I just got the lyric "thousand words a day," and I'm joined by two authors in the Trail Studio for the Trail Lunchbox.
Ednor Therriault, welcome.
Thanks, Mike. It's good to be here.
Anybody tell you you look like Bob Wire?
You know, I think Bob is a little taller, but I think that was in a while.
Yeah, interesting. Ednor Therriault smells a little better, maybe.
Thank you. Like that.
A friend, another author in the Trail Studio today, Philip Burgess. Philip, welcome.
Thank you. It's good to see you. It's very good and very interesting to be here.
Bob got a hold of me. He said I've been helping another author with a project, and Bob, you want to take it from there?
We've got an event coming up at Shakespeare and Company on Agate Street. This is just in time for summer reading.
It is. I'm not just a reading, but it's a release party, an event. My close personal friend, Bob Wire, will be there to open with a couple of songs.
I plan some music.
Sure. Great.
He's a fantastic MC.
Yeah, it's all about Philip and his book. Philip and I've been friends, oh, 12, 13 years. I got involved in a CD project he did. He's a storyteller and poet. And he had a lot of his stories recorded for a CD. I just designed a cover and a package, and we got to know each other through that. We've become really good friends over the years. And I've helped him put out a couple of books.
Then, about three years ago, he tells me, kind of off-handedly, "Oh, I wrote my memoir, and it's probably in there." By the way, where is this memoir?
"Oh, I put it on a shelf six years ago."
So I said, "Well, let me read it." This was almost three years ago. And so this project was planted at that point, and now we're at the fruition.
You strike me as somebody who's not one of those self-promoters, Philip, one of those people that goes out and tells every single person who will listen that you have a book.
Listen, I grew up Norwegian-Scottish. And if I stood up and started telling a story, my mother would tell me to sit down and be quiet.
On the press release or the one-sheet, there's a whole bunch about you growing up on your family's ranch in Eastern Montana. Can you paint a picture of that life?
We were about 20 or 30 years behind the times. We didn't have telephones until the '70s and electricity didn't come in until the '50s. We had a one-room schoolhouse, and the community took care of one another. It was a different time, and it was very separate, very isolated.
Was it an ideal upbringing? What do you feel about it in retrospect?
Clearly, and we'll just say this for some of the non-historians out there, and I can't say I know exactly what the dates are, but the phone had been invented and electricity had been invented. You were in a community just going without those things.
Yes. And I grew up around wounded people. People wounded by World War II, people wounded by the Great Depression. My grandfather was an abusive patriarch and my father was this silent, loyal, quiet guy. But there were such interesting people. It was like growing up in a kind of menagerie, but in the best possible sense. Everybody was interesting.
So I'm a little kid with big eyes and just drinking it all in, just sucking it in.
Tell us a little bit about—we've all kind of known a little bit about that part of the state. Tell us about the backdrop, the natural world.
Well, we grew up—the ranch was on a shelf looking out over the Missouri Valley. We could see something like five or six miles of river from our backyard. And it was very... with badlands on the other side and a lot of... we had 200 acres of woods on the place.
Yeah. I loved that landscape and I still do. It was like a third parent in a lot of ways.
A lot of times folks will move—myself included—growing up in Bozeman and then being in Missoula, and you look around and you see mountains and you say, this is Montana. Well, true story. But you get out there and the badlands have their own beauty. The fact that you can see a storm hours, maybe even a half day before it gets to you. You can see these things. You can see so far. And then you take a closer look at the badlands themselves, you see some really beautiful wildlife, birds.
I used to watch a cloud come over from the west and track it all the way when I was out there. I was very tired because everything was kind of slow motion and everything was understood. But you learned to pay attention.
Did you start writing—were you writing at an early age?
High school. And it seemed to be just something natural. I don't know why I started. It just—because it was kind of a diary. I was a silent, secretive kid. And I think that it was a place that I went to express my reaction to what I saw around.
When did you know there was value outside of what this would mean to you personally or maybe family members following your work? When did you realize or when were you told that, hey, there's other folks that would like to read your work?
I was a drifter, and I drifted through Missoula at one point and I had this pile of poetry—I mean, sheafs of poetry. I didn't know what to do. I was completely naive. Somebody mentioned Richard Hugo. I didn't know who the hell he was, but he was the head of the department. I thought, what the heck? So I go over there, walk into his office with this pile of paper, and I said, "What should I do with this?"
I didn't realize the lady is dying of cancer and the last thing he wanted was this pile of paper. He said, "Come back in a couple of weeks." I came back. He said, "Keep writing."
Oh, nice.
Well, I took it that way, but it didn't occur to me until later that maybe he was trying to get rid of me.
Yeah, just go about whatever you were doing before.
I'm speaking with Philip Burgess, Montana author, who's going to be tonight at Shakespeare and Company. 7 o'clock it gets underway. Our friend Bob Wire as master of ceremonies, playing a couple of songs.
Ednor, that's a great room. I say as you know, from a music standpoint, but that's just—it's a very cool space, Shakespeare and Company. Do you want to talk a little bit about that?
If you've been in there, you know. Exactly. Garth Whitsitt, our good friend, opens up the big room, sets out about 30–40 chairs. And the acoustics—it's just that old building on the corner of Third and Higgins, with the super tall ceiling, the stamped tin surface and all the books. It creates such a great acoustic environment that you don't even really need amplification in there. It's so welcoming, and you have the sun coming in the main front windows. Boy, it's just right there at the foot of the bridge—such a great gathering spot for Missoula.
And dare I say the word curated—but a curated selection of books. Beautiful selection of books of all kinds. And you're surrounded by books. When you're in there, you've got books on all four sides. And that's part of the ambience, I think, especially for the reader.
This is really a privilege for me. Again, I'm Mike Smith. This is The Trail 103.3, joined by Ednor Therriault and author Philip Burgess, Montana author. The event gets underway tonight at 7 o'clock at Shakespeare and Company. You were kind enough—or Ednor, I don't know if you knew this—but he sent me a chapter. Chapter 16: "Gone to Be a Sailor."
Surprise.
I've been reading it this morning, and I'm a little bit hooked. I don't know—I'm going to get this all wrong, Ednor—but I kind of feel like it's got a Carl Hiaasen vibe, maybe a James Lee Burke sort of thing going on, and then maybe a little dash of Hemingway.
Oh, well.
Yeah. I could see all of that in Philip's writing. That was a true pleasure of this project for me. We got to know each other over the last few years just intimately through this project. I also did the audiobook this spring.
Oh, you voiced it?
No, Philip read it and voiced it. We'd go to the house twice a week, set up the mic, and just had a session. In the finished product, you'll hear the occasional train whistle or barking dog or something that just adds to the ambience without taking you out of the story. I was feeling like this story deserves attention. It needs to be seen. It needs to be out there. And I thought, I need to be Philip's champion—his advocate—to help make that happen.
I did the first round of edits. We set up a relationship where we are friends, but he hired me in a professional manner to do this. We would get together and—
Stay everybody honest.
Exactly. He says, "I just trust you when the meter is running and when it's not. You make that call." We never had a contract or anything. He liked that. And it can be dicey to go into something like that with a friend, but it only strengthened our relationship. I constantly checked in—"Is this going okay for you?"—and made adjustments as we went. But it's easily the biggest creative project I've ever been involved in. And I feel very proud of the finished product. I hope that everybody can get their hands on this book and read about—not just its history, its prose, its poetry—its Montana, its Vietnam, its search for personal freedom, which a lot of us are still trying to do in this difficult climate.
But I think this book has a lot of value. I think it's going to be around a long time. It's a unique story.
It's called The Bunch Quitter. What does that mean?
Bunch quitter is—well, we ran cattle, and we had a bunch quitter. We had an animal, a two-year-old heifer I think it was, that just refused to go along with the program. It would run headlong into a corral fence, would run headlong into you—anything rather than be controlled. And so, the bunch quitter is me.
Yeah.
I was 12 years old when I decided I was going to go away. I was not going to be part of society. And I did, 12 years later.
Wow.
But also, a lot of this book really is about the price you pay. The price that that bunch quitter paid when I was a kid was my dad and Uncle Charlotte butchered it out. And the price that I paid kept increasing. I found that price harder and harder to bear as the years went by while I was out there. But I was always cognizant of the price. Like, I had a bad motorcycle accident early on. And I was going, "Okay, this is part of the price. Part of the price of personal freedom—the extreme freedom."
When I was reading Chapter 16, I felt like I was kind of there with you—on the beach, trying to figure out... on a hot night on the Gulf Coast, either you're way too hot in your sleeping bag or you're out of the sleeping bag and you're getting eaten alive by sand fleas. Your writing had me right there.
Reading Chapter 16, I'd like to read more. I'd like to read past that. I'd like to read the first 1 through 15.
I'm blessed by an excellent memory for detail. Putting this thing together, I'm an old man. This stuff happened a long time ago.
Yeah, sure.
But I remember the details very clearly—like the sand fleas.
There's a blessing to that. But also, you're remembering everything. That includes the pain too.
Yes. That was part of my job—to prod him and say, "You need to—if you're going to tell the truth, you need to reveal more of yourself, even if it makes you look bad."
Well, it worked the other way around, because Richard said, "Reading this book, you sound like a jerk the first time through." I thought writing it—the challenge would be not to make myself look better. But instead, what I did early on was I left out all the good stuff. I made myself come across as somebody much worse than I was.
Right. You started out as more of a narrator, but you were the main subject of the book. So I think you have to really strip away some of that protective shell and reveal—even 40 years later—"Now I realize that I was being an idiot," or that "I did leave a trail of pain in certain situations."
And the other aspect of that is realizing that I did some good stuff. There were people who were blessing me all along, and they had reason to come to that. I found myself being kind of a Pied Piper sometimes with kids. These kids would be fascinated by what I was doing and start following me around.
Yeah.
I was hitchhiking from Canada, and I stopped overnight at this little town because the border was closed. I ended up with six kids in this park who adopted me and were stealing food because they were convinced I wasn't eating well enough.
Yeah. What did they call you? Philip? Mr. Burgess? Or just "that interesting guy in the park"?
I have this very sweet memory of sitting in that park in that little town, surrounded by these kids. I don't remember what they called me, but they were almost protective. They went and stole a blanket. We probably had the biggest crime wave that little town had seen in years. These kids went home—got some food and blankets. We went home and ripped off this stuff.
We are looking forward to the event tonight: author Philip Burgess and the book The Bunch Quitter. 7 o'clock at Shakespeare and Company. Bob Wire, MC, and playing a couple of tunes tonight. The book will be available for purchase and for signing.
Did I leave anything out?
The book is available locally. It's a fun read. My favorite part is that the meat of the book is the 10 years that he was on the road in the '60s and '70s—when America was utterly in turmoil politically, socially, economically. And Philip wasn't attached to any of it, technically. He could drift into one circle, out of that, into another. He was always working his way along to earn some money, occasionally staying in one place for a while, then starting to feel a bit too comfortable. That's when he would pull up stakes and get back on the road.
He talks about his candy-orange Honda motorcycle in loving terms.
I did a lot of research on this motorcycle.
Oh, you did?
Because I fell in love with it.
Yeah, like, oh, 750 Honda, man.
CB750?
Yeah, yeah. And in some ways, the history of and what was going on at that time—how things weren't necessarily set up in a sterile environment. The interstate highway system hadn't been created everywhere. There weren't giant travel plazas. So this is something younger readers are going to find quite fascinating.
I avoided the interstates. If they were there, I didn't want them. I took the back roads whenever I could.
On that motorcycle, those back roads are the place to be. And you don't really carry much on a motorcycle. You can't really carry much.
So you just have your essentials?
Yeah. I lived out of basically a backpack. Eventually, towards the end, that changed a little. But minimalist—that was the point. Freedom was the point. I learned when I was 12 years old: I saw that freedom meant owning as little as possible, being fearless. I saw that at the age of 12.
Wow.
And I wanted that. That's what I wanted. I wanted to strip down and see what happened.
And you could see that at 12? That's fascinating.
I saw a hobo. That's what happened. I saw a hobo get on a train. And I realized: That man's free.