Jubilee Hitchhiker: The Life and Times of Richard Brautigan by William Hjortsberg

Author:William Hjortsberg [Hjortsberg, William]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Publishers, Journalists, 20th Century, Editors, General, Literary, American, Authors, Biography & Autobiography, Biography
ISBN: 9781582437903
Publisher: Counterpoint
Published: 2012-01-10T08:00:00+00:00

thirty-eight: lit crit

IN THE SUMMER of 1972, Richard Brautigan, Jimmy Buffett, photographer Erik Weber, and I set off for Sixteenmile Creek, a legendary Montana fishing spot. Our directions veered somewhat askew. Finding Sixteenmile on a map, flowing out of the Shields Valley (named for Sgt. Shields, who passed through with Lewis and Clark), we assumed driving north on U.S. 89 was the best way to go, unaware the fishery was located mainly on the huge CA Ranch across the Meagher County line eighteen miles southwest. The correct approach was from the Gallatin Valley, via Maudlow.

Instead, we found ourselves in Ringling, a ghost town named for the circus family whose huge surrounding ranches once grew hay to feed their traveling menageries and the draft horse brigade hauling gilded show wagons down Main Street America. We were an odd quartet, a literary luminary accompanied by three unknown artists. At this point, Buffett’s career appeared to be faltering. He’d struck out in Nashville, bailed from a failed marriage, released an unsuccessful first album in 1970 (Down to Earth sold a total of 324 copies), and recently started working day jobs while singing in Key West bars at night. The songs he wrote over the summer were soon to make him famous. This trip resulted in “Ringling, Ringling,” a melancholy ditty that later graced Buffett’s Living and Dying in 3/4 Time album (1974).

Ringling was indeed “a dying little town.” All that remained of the bank was the fireproof vault, standing stark and alone amid the surrounding debris. Only the bar survived, a squat log building crouching beneath a towering aluminum Matterhorn of discarded beer cans glittering in the late morning sun. We stopped to ask about access to fish Sixteenmile and got the bad news, staying on for most of the afternoon, doing our part to enlarge the alpine empties pile.

Erik Weber remembered an aloof Brautigan sitting at the end of the bar, while the rest of us horsed around playing pinball. “He was talking to the person running the place, this older woman. But he wouldn’t relax. He wouldn’t have any fun.”

Hoping to rescue what was left of the day, we headed later up through White Sulphur Springs to the Musselshell, a slow-moving river the color of coffee and about as fishable as an irrigation ditch. Before we encountered the final sad truth of a fruitless fishing trip, conversation in the car volleyed amiably from front seat to back. Richard grouched about bad reviews from the East Coast literary establishment. I replied that the harshest criticism I ever received came from Ben Stein, a former state senator who had edited the remarkable journals of Montana pioneer Andrew Garcia. A Tough Trip through Paradise was a book I much admired. When I bumped into Stein and his wife outside Sax & Fryer in Livingston the previous winter, I told him so.

Stein said he’d recently read my first novel, Alp. The senator further observed that it was the most depraved and disgusting book he’d ever

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