Bangtail Press has just released Riding the Rough String: Reflections on the American West, by Toby Thompson.
One of the most respected journalists in America (his work has been published in
Esquire and
Vanity Fair,
Outside and
The Washington Post), Toby Thompson has, for more than 40 years, been considering what it means to live and work in the West.
Riding the Rough String is a series of profiles, essays, and explorations, his best work brought together under one cover.
In the following interview Thompson talks about migrating to Montana, and how personal relationships with writers like James Lee Burke, Gary Snyder, and Gretel Ehrlich influenced his work and his life. He also drops a few other names: "To have partied with (Thomas McGuane), Hunter Thompson and Jimmy Buffett in the same summer is memorable."
An Interview with Toby Thompson
Bangtail
Press: You’ve been writing about the West, and specifically about Montana,
since the late ‘60s. That’s a long time to gain insight and perspective. How
have you seen the West change in that time?
Toby Thompson: The West I know has
changed primarily through an influx of “immigrants”—largely middle-to-upper
income types like myself, who have bought second houses yet have not retired,
due to the ease of modern communications. In fact I would say that
communications have changed the Mountain West more drastically than any other
factor. When I came to Montana during the summer of 1959, there was no
television or radio accessible at our ranch. In ‘62 there still was not, and by
‘72, in larger towns there was at least local television and radio. By ‘76 and
then by ‘80, cable TV was available which, in many ways, brought contemporary
music, mores and styles to the Mountain West. Particularly through MTV.
Suddenly I was hearing the same songs on the jukebox or from bands as I had
heard back East, and was watching the same television news. Kids dressed in
gangsta fashion, wore tattoos and spoke in a hip patois. Cable TV and Clear Channel
radio, to say nothing of the internet, have done their damnedest to homogenize
the West.
BP: You had a summer job on a ranch
when you were fourteen?
TT: Yes, on a cattle and dude ranch
outside West Yellowstone, Montana. Its mistress was Maggie Grand, the scion of
a Long Island clan that had relegated her to the family spread to oversee it. She
was typical of wealthy misfits who had been drawn to the Mountain West, nearly
since its settlement by whites. During the day she wore jeans and rough workshirts,
but at the stroke of five she emerged from her cabin in pink Chinese pajamas,
Arabian slippers, a turban and smoking cigarettes from a Sterling silver
holder. She’d knock back several martinis then take me to the main lodge’s
porch to bag starlings, as they angled in to nest, with .22 birdshot. It was a
revelatory experience.
BP: How so?
TT: She, and more to the point, my
generation of cowboy want-to-bes, were just starting to arrive. We would
infiltrate, then change the culture of the West as thoroughly as had the
pioneers. Even at fourteen, I recall being resented for my presence. The
ranch’s local hands felt quite threatened. We were a vanguard of the West’s
gentrification. I’ve recounted an introduction to that process here in my
story, “Summer Wages.”
BP:
Let’s back up. If you had to find larger themes in your own work, if you
were asked to take a big-picture perspective in describing what you do, how
would you start?
TT: I write about the American West but
am probably more interested in middle-American themes—that is, my generation’s
move from the city to the suburbs in late 1940s and early 1950s. That was my
experience—first from New York City, then from Washington, D.C. That move
effected huge changes in our culture. Gone was a sense of community that even
the rowdiest urban neighborhoods possessed, to be supplanted by the empty lawns
of tract houses and sidewalks devoid of pedestrians. It was lonely, and that
loneliness was capitalized upon by ‘50s television shows, performed live from New
York. In fact I’m a child of ‘50s television, as my uncle was a writer/producer
for Your Hit Parade. It was a
top-ten-hits show—a predecessor to MTV—and its message was “there’s nothing
happenin’ in the suburbs, baby—it’s happenin’ downtown.” We’ve seen a
repopulation of inner cities over the past forty years, largely due to baby
boomer interest and, it’s my belief shows like Saturday Night Live, with its weekly pronouncement, ‘Live from New
York: it’s Saturday Night!’ helped. Your
Hit Parade was broadcast live each Saturday in the same NBC studio as SNL. I was present many times.
BP: How does suburban angst factor into
your interest in the West?
TT: When I first experienced town life
in Montana, I realized that I’d been longing for neighborhood, for community. A
town like Livingston (pop. 7,380) where I own a house, is like a neighborhood
in a major city–say Murray Hill in New York, or North Beach in San Francisco. People
stroll the sidewalks, say hello, know your name. And they watch out for each
other. As my generation retreated from the horrors of Vietnam, it homesteaded
not only the cities’ ravaged cores but the American West. Both derived from
frontier impulses.
BP: Riding
the Rough String has an impressive developmental arc. It’s part memoir, part
biography, part “novel” of ideas. Seeing its pieces side by side, collected in
one place, have you learned anything new about the totality of your work?
TT: Only that the generational angle
remains sharp. Baby boomers were raised with a mythic conception of the West. We
saw it on Saturday morning TV, read about it in comic books, and saw it in
movies. Our heroes and heroines were cowfolk. We dressed like them, wanted to
be them. A major theme in these pieces is how my generation realized its dream
of experiencing the American West. And in many cases, their members became
cowboys or cowgirls. I don’t think kids today
have any sense of what it means to be a cowboy or cowgirl. When’s the last time you saw a child costumed
as one?
BP: Many of your pieces in Rough String concern writers. Is that an
accident?
TT: No. Many writers were smitten as
children by the mythos of the West, and as adults, writing was one way to
survive here. You could create your books, articles or screenplays without
living in New York or Los Angeles, and you could do so in an extremely loose
manner. I started profiling writers
because A: I was interested in their work, and B: because I wished to see how
their lives embraced the West. My long piece about Thomas McGuane and Livingston
during the manic 1970s is case in point. The huge profile of Gary Snyder is
another. Snyder did it on a subsistence basis, with a community of activists
and writers accompanying him. I believe the settlement of the West by artists
and writers, in the mid-to-late twentieth century, will be seen to be as
important as that of cowboys or miners in the nineteenth.
BP: You’ve interviewed some of the
biggest names in the literary and artistic West. Which were your favorites?
TT:
James Lee Burke was particularly insightful, and I got to play country guitar
with him. Gretel Ehrlich was determined in her remarks and purposeful in her
life; she has been struck twice by lightning, and I hiked through a
thunderstorm with her. Tim Cahill is the architect of contemporary adventure
writing, and his thoughts on risk and why we seek it are riveting. Peter Fonda,
if only for his work in Easy Rider,
is etched into film history, and I got him out on a motorcycle—perhaps the
first journalist to have done so. Thomas McGuane may be the most brilliant
writer I’ve met, and as a Middle Westerner the life he’s created for himself in
Montana is exemplary. To have partied with him, Hunter Thompson and Jimmy
Buffett in the same summer is memorable. The godfather of Western writers, William
Kittredge, was a rancher before he became a writer, and as the eldest of this
bunch, is suffused with wit and wisdom. Robert Redford is Robert Redford: a
cinematic legend. And his filming of A
River Runs through It in 1991, which I track in “A Private River,” changed
Montana as forcefully as had cable television. River did it through the fly fisherman invasion, which amped up
gentrification and its attendant woes. Gary Snyder, whose voice and
determination Jack Kerouac captured in his 1958 novel, The Dharma Bums, is larger than life. To have slept and hung out at
his Sierra Nevada home, to say nothing of having hiked with him, were unique
experiences. And he taught me Zen meditation.
BP: Gary Snyder taught you to meditate?
TT: Yes indeed. He’d built a zendo at
Kitkitdizze, his mountain retreat, and a meditation group—Ring of Bone—practices
there. I wanted to sit with them. One afternoon Gary took me to the zendo,
perched beside me on a cushion, taught me the rudiments of posture and breathing,
and schooled me in what to expect during the three-hour ritual. I have those
instructions on tape.
BP: Many of the figures you profile here had difficult childhoods,
and Snyder is no exception. You seem drawn to these types.
TT: My childhood was thorny, to say the least. And Snyder’s was
abusive; he describes his mother as having had a temperament that was “almost
multiple personality.” He survived her beatings and other mistreatments in a
remarkable way. He’s a testament to the introspection and hard work necessary
to repair character flaws. He’s described Zen as “the crispest example of
the‘self-help’ branch of Mahayana Buddhism.” And self-help is of course a
boomer preoccupation, though it’s always been with us. Gretel Ehrlich expresses
this in the quote I use for the epitaph of my book: “Riding the rough string...you
get bucked off and you get back on. You understand what you did to make the
horse scared. And you don’t become a victim.”
BP: What’s next for you?
TT: This afternoon, the Wilsall Rodeo. Then continued revisions of
a novel I’ve completed.
BP: About the West?
TT: About the East. It seems you can go home again.
