Bozeman News

GUEST COMMENTARY

The political wrangling over wolves since the latest relisting in August is now in full force. It’s unfortunate that we’ve arrived at a place where the only solution that most Montanans see regarding wolves is political in nature.

Looking back over 100 years of wildlife conservation in the state of Montana, political solutions have rarely helped wildlife. In the past, hunter-conservationists struggled mightily to remove political influence from wildlife management, and we were largely successful. The management scenario that was developed, known as the North American Fish and Wildlife Conservation Model, has resulted in the largest rebound in wildlife populations around the globe. This is the model that would be applied to wolves if we could get to a sustainable delisting, and get beyond the pettifogging and the political grandstanding. But for now, we’re at a stalemate. This stalemate has led to congressional efforts to delist wolves: 

Western Book Roundup

October is National Book Month, and there are book festivals throughout the region for the next few weeks—check out our Book Festivals of the West map to learn more about what’s going on in Montana, Utah, Colorado, and Idaho this month.  (The orange books on the map mark the October events.)

• Every year the Lighthouse Writers Workshop brings a notable writer to Denver for Inside the Writer’s Studio, a weekend full of literary activity.  Past guests have included Lorrie Moore, Tobias Wolff, and Francine Prose.  This year the featured guest is Colson Whitehead, the funny, talented author of four novels and one collection of essays.  A few years back, he won a MacArthur “genius grant” for his trouble.  (Also check out his always-amusing Twitter feed.) The festivities kick off on Saturday, October 23 with Inside the Writer’s Studio, an on-stage interview of Whitehead at Jones Theatre (DCPA, 4 p.m., $15-$20).  After that comes the Intuitive Dinner and Drinks, a chance to schmooze with Whithead at Tamayo (7 p.m., $100-$140).  On Sunday, October 24 at the Tattered Cover LoDo, Whitehead will deliver “Five Micro Lectures on Craft” ($50-$65).  Tickets to all three events are $150 for Lighthouse members, $185 for non-members.

Also in the Roundup: the Utah Humanities Book Festival and Jamie Ford’s continued book tour.

TIME TO MOVE ON

Here’s something that isn’t news to anybody. The number of guns Americans own has skyrocketed, but how is this significant?

An incredible--and later proven unfounded--paranoia swept the country starting back in 2008 when it started to look like a perceived anti-gunner, Barack Obama, might become Commander-in-Chief. The rest of the economy tanked, but thanks to Obama, the gun industry flourished and had its best three-year run ever. Firearms manufacturers worked three shifts per day and still couldn’t make enough guns, especially handguns, to meet demand. Not only has the number of handguns owned by private citizens at least doubled, to more than 100 million handguns, about one handgun for every two adults, but sales of long guns and shotguns has also soared. Americans now own at least 250 million guns, more than one per adult, including at least 20 million firearms gun control advocates might call “assault weapons.” The number of privately owned firearms continues to go up by at least 4 million per year, and interestingly, many new handgun buyers are women. 

COULD IT ALL HAVE BEEN OVER ON SEPTEMBER 30?

The founder of Sportsmen for Fish and Wildlife (SFW), a multi-state conservation group that has been aggressively pushing for a congressional resolution to the wolf delisting controversy, claims Montana Senators Max Baucus and Jon Tester, both Democrats, are not his allies.

Instead, he insists, both the Montana Senators worked behind the scenes to actually derail delisting efforts at the same time they were jointly introducing a bill to delist the wolf.

No, I’m not making it up.

Journey to Anaconda

When Tom Vergeront drove his 9-year-old daughter to soccer games around the state, he jokingly told her to “bow down her head” as they passed Anaconda in deference to her female ancestors there. This was before they learned the full story of one of them, Gwenllian Evans, Montana’s first female homesteader and Tom’s great-great-great grandmother.

Evans, a widow from Wales, proved up in 1870 on land in what is now Opportunity. She stayed in the Deer Lodge Valley from 1869 until the time of her death on Feb. 13, 1892, and lived, according to her obituary “a life full of years and noble deeds.”

None of this, however, was known to her descendents. Not to Gwenllian’s great-great-granddaughter, Sallie Vergeront, whose grandmother was left behind in Cadoxton, Wales, when Gwenllian emigrated in 1868. Not to her great-great-great-granddaughter, Jeanne Vergeront, a museum planner from Minneapolis. Not to her great-great-great-grandson Tom Vergeront, who recently took a job at a mill in nearby Deer Lodge, or her great-great-great-great-granddaughter, Kali, the former 9-year-old who’s now an accounting major at Montana State University in Bozeman. 

IN RUSSELL COUNTRY

You ever heard that rumor about Montana being Trout Country? Well, I guess it’s true, sort of, at least in the collective public consciousness. In reality, though, Montana is also Walleye Country.

Especially up in north central Montana, officially known as Russell Country. In July, in fact, with the kind assistance of the Russell Country tourism office, my fishing partner, Gene Colling, and I spent nine days up there trying to prove it.

AGENCY SLAPPED DOWN AGAIN BY FEDERAL JUDGE

Since December 2004 when the Bush Administration talked Congress into tacking the Federal Lands Recreation Enhancement Act (FLREA) onto a must-pass budget bill as a dreaded “midnight rider” and made it the law of the land without public debate or congressional vote, it has been more than controversial. The Forest Service (FS) immediately started illegally interpreting the law as a license to charge the public entrance fees to drive, walk or ride a bike into National Forests and to park along state highways passing though federal land.

Citizens protesting the illegal policy have won court cases in the past (click here for details), but in every case, the FS reacted by appealing with the full force of the federal legal machine until it prevailed over volunteers hoping for a little justice.

GUEST COMMENTARY

On September 14th, Magistrate Judge Mark Aspey issued a ruling in Federal Court in Flagstaff to dismiss a citation I received from the Forest Service for not displaying a Red Rock Pass while parked at the Dry Creek/Vultee Arch trailhead.  In doing so he dealt a blow to the Forest Service’s collection of fees in undeveloped areas around Sedona.

Western Writers

In the second half of New West’s interview with Benjamin Percy, whose debut novel, The Wilding, hits bookstores today, we discuss the characters in the novel, how Central Oregon is Percy’s muse, the many creative projects Percy is working on, and how Percy “could definitely beat [James Franco] in a cage match.”

New West: It seems like all the elements that you wove together in The Wilding are introduced to provide maximum tension in each chapter.  Karen is dissatisfied with her husband Justin, Paul has just had a heart attack, the convenience store employee is angry at them, Graham has asthma.  Is that the goal you had in constructing each chapter?

Benjamin Percy: I’m always trying to ratchet up the tension and raise the emotional and physical stakes in every chapter so that by the end, there is hopefully a sense of explosion.  A slow burn that moves toward an explosion.  I’m doing something similar in my short stories.  They’re not quiet stories—they’re all tamped down with gunpowder.  Only trouble is interesting in fiction, and I’ve got a whole lot of trouble going on in my pages.  It helps keep me interested, and hopefully the reader leaning forward as well. 

Western Writers

Benjamin Percy is a busy man.  The Central Oregon native’s debut novel, The Wilding (Graywolf, 288 pages, $23), hits bookstores Tuesday.  This gripping novel tells the story of a man, his father, and his son taking one last hunting trip into a wooded canyon near Bend that’s slated to be razed for development.  Publishers Weekly wrote, “It’s as close as you can get to a contemporary Deliverance.” Percy is an award-winning short story writer and teaches in Iowa State University’s MFA Program in Creative Writing & Environment and Seattle Pacific University’s Low Residency MFA Program.  Percy regularly writes stories and articles for Esquire, the Wall Street Journal, Outside, and Poets & Writers.  Percy recently sold his next novel, Red Moon, to Grand Central/Hachette.  Meanwhile, he’s writing a screenplay, completing a book of fables, and touring the country in support of The Wilding, with stops at the Wordstock Festival in Portland (October 9), NOW Literary Center in Bend (October 11, 7 p.m.), and the Montana Festival of the Book in Missoula (October 29-30).  I recently spoke to Percy on the phone from his home in Ames, Iowa, about all these topics and more.

New West: You have been traveling a lot recently.  You just returned from the Grand Tetons, right?

Benjamin Percy: Yes, I was in Jackson Hole.  I’ve been doing these Mad Hatter assignments for the Wall Street Journal.  They send me on these weekend adventures.  The idea is, if you get away for two or three days, what can you do?  I scaled a 250-foot old growth Douglas Fir in Oregon and spent the night in it.  This past week I went up to Jackson Hole for three days, did some trails, rafted the Snake, and did a hang gliding trip.