Distinctly Montana Magazine

55 w w w . d i s t i n c t l y m o n t a n a . c o m R OBERT SIMS REID—BOB—HAS LIVED IN MISSOULA SINCE 1975. He grew up in Winchester, Illinois, on what he de- scribes as "the kind of farm that doesn't exist anymore." Win- chester's population has been around 1,600 for 120 years. He notes its lack of a grocery store. You might wonder, who is Bob Reid? You may have missed Mon- tana's zenith of homegrown crime novels in the 1980s and '90s: Crumley, Jackson, Reid. He wrote authentic Montana cop tales because he was one. Titles like Big Sky Blues and The Red Cor- vette received national acclaim—and intrigued French readers. By the millennium, though, the novels stopped coming out. "Well," says Reid, "the books didn't make anybody any mon- ey." He sits with a cup of black coffee and a fine view of the mountains in the shade of his back porch. Birds sing. A Buddha statue faces from a tranquil back yard. The books may have stopped, for now, but he still writes. He writes for what the craft means to him, not the market. After years of balancing full-time police work with a literary career, sleeping four or five hours a night, he now writes at his own pace. Reid first experienced Montana in 1969. The Air Force brought him to the radar station at Lakeside in the Flathead Valley. He remembers bus rides to radar towers atop Blacktail Mountain. The bus climbed above valley inversions, and the mountains surrounding Blacktail appeared as "islands" in an ocean of clouds. The bus would get stuck behind a resident moose. Why didn't the driver honk the horn? He tried that once; the moose tore the radiator off the bus. He came to the Flathead with his wife, Gayle, to whom he is still married. Montana impressed the newlywed couple as the kind of place they would like to settle down. Reid had wanted to be a writer since elementary school, but didn't know where to begin. After the Air Force, he majored in geography at the University of Illinois in Champaign. There, he took his first creative writing class. His professor demysti- fied the art. "It's like you are a mechanic," Reid realized, "and there are tools you can learn how to use." Because it was the only MFA program he had ever heard of, he applied to the Iowa Writers' Workshop. "They sent me back a nice letter that said, basically, it's real hard to get in here. You probably can't be- cause, really, nobody can…unless they're struck by lightning. Here's a list of all the MFA programs in the country." In that directory: The University of Montana. Reid still listens to recordings of local bands like the Mission Mountain Wood Band and Big Sky Mudflaps, popular when he studied writing at UM. The music reminds him of Montana's freeness and easiness, especially during his early years here. He's never fallen out of love with the landscape. There can't be another morgue in the world that has a view like this, he thought once: An investigation brought him to an autopsy on a day you could see into the Bitterroot Valley from the sixth-floor morgue window of the old Saint Patrick's Hospital. And Reid doesn't mind the long, gray Missoula winter. Though he admits, "Feb- ruary in Missoula separates the truly despondent from the merely depressed." Nature is a redemptive force in Reid's fiction and life. For rejuve- nation, he goes where there's, as he put it in one of his novels, "no city, no story." But, "the green of a thousand million trees, and the brown of rocks and of late summer grass and hidden elk, and the smart blue and white of sky. And silver. The silver of lakes." Reverentially, he tells of backpacking with his grandson in the Rattlesnake and awakening just after daylight to find a black bear sow with two cubs, watching them from high in a tree. Right after graduating from Illinois, Reid wrote an inquiry let- ter to William Kittredge, then head of UM's MFA program. Kittredge wrote back, explaining the application procedure. "But don't just come out here," Kittredge told him. Reid dis- regarded. Upon his dead-of-winter arrival, he walked into Kittredge's office and introduced himself. "You said, don't come. But here I am." "Well," Kittredge said, "you might as well start coming to class now," and Reid audited creative writing courses until official admission into the program. The '70s were a golden age for the University of Montana's MFA program, when, besides Kittredge, Madeline DeFrees, Earl Gantz, and Richard Hugo taught graduate-level creative writ- ing. "He was a very nurturing teacher," Reid says of Hugo. "You know, he would never just tell you something was awful." Hugo might instead "look at you over his glasses and say, 'I'm not quite sure what this means, but it's very interesting.'" Reid connected by ROSS PETERSON

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