he's got a new book out now.

• 18:35Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 18:36Steven Rinella?

  Well, he's still, still writing. What was the name of the McWayne episode, do you remember?

• 18:41Steven Rinella?

  If you want to refer back, we're gonna mention McGwain a number of times. McGwain was like a contemporary of, uh, I'm sorry, go ahead.

• 18:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, well.

• 18:47Steven Rinella?

  Crin will dig that up.

• 18:48Speaker 05

  Tom McGwain on the beauty of not knowing.

• 18:51Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 18:51Speaker 05

  What a gentleman.

• 18:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, um, great guy and, uh, you know, we can talk about how they're connected and stuff like that. But McGwain once called Jimmy, said he's a country boy who was touched.

• 19:03Steven Rinella?

  Oh.

• 19:03Speaker 03

  Is how he described Jim and I mean, I think that's a really good description, uh, touched by genius, that is, right?

• 19:08Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 19:08Speaker 03

  And Jim worked extremely hard at his writing and got himself into a position, I mean, where he really worked his way into, um, you know, literary culture in America. But I think, I think his, his sort of rustic identity, right? His, what did you say, up north? What did he say? He's, he's above north, right? He's way up there, right? He's part of his appeal in France. So I'd say, you know, not only did he earn that through his writing, but I also think the appeal is partly where he comes from.

• 19:41Steven Rinella?

  Like they recognized him as a country bumpkin.

• 19:43Speaker 03

  They recognize.

• 19:44Steven Rinella?

  Not a bumpkin, but they recognized him as like a man of the, like someone of the land in a way, you know? Yeah.

• 19:50Speaker 03

  Definitely, I think, I think the French associate Jim with wilderness, right? The American wilderness, the American, you know, the great north woods. Someone who's writing about the sort of land and landscape and history of, of, of northern Michigan and of northern America. Right? And I think that's part of his appeal. So his sort of rusticity is part of his appeal in France.

• 20:10Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, cause he never got, there's a thing that happens, it didn't happen to him, but

• 20:16Steven Rinella?

  like I remember when I was going away to writing school, I remember, like I always read about like trappers and hunters and explorers and shit. That's all I wanted to read about when I was a kid.

• 20:26Steven Rinella?

  When I was going away to writing school after I got out of regular college, I remember being like, man, I should probably, I remember I went and tried to read James Joyce's Dubliners. So I was like, I should probably figure out what people actually write about. Do you know what I mean?

• 20:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 20:37Steven Rinella?

  And then quickly like gave up on that. He never got, he never fell for that trap. Cause his early work was about the people he knew. Like his early work was about the people he knew. You know, he didn't try to be something he wasn't. But he wrote about it with like the skill set of someone who is not that.

• 20:57Speaker 03

  I think that's right. I mean, he was so well read. And so I think, you know, he's he's coming to even his early works with this immense body of sort of learning and reading behind him. Right. But he was smart enough not to fall into that trap of sort of trying to too closely or carefully emulate. Right. Some of the some of the writers that he so admired. I mean, I think he really claimed that maybe if he used and borrowed some of the style and was influenced by writers, he really made it his own. Right. And he was going to anchor his books in the people he knew, the world that he grew up in. Right. The local details and characteristics of of his own specific upbringing.

• 21:36Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 21:37Speaker 03

  Right. In Michigan and, you know, and he carries that around the country with him and Wolf.

• 21:42Steven Rinella?

  What's his deal? What's his deal with like his love hate? Kind of like, like he's haunted by Hemingway.

• 21:49Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 21:50Steven Rinella?

  Haunted by Hemingway. Like, what is that all about? Did you ever come to understand that? Like, you never tell if he likes the guy or hates the guy.

• 21:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, I I think he was conflicted. I think he wanted to distance himself from Hemingway because he had so much in common with Hemingway.

• 22:04Steven Rinella?

  People would point out the same.

• 22:05Speaker 03

  Right.

• 22:06Steven Rinella?

  Hanging out the same place. But Hemingway is from Illinois, dude.

• 22:08Speaker 03

  Well.

• 22:09Steven Rinella?

  Like outside of Chicago, right?

• 22:10Speaker 03

  You're right. Yeah. But he but he spent his summers all the time in.

• 22:13Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, big difference, man.

• 22:15Speaker 03

  Big. No, I agree. I won't claim otherwise. Yeah.

• 22:18Steven Rinella?

  Hemingway's dad is a doctor or something, right?

• 22:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, you're right. So his dad's a doctor. He comes from a very different background, grows up in Oak Park, Illinois. Comes from a religious family. His mother was very religious and Jim's mother was very religious. But, you know, Hemingway, but Hemingway also, you know, his early books are associated, they're set in Michigan.

• 22:37Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 22:37Speaker 03

  Up in Michigan.

• 22:38Steven Rinella?

  Same rivers he fished, man.

• 22:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, I know. Exactly. The Big Two Hearted and other rivers. And so, you know, and he's what Hemingway's writes about fishing and hunting. Lived in Paris, right? Fished in Key West and is associated with Key West. Was a man of big appetites like Harrison was. And so there's lots of parallels between Harrison and Hemingway.

• 23:01Steven Rinella?

  They like to pull a cork.

• 23:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, you like to pull a cork from time to time, to put it mildly. Uh, but I think, so I think on one level, right? A whole generation of writers coming after Hemingway felt like they had the distance themselves from him.

• 23:15Steven Rinella?

  Mm hmm.

• 23:15Speaker 03

  To do exactly what you suggested earlier, right? Was to avoid being sort of pulled into his universe, right? Become a satellite instead of their own system.

• 23:23Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 23:24Speaker 03

  Right? And Hemingway had that allure.

• 23:26Steven Rinella?

  That's a good way of putting it.

• 23:26Speaker 03

  Right? He had that appeal and that power. And so I think writers went out of their way to distance themselves from him after him. Right?

• 23:33Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, to not be like, you know, guys like Hemingway.

• 23:36Speaker 03

  Right.

• 23:36Steven Rinella?

  Whenever I'm talking about Harrison, someone says something about Hemingway, I just, I just kind of roll my eyes like, it's not the same thing.

• 23:42Speaker 03

  No.

• 23:43Steven Rinella?

  It ain't the same thing.

• 23:44Speaker 03

  No, it's not the same thing. And he writes extremely, very differently than Hemingway. Um, and so I think, you know, there's a love hate thing there. I think he tried to distance himself from Hemingway and did so successfully. But I think he also admired Hemingway, but maybe didn't want to, you know, was reluctant maybe to celebrate Hemingway as much as he might have otherwise.

• 24:02Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 24:03Speaker 03

  Coming out of his, you know, uh, as everyone did, you know, growing up in Hemingway's shadows, so to speak. Um, and so, yeah, did I ever get to the bottom of that? I mean, he likes Hemingway, right? He admires his writing and he says it plenty of times, but he also says, you know, ah, he dismisses him simultaneously. And so I think there's a conflict at his core.

• 24:24Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

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• 24:57Steven Rinella?

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• 25:39Steven Rinella?

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• 27:38Steven Rinella?

  Talk about, uh, tell everybody about, like, you look at Harrison, like, here he is, you know? Yeah. Um, on the, I'm holding up the book, cover the book. This is when he's older, this is closer to, way closer to death, I guess. A big thing that comes up in his work, comes up, I mean, the guy can't, he can't write.

• 28:01Steven Rinella?

  I don't know, I was gonna, saw it a number of pages. I can't do it that way. Harrison, man, he was disfigured as a child. And it permeates, like, it's, it's every, it's in everything. It's baked into everything. He's got, he's got a googly eye. That's his, his word, not mine. His word, not mine. Um, it haunted him, dude. Like, it's like, it became him, you know? Like, explain that to folks, like, how that happened and the way that just was kind of like, you know, it was his, uh, what's that famous, uh, you know, the, the Orson Welles deal, like, the, the fucking, uh,

• 28:46Steven Rinella?

  Rosebud? Yeah, it was his rosebud moment, you know? It's his rosebud moment. I think that's really a good way of saying it. Uh, so, you know, it was a spring day in 1945, I think. Is that what it was, his four, okay? Yeah, he was seven years old. Um, and, uh, he was, you know, uh, living in Reed City, Michigan. Uh, went down the street and he was playing with a young girl.

• 29:09Speaker 03

  And they were in a lot behind a hospital and um what exactly

• 29:13Steven Rinella?

  Behind a hospital in Reed City.

• 29:14Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 29:15Steven Rinella?

  People are gonna get the wrong picture when they hear behind a hospital.

• 29:18Speaker 03

  Well, it was just a it was just an empty lot, right? Um, just down the street from his house. You know, what kids playing in back lots and there was, you know, some woods behind.

• 29:27Steven Rinella?

  Very old, little, small, little town.

• 29:30Speaker 03

  It was a small town, small hospital. Yeah, rustic. Uh, and he's out back and what exactly was going on? It has never been made entirely clear, but I think they were experimenting, uh, playing around, maybe playing doctor. Right? Jim, Jim would say this himself, right? That they were experimenting and something happened, something clicked. The girl panicked or, you know, got scared or defensive and she grabbed a, a piece of glass broken from a beaker that was next to them on a trash pile and jabbed at it, Jim, and caught him in the eye.

• 30:08Steven Rinella?

  So.

• 30:09Speaker 03

  And.

• 30:09Steven Rinella?

  And Wolf, that what happens to the character who's very much like him, but not him. It's like a broken beer bottle or something. But yeah, beaker, beaker glass.

• 30:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, it was like a beaker glass, um, caught him in the eye and immediately, you know, um, the sort of left side of his face, you know, went blind, left, you know, his left, his left eye. And, um, so the girl took off and he went, he went across the street to his neighbor's house and the mother was a nurse and she recognized the severity of what had happened immediately. And is, you know, everybody freaked out. He ended up in Grand Rapids in the hospital, uh, for a couple of weeks with bandages on both his eyes. And at one point they tied him to the bed because he was panicking and, and they wanted to keep him still. And this was an incredibly traumatic experience for him, right? And he recalled, it's, it's an experience, like you said, it's his rosebud. It's something he would never forget for the rest of his life.

• 31:02Speaker 03

  And all he could really see out of that eye was just sort of like maybe light and shadow a little bit, right? So he could remember seeing a bit of sort of the blur, the vague blur of, of the moon. But for all intents and purposes, that I was blinded. He'd never get his vision back. And it was incredibly traumatic for him. Um, you know, uh, literally the left side of his, his, his vision was completely cut off for the rest of his life.

• 31:27Steven Rinella?

  Changed how the brother looked, man, like.

• 31:29Speaker 03

  It changed how he looked. He felt, uh, you know, sort of freakish. He had a googly eye, right? His, he says his eye jogged in its socket like a milky sparrow, you know? Um, it was, uh, and, and he, you know, he thought, he thought he had buck teeth. He thought he had this swarthy complexion. He had this googly eye.

• 31:49Steven Rinella?

  That's another thing that comes up a lot is he's like, just constantly mentioning that, that people would think he was, people would think he was Hispanic or, and he's got this crazy eye and they didn't believe that he's from where he's from and.

• 32:01Speaker 03

  Definitely. Yeah. I mean, he was, he did have a kind of swarthier complexion. Part of that was just from being outside, but part of that was just maybe the pigmentation in the skin. He just had a little darker complexion and, you know, and he really felt like an outsider. Uh, he felt, um, sort of alienated from those around him. Uh, and I think if you wanted to sort of draw this back his early to, you know, that period in his life, he sort of retreated into the woods. And Jim already liked the woods a lot, but this was a moment, I think, when he really developed attachments to the natural, non-human world because there he wasn't judged, right? He could go out into the woods, um, you know, observe creatures, walk in the woods, things like that. And there became sort of this really stark division

• 32:45Speaker 03

  between the societal and the judgment that he experienced there with his eye and his disfigurement, uh, that I think in his mind was sort of blown out of proportion and amplified.

• 32:54Steven Rinella?

  You get the sense that, yeah, I always had the sense that he thought, when he looked in the mirror.

• 33:00Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 33:01Steven Rinella?

  He saw something a lot worse than what was there.

• 33:03Speaker 03

  Right. You look at Jim at 30 and he, you know, you see something askew with his eye, but it's not probably what he imagined. Probably, you know, the way he.

• 33:11Steven Rinella?

  I think in some days he thought it was like a monster.

• 33:13Speaker 03

  Yeah. I think he looked, I think he felt like he looked like a monster and, you know, the children's book that he wrote, um, The Boy Who Ran Into the Woods is really about, is exactly about this experience and it becomes sort of like an origin story for Harrison, uh, where he says, you know, sort of this started, you know, sort of, um, You know, uh, it was the origin of my sort of interest in and fascination and love and devotion to the natural world on the one hand, but also to, uh, his, uh, giving himself sort of an artistic perspective, right?

• 33:47Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 33:48Speaker 03

  He wasn't in it now, he was off to the side, right? And that's something he would later name his memoir, Off to the Side.

• 33:54Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 33:54Speaker 03

  Right? And because of his disfigurement, he felt he, he was sort of always off to the side now. Seeing things differently, literally, figuratively.

• 34:05Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 34:05Speaker 03

  Right? Um, and sort of not part of the crowd, but observing part of the crowd. And so, you know, it becomes this sort of beginning, sort of this mythology, right? This, this origin story of Harrison. But, you know, uh, and that all may very well be true, and I, I think in many ways it is, but he would still carry this trauma with him for the rest of his life. That, you know, had real consequences for him. Uh, there's a story about him walking through the woods one time fishing in northern Michigan, and he's with this guy named Mike Ballard, the guy he used to fish with in, in, uh, in the Upper Peninsula. And, uh, it was getting dark and, uh, Mike's urging Jim to hurry up and he says, I can't,

• 34:48Speaker 03

  you know, I, I can't go any faster if I get a, a branch in my other eye.

• 34:53Steven Rinella?

  I'm done.

• 34:54Speaker 03

  I'm done.

• 34:54Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 34:55Speaker 03

  And when you stop and think about that, you're like, oh.

• 34:58Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 34:59Speaker 03

  I get it, like.

• 35:00Steven Rinella?

  It's like living with one kidney, man.

• 35:02Speaker 03

  He's gotta really be careful with that one eye, right? Uh, because that's all he's got left, right? In terms of vision, so.

• 35:09Steven Rinella?

  One of the funnier, not one of the funnier, he's, he's like, he was also, we haven't touched on this, also at times a very funny writer, but in one of his bird hunting essays, I think he talks about the moment it occurred to him that instead of carrying around binoculars, he could buy a monocular.

• 35:22Speaker 03

  That's great, yeah.

• 35:26Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, so it came with a stroke of genius. It was to realize you didn't need two things. It came with real practical consequences, right?

• 35:36Steven Rinella?

  And then another big one with being a kid as a and I kind of know the way it comes up in his, I kind of know the way it like comes up in his writing and things, but he also like his father and his sister. Mm hmm. Or killed in a car accident. Yeah. And that also just lives like it just plays out over decades of writing, you know, it's just it's it's becomes baked into his

• 36:06Steven Rinella?

  everything, you know, and it's probably kind of like, I just said, he's funny. He's funny. Um, also it's his stuff is sad. Yeah. I mean, I keep talking about wolves. It remains my, it remains my favorite work of his.

• 36:23Steven Rinella?

  Not just because of it, like not because of the work. I mean, the, the work for sure, but it remains a favorite of mine because of what it meant to like what it meant to grow up in those areas and to hang out in the U P a lot. And then here's this guy that like wrote about that in that way. It also remains a favorite of mine because like when I discovered it, I was at that age, kind of like at that age of where the of where the narrator is. Um, I remember I saw my first wolf track in the U P. You know what I mean? It's like, so I hold it out as my favorite, not because it's his best work, but it's it's his most meaningful thing. Right, right. You know? Yeah.

• 37:08Steven Rinella?

  And it has, and I want to blow it for anybody. It has one of the most abrupt, sad.

• 37:16Steven Rinella?

  Catatonic like endings to a book.

• 37:19Speaker 03

  Uh huh.

• 37:20Steven Rinella?

  He goes to see his grandma.

• 37:21Speaker 03

  Uh huh.

• 37:22Steven Rinella?

  Like stops in at his grandma's and like, nothing happens.

• 37:27Speaker 03

  Uh huh.

• 37:27Steven Rinella?

  He just says a couple of things about leaving his grandma's house and it leaves you just gutted.

• 37:32Speaker 03

  Uh huh.

• 37:33Steven Rinella?

  So he's like funny, but it's sad.

• 37:35Speaker 03

  Right.

• 37:36Steven Rinella?

  And like that sadness, like his losing his dad and his sister's big for him, you know?

• 37:43Speaker 03

  I mean, yeah, that's one of the most remarkable things about Jim that I found writing this book is, is his ability, you know, he's went through incredibly deep depressions throughout his life.

• 37:53Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 37:54Speaker 03

  Right?

• 37:56Steven Rinella?

  Like, how bad would that get for him?

• 37:58Speaker 03

  I

• 37:58Steven Rinella?

  Would it make it that he couldn't work ever?

• 38:01Speaker 03

  You know, I

• 38:01Steven Rinella?

  Cause he's so prolific, you know?

• 38:03Speaker 03

  Later in life, really after the death of his father and sister, he would work through the deepest of depressions. And somehow his poetry would help to sort of lift him out of it.

• 38:11Steven Rinella?

  God.

• 38:11Speaker 03

  Right? Um, but before he really, really started writing, before his, his, before the deaths of his loved ones, um, he, he, he wouldn't necessarily write and he would fall, he would fall into the deepest of depressions, even as a young man, right? Like while he was in the years that take place in the novel Wolf. Um, and he would come close to sort of nervous crackups. Really, really serious.

• 38:35Steven Rinella?

  Tell, tell the story of how, of the, of the car crash.

• 38:38Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 38:38Steven Rinella?

  I don't even know the, I don't even know the, the when or where. I don't, I don't know that.

• 38:42Speaker 03

  So Jim was, uh, in his, in his, in his twenties, I think it happened in 1962.

• 38:46Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 38:47Speaker 03

  And, um, it was Thanksgiving week, weekend.

• 38:51Steven Rinella?

  Uh huh.

• 38:51Speaker 03

  Um, and, uh, Jim was, uh, married, uh, to his wife Linda. And they were visiting, um, with his parents. They were in Hazlet. And, um, Jim's father, Winfield and his sister Judy were gonna go on a hunting trip, deer hunting trip, as they did annually. And Judy would go along. She was a hunter too. And, um, and Jim was sort of wavering on whether to go with them, right? That day.

• 39:16Steven Rinella?

  Uh huh.

• 39:17Speaker 03

  And he was, uh, sort of hanging around the house. He'd, he'd just gotten home from a trip with his wife and, um, sort of decided at the last minute that he wasn't gonna go. And Judy and Winfield took off and for their trip. Jim went over to Linda's parents' house, right down the street, not too far in Lansing. And later that evening, Norma called the King's House, which was Linda's parents' name. And Bill King picked up the phone and sort of had a stricken look on his face. And pulled Jim aside and told Jim that there'd been a car accident. And that his, his father and his sister were killed. So unbelievable, right?

• 40:04Speaker 03

  Incomprehensible sort of information being conveyed to Jim. It turns out that what happened was that they had headed up, you know, north and on their way. They were coming down a two lane road. A car was backing out onto the highway. And a car that was coming the other direction swerved to miss the car that was backing out and hit them head on. And they were both killed instantly.

• 40:27Speaker 03

  And as you can imagine, I mean, the trauma of that is unimaginable. Learning of the sort of sudden deaths of two loved ones and Jim was so close to his father. And even closer to his sister, arguably, I mean, Judy and Jim were like twins in their connection. And so it absolutely devastated Jim. And on top of that, compounding things was the fact that Jim felt somehow responsible because he had sort of delayed their departure by thinking whether or not, maybe I'll go, maybe I won't. And so he was tormented by the fact that if he had decided a few seconds earlier, a few minutes earlier. Or a few minutes later, they would still be alive. And so he really blamed himself for the timing of that.

• 41:10Speaker 03

  And, you know, that was an event, really, that's another sort of, if you want to call it that. I mean, as horrible as it is, it's also a kind of origin story for Jim's writing. And I think that was absolutely definitively the catalyst that Jim needed. As dark as it was, he

• 41:27Speaker 03

  Just absolutely devoted himself to his writing after that. He was already interested in writing before that, but he was really having trouble getting pen to page. And and make, you know, actually having some kind of productive output. But after that, I think Jim's world changed. I think he thought if this can happen and death is that close and so sudden and unpredictable, that there's absolutely nothing left to do, but to do what you absolutely want to do. No plan B for Jim, right? There was not going to be a plan B. He there was plan A. He was going to be the writer that he wanted to be. He was going to be a prolific writer and he was not going to look back. And that was it. And he started writing after that. He says at one point, he says, I found a new voice.

• 42:10Speaker 03

  He says, the truth is always new wine. Right? He had somehow been gifted, he thought, with sort of the gift of speech. Right? And all of a sudden he could begin writing and he really never looked back from that. But I think you're absolutely right. That story permeates everything he wrote after that.

• 42:28Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 42:29Speaker 03

  And defined the rest of his life.

• 42:33Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 42:33Steven Rinella?

  Hmm. What was, how did it come to be? Like, like, when did he start becoming friends with all these with like these other writers? Well, let's just, I guess we'll focus on instead of saying these other writers. We'll focus on, we'll talk about McGowan because here's this other great writer. Another Michigan guy, another guy like obsessed with hunting, obsessed with fishing, transcended that world. Neither of these guys, no one would call Harrison or McGowan an outdoor writer. No one would call him a hunting and fishing writer. But they're writers that hunters and anglers love. But they they way they they overshot any kind of definition like that. They became like literary figures.

• 43:18Speaker 03

  Right.

• 43:19Steven Rinella?

  You know?

• 43:19Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 43:20Steven Rinella?

  How like, like, how, at what point did he start to be that he was going to be with? Writers and associate with writers and join the kind of like literati, you know?

• 43:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean.

• 43:33Speaker 03

  So, you know, Jim, like, like we were saying, I mean, Jim didn't grow up knowing writers. It wasn't really until he got into college and he began like, you know, getting to know professors and things like that. He really didn't get to know some professional writers until, you know, I think he ran into Jack Kerouac once at a bar in New York. And so that was like the first writer I'd ever met. Right. And Jack Kerouac was at a jazz bar in a village and he was apparently really drunk. And Harrison says he met him and sort of got to know him. And he says, well, that was the first writer I ever really got, I met.

• 44:06Speaker 03

  But, you know, he really began, he really got to know and sort of become part of the literary scene. At one point, he was invited by a professor at Michigan State University. He got to Stony Brook University on Long Island. And there, Jim got to know a lot of poets. Right. He was partly in charge of inviting writers to the department to get them, you know, to, for talks and readings and things like that. And sort of met the whole literary world there. At least in the world of poetry. Yeah, yeah. Right.

• 44:37Speaker 03

  And I think so that got him to know a lot of writers. And then, you know, McWayne, who he'd gone to school with at Michigan State University, reached out to him, you know, around this time. And they didn't know each other that well at MSU, but McWayne reached out to him. And they began this sort of decades long correspondence and deep friendship that would develop. And it turns out McWayne was, you know, incredibly invested in writing too, and was very active in writing and publishing. And so all of a sudden, Jim started to have a literary community. Right? And it was McWayne in many ways introduced Jim to lots of his good friends, who would later become good friends, like. He became friends with Jimmy Buffett. Jimmy Buffett, Guy Delavauden, right?

• 45:20Speaker 03

  Who was a French count, who he met fishing in Key West. That's one dude I'll never understand. What did that dude do? Well, he's always like, they're always bringing him up. Did they just like him because he's a French count? Like, what is his deal? He was, he was, he was an avid fisherman. Is he dead or alive? He's dead now. Yeah, I did get to. Yeah, they're always talking about that guy. I never got it. Yeah, Guy, I mean, Guy was. What the hell's his name again? Guy, Guy Delavauden.

• 45:42Speaker 05

  I think I met his great, his, not grandson or.

• 45:49Speaker 05

  Yeah, we we hunted in Scotland together.

• 45:52Steven Rinella?

  Oh, really?

• 45:52Speaker 05

  And I heard all about gee.

• 45:54Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. Yeah, I don't mean to disrespect the dead, but whenever those dudes like either of them just talking about that guy, I'm like, this guy again?

• 46:02Speaker 03

  Who is this guy? Yeah, he was important to them though, you know? Yeah.

• 46:05Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, but like for what? I never got it because he had like he could afford the good wine.

• 46:09Speaker 03

  Definitely part of it. Um, but also.

• 46:12Steven Rinella?

  Paid for everything or something.

• 46:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, he had money. I think they genuinely really liked him. He was, he was, he was an excellent fisherman. Right? He was one of the people that McWayne met down fishing in Key West.

• 46:23Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 46:24Speaker 03

  And was one of the only people, I mean, very few people on the island who understood tarpon fishing.

• 46:30Steven Rinella?

  He did. The French dude.

• 46:31Speaker 03

  Gee did. Oh, yeah. Extremely serious fisherman and bird hunter.

• 46:35Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 46:35Speaker 03

  Right? And so they had that in common.

• 46:38Steven Rinella?

  And maybe I was jealous of.

• 46:39Speaker 03

  And then he was, who wouldn't be, right? Yeah. Who doesn't want to be a French count? He had, he grew up with a moat. I mean, you know, uh, who can say that?

• 46:49Steven Rinella?

  Never understood, like he like, just like having a googly eye and having your mom, your dad and sister die in a crash. Like, there's like those things that you go like, what else permeates Harrison's work? Like the French count.

• 47:00Speaker 03

  Right. Exactly, right.

• 47:03Speaker 05

  What a life.

• 47:04Steven Rinella?

  Right.

• 47:06Speaker 00

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• 47:37Steven Rinella?

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• 48:20Steven Rinella?

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• 49:43Steven Rinella?

  How would you put like, uh, there's a songwriter I like a lot, Evan Felker from Turnpike Troubadours. And we were talking about, he, he puts hunting and fishing in his music. But he does it in a way that you know it's legit. Okay. Like you can from a mile away smell when someone is just inserting stuff they don't understand well. It's like, his references are very good. Like you know it's legit.

• 50:11Steven Rinella?

  And he said, well, I don't, I only think of it like, it's not, it's not what the story's about. I just need them to have a thing to do. Like, I, they're gonna, the characters in the songs, they're gonna interact and say the things they need to say. Or the story is that, but then, well, what are they doing? Why are they there? And he goes, in my head, I'm paraphrasing, when I think of like, where do I put them? That just tends to be where I put them, but it's not what it's about. It's just where I stick them. I mean, like, like, I'm doing a horrible job of like, putting it, but that's like, he's not trying to write like, a song with like, a hunting reference. He just doesn't know what to have him doing or whatever. So oftentimes, they're doing

• 50:55Steven Rinella?

  stuff with horses, or they're doing stuff with guns, or you know, whatever.

• 50:58Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 50:59Steven Rinella?

  So, how, like, how, after doing all this work, spending all these years on this, um, and I'm saying this as a guy, like, I wouldn't, if he wasn't into hunting and fishing, I wouldn't have discovered them, and I wouldn't read them. But like, how do you think of the role? Do you know what I mean? Like, if you look at like, all these poems, and all these books, and novellas, and essays, how would, how do you describe what those things meant to him? You know?

• 51:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, uh, you know, I, I, I think it's, you did describe it nicely. I mean, this idea that you, you might be writing about death, or mortality, or, you know, consciousness, or these other things, but, but what the characters are doing are hunting and fishing, right? It's, and that's what Jim knew, right? I mean, he grew up with hunters and fishers in his family. You know, what that means to him, I mean, it meant everything to him. It's, it was how he grew up, it's what his family did, it's, it's what he truly enjoyed to do, doing, right?

• 51:59Speaker 03

  And so, you know, uh, And I'm not talking just about hunting and fishing, but I'm talking about being out in the natural world, right, in the non-human world, whether it's floating a river and fly fishing, or bird hunting, which Jim genuinely loved to do, walking fields, he would just love to walk through the woods, right?

• 52:19Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 52:19Speaker 03

  And so-

• 52:20Steven Rinella?

  He's a great observer, a very astute observer of nature, and one of his frustrations with a lot of hook and bullet guys, and one of his big frustrations with like a lot of outdoor writers, is they were only interested in animals insofar as like how best to kill them.

• 52:38Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 52:38Steven Rinella?

  And it like, it infuriated him, like it comes up, references again and again, like they weren't students of nature.

• 52:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's right. I mean, I think Jim was an incredible student of nature, right? He, and hunting and fishing was part of that to him, but it was not the only thing to him, right? He was incredibly observant, as you said, right?

• 52:57Steven Rinella?

  He was like, he probably, I don't know if he called himself that, but he was definitely like a birder, you know?

• 53:01Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. And not just a bird hunter, but a birder. He loved to just, you know, like his mother, he loved to go out and bird watch, right? And he, you know, would go, you know, he knew a huge range of birds, you know, could talk about them fluently. But, you know, Jim was famous for just going out and sitting on a log, right, in the middle of the woods, and he would just sit there, and he would sort of meld, sort of melt into the, into the, into the stump he was sitting on, as the sort of natural world around him came alive around him, because he no longer posed a threat. He was this sort of, you know, inanimate sort of object, or animate object, that had become one with his surroundings, and he would just observe.

• 53:43Speaker 03

  And I think, I mean, that meant everything to him, it was his spirituality, it was a very deeply spiritual practice for him. And he would connect with that, you know, in a classic sort of romantic, romantic way, even though I don't think Jim ever romanticized nature, he knew, I think he knew what the wild was.

• 54:02Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 54:03Speaker 03

  But I think, in a spiritual sense, I think he found sort of spiritual sustenance there.

• 54:08Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 54:08Speaker 03

  I mean, it was, you know, not to use a cliche, it was like his church, right? He would go into, he would go into the, into the wild, into nature, just on even, just sort of small walks, but that's where he got his ideas for literature, that's where he'd do his thinking, and that's where he'd do his sort of meditating. And so, you know, it was such a large part of his life that, what else would he write about? Right? I mean, a large part of his work has to deal with that huge factor in the, that's in the middle of his life.

• 54:36Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. I don't think he ever had like a main character that didn't respect nature. It was like a prerequisite to be a character of his, like you had to respect nature else you're not allowed in.

• 54:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, you're certainly not a good guy, right? In his work, right? They're bad, bad characters, right? Who are, you know, exploitive and that was Jim's one thing, right? He, he really could not stand people who hunted to excess or fish to excess. Um, almost in a sort of greedy sort of way. Uh, with, you know, taking much more than they would eat or kill, or any reasonable person could possibly want to take out of, take out of the wilderness. Um, and, and, or, or, you know, sort of malpractice in fishing and hunting, snagging fish and other things. Jim had zero patience with that, as I'm sure you know, right? And just incred, you know, disliked that to his core. Um, yeah.

• 55:29Steven Rinella?

  What, uh, how did he cope with or? You know, somewhat like, like I said, like a lot of his work is like,

• 55:39Steven Rinella?

  angry about, um, like wealth, angry about people that like just getting things without working for them. You know what I mean? Like he's got like, there's, he like prides people with work ethics. Uh huh. Like the, the, his good characters work hard. Um, but then all of a sudden, like later, he kind of becomes like, like early, he's sort of looking into the fishbowl.

• 56:05Speaker 03

  Uh huh.

• 56:06Steven Rinella?

  Do you know what I mean? And in the fishbowl is like wealth and wealth and, and privilege and elitism.

• 56:13Speaker 03

  Uh huh.

• 56:13Steven Rinella?

  But then later he's kind of in the bowl.

• 56:15Speaker 03

  Uh huh. Right.

• 56:17Steven Rinella?

  Like, what, what was that like? What do you think that was like for that guy?

• 56:20Speaker 03

  Uh, it was a conflict and a struggle for him. Um. You know, he grew up, his parents, his dad and his parents, he was, you know, were um, sort of, uh, you know, they respected uh, labor leaders, right, to come from real working class, blue collar democratic families, uh, sort of like a Butte Democrat, uh, Butte, Montana Democrats, um, who were, you know, very invested in the labor movement. Um, and Jim grew up in that setting. He grew up around people who worked hard, outdoor labor, hard work, right? And, and his dad wasn't, um, you know, his dad was always going out to farms and Jim was always meeting farmers. And so he deeply respected, um, you know, people who,

• 57:02Speaker 03

  you know, weren't, weren't, uh, didn't have easy wealth, right?

• 57:06Steven Rinella?

  That's really important, yeah.

• 57:07Speaker 03

  Right? Um, and then later, you know, but I think Jim also, I think this is why he's a contradictory and complicated person. I think Jim liked nice things. He liked the things that he could get with his buddy, the French count, right? Uh, and Jim seemed to sort of, uh, gather around him, people of means throughout his life. And then, once he published, uh, Legends of the Fall, which was a really big hit, and then started getting movie deals, he started making a ton of money. And I think he enjoyed the money. He liked the wine, uh, certainly, right? He liked, uh, some of the other fruits of, of his money,

• 57:46Speaker 03

  wealth, good food, certainly, and even some, some, some cocaine, uh, from time to time, or maybe more than from time to time. Uh, and I think, I think he enjoyed that, but I always think he became deeply conflicted about that.

• 58:01Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 58:01Speaker 03

  Uh, on the one hand, he feared that he had lost track of who he once was, to some extent, right? And he, he laments this fact in his poetry and his fiction, I think, um, you know, he, he has an image in one of his poems of like feeding at the bourgeois trough.

• 58:18Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 58:18Speaker 03

  Right? And he's like leaning into it and just, and he knows that this is highly problematic. And it's problematic for him because it's distancing him from, I don't know, a certain kind of consciousness that he thought was necessary to be a writer and a poet, right? And it's, and it also distanced him from the sort of values and things, things that he valued and the people who he valued. And I also think it was a conflict for him because what he had to do to make that money repeatedly took him away from his first love, which was poetry. Right? And so no one was going to get rich writing poetry, but poetry was sort of in his core. Right? And every time he was.

• 58:58Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, he describes himself as that all the time. It's funny because I never read a lick of that stuff.

• 59:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's funny. Yeah. You know, he says it was the true bones of his life, his poetry, right? And every time he had to go out to Hollywood to work on a screenplay or go to New York to meet with film producers or do all the things that, you know, or go on tour for even a novel. All that was constantly taking him away from what he's viewed as his calling. Right? Which was, I won't say fiction wasn't a calling of his, but his poetry was his core. And that was always taking him away. Right? So sort of that conflict was twofold, right? It contrasted with the values he'd grown up with.

• 59:36Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 59:36Speaker 03

  Uh, of sort of just rural simplicity, right? And simple pleasures.

• 59:43Speaker 03

  And it conflicted because it took him away from his art.

• 59:46Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 59:47Speaker 03

  I think.

• 59:48Steven Rinella?

  You know, I've hit you with a bunch of like things that I regard as, uh, I don't know, man, like, like themes of his work and, and, and things I pull from it. In, in your book, like, what are some of the, the things you pull at outside of what I've asked you about? Like, what are some of the, you know, the through lines or, or, or the discoveries you found that helped kind of explain him as a, as a writer?

• 1:00:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's a good question. I mean, you hit on a lot of the key themes, I think, that I do explore in the book.

• 1:00:22Speaker 03

  As a writer, I mean, as a human, friendship was one of the sort of through lines in this book.

• 1:00:28Steven Rinella?

  No, he was a good friend.

• 1:00:29Speaker 03

  He was a good friend, I think. He was, he could be a difficult friend.

• 1:00:33Steven Rinella?

  He seemed to have friends, he had friends for long times, man, which I respect.

• 1:00:38Speaker 03

  Me too. I mean, you know, you hear so much about sort of the crisis of, of male friendship and, and loneliness in, in, in the US today and. Jim, in some ways, I mean, modeled a sort of life that was very different from that. Here's like masculine guys, outdoor guys, who, you know, were not solitary people. They were communal people. They loved to be around other male friends. And, and Jim cultivated, not just male friends, female friends, too. Jim really worked at building friendships.

• 1:01:07Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:08Speaker 03

  And sustaining them over decades. I mean, Tom McGowan and Jim Harrison wrote for, what, five decades to each other? Two letters a week? I mean, that alone is insane.

• 1:01:21Steven Rinella?

  It's so foreign, like.

• 1:01:22Speaker 03

  I know.

• 1:01:23Steven Rinella?

  I'm still buddies with guys I knew growing up.

• 1:01:25Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:01:25Steven Rinella?

  There's some guys that I grew up with, I'm still buddies with. But like, there is no way in the world I'm gonna pen them a letter. It's just not gonna happen.

• 1:01:34Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:01:35Speaker 05

  The letters of Steven Rinella.

• 1:01:37Steven Rinella?

  It's just not, I'll shoot them a quick text.

• 1:01:40Speaker 03

  Somebody someday is gonna wanna publish your collected letters. You have to, or your collected.

• 1:01:46Steven Rinella?

  Where you at? Over that way?

• 1:01:48Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:01:49Speaker 05

  No, the text should be published into like a coffee book, cuz they're so funny. The random texts you get from Steve.

• 1:01:56Speaker 03

  That's funny. Yeah, and Jim, you know, you could collect his emails to friends, too. But I mean, he would handwrite letters to, to McGowan for decades and decades, you know? But he would.

• 1:02:06Steven Rinella?

  Were they doing it like knowing it would be collected?

• 1:02:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think Tom and Jim were. Yeah.

• 1:02:11Steven Rinella?

  Like, they were like writing out so that someday there'd be a record of themselves.

• 1:02:20Speaker 03

  I suspect that someday they suspected someone like me would be spending like six months in an archive somewhere, reading every letter they ever wrote, so I could write a biography of one of them. I do think that's true. And I think at first it was aspirational. They were like, we're gonna be famous, right? We're, we're gonna be great writers, we're gonna be famous writers. And then at a certain point, they were like, wow, we're pretty famous writers, right? And this came true, and we're doing this for posterity. And so, you know, there's a level of sort of performativity in the letters, right? Where they know, definitely, I think there's an eye, they know people are gonna be reading these letters, but I.

• 1:02:58Speaker 03

  But in spite of themselves, they're always lapsing into real periods of honesty and being incredibly supportive of each other in their correspondence. Early on, Tom and Jim saw each other a lot. They'd see each other in Montana all the time, yearly for sometimes weeks and months at a time. They go fishing together in Key West all the time. So they did spend a lot of time together physically in the same place. Later, that became more correspondence. But no matter how busy Jim was, and he was extremely busy,

• 1:03:26Speaker 03

  he would always carve out time for friends, you know, for Guy until it all done, right? For Russell Chatham, for Buffett, for... And a lot of Jim's professional relationships became friendships.

• 1:03:40Steven Rinella?

  No.

• 1:03:41Speaker 03

  He would hang out with his psychiatrist, you know? They would write letters to each other and spend time together when they were in New York, right?

• 1:03:50Speaker 03

  You know, his publishers and his editors and his producer friends, they would all become friends. And so Jim, yeah, really went out of his way to cultivate friendships. And, you know, Guy and those other guys would come up to Lake Lillina and they'd hunt every fall. They'd come up to Montana every year for bird hunting season, right? They'd all congregate and meet at... Early on, they'd all meet at McWayne's Ranch in Paradise Valley. And they would all hunt together. And then they would create, they would cook these big feasts of everything they'd caught, right? The fish and the birds that they shot, and they'd create these elaborate meals. And that was very much part of their life, you know? That's one of the through lines of this book, and it's one of the big surprises for me, just how dedicated Jim was to cultivating and sustaining friendships.

• 1:04:33Steven Rinella?

  One of his buddies, so for years, I'm explaining this to listeners, not you, is...

• 1:04:41Steven Rinella?

  If you go buy Harrison's books, the covers are Russell Chatham paintings.

• 1:04:49Steven Rinella?

  If you want to watch a great movie, go watch Rivers of a Lost Coast. It's a very obscure film about the steelhead runs of Northern California. Kind of about the death of the steelhead runs of Northern California, but like the steelhead heyday of Northern California. And Chatham, this painter, Chatham, kind of carries this documentary. But also does these beautiful landscapes. And Harrison always used them. Did that just stay true all the way to the end? No, I guess some, some of his covers weren't Chatham paintings, but you know, I mean, like all those covers were those like very moody, dark landscapes by Russell Chatham.

• 1:05:32Speaker 03

  Oh yeah, definitely. So yeah, I mean, Chatham.

• 1:05:36Speaker 03

  Chatham was a fisherman, right?

• 1:05:37Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, he's from the Bay area.

• 1:05:40Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:05:40Steven Rinella?

  Oh dude, it's an unbelievable movie, Rivers of a Lost Coast.

• 1:05:43Speaker 03

  I can't wait to see it.

• 1:05:44Steven Rinella?

  Kind of a cool classic, man. Like no one, no one knows about that movie.

• 1:05:47Speaker 03

  Uh, yeah, I'm totally going to watch that. Um. Yeah. I mean, Chatham, it's funny. I was, I was talking to Chatham's daughter, um, you know, I don't know.

• 1:05:55Steven Rinella?

  Did he pass away?

• 1:05:56Speaker 03

  He did. Yeah.

• 1:05:57Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. Cause he started that restaurant, kind of like that went a little tits up and then like. Yeah.

• 1:06:03Speaker 03

  I mean, he was.

• 1:06:04Steven Rinella?

  That was a cool restaurant.

• 1:06:05Speaker 03

  Yeah. He started all sorts of ventures, publishing house, uh, Clark City Press in Livingston and then opened Livingston Bar and Grill.

• 1:06:12Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, we used to go there a bit, man.

• 1:06:13Speaker 03

  Yeah. Um, but I mean.

• 1:06:15Steven Rinella?

  That was a long time. That was back in like around 2000 or something. Yeah. That was a long time ago.

• 1:06:19Speaker 03

  Even today, Leah Chatham, uh, Russ's daughter says that if you ask someone in town in Livingston, Montana, who Russ Chatham is.

• 1:06:27Steven Rinella?

  The guy from the restaurant?

• 1:06:28Speaker 03

  Half of them will say, oh, he's that famous fisherman. And half of them will say he's an artist, which really speaks volumes, right?

• 1:06:36Steven Rinella?

  Well, I thought they'd say like the guy with the restaurant?

• 1:06:38Speaker 03

  Some of them would probably definitely say that too. But I mean, I think he holds, he held the record for the largest striped bass caught on a fly for a long time. If not still, um. So, okay, so I'm losing track of where I was, but so Jim and Chatham became close friends, uh, beginning from Key West fishing days.

• 1:06:56Steven Rinella?

  That's how they met, okay.

• 1:06:57Speaker 03

  They met in Key West.

• 1:06:58Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 1:06:59Speaker 03

  And they just hit it off.

• 1:07:00Steven Rinella?

  He was into that fishing scene down there.

• 1:07:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, and Chatham had a, uh, also a bad eye.

• 1:07:05Steven Rinella?

  Oh, he did?

• 1:07:06Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:07:06Steven Rinella?

  I don't know.

• 1:07:06Speaker 03

  He had no depth perception. He's an artist, a landscape artist with no depth perception. Apparently he-

• 1:07:11Steven Rinella?

  One of tarpon fishermen, which-

• 1:07:14Speaker 03

  And it's a tarpon fisher-

• 1:07:14Steven Rinella?

  Depth perception game.

• 1:07:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, so somehow Russ managed to like, not only like fish tarpon and spot them and cast to them, but also to paint, right? And he was apparently a really good pool player to boot, so I don't know how he rolled this off.

• 1:07:27Steven Rinella?

  Overcame his, uh, yeah, deficiencies.

• 1:07:30Speaker 03

  And he had the eye, same eye injury as Jim, not, you know, for the same reasons, but he had a bad eye. And it happened around the same age as Jim, maybe the exact same age as Jim. So they were like, they saw each other then in Key West and they were just like, "Oh, we need to be friends," right? And they just hit it off from the start, right? And, uh, I can't remember exactly when it began, but, uh, Chatham, Jim started using, uh, Chatham's paintings on the covers of his books. And really that would, that would, and then eventually, you know, Chatham would go back and create covers for his like sort of backlist of books. And so now, pretty much if you go into any bookstore, uh, and pick up a Jim Harrison book, you're gonna see a Russell Chatham painting on the cover.

• 1:08:13Speaker 03

  Uh, and I, you know, and they're beautiful covers. A lot of people have told me that they picked up a Harrison book because of the cover for the first time.

• 1:08:21Steven Rinella?

  Sure.

• 1:08:21Speaker 03

  Right? Because it's such a striking cover. And they became sort of inextricably linked, right? Uh, complementing each other, right? Larger than, uh, they would be individually, right? And so, yeah, they really-

• 1:08:36Steven Rinella?

  You know, there's a documentary, um, if, I don't know, it's not even really fair to call it a documentary. It's more like a compilation of clips of that seventies era.

• 1:08:47Steven Rinella?

  Of fly fishing in Key West with those guys all in it. Uh huh. I can't remember, it's not chasing silver. No.

• 1:08:54Speaker 03

  Well, the original documentary that Guy made, right, of fly fishing, of those guys fly fishing in Key West was called Tarpon.

• 1:09:03Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:09:03Speaker 03

  And that is, if you haven't seen that's.

• 1:09:05Steven Rinella?

  No, I have that, yeah, I have that on DVD.

• 1:09:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, really cool. Yeah, great.

• 1:09:09Steven Rinella?

  Which is impossible to play, but I own it.

• 1:09:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. And then someone recently made a documentary of that documentary. Is that what you're talking about?

• 1:09:17Steven Rinella?

  No, no, I'm talking about Tarpon.

• 1:09:19Speaker 03

  You're talking about Tarpon specifically?

• 1:09:20Steven Rinella?

  Chase, yeah, that's in my DVD pile, but that's not it. Rivers of the Lost Coast and Tarpon.

• 1:09:25Speaker 03

  And Tarpon, yeah. And that documentary, Tarpon, um, I mean, just really sort of tried to capture sort of, you know, the wonder and amazement of, of, uh, you know, pulling a skiff around the flats off of Key West, right? Um, and casting, you know, sight casting to Tarpon. And then with amazing sort of photography, right, they captured these tarpon, you know, coming up out of the water, under the water, you know, being caught in the sort of electric experience of catching these tarpon.

• 1:09:57Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:59Speaker 03

  And then it brushed, you know, to a decent amount, also explores sort of the nightlife that those guys explored in Key West, but maybe a lot less. So I think it's a lot more about the fishing.

• 1:10:07Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, we get to send to the nightlife aspect.

• 1:10:09Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:10:11Speaker 00

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• 1:12:59Steven Rinella?

  Outdoorsman writer that definitely transcended the, the world is, uh, Richard Broadigan.

• 1:13:04Speaker 03

  Mm hmm.

• 1:13:05Steven Rinella?

  So Richard Broadigan wrote Trout Fishing in America, which is not about, people fishing it, but it's not about trout fishing in America, but it has one of the greatest fishing lines ever is Broadigan's talking about fishing a stream. That was so narrow and so brushy and hard to fish. He said, you had to be a plumber to fish that creek. Which was the greatest thing, but like Broadigan kinda like, and Broadigan later shoots himself.

• 1:13:34Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:13:36Steven Rinella?

  Do you know, is it true?

• 1:13:39Steven Rinella?

  Like chat, like Russell Chatham kinda wrote this thing and it was kinda from hanging out with Broadigan and Harrison and all that. Is it true that Broadigan like maybe killed some kid with a 22 when he was young? Are you familiar with that?

• 1:13:52Speaker 03

  I don't know that story. No, it, it's possible.

• 1:13:56Steven Rinella?

  Cause it may like, like he's talking about they, they would get together to hunt birds.

• 1:14:00Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:14:02Steven Rinella?

  And Chatham wouldn't hunt, or sorry, Broadigan wouldn't hunt.

• 1:14:06Speaker 03

  Mm hmm.

• 1:14:06Steven Rinella?

  Wouldn't go hunting, but talk about one time he shot a hole through a TV with a shotgun.

• 1:14:10Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:14:11Steven Rinella?

  And he talks about, I understand why you would shoot zebras.

• 1:14:16Speaker 03

  Mm hmm.

• 1:14:16Steven Rinella?

  But not pheasants.

• 1:14:18Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 1:14:18Steven Rinella?

  It was kind of about like Broadigan's torments, you know, but like killed himself, right?

• 1:14:23Speaker 03

  He did, yeah. And you know, he had a thing, um, you know, he had a thing with guns, um, it's sort of shooting them off indoors.

• 1:14:32Steven Rinella?

  Yo.

• 1:14:32Speaker 03

  Um, he had, uh, you know, he did lots of stories of, of Broadigan, uh, who, and Broadigan eventually bought a sort of small farm in Paradise Valley, Montana too, right? Not, not.

• 1:14:46Steven Rinella?

  I didn't know that.

• 1:14:47Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:14:48Steven Rinella?

  Um, in that same seventies era.

• 1:14:50Speaker 03

  Off of East River Road in the same area. Yeah. Same era, right? Um, when McWayne and all them were there and Broadigan sort of.

• 1:14:56Steven Rinella?

  And Whoopi Goldberg for a minute?

• 1:14:58Speaker 03

  Yeah. And, yeah. And everybody, right? In LA who was like setting, yeah, it was the new place to be. Um, Broadigan lived there for a while. Yeah. And he would hang out with all these guys and, and, and Paradise Valley, but there are lots of stories of sort of, you know, unfortunate sort of drunken late nights with, uh, you know, 44 Magnum that, that Broadigan would carry around and he would, there's a story of him, uh, shooting out a clock. Like that was on the wall and he shot around the clock in a circle. You know, until they could push the clock out of the wall.

• 1:15:31Steven Rinella?

  Oh.

• 1:15:31Speaker 03

  There was another one of him shooting up through the ceiling. And then him going to bed and waking up in the morning. And coming downstairs and having splinters and stuff all on his back because the bullets had gone through the roof into the bed, through the bed and his mattress and had shot splinters up into the mattress.

• 1:15:48Steven Rinella?

  Into his own bed.

• 1:15:49Speaker 03

  And came down with.

• 1:15:50Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:51Speaker 03

  Splinters in him.

• 1:15:54Speaker 03

  So, yeah, yeah, I, I never heard that story about him having shot somebody.

• 1:15:57Steven Rinella?

  Man, I feel like I maybe.

• 1:16:00Steven Rinella?

  I should, I should have brought, I should have checked in that before I brought it up.

• 1:16:02Speaker 03

  But, uh, you know, I know he loved to fish and he would go fishing with those guys all the time. Yeah. And he would, he didn't cook, but those guys would go over Brodigan's house and they'd cook big elaborate meals at his house and they would host big parties over Brodigan's and there are some funny stories in the book about Jim and Brodigan and their funny relationship together.

• 1:16:20Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:21Speaker 03

  Uh, Jim taught his daughter to fly fish. Brodigan's daughter to fly fish.

• 1:16:24Steven Rinella?

  Oh, really?

• 1:16:25Speaker 03

  Yeah. And Brodigan was very much part of the community and Brodigan's in Tarpon.

• 1:16:28Steven Rinella?

  What state did he kill himself in?

• 1:16:30Speaker 03

  California.

• 1:16:31Steven Rinella?

  Does it ever surprise you, it wouldn't like, had I read that Harrison killed himself at some point, I would not have been surprised. Doesn't it seem like he would have been a dude who would have killed himself, maybe?

• 1:16:39Speaker 03

  He came really close. I mean, because of his depressions, um, you know, in his thirties, he had a depression of all depressions, basically. And, um, you know, and contemplated suicide very seriously. His daughter, I mean, said repeatedly that they would just, she was reading his poetry a lot at the time. But everywhere she looked, she saw thoughts and ideas of suicide and Jim came extremely close. He was writing a collection of poetry called Letters to Usenin. It was, Sergey Usenin was a Russian poet. And Jim was called the collection Letters to, you know, Letters to Usenin. He was literally writing letters to this dead Russian poet. Right? But he credits that book with really sort of pulling him out of that deep depression.

• 1:17:21Speaker 03

  Right? And sort of poetry helped him sort of gain his footing. Uh, and recover himself, right? In, in writing to this poet. And it turns out Sergey Usenin had committed suicide, hung himself. Wrote his last letter out in his own blood or a poem. And then you really grew some stuff. And Jim recovered, you know, some sort of recovered himself through, through the writing of poetry. But I mean, something we never got at earlier, which we were talking about was that, you know, despite all of the other big through line through this book. And what always amazes me is that despite these epic depressions that Jim would go through, he had these unbelievable store of humor. And, you know, it would be a mistake to paint him as this really dark.

• 1:18:03Steven Rinella?

  Sure.

• 1:18:04Speaker 03

  Troubled figure, which he was, but he was also this guy with this just endless sense of humor and sort of exuberance for life and joie de vivre, right? That he never seemed to lose.

• 1:18:15Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:16Speaker 03

  You know, it had been flow, but he would always recover himself. Even in his darkest times, he'd make jokes.

• 1:18:21Steven Rinella?

  You know, we talk about the Hemingway deal?

• 1:18:22Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:18:24Steven Rinella?

  He, Harrison, I can't remember where he was writing it, but Harrison had talked about, you know, that ritualistic suicide, like is it Hari Kari?

• 1:18:33Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah. Like falling your sword kind of thing?

• 1:18:36Steven Rinella?

  Well, you disembowel yourself.

• 1:18:38Speaker 03

  Disembowel yourself, right? Yeah.

• 1:18:39Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. Reason, one of the reasons I always pictured that he might, that you'd be that that would have been how he would have died. Is he, he seemed to struggle with this like, um, like death before dishonor. But dishonor would have been senescence.

• 1:18:54Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:18:55Steven Rinella?

  Do you know what I mean? Like, would you really let yourself get old and senile? Would it be better to like go out on your own terms? And that's kind of, he seemed to, that's like a reference he seemed to make a fair bit. And that was like the Hemingway deal. Cause I think that when Hemingway shot himself, like Hemingway was supposed to be contributing like a sentence to a Kennedy memorial.

• 1:19:18Speaker 03

  Uh huh.

• 1:19:19Steven Rinella?

  And my understanding is, and maybe this is like a little bit of a, you know, maybe it's like an apocryphal story, but, but like, he couldn't come up with a sentence.

• 1:19:29Speaker 03

  Uh huh.

• 1:19:30Steven Rinella?

  For Kennedy's memorial or something. And felt that it was like he was tapped out.

• 1:19:35Speaker 03

  Uh huh.

• 1:19:36Steven Rinella?

  And, you know?

• 1:19:37Speaker 03

  Maybe that's what kept, kept Jim, Jim in this world is he never ran out of words. In fact, I think the closer he came to death and dying, he wrote more and more and, uh, you know, uh, language, uh,

• 1:19:52Speaker 03

  You know, he felt sometimes trapped in language, you know, ironically, maybe I think he felt that he'd been a slave to language his whole life and he started to feel that later in life, but it was language that really never abandoned him.

• 1:20:05Steven Rinella?

  He would sometimes lament that he had no mechanical capabilities.

• 1:20:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, definitely. Yeah. I mean, his physical capabilities, is that what you mean, like, physical capabilities?

• 1:20:13Steven Rinella?

  No, I mean, like, um, wasn't like, he wasn't like, like fixing stuff and all that, like, mechanical stuff.

• 1:20:19Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:20:19Steven Rinella?

  He would make jokes about that he was, you know, like, not, not in some capacities handy at, like, vehicle repair or whatever, like, he was a man of words, you know what I mean?

• 1:20:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, I, I don't doubt that at all. Yeah, I don't think Jim ever, like, he wasn't the kind of guy who was gonna crawl under, you know, a hood and, you know, get greasy, although, you know, maybe when he was younger a little bit, but he wasn't, yeah, mechanically inclined.

• 1:20:41Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:42Speaker 03

  Um, he wasn't that guy, but language never abandoned him, you know, and he died writing a poem.

• 1:20:47Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 1:20:48Speaker 03

  He was writing a poem the day he died, um, and so till his very last breath, I mean, he was sitting at his desk with the poem in front of him and a cigarette smoldering in an ashtray.

• 1:20:57Steven Rinella?

  Huh.

• 1:20:58Speaker 03

  When he died.

• 1:20:59Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, he smoked right up to the end, dude.

• 1:21:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, he had a big pile of cigarettes, uh, on his desk and one was smoldering, or, I mean, the, the day he died. And he basically fell over after writing his last poem, so, you know, maybe, I mean, who knows, maybe if language had abandoned him, he might, you know, where would he have been?

• 1:21:16Steven Rinella?

  He later talked about that you take a lot of naps.

• 1:21:19Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:21:20Steven Rinella?

  But he said he didn't count it as a nap unless he took his socks off, which I thought was a funny line.

• 1:21:26Speaker 03

  And a classic Harrison, right? Yeah.

• 1:21:29Steven Rinella?

  The one caveat that hangs over this and, like, the one reason, and I, I hate it, like, I wish it wasn't true, because the one reason I can't be like, that I love him.

• 1:21:40Steven Rinella?

  You know, and, and like I said, man, he did me a good turn, like, he blurbed a couple of my books and, right? Helped me out, but, like, a thing that keeps me from being like, I love the guy, is, is, like, I don't understand how he could, how he would just, like, humiliate his wife like that.

• 1:21:58Speaker 03

  Uh huh.

• 1:22:00Steven Rinella?

  Do you know what I mean? Like, I'm, like, I, I've been married for

• 1:22:05Steven Rinella?

  Seventeen years.

• 1:22:05Speaker 03

  Uh huh.

• 1:22:06Steven Rinella?

  Right?

• 1:22:06Speaker 03

  Uh huh.

• 1:22:07Steven Rinella?

  There's just no way, there's no way I'm gonna humiliate my wife.

• 1:22:12Speaker 03

  Uh huh.

• 1:22:13Steven Rinella?

  Do you follow me?

• 1:22:14Speaker 03

  Uh huh.

• 1:22:14Steven Rinella?

  But he would so freely humiliate his wife. Like, what is all that about?

• 1:22:18Speaker 03

  You mean by, um.

• 1:22:19Steven Rinella?

  Carrying on with other women.

• 1:22:20Speaker 03

  Carrying on, carrying on with other women.

• 1:22:21Steven Rinella?

  Fantasizing about women, carrying on with other women. Like, how could you like do that to somebody like habitually, dude? And then not only that, but then like go home and face them.

• 1:22:29Speaker 03

  Uh huh.

• 1:22:29Steven Rinella?

  Do you know what I mean? Like, I, like, I don't talk, like, i- if, like, I can't be...

• 1:22:37Steven Rinella?

  Like, one way to get like majorly like OTC'd out of my circle

• 1:22:42Speaker 03

  Uh huh.

• 1:22:42Steven Rinella?

  would be to like hu- like dudes that humiliate their wives are just like out of the club.

• 1:22:46Speaker 03

  Uh huh.

• 1:22:46Steven Rinella?

  Do you follow me?

• 1:22:47Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:22:47Steven Rinella?

  So like makes it that I can't...

• 1:22:51Steven Rinella?

  Like, I wanna be like, "Oh, he was great," but I'm always like, "Yeah." Like, what was that about?

• 1:22:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, that's... That's tough. Um...

• 1:23:04Speaker 03

  What is that about? Uh...

• 1:23:10Speaker 03

  I think...

• 1:23:14Speaker 03

  I think Jim and his wife, I mean, I, so there's no, there's no excuse for humiliation. I think, I think Jim loved his wife very much. I don't have any doubt about that. And I think she loved him very much. Um, I think Jim became so difficult to live with for other reasons later in life because of his alcoholism and his, um, you know, the sort of things that had happened, his, his ability to sort of comprehend the consequences of his actions. And I'm not talking about affairs now, I'm talking about smoking cigarettes around his wife when she was suffering from asthma and lung problems later in life. And he could be incredibly self-centered

• 1:23:54Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 1:23:55Speaker 03

  and self-focused in a way that seemed, uh, incredibly frustrating to people around them because they knew that his smoking was hurting his wife and such. And I think that eventually sort of, his wife became increasingly intolerant of him.

• 1:24:11Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 1:24:12Speaker 03

  I think earlier when Jim was having affairs and, um... You know, you can't really make excuses for him. You're right. It was a humiliation. I think it's one that Linda realized what she was getting herself into very early on. Yeah, well, he wasn't even bashful about it. He wasn't bashful about it, and she was smart. His wife, she was incredibly smart, incredibly perceptive. I think she knew very, I know for a fact that she knew very early on how Jim was going to conduct his life. And I think Linda was an adult, and I think she chose to stay in that relationship for, you know, reasons of all sorts of complex reasons, right? Because she valued that relationship. She valued Jim.

• 1:24:59Speaker 03

  She accepted explicitly, tacitly, if not explicitly, the terms of that relationship. Right? From a very, from a young age.

• 1:25:14Speaker 03

  McQuain once wrote to a friend, and I write about this in the book, and he said, you know, there's only really two paths with marriage, and he says, one is, at least this was his perception, and he was speaking about Jim's infidelity specifically. And he said, you know, there's one where, you know, you conduct your business in private, you go and have illicit affairs, you hire sex workers, you do this or that, all like in closed, private spaces behind your wife's back. And the alternative is sort of having an open relationship, right? And he says, now, I don't know, he says, and at the time, McQuain said, well, and we know Jim, you know, McQuain himself had gone through a series of relationships with their own sort of levels of complexity.

• 1:25:56Speaker 03

  And one of them was a relatively high-profile, relatively open relationship. But he said, you know, the trick to that, and maybe, maybe it's doomed to failure, open relationships to begin with. By definition, maybe they're non-sustainable. Oh, it's like, just as a side note.

• 1:26:15Steven Rinella?

  People that act like that's gonna fly.

• 1:26:16Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:26:17Steven Rinella?

  It doesn't.

• 1:26:18Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:26:18Steven Rinella?

  And it's like such a joke when people like, oh, no, we have an understanding. I'm like, you don't.

• 1:26:23Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:26:23Steven Rinella?

  You might think you do.

• 1:26:24Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:26:24Steven Rinella?

  You don't.

• 1:26:25Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:26:25Steven Rinella?

  And it's not a two way understanding.

• 1:26:27Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:26:27Steven Rinella?

  You have an understanding with your desires, but that's about the, that's the limit right there, you know?

• 1:26:32Speaker 03

  Yeah. And, and McWayne recognized that. And he said, you know, but the trick to doing that, and maybe it's impossible anyway, the trick to doing it is to extend the privileges to both people.

• 1:26:40Steven Rinella?

  Sure.

• 1:26:41Speaker 03

  Fully, right? You can't have one sided. It has to extend to two. And Jim, you know, there was no, there's no evidence that they had that sort of agreement.

• 1:26:49Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, but she wasn't a big swinging dick writer either.

• 1:26:52Speaker 03

  You're right. You're right. But she was also very attractive though. She was a beautiful woman. And she was, and she was intelligent. She was beautiful. But I mean, you know, I don't know. McWayne went through several relationships, eventually settled in what it's, is a very happy marriage now to Jimmy Buffett's sister. But Jim, you know, Jim and Linda stayed married when a lot of other of their friends got divorced. Uh, throughout the years and man, they were, they were together up until the end.

• 1:27:16Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:17Speaker 03

  And you know,

• 1:27:17Steven Rinella?

  It's something I'll never understand, man.

• 1:27:20Speaker 03

  And I think for someone who wrote poetry, for someone who was so sensitive, so someone who was a student of consciousness and all, you know, and, and, and looking at the world honestly, to be able to still do what he did, um, you know, is a contradiction.

• 1:27:33Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:33Speaker 03

  And it's a complexity, um, that.

• 1:27:36Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:36Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:27:37Steven Rinella?

  I wouldn't, talking about speaking ill of the dead, like if he was alive, I would be uncomfortable bringing it up.

• 1:27:43Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:27:44Steven Rinella?

  And I didn't.

• 1:27:45Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:27:46Steven Rinella?

  You know, like, cause we had mu- mutual associates and mutual friends and stuff. And like, I, I just always, I was always like, why? You know, you know what I mean? It's like a, like, who's, who's that culture that used to make, um,

• 1:28:02Steven Rinella?

  who's a culture that make rugs and they'd put imperfection in the rug? Because, because it was hubris to, to, to make it perfect, like in the eyes of God. You intentionally make it imperfect.

• 1:28:13Speaker 03

  Uh huh.

• 1:28:13Steven Rinella?

  Hmm. Right?

• 1:28:15Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:28:15Steven Rinella?

  And it was like, he had this like glaring imperfection that has always bugged me, man.

• 1:28:20Speaker 03

  He did have a glaring imperfection, more than one.

• 1:28:23Steven Rinella?

  We all do. I mean, we all do, but his was like celebrated.

• 1:28:26Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:28:28Steven Rinella?

  You know what I mean? Like, like when I was young, it didn't occur to me to be, it didn't occur to me to look at it from two sides.

• 1:28:35Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:28:36Steven Rinella?

  Only later did I be like, man, like, you know?

• 1:28:41Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, like I have somewhat of a, you know, like I have some of a public profile. I have somewhat of a way to go out and meet people and have adventures that like isn't like readily available to my wife.

• 1:28:54Speaker 03

  Uh huh, uh huh.

• 1:28:55Steven Rinella?

  Taking care of the kids that we had together.

• 1:28:57Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:28:58Steven Rinella?

  You become aware of the like, there's just a baked in, dude, I don't want to call it an imbalance, but there's like a baked in something that you can take, that you can exploit.

• 1:29:07Speaker 03

  Uh huh.

• 1:29:07Steven Rinella?

  And then later, when I became aware of that, that there is a thing to exploit.

• 1:29:11Speaker 03

  Uh huh.

• 1:29:12Steven Rinella?

  When I became aware of it, it made me

• 1:29:16Steven Rinella?

  very judgmental about someone that takes the bait.

• 1:29:19Speaker 03

  Uh huh. I think it was baked in. Yeah, it was definitely baked in for Jim too, you know, where he grew up, the people he grew up around and with.

• 1:29:27Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:27Speaker 03

  Uh, from a very young age, I think a lot of that, you know, that the way of thinking about, uh, you know, uh, male female relationships and marriages was baked into him from a young age. And, and I think it was, it just, it always just remained a sort of like Fisher in his identity. Right. This, this, uh, this contradiction, right? That, uh, he could be as sensitive as he was to people's suffering. He could write novels in women's voices in ways that-

• 1:29:56Steven Rinella?

  That's the thing dude, like so sympathetic, man.

• 1:29:59Speaker 03

  So sympathetic. Dolva and Women Look by Fireflies.

• 1:30:02Steven Rinella?

  Like in a way you wouldn't be able to do now, like you couldn't, he would have, if he'd have written, if he'd have written a novel from the perspective of a female Native American in 2020, dude, they would have murdered him.

• 1:30:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's true.

• 1:30:17Steven Rinella?

  They would have hung him from a tree.

• 1:30:20Steven Rinella?

  Do you know what I mean?

• 1:30:21Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:30:21Steven Rinella?

  He's like, I got an idea. I'm like an old white guy. I'm gonna write a book where I'm a Native American woman.

• 1:30:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, I know. He might have gotten away, he might have gotten away with the woman, but not the Native American woman, right?

• 1:30:32Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, he'd have got away with it in France.

• 1:30:34Speaker 03

  So he would have gotten away with it.

• 1:30:35Steven Rinella?

  But I'm not saying he shouldn't have done it. Like, that's not my perspective. Like, I don't think that. I don't, I don't look at it like, I don't think that you can own- I don't believe in, in, I understand the arguments for it, but I don't believe in people being like that, that you can make it that other people can't think about certain things, you know what I mean? I don't, I'm not, I don't, I don't, I don't like that. I understand the argument, but I don't, I don't, I don't like live by it.

• 1:30:58Speaker 03

  I completely agree with that and it's funny, you know, I just read a teaching, you know, and I just read three books in a row where the man wrote a book from a woman's perspective and then the two women wrote two books from men's perspectives. And these are all in the past five years. And so I'm like, okay, well, yeah.

• 1:31:14Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:14Speaker 03

  We haven't, you know, fully, you know, people are still experimenting with, and I completely agree with you.

• 1:31:19Steven Rinella?

  And we live in like a little bit.

• 1:31:20Speaker 03

  Write from whatever experience they have.

• 1:31:21Steven Rinella?

  We live in a little bit of freer time right now. You know, you know, the writer Larry Brown?

• 1:31:27Speaker 03

  Uh, yeah, a little bit.

• 1:31:28Steven Rinella?

  Big Bad Love?

• 1:31:29Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:31:29Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:30Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:31:31Steven Rinella?

  He died young. He had a heart attack. He was from Mississippi. He was a fireman.

• 1:31:35Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:31:36Steven Rinella?

  He wrote seven books. He wrote seven novels before he had a novel published.

• 1:31:40Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 1:31:42Steven Rinella?

  Um.

• 1:31:44Steven Rinella?

  He, uh.

• 1:31:47Steven Rinella?

  He, he became like a very, like, he, he sold some of his stuff to, he did have stuff, had movies, like the Coen Brothers bought one of his things. He became a big, pretty big writer. He was the first guy, this is the last thing I'll say about this thing with marriage and stuff is, uh.

• 1:32:04Steven Rinella?

  When I was in writing school, Larry came and did a, he like came for a semester or something up from Mississippi. Um, dude never went to college enough, man. He taught himself to write like between calls at a fire barn.

• 1:32:16Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 1:32:17Steven Rinella?

  But became a very celebrated novelist, you know?

• 1:32:19Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:32:20Steven Rinella?

  Uh, and I mentioned him, he, he knew Harrison and hung out just in the literary circles. And he was the first guy that like said to me, I brought him up and he said something about like, like eye roll. Cause he was a very faithful, loyal family person.

• 1:32:36Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:32:37Steven Rinella?

  He had like an eye roll about like, oh, him and his starlets. Do you know what I mean? It was the first time I heard someone like do like a condemnation and it was like dismissive.

• 1:32:47Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:32:47Steven Rinella?

  You know? Man, it wasn't even that long after that Larry Brown died of a heart attack.

• 1:32:51Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 1:32:52Steven Rinella?

  You know? Um. What was, uh, like?

• 1:32:59Steven Rinella?

  When Harrison died, what was sort of going on with him? You know, like where was he at? Right with his work and he had like, didn't he have, it's hard to have like bad health problems and things?

• 1:33:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, he was sort of ravaged physically, right?

• 1:33:14Steven Rinella?

  Was he still sharp, though?

• 1:33:17Speaker 03

  Uh, was he still sharp?

• 1:33:20Speaker 03

  I, he still had the capacity to write and write poems and I think fiction had become difficult for him.

• 1:33:27Steven Rinella?

  Good.

• 1:33:27Speaker 03

  Uh, he just couldn't sort of sustain the attention to detail that was required for fiction, right? I think he was at that point in his life.

• 1:33:36Speaker 03

  Right before he died, he began a new novella called The Woman Who Loved Trees, I think. And it was about his wife, about Linda.

• 1:33:43Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 1:33:44Speaker 03

  And so the important thing to know is Linda died about five months prior to Jim.

• 1:33:49Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:50Speaker 03

  Um, and so when Jim died, he was extremely lonely, right? He was, uh, sort of living in Montana, but then when he died, he died in Patagonia, Arizona. And he was just didn't know what to do with himself, right? Because he'd been married since 1959 to Linda, right? And all of a sudden he was without her. And so there was this huge gaping, you know, hole in his life. Um, but in the sort of waning months of his life, I mean, he, uh, he could write poems still. There was still that sort of compression and smallness of it that he could get his mind around.

• 1:34:23Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, that's a good way of putting it.

• 1:34:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, and he, you know, he was sharp enough to write. I think his mind was very sort of, um, uh, uh, beclouded by sort of, uh, all the alcohol that he was drinking, right? Uh, from years and years and years of alcoholism. And I think it had taken a real toll on him mentally, intellectually.

• 1:34:44Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 1:34:44Speaker 03

  Um, uh, but you know, he's, he had his humor. He had, um, he had it still like a decent life going on, so his friends and things like that. But I think in the absence of Linda, it seems he, he really could.

• 1:34:57Steven Rinella?

  Got it. Started to fade.

• 1:34:59Speaker 03

  It's not an exaggeration to say that he faded, you know, in the absence of his wife, you know? Died from a broken heart in some ways, right? From the loss of Linda, he couldn't go on after that. But he was still writing, I mean, up until he died. He wrote, uh, there was a collection of poems published right before he died called Dead Man's Float. And, um, and actually the soft cover came out after he died and includes the last poem he was writing when he died.

• 1:35:22Steven Rinella?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:35:23Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:35:23Steven Rinella?

  Uh, dude, when you look at him, like especially on the cover here and you listen to it, like clips of him talking. You'd form sort of an impression and then you go read some of the sentences he wrote and you're like, how could that sentence? Like, how do those sentences come out of that guy? Just like so unbelievably talented and smart, man.

• 1:35:44Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:35:45Steven Rinella?

  But it's so talented.

• 1:35:47Speaker 03

  As Gary Snyder, right? The poet from California, beat poet, nature poet.

• 1:35:54Speaker 03

  Was walking across the campus one time in California, uh, with his wife and saw Jim Harrison coming across the campus. And she turned to Gary and says, I cannot believe that's the man who wrote Dalva.

• 1:36:08Speaker 03

  So similar, similar idea, right?

• 1:36:11Steven Rinella?

  Uh.

• 1:36:12Speaker 03

  You look at Jim on the cover of this and yeah, he doesn't scream sensitive poet, right?

• 1:36:16Steven Rinella?

  No, like some greasy sweatshirt and stuff, like, you know, I mean, it's just like.

• 1:36:22Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:36:23Steven Rinella?

  Eight cigarettes hanging out of his mouth, just, but then just so brilliant, man.

• 1:36:28Speaker 03

  Lived a long, hard life. Yeah. And it shows on his face.

• 1:36:32Steven Rinella?

  So he took you, you, you spent five, six years on the book and talked to how many people did you interview?

• 1:36:38Speaker 03

  I mean, well over a hundred different interviews, um, for the book, um, sort of all over the place from Montana and Michigan to New York and LA to France. You know, um, Florida, obviously Arizona, um, took a solid six years, but from like the first phone call I made to publication date, probably seven years. Total. So it's been a long journey.

• 1:37:00Steven Rinella?

  And no, um, and you beat everybody to it. No one's done a, no one's done like a full biography of. Jim Harrison.

• 1:37:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, I couldn't believe it. I mean, that was.

• 1:37:10Steven Rinella?

  Were you worried while you were working on it that someone else is gonna crick, kick one out?

• 1:37:13Speaker 03

  I was.

• 1:37:13Steven Rinella?

  You'd have caught wind of it.

• 1:37:15Speaker 03

  I didn't think they'd get it done before me necessarily, but I was, I, I, yeah, when I first started, when I first sort of zeroed in on, on, on writing a biography of Harrison, I was shocked that no one was already doing it.

• 1:37:26Steven Rinella?

  I had some dudes call me that were kicking around making a documentary about his life.

• 1:37:29Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:37:31Steven Rinella?

  I don't know if you were involved in that or not.

• 1:37:32Speaker 03

  No, no, I'm not. Um, there's, yeah, there's been a number of sort of, sort of people circling the documentary of Harrison, and I think there should definitely be one.

• 1:37:40Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, they had asked whoever, well, I don't even remember. I don't even know if I'd be able to even find anything, but we spoke on the phone and they were asking me about if I would do like a little talking head bit in it, but I don't know what came of it.

• 1:37:51Speaker 03

  Yeah. Um, yeah, people, people have been circling the documentary, but, uh, and I sort of thought someone would start it, not start one while I was writing it, but, uh, uh, I don't think anyone did, not that I heard of.

• 1:38:03Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, when they were asking me there to say, it was like, not as someone that knew him, but just someone who was influenced by the work.

• 1:38:09Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:38:09Steven Rinella?

  Right, writers that were influenced by the work.

• 1:38:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, for sure.

• 1:38:12Steven Rinella?

  And then I was kinda, I didn't get, you know, I definitely didn't get the sense that it was a done deal on being in it. I was like, sure, whatever.

• 1:38:19Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:38:19Steven Rinella?

  But I kept kinda, I still kinda keep my eyes out expecting the movie to come out.

• 1:38:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think it'd be great.

• 1:38:25Steven Rinella?

  But the fact that you managed to get like a big ass book done before they could get a documentary done is impressive.

• 1:38:31Speaker 03

  I appreciate that. Thank you.

• 1:38:32Steven Rinella?

  What year did he die?

• 1:38:34Speaker 03

  Two thousand sixteen, March.

• 1:38:36Steven Rinella?

  Okay, so you didn't get crank until he was dead?

• 1:38:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, I didn't, right, yeah.

• 1:38:40Steven Rinella?

  Would you have felt funny doing it while he's alive?

• 1:38:43Speaker 03

  I don't think so. Um, no, I, I don't think, I think I would have done it. Yeah.

• 1:38:49Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think I would have. Um, I think there's, you know, I would have loved to have interviewed him for the book, but a, at the same time, you know, there's, it, it, it's also sort of liberating to do it.

• 1:39:01Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:01Speaker 03

  When they're not alive too.

• 1:39:02Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, cuz when they're alive, I'm not a written biography, but, well, I've written like biographical sketches, but I think when they're alive, um,

• 1:39:12Steven Rinella?

  It just becomes different.

• 1:39:13Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:39:13Steven Rinella?

  Because their own, their own mythology is.

• 1:39:17Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:39:17Steven Rinella?

  Someone's own mythology is part, like in an interview, is you're getting the mythological version. Do you know what I mean?

• 1:39:25Speaker 03

  Totally.

• 1:39:26Steven Rinella?

  Unless they're just done.

• 1:39:28Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:39:28Steven Rinella?

  And the guard's down, you're gonna get like, here's how I'd like, you know what it is?

• 1:39:31Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:39:31Steven Rinella?

  Here's how I'd like to be remembered.

• 1:39:33Speaker 03

  Totally, yeah, and you would have to really filter for that, right? You'd have to like, take everything they said with a grain of salt.

• 1:39:38Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 1:39:39Speaker 03

  Um, but I mean, there were enough like friends and family members still alive, uh, and are still alive now, um, around Jim's, in Jim's world that, you know, I don't know if I would have written it differently, had they been alive, because I'm still writing, you know, with the idea that it's still very much living story.

• 1:39:57Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:57Speaker 03

  Right, and so you have to keep that in mind, I think, when you're writing biography.

• 1:40:01Steven Rinella?

  Well, congratulations on it, man.

• 1:40:03Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 1:40:03Steven Rinella?

  Um, I'm excited to, I'm, I'm excited to dig in and read it, I just, I, I mean, I just took possession of my hardcover right now.

• 1:40:11Speaker 03

  Wonderful. That's great.

• 1:40:13Steven Rinella?

  I'd like to have you sign, yeah, I'd like to have you sign it for me.

• 1:40:15Speaker 03

  I would love to.

• 1:40:16Steven Rinella?

  Um, again, the title is Devouring Time, Jim Harrison, A Writer's Life by Todd Goddard. So if you're a fan of Harrison's work, and I know there are many out there, um, more than any out, like of the people

• 1:40:34Steven Rinella?

  of the writers that sort of touch on and swerve in and out of the worlds of hunting and fishing in nature, like I think that he's the most celebrated. I don't think anybody comes close.

• 1:40:46Speaker 03

  I, I agree entirely.

• 1:40:48Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:48Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:40:48Steven Rinella?

  I don't think anybody comes close. Um, and in a manner, it's something for everybody.

• 1:40:53Speaker 03

  There's something for everybody.

• 1:40:54Steven Rinella?

  Even novellas.

• 1:40:55Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:40:55Steven Rinella?

  Which if you're like a little too ADHD for a novel.

• 1:40:58Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:40:58Steven Rinella?

  Try a novella.

• 1:40:59Speaker 03

  Yeah. And Jim, Jim.

• 1:41:01Steven Rinella?

  It's a short novel.

• 1:41:02Speaker 03

  And Jim was a, Jim had mastered that form, I mean, he's known for that.

• 1:41:05Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, so.

• 1:41:06Steven Rinella?

  If you're like, dude, I don't got time for a novel, it's like, the novella is for you.

• 1:41:10Speaker 03

  Take a novella, right?

• 1:41:11Steven Rinella?

  Exactly. What's that term for a really long essay of, uh, not a man, not a memo.

• 1:41:17Speaker 03

  Like a monograph?

• 1:41:18Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, a monograph.

• 1:41:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. Well, it's been a real honor to be invited on here, so thank you so much.

• 1:41:24Steven Rinella?

  I, I love it, and, and again, man, you can tell that I'm like, I'm a Harrison fan, I'm haunted by Harrison, um.

• 1:41:33Steven Rinella?

  I get mad thinking about him. I love his work.

• 1:41:36Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:41:36Steven Rinella?

  I reread his books. Dude, he's like, he's like, uh,

• 1:41:41Steven Rinella?

  you know, I guess he's to me what Hemingway was to him.

• 1:41:45Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah, yeah, right, right. Contradictory and complicated.

• 1:41:49Steven Rinella?

  Like a, like a, not a dark cloud, like, but a cloud and the sun, you know what I mean?

• 1:41:54Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:41:54Steven Rinella?

  He's, he's just there, right?

• 1:41:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, I turn, and I turn back to him for nourishment in some way, right? I don't know. Jim said this great thing in tarpon, actually. He says, you know, you go fly fishing, you go tarpon fishing. He says, because catching a tarpon gives you a jolt of electricity that freshens the feeling of being alive. And I think Harrison does that.

• 1:42:13Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:13Speaker 03

  I mean, go pick up a food essay, one of his sports essays, right? Or, and you know, you'll be freshened, you know, your feeling of life will be freshened. And Harrison's so good at doing that, um, you know, that he, I can't turn back to him enough and, and not, not feel that.

• 1:42:28Steven Rinella?

  The thing we didn't touch on, and I'll just mention it, is, um, he was a lifelong unapologetic environmentalist.

• 1:42:36Speaker 03

  Definitely.

• 1:42:37Steven Rinella?

  Unapologetic.

• 1:42:39Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:42:39Steven Rinella?

  He didn't care if that shit was in fashion or out of fashion. That dude was an environmentalist.

• 1:42:43Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:42:43Steven Rinella?

  You know, and he probably would have said that. He, he, maybe he didn't use that word, but he was like, he was a clean air, clean water, wildlife guy through and through.

• 1:42:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, definitely.

• 1:42:53Steven Rinella?

  No one had to ever wonder what he thought about the habitat and that, you know, and degradation and the kind of people that degrade.

• 1:43:01Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:43:02Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, and he never lost sight of like, you know, um, you know, the people who work in that world, you know, he never had an unrealistic view of, of the fact that humans go into the natural world and have an impact on it, right? He was never one of those people who was gonna say, you know, everything needs to be preserved in a pristine state where, you know, people can't go in and work in those environments. But he had a strong environmental consciousness.

• 1:43:25Steven Rinella?

  No, he knew it's a, it's an occupied landscape that has to be taken care of.

• 1:43:28Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 1:43:29Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, but he cared about it, right? And he knew, uh, we had to take care of it.

• 1:43:32Steven Rinella?

  Uh, well, thanks for coming on, Todd.

• 1:43:34Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 1:43:35Steven Rinella?

  Again, devouring time, Jim Harrison, The Writer's Life, um, fascinating guy, and I can't wait to read the book. Thank you.

• 1:43:41Speaker 03

  Thank you so much, Steve.

• 1:44:09Steven Rinella?

  If you spend a lot of time outdoors, you got dogs, you got kids, you know how hard it is to keep the floor of your rig clean. A thing we do in our, in our little fleet of vehicles that I have at my household, if you go look, open the door on any one of them, they all got WeatherTech. We get a car, we throw the mats out and put in WeatherTech. Cause that way, when there's a mess, it's like your kid's fault, your dog's fault, it's the weather's fault, doesn't matter. You take them suckers out and hose them off and you're back to being good as new. I'm telling you, if you've got a vehicle, put WeatherTech in there, you're gonna be happy you did it. And check this out, American-made floor liners and cargo liners, okay? They laugh in the face of all weather. Go take a look for yourself today at weathertech.com. Hey, let me tell you, when the hunt is over, the work isn't over. You've still got all

• 1:44:54Steven Rinella?

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• 1:45:37Steven Rinella?

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