insight pared

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DISTRUSTING THE MEDIA

 

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Tip o' the Day

Campfire Cooking

The very first imperitive for proper campfire cooking is to control your heat. Since there are no twist-knobs to regulate temperature on a campfire, the only effective way to control heat is through the size of your fire. Controlling fire-size means wood can only be added in limited amounts. Translated, that means by the cook, or at the cook's direction.

Read my lips: a cooking fire is NOT a warming fire. If scorched casseroles and charcoaled cookies are what you wish, then by all means serve up a meal cooked on a blazing campfire fed by the equivalent of an out-of-control Boy Scout troop who, each and every one, insists on crowding around to dry out or warm up, or soak up a modicum of campfire ambiance. If that's the kind of camping situation you find under foot, kick 'em out! Tell 'em to go find their own wood and build their own fire. Then, after a while and you've grilled steaks and roasted corn and potatoes to perfection, and called the others to eat, and they've helped themselves to full plates and returned to their own campfire, THEN you can kick back and enjoy private dining in the pleasant atmosphere of your own quiet campfire.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Cheek takes the struggle beyond the usual disputes over land, animals and political power, beyond the race and divisions that leave [Jethro] Spring caught between the Native American blood of his mother and the so-called civilized world of his white father. While all these elements drive action in the novel, what sets the book apart is the struggle for men's minds.

* Billings Gazette

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Jane -

Last night I grabbed Gunnar's Mine to finish it. I was exhausted when I was through and hoped I could sleep. But would you tell your prolific husband to let that poor boy / man, Jethro, have a vacation. I'm taking up a collection to finance a carnival cruise for him. If he can't have his own little farm with a pretty adoring wife, then let him have a riproaring time on a cruise.

* Genevieve DeBrecht Whitefish, MT

An email came from 13-year-old "molester" telling what he thought of Echoes of Vengeance. It was to the point:

"roland cheek kicks a--"

I sent "molester" [Ethan Lester is his real name] a Bloody Merchants' War in order to discover more about him. Watch this space for our exchange

WHEELCHAIRING WILDERNESS

It was a little over 22 years ago when I first penciled the following column on the back of wadded-up scrap paper, using my saddlehorn for a writing desk. At the time I was a scribbling wannabee instead of a journeyman journalist and didn't have the foggiest idea that what I was looking at had all the elements of a major wire-service scoop. Besides, at the time I was less than skilled at the craft; perhaps why one of Montana's top daily newspapers spotted my rudimentary effort and sent out a real writer to interview my subjects and come up with a scoop that was picked up by the Associated press and carried in newspapers across the land.

Indulge me, will you? I think I'm a better writer today and I'd like to take another crack at the story that, had I been ready might've established Roland Cheek alongside the likes of Royko, Ruark, or Red Smith. (Okay, okay! But I would like to shame my high school English teacher who flunked me--twice!)

July 18, 1984 - I waved to the party camped between the trail and river. Encumbered with a lumbering packstring, as well as loitering neurons, I traveled a few hundred yards before it hit me that one of those guys had been sitting in a wheelchair twenty trail miles into the Bob Marshall Wilderness! I tied my packhorses to trees, then trotted back to their camp.

The name of the man in the wheelchair was Don Hanson. Hanson hailed from the tiny hamlet of Condon, in Montana's Swan Valley. He did not, as I supposed, ride a horse into the Bob Marshall Wilderness, then transfer to the wheelchair for rafting down the South Fork of the Flathead River. Instead, he and two Condon friends, Peter Meyer and Kurtis Berry, set out from road's end in the Valley of the North Fork of the Blackfoot (south of the Bob Marshall) on July 1, pushing Don's wheelchair toward "the Bob."

It took 4-1/2 days to travel up the Dry Fork of the Blackfoot before even reaching the wilderness boundary. Then it took 4-1/2 additional days to reach the junction of Danaher Creek and Young's Creek, where they were able to inflate their raft and begin floating downstream. All in all, the men "wheeled" it well over 40 miles. The three adventurers trailed a packhorse to carry their camp gear and food. I talked with them about their amazing experience and the obvious difficulties encountered.

Don: "Kurtis led the horse while Peter pushed my chair."

Kurtis: "Sometimes I'd lead the horse ahead and tie it up, then go back and help where the going was tough."

Don: "Lots of places the trail tread wasn't wide enough for the wheels. That was kind of hairy."

Peter: "Then the chair broke down and we had to repair it." I paid more attention to a wheelchair held together largely by binder twine and bailing wire. I shook my head.

Don: "Peter fireman-carried me along some of that cliff trail between Danaher and Basin." Excitement still snapped in the young man's eyes. I sized up the stocky Peter Meyer and turned back to the also husky Don Hanson and again shook my head.

Don: "I've never been so scared in my life! Part of the way I was hanging out over the edge of the cliff." I scribbled on, then the guy in the wheelchair added: "Down on that good trail at Basin, though, we were knockin' off a mile every 30 minutes."

Kurtis: "You ought to take a look at Peter's hands." I glanced at the guy who'd done most of the pushing as he shook tobacco from a pouch onto a cigarette paper, licked the paper's edge, then rolled it. His hands looked--well, uh--used.

Roberta Underwood and Tom Mitchell, also from Condon, were in camp. They'd traveled in by horseback to meet the group at Salmon Forks in order to re-supply them with food. Roberta handed me a cup of coffee.

Two other friends, Ed Aldon of Butte and John Yeager from Echo Lake, had joined the adventurers a day or two earlier, backpacking in from Holland Lake. All seemed aware that Don's and Peter's and Kurtis's journey was epic; something great and supremely challenging and that those rubbing shoulders with them during the doing were also becoming part of a legend in the making; of an adventure that should be shouted from mountaintops as long as annals are written of America's greatest wilderness.

At the time I spotted them and talked with them, Don and Peter and Kurtis had roughly 25 easy floating miles left on the river. Then they must deflate their raft and repack their horse for the final three trail miles skirting the deadly Meadow Creek Gorge, prior to reaching the road and their waiting vehicle. Compared to the 60 miles already covered, what they had left could be considered a piece of cake for three such intrepid Argonauts.

Don's and Peter's and Kurtis's saga is slated to end on July 21. Overall, theirs was a three week trial of fire to beggar the pitty-pat little 50-milers undertaken by the fit, muscles-in-the-eyebrows hordes of other backpackers who, each summer, trek through the Bob Marshall Wilderness proudly, as if they belong in same league as that truly earned by Don's courage and Peter's blisters and Kurtis's three lonely weeks. Before I left their breakfast fire that fine July morning, I asked Don Hanson if he had anything to add about the experience. "We made that son-of-a-gun!" he exclaimed. "We made that baby!"

It seems ironic that there are people who believe roads should be punched into each of America's splendid tracts of God's wild country to enable everyone who cared to do so to drive through. I believe it significant that Don Hanson does not agree. he doubts he would want to visit places with traffic jams and hamburger joints, with disposable diapers and broken beer bottles littering places where he parked his wheelchair, breathed deeply, and filled his heart with nature's finest vistas.

Roland Cheek wrote a syndicated outdoors column (Wild Trails and Tall Tales) for 21 years. The column was carried in 17 daily and weekly newspapers in two states. In addition, he scripted and broadcast a daily radio show (Trails to Outdoor Adventure) that aired on 75 stations from the Atlantic seaboard to the Pacific Ocean. He's also written upwards of 200 magazine articles and 12 fiction and nonfiction books. For more on Roland's current work, visit:

www.rolandcheek.com

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