Encounter: Montana literature, Robbie Robertson and Haida Gwaii
My bus doesn’t leave until 3:45 in the morning. I pass the time with a walk. Buy spontaneously in a second hand bookstore The Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver, which Liesl in Watchapreague, Virginia, had given me for my birthday last year and then mysteriously disappeared.
As I walk along, the sounds of indigenous music make me ring a front doorbell. Tom opens and after a few sentences invites me in. The next two hours fly by.
Tom explains that the music that had attracted me is by the late Robbie Robertson, who died on August 9, 2023, and who once accompanied Bob Dylan as a member of The Band in the mid-1960s. Robertson grew up in Canada, his mother descended from the Mohawk-Cayuga tribe from whose music the young Robbie was inspired, his biological father was a descendant of Jewish immigrants.
The song I heard from the road was from the album Robbie Robertson & the Red Road Ensemble.
Tom and I chat about his motorcycle trip along Highway 20 through Bella Coola in British Columbia and about the indigenous island of Haida Gwaii, to which, we find out, we both desperately want to travel. Tom gives me the autobiography This House of Sky. Landscapes of a Western Mind by Ivan Doig. The writer and author, who died in 2015, was born in 1939 in White Sulphur Springs – the town of 900 souls where I was at the end of July for the Red Ants Pants music festival. And where Sarah Calhoun’s eponymous work pants for women originate (read here). Most of Doig’s sixteen books and novels are set in Montana. And, of course, he’s something of a legend in his home state.
As I say goodbye to Tom, I feel inspired and elated. I am always grateful for encounters of this special kind, which I seem to experience only when traveling.
By the way, Tom’s dog, a German Shepherd-Greyhound mix, is called “Shotse”, a combination of the mountain Lhotse, in the Himalayas and the German term of endearment “Schatzi” (Darling). His last dog was called Mitzi, another German term of endearment.