RISKY OLD MEN

I once said the name “Peter Beard” in the presence of Peter Matthiessen and saw that it had roughly the same effect on the latter as being plugged into a wall socket. “What?” he demanded. “What about him?” I love both Peters, though I’ve only met Peter M. and own all his books but have never owned any of Peter B’s photo books. Just now I googled Peter Beard and discovered that he is the great-grandson of James Jerome Hill, the founder of the Great Northern Railroad which opened the northern prairie to homesteading and provoked the creation of Glacier National Park, which means that he relates to the past of this part of the world in much the same way as Barnaby Conrad III. But Peter Beard himself has become greatly identified with the Kenya of Isak Dinesen. They were only alive at the same time for a brief period, but their spirit was similar. He met her the same year I came to Browning, Montana.

I have always said that this part of Montana was my Africa. Peter B. is a year older than me and very, very rich to say nothing of being very very well connected. He takes fabulous photos with magnificent cameras and then besmirches and adorns the enlarged photos with bloody handprints, tiny India ink drawings, glued on bugs and leaves, anything. He’s a little like Robert Kennedy (who was a friend) crossed with (if you must know) Tim Barrus. And not terribly unlike his Yale compatriot, Peter Matthiessen, except that everyone loves Peter M. and some people think Peter Beard is, well, too much the free spirit. He probably has as much of what he calls “jewelry” in his hips as Tim Barrus does, but because an elephant trampled him, an event that was filmed, right out to the moment he actually died as he was wheeled into the Nairobi hospital. They did revive him and he’s still out there having art shows and getting into trouble, which is like Tim Barrus.

Beard’s specialty is photos of supermodels, meaning very skinny and young women with long necks, like gracile gerenuks, who are willing to take all their clothes off and stand against a background of the least modern African people Beard can find. Splashed with paint, encouraged into extreme poses, adorned with extravagant objects, they are quite stunning. Beard says they are NOT fashion photos and one has to agree. Who would show up at a cocktail party looking like that? The Africans are terrific -- work-worn, humorous, always up for anything. The most famous photo of Beard is the one he took of himself half-inserted into a dead croc. It had only been dead a short time and some of its reflexes remained, so he ended up with painful tooth marks. I’ll bet his toenails got bleached as well. I just rented “Peter Beard Scrapbooks: Africa and Beyond” from Netflix.

I love these kinds of wild and original guys. Yesterday one of our local examples (a good reason for loving Montana), Rib Gustafson, took me to lunch at the Panther Cafe. 84, Rib and his beautiful artistic wife have raised five kids, four of them men, two of those veterinarians like their dad, in addition to a famous singer (Wiley) and a math teacher. They all write, especially Sid. The daughter is a lawyer who has just finished a book on maritime law.

Rib met Bob Scriver for the first time in what must have been the late Fifties after a rousing bar fight that caused him to be jugged until he sobered up. Bob was the City Magistrate who tried Rib's case, but I didn’t ask what the sentence was. The other story Rib told happened in the Nineties. Bob had a pet badger, which can be thought of as either a weasel on steroids or a mini-grizzly. The badger had caught one of its formidable claws under a piece of heavy machinery in the shop and was so frantic that Bob couldn’t get near it to help. So at midnight, happily asleep, Rib’s phone rings and Bob wants help -- NOW. It’s an eighty mile drive, but Rib gets up and heads to Browning where he rendered the badger comatose with a shot. Even the two men working together had to remove the wedged claw to get the animal loose. Rib said when he left Bob was holding “Badgie” on his lap, soothing his beloved pet.

It’s not that I love these extravagant guys because I want a romantic relationship with them. Been there, done that. My thing is that I wish I could live the risky life as they do. I wish I were them. But women in bar fights end up dead and I’m not willing to go that far. The next best thing is to sit across a table or in front of a fireplace and hear all about it. Not that I haven’t managed to do a few far-out things, but it doesn’t matter how liberated a woman is, she still can’t live quite so “large.” Of course, men die along the way, too. Now and then.

Rib has the great advantage of being in a position to do a great deal of good for people and they reward him by watching out for him. In his several books Rib tells about some of his strategies. For instance, once he was called by a threadbare rancher with a cow teetering on the edge of oblivion, a man too proud to go into debt. So Rib proposed that the rancher make him the half-owner of the cow as payment. That way there was a chance the cow would be saved and the rancher would have half a cow -- without treatment he would have nothing. When word got around, Rib accumulated quite a little herd of half-cows.

Society theoretically likes the dependable wage-earner who protects his children and comforts his wife and we do, we do. But we also love the guy who gets out there and tastes everything the world has to offer, risks big-time pain but also big-time gain, and then can tell us all about it. I’m going to watch this movie from Netflix about Peter Beard about five more times before I send it back. Then I’ll try to buy the disc. In the meantime, I’ll watch for Rib or any of his sons, or any of a dozen other resourceful reprobates around here. And, of course, I can email Barrus any time and I do, I do.