Getting 2 Know Bruce Hunter

BCB: What’s the best book you’ve read lately, and why?

Bruce Hunter: The best collection of essays I’ve read lately is Wallace Stegner’s When the Bluebird Sings at Lemonade Springs, after a line from Woody Guthrie’s “Big Rock Candy Mountain”.

Stegner’s range is wonderful. His meditation on his mother 54 years after her death, and how she influenced him, both good and bad, is poignant and unsentimental in the same breath. He recalls how her last words to him were perhaps a curse: “Be a good boy, Wallace.” Stegner then details a life trying to undo and yet honour those words.

In another essay, Stegner rails against Mormons monopolizing water rights in early Utah, and by that, how they gained control of the state.  Stegner was a early member of the Sierra Club, an environmentalist, a novelist and essayist, as well as an English professor.  His Wolf Willow, a memoir of growing up in southern Saskatchewan, is a Western classic, which allowed me to see the prairies of my Calgary youth in print for the first time. I’m so thankful for Stegner’s parallel gifts of passion and insight. He shows me how to write about family, about the land and about politics.

BCB: Where do you feel most comfortable, and why?

Bruce Hunter: Perhaps not surprisingly, one of the places I feel most comfortable in Alberta, is Kootenay Plains, a vast alpine meadow in the Rockies, forty miles west of Nordegg, and about an hour and half drive northeast of Banff.  I’ve written  poems about these Plains, notably “Two O’clock Creek”,  about the magic of water appearing anywhere, especially on a mountain meadow – and on time!  From that poem came a novel, In the Bear’s House, about a deaf boy coming of age in the wilderness.

Kootenay Plains has claimed me.  It’s where I go to escape.  The blonde grass riffles in the coastal wind that comes through the chute of Howse Pass, over the Great Divide, bringing warm winds, even in winter, to this parched plain on top of glacial silt. Kootenay Plains has been a haunted and holy place for thousands of years for aboriginal peoples, especially the Kutenai, for whom the plains is named, and the Nakota First Nations.

Many families are buried there, including my own.  Black bears swim in the jade waters of the Upper North Saskatchewan River and white tail deer mingle in the pencil-thin aspens that line its ridges and the remnants of over-hunted Bighorn sheep climb the slopes of the front ranges.  And thankfully too, there are people; many people in the summertime.  Every year there are sweat lodges and a Sundance.  This is the place I wander in my dreams, between the highest point of land and the sky. Where rivers are made, from glaciers and sun.  Go there. See for yourself.