Western Book Roundup

How Anton Chigurh from “No Country for Old Men” Got My Son’s Sippy Cup

By Jenny Shank, 9-09-09

Has anyone else out there ever been on a hike gone awry that feels like something out of Cormac McCarthy‘s No Country for Old Men is about to happen?  Over the weekend my family and I decided to explore some nearby open space.  We pulled off on the side of a road in a rural area outside of Boulder and hiked up a yucca-and-prickly-pear-filled hill.  We discovered that the baby had pitched his baseball hat somewhere along the way.  We looked for it on the way down and couldn’t find it.  There was no trail, the vegetation was scratchy, and I was the only one wearing jeans, so I went back to search for the hat while my husband fed the kids snacks by the car. 

I didn’t find the hat, and on my way back down a man that sounded a few yards away yelled a string of expletives at someone else, startling me because I thought I was alone.  A man emerged from the underbrush and started walking down the road toward my family while I watched from the hill.  He didn’t look like the hiking sort—stocky and dressed in black urban clothes, dark-haired, with a whisker-stubbled, scarred-up face. 

I thought, where have I seen this before?  And I remembered the scene in No Country for Old Men where Anton Chigurh is about to dispatch a guy pulled over on the side of the road with a cattle bolt gun.  So I start to gesture at my husband to convey I don’t know what—a Cormac McCarthy villain is approaching?  What would the sign for that be?  I just sort of waved my hands and mouthed “NO.”

Chigurh approached my husband and I couldn’t hear what he said.  I hoped it wasn’t, “You know how this is going to turn out, don’t you?” (Later my husband told me that he said, “Are you going down south?  I’ll give you some money.” Which is kind of a Chigurh-like line.  Except for the money part.  My husband told him, “Sorry, we have to get home.") Chigurh continued down the rural road, miles from any town.

When I reached my family a few seconds later, I said that we needed to get out of there—I didn’t know if Chigurh had an accomplice out there in the underbrush, the person he’d yelled at, or if he had just been talking into a cell phone or to himself.  So we sped off and something clattered down from the roof of our car as we passed Chigurh.  He dove after it, and when we turned around to return the way we’d come down the road, we saw Chigurh sitting on the side of the road, refreshing himself with the water from our son’s sippy cup.

As Anton Chigurh is a fictional character, it probably wasn’t him, but with my acute sense of mother’s paranoia and tendency to get wrapped up too much in books, it might as well have been. 

Has anyone else out there had an experience where you confuse fiction with reality, or in which something you learned from reading a book informs your reaction to a situation?  If so, leave a comment and share your tale.

Okay, enough about my imagination run amok.  The National Museum of Forest Service History is sponsoring an event in Missoula today with the author of Barebow!, Dennis Dunn, a guy who would be very useful to have around during an encounter with Anton Chigurh.  According to a press release, “the book contains 104 hunting stories from Dunn’s 40-year, successful quest to complete the North American Super Slam with a bow.” Dunn will sign books at the Hilton Garden Inn in Missoula at 11:30 a.m.

Montana native Janet Skeslien Charles, is kicking off her book tour for her debut novel Moonlight in Odessa today in Shelby at the Prairie Peddler where she will discuss and sign her book twice, from 10 a.m. to noon and 1 to 4 p.m.  Then she’s off to Helena (Montana Book Company, September 12, 12-2 p.m.), Billings (Barnes & Noble, September 17, 7 p.m.), Great Falls (Hastings, September 20, 2-4 p.m.), and Missoula (Fact & Fiction, September 23, 12-1:30 p.m.).  Her book is the comic tale of Daria, an ambitious young woman in Odessa, Ukraine, who seeks to pull herself up in life by working for an international matchmaker and seeking her own love match.  Watch for my interview with her soon.

Until next week, happy trails, and I hope nothing out of Cormac McCarthy happens to you…or out of Annie Proulx or Thomas Savage or…

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