Missoula News

Bob Wire Has a Point (It's Under His Cowboy Hat)

Here comes the introduction: “Mr. Speaker, live from New York, it’s Saturday Night!”

Is it in the Constitution that all female Congress members have to wear a scarlet dress?

Obama shook hands with Boehner, Boehner broke down crying. Not really.

Democrats and Republicans mixing it up, sitting on both sides of the aisle. Sheep, running with the wolves! Cats and dogs, living together! It’s madness!

Obama introduces Boehner. Boehner gets standing ovation, is required to act surprised.

Western Book Roundup

The Weird Sisters (Amy Einhorn Books, 318 pp., $24.95), the debut novel by Denver-based writer Eleanor Brown, is earning lots of national praise. USA Today featured it in a recent “New Voices” column, describing the plot in this way: “Three seemingly incompatible sisters, whose father is a Shakespeare scholar, return home to help their mother deal with breast cancer.”

Barnes & Noble picked it for their Discover Great New Writers Program, Amazon.com featured it in their “Best of the Month” list, Cathy Langer, head buyer for Denver’s Tattered Cover, talked it up, Entertainment Weekly and People Magazine praised it, and Janet Maslin wrote for the New York Times, “Eleanor Brown’s debut novel begins charmingly, narrated by three sisters who speak as a single entity.” And The Weird Sisters has just been out for a week.

Also in the Roundup: Cortright McMeel picks his favorite Western novels, Bozeman’s Country Bookshelf has a new owner, and Annie Proulx promotes Bird Cloud in Dallas.

Bob Wire Has a Point (It's Under His Cowboy Hat)

It’s been two years since that unforgettable Inauguration Day, when hundreds of thousands of people froze their giblets off in D.C. to witness Barack Obama take the oath of office. Yo-Yo Ma wailed on the cello, Jesse Jackson wept tears of joy, and Aretha Franklin wore a hat made from the tarp that covers the Washington Nationals infield during rain delays.

Book Excerpt

For 26 years, Carter Niemeyer worked for USDA Animal Damage Control in Montana, where he was a trapper, a district supervisor, and the West’s wolf management specialist. He retired in 2006 from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service as the federal wolf recovery coordinator for Idaho. The following is an excerpt from his new memoir Wolfer (BottleFly Press, 374 pages, $17.99). Niemeyer’s speaking engagements are listed on his website.

Once the shine of reintroduction had worn off, the troubles between people and wolves resumed, each living up to their worst traits.

After returning from a trip to Albuquerque, where the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service was wrestling with problems related to Mexican wolves, there was more trouble in the Ninemile: this time on a ranch in Huson, Montana, owned by actress Andie MacDowell.

Skiing and Snowboarding

On a powder day, there are no friends. That saying is probably as old as the first ski lift, but it’s a dangerous wisdom — as was demonstrated at Montana’s Whitefish Mountain Resort during recent weeks.

Two snow riders – one on skis, the other a snowboard – both plunged head first into the wells surrounding trees at the resort. Hung upside down by their boards, choked by the collapsing snow and wedged by the tree and branches, they could barely move. Or so the evidence suggested.

The first victim 16-year-old Niclas Waeschle, an exchange student from Germany, was unconscious but still alive when he was fished out of a tree well. Several days later he was removed from life support. Then, in early January, Scott Allen Meyer, a 29-year-old probation and parole officer, was found dead after he failed to reunite with friends at day’s end.

The particulars of these separate tragedies broadly parallel a statistical profile of victims of what is clinically called non-avalanche related snow immersion deaths, or NARSIDs. About one-third of victims die with no tree near. But whether in tree-wells or out, nearly all victims are young, male and were riding the snow alone during or shortly after a big storm.

“It doesn’t happen every place every year, and it doesn’t necessarily happen every year,” says Michael Berry, president of the National Ski Areas Association, a trade group. Prodded by his group, ski areas have become more aware of the potential peril in recent years and have taken increasing steps to remind customers of dangers.

Western Book Roundup

Steven Rinella, author of American Buffalo, one of my favorite books from a few years ago, is the host of a new show on The Travel Channel, ”The Wild Within.” My television is not equipped with those fancy channels that you pay for, but there are several amusing trailers for the show available for cheapskates to view on the Travel Channel’s website.  In one, Rinella is out hunting with his brother, who discusses his idea to turn some elk ivories (the molars of an elk) into an engagement ring for his girlfriend.  In another, Rinella takes a boat he made out of a buffalo hide out in the Missouri River in Montana, and capsizes.

The show features Rinella hunting, chatting with hunting buddies, and expounding on his philosophy of only eating the meat of animals that he has killed himself.  You can also catch various Rinella tidbits on his Twitter feed.

Bob Wire Has a Point (It's Under His Cowboy Hat)

I don’t blame Britney. She has a lot of mouths to feed. We all saw what happened when she took charge of her own career. She split from rap, uh, legend K-Fed in late 2007, started flashing her lady bits to paparazzi, then checked into Eric Clapton’s rehab center in Antigua, only to check out 24 hours later. From there it was on to a hair salon in Tarzana, California, where she shaved her head bald. Then it was straight to a tattoo parlor in Sherman Oaks for some new ink. But now this, this takes the cake.

Western Book Roundup

In this week’s Roundup I’ll take a look at some books of special interest to Western readers that will be published during the first half of this year:

January

• Kings of Colorado, the debut novel by Austin’s David E. Hilton is out this week.  To learn more about it, check out my interview with him or the review I wrote for the Dallas Morning News.

• Annie Proulx’s new memoir Bird Cloud is now in stores—it has been getting a strange mix of glowing and/or disapproving reviews.  Among the people who loved it are Tim Gautreaux, who covered it for the San Francisco Chronicle, and Donna Seaman, who gave it a starred review for Booklist.  Not as enamored were Alexandra Fuller and Dwight Garner, who both wrote about it for the New York Times—Garner’s review is really funny. 

Bob Wire Has a Point (It's Under His Cowboy Hat)

How many “troubled,” “unstable” and/or “unbalanced” loners are sitting in their moldy little studio apartments right this minute, having their blood boiled by the hatred and bile spewed by Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Sarah Palin and the whole Fox News cadre, while compulsively cleaning and fondling their oily semi-automatic weapons, waiting for their moment to get their names on CNN, BBC, and the New York Times front page, above the fold? Hundreds? Thousands? Hundreds of thousands?

Who knows? But all they need is a push, and there are plenty of high-profile media blowhards who are willing to supply it.

Western Poets

A few short months after arriving in Montana, I made a point of stopping at The Milltown Union Bar, the working-class watering hole immortalized by Richard Hugo in his poem by that name. The bar, as it was in Hugo’s time, is really called Harold’s, “Harold’s Dine Drink and Dance” the sign reads. Driving west on Interstate 90 toward Missoula you see it at the exit for Bonner and barely need to wet your lips and twist your wrist 10 degrees in order to slice off the highway and circle down the ramp in its direction.