But Tom Robbins lived a long time. He was 92 when he died Sunday. Still … I wish he’d written just one more book. I could never get enough of him.
I never met Tom Robbins. But I came close. It was long ago, back in 1990 or ‘91, when I was North Dakota’s tourism director. My phone rang one morning when I was in my office on the Capitol Grounds. I answered.
“North Dakota Tourism. This is Jim.”
“Is this Jim Fuglie?”
“Yes, how can I help you?”
“Are you the guy who put up those goofy billboards?”
“Yeah.”
“I saw your picture on the front page of the Los Angeles Times with the billboard about Gen. Custer.”
“OK. How can I help you?”
“I’m calling on behalf of Gus Van Sant. Do you know who he is?”
“Yeah, he’s the movie guy, right?”
“That’s right. Gus is getting ready to make a movie, and he’s scouting for a place to shoot it. I’m wondering if you’d be willing to help him.”
“Well, sure. What’s the movie about? How can I help?”
“He’s flying to Bismarck tomorrow. Could you pick him up at the airport and take him for a drive to the Bad Lands?”
“You bet!” I almost shouted into the phone as I tried to keep from falling off my chair.
The lady gave me the details. Van Sant, who hadn’t really made his mark in the film business yet, but later did with such movies as “Finding Forrester,” starring Sean Connery; “My Own Private Idaho” with Keanu Reaves and River Phoenix; and, later, “Goodwill Hunting” with Matt Damon, Robin Williams and Ben Afleck, was going to make a movie of Tom Robbins’ book “Even Cowgirls Get The Blues,” and since the book was set in the “Dakota Bad Lands” (the word “North” never appeared in the book, to my recollection — it was always just “Dakota” — see, I told you …), Gus thought he ought to go there and see what they looked like.
We hung up. I was beside myself. (Tom would like that phrase.) Gus Van Sant. Tom Robbins. North Dakota. On the big screen. Wow! This was a tourism director’s dream come true.
I had seen a Van Sant movie. “Drugstore Cowboy,” starring Matt Dillon. It had come out a year or two earlier, I think.
But more — I was already a big Tom Robbins fan. Maybe the biggest Tom Robbins fan in North Dakota, along with my friend, Lucy Calautti. Lucy, the wife of U.S. Sen. Kent Conrad had already moved with Kent to Washington, D.C., to be chief of staff for Kent’s protege, Byron Dorgan, who was representing us in Congress. She and I exchanged Tom Robbins books in the mail as I recall.
I had read a bunch of Tom Robbins’ books, including “Still Life With Woodpecker, Another Roadside Attraction,” and not long before that phone call, “Skinny Legs And All,” and, of course, “Cowgirls,” my favorite so far because I was pretty sure that the “Dakota” he talked about in the book was my Dakota, not the Dakota of my friend Susan Edwards, the South Dakota tourism director.
After I caught my breath, I started planning our road trip. “Even Cowgirls Get The Blues,” like Robbins’ other books, was a wacky story, some say completely written while Robbins was on LSD, which you could believe if you’ve read it, or seen Van Sant’s movie. I could believe the LSD part. I mean, he wrote in “Cowgirls,” completely astray from anything else in the book, a random thought that read, “The normal rectal temperature of a hummingbird is 104.6. The normal rectal temperature of a bumblebee is calculated to be 110.8, although so far no one has succeeded in taking the rectal temperature of a bumblebee.”
The nitty-gritty of “Cowgirls” was a story about a young woman with enormous thumbs, which she put to work as a professional hitchhiker, heading west to join a group of cowgirl whooping crane “rustlers” living on a ranch called the Rubber Rose Ranch, in the Bad Lands, trying to hold hostage the last flock of whooping cranes in the world, which were sitting on a lake called something like Siwash Lake in the Bad Lands. I think that was it. It’s been 30 years or so since I read it.
I don’t know how Robbins came up with that, but I immediately said the Logging Camp Ranch west of Amidon, south of Medora, was the perfect setting for the movie, and the nearby White Lake National Wildlife Refuge was the perfect home for the whooping cranes. I had the film credits rolling in my head within minutes.
By that time, Logging Camp Ranch owners John and Jennifer Hanson had created a tourist business, with cabins and a log-built headquarters to host visitors who wanted a Badlands experience. It could probably hold a dozen people, although that would be a bit crowded, but there was camping. … And Medora with all its visitor facilities was just up the road. Perfect, I thought.
And so, the next morning I went to the airport. And there was Gus Van Sant. Gus, I knew, was openly gay, and traveling with him was one of the most beautiful young men I’ve ever seen. At the time, Gus was about 40, and not bad looking himself, and the young fellow in his early 20s. They made a pretty nice-looking couple.
We hopped into my Isuzu Trooper and headed for the Bad Lands. I had decided not to take the freeway, but to head south from Mandan down to state Highway 21 and then west, a much more scenic drive. And we had plenty of time. Highway 21, which starts about 20 miles south of Mandan, is a straight shot across western North Dakota to the Logging Camp Ranch, although the last 15 miles or so are gravel. Scoria out there.
We talked of their plans, and I pitched North Dakota for all I was worth, as we passed through Flasher, Carson, Elgin, New Leipzig, about a hundred miles, and Mott. Time for a lunch stop.
Serendipity. Mott was the only town of any size nearest the Logging Camp. And I was pretty sure that Tom Robbins had done his “Dakota” homework, because in “Cowgirls,” the nearest town to the Rubber Rose Ranch was “Mottburg.” I thought that might be a deal closer.
But they were strangely quiet about it over lunch at the Pheasant Café. We got up to pay, and at the glass case where the cash register was sitting, there was a telephone sitting beside it. Gus asked politely if he could use the phone. The waitress said, “Sure, go ahead.”
Gus took a phone card (remember those?) from his wallet, picked up the phone, dialed the operator, and called Tom Robbins. No shit! We waited. The next thing we heard was “Tom, this is Gus. You’ll never guess where I am.” Pause. “I’m in Mottburg.”
A short conversation ensued, and Gus promised to call Tom after the trip was over. I stood, awestruck, beside the counter. Beside Gus Van Zant, talking to Tom Robbins on the phone! At the time, it may have been the highlight of my life. More than 30 years later, I can still feel the goosebumps.
That was as close as I ever got to Tom Robbins. Gus and the pretty man and I went to the Logging Camp. We stopped beside White Lake. We drove to Medora on the back roads. I showed the two of them Medora, including the old Rough Riders Hotel, the newer Bad Lands Motel, and the brand-new AmericInn, and we stopped at the Visitor Center at Theodore Roosevelt National Park, and then headed for Bismarck on Interstate 94.
I dropped them at a hotel in Bismarck and never heard from them again. I read somewhere that the movie, which, in my opinion, and the opinion of most critics, was funny, and fun, but not very good, was filmed in Oregon, where the infrastructure for making a movie was closer than what we offered in “Dakota” (that would be Minneapolis, I suspect). One critic wrote, “The novel was hopelessly dated, and there is not enough peyote in the entire American Southwest to render this movie comprehensible or endurable.”
I found a long review with mixed feeings online today. You can read it here. It’s worth clicking on, just to get a glimpse of Uma Thurman’s huge thumbs.
Sigh. Tom Robbins is dead. But “Skinny Legs And All,” “Another Roadside Attraction,” “Still Life With Woodpecker,” “Half Asleep In Frog Pajamas,” “Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates,” and yes, “Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, live on.”
