85
w w w. d i s t i n c t l y m o n t a n a . c o m
her two children, cats, dogs and horses near Rattlesnake Creek.
He and Ripley traveled through time and space together.
Our memories of time and space are hard to grasp for certain,
especially as we age.
Shuffling my memory of the what with the when of the last
time I encountered Richard Hugo folds as a maybe then within a
story from his autobiography The Real West Marginal Way.
We know Hugo was in Washington, D.C. where I lived in Jan-
uary, 1980. He came there then for a White House national cele-
bration honoring American poets created by First Lady Rosalyn
Carter.
Possibly that was when this happened.
Hugo was invited to give a reading at Washington's oh so
elite Cosmos Club where he needed to wear a suit or at least
sports jacket & a tie, not the preferred apparel for him or me,
yet I too donned a suit & tie and wrangled an invitation to this
reading coming six years after my first novel Six Days Of The
Condor (written in Helena, sold from Missoula) launched 1975's
Robert Redford movie, 2018's Max Irons TV series and my lucky
career that in 1980 had me also muckraking for Jack Anderson's
syndicated investigative reporting column that then appeared
in 1,000 newspapers.
Imagine: An America with 1,000 newspapers.
My heart beat with joy to be in the Cosmos Club listening to
the poet who'd taught me so much—including much that I had
yet to fully grok.
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Hugo was a mentor
and friend to James Welch,
A DIED-TOO SOON MONTANA AUTHOR OF SUCH
BOOKS AS THE INDIAN LAWYER. BROWNING-BORN
WELCH WAS A POET, TOO, YET AS HUGO PREDICTED,
HE FOUND HIS REAL HOME IN FIELDS OF FICTION.
