Bert Gildart: Writer and Photographer

©Bert Gildart: Commemorating a landmark passage in age, I’ve been reviewing pictures forwarded by friends and family, using them to help me evaluate life altering choices I once made. Were they good ones?

First thoughts.  In most cases I shudder to think what might have happened if I’d followed other roads.    Why I might have become an accountant, an engineer — an officer and a gentlemen.

But that’s not what happened.  Instead, I heard other drummers, though it took much trial and error to reach my destiny, for I was attempting to veer from the military tradition created by generations of high-ranking and insistent forefathers, and sometimes rebellion got in the way.

L to R:  Confused and floundering young man; two, older and creatively searching

In high school and my first year of college, rather than seeking academic success, I boxed; and during those years I became the Alabama state runner up in the Golden Gloves.

INFLUENCES OF MUSIC

Music also influenced me, and there were times when all I could hear was Hank Williams crooning “Hear That Lonesome Whistle Blow.”  And so I headed away from the sanitized environment in which I had been reared and headed west, the most significant move of my life.

Boxing took me to
many places in the South, and though I lost but one fight by a technicality, wisely I got out of the sport.

Nevertheless, I still floundered for awhile and suspect a good name for me during my early years in Montana might have been Bourbon Bert.  But simultaneously I also learned to ride a horse and even got to the point where I could stay on the back of a truly wild cayuse.  I learned to shoot well, and once I dispatched a charging bear with a .30-06.  The bear had killed a young girl.

Rogue bear was created by its
association with garbage dumps, and in1967 it killed a college girl. A ranger friend and I were assigned to find it and kill it.

 

I guess roving might also be called “getting your shit together,” and that’s what happened. As birthdays began to mount I returned to college in Montana.  Upon graduation I became a teacher and summer-time ranger, and then, a few birthdays later, I began working as an Outdoor Writer for a newspaper.  Simultaneously I freelanced and published in most magazines that used outdoor material to include Field & Stream, National Wildlife, and Smithsonian.  I even tried Playboy, but editors there replied that I simply had not covered the subject adequately.

DON’T WE ALL MAKE MISTAKES?

All this is not to say that everything was perfect, and that I didn’t make a few mistakes.  But then that’s what birthdays are for.  They’re intended to instill wisdom, and I finally concluded that Playboy was not for me.  As well, a very good part of my past caught up to me.  I found a girl I had dated in high school.

L To R:  Photography and writing have become not only an avocation
but a vocation; two, photography has taken me all over the globe; three, peripatetic Janie, my kindred spirit.

In 1991 I married Janie and that inaugurated a genuinely adventurous period of time.  Together, we’ve shared 25 more birthdays — highlighted by months on the Yukon, hikes through the Arctic Refuge and a very meaningful association with the Gwich’in Indians. More recently it has inaugurated explorations of North America in an Airstream trailer resulting in literally dozens of travel stories.  It also marked a period during which I’ve produced some of my best works.  Significantly Janie and I have coauthored several hiking books and I authored several celebratory books on national parks and scores of magazine stories.

Because of the sterling life I’ve led I’m anticipating that I’ll add another quarter of a century to my current tally. If that proves to be the case, I plan to spend the years with my children — and of course with all family members – helping, I hope, when I can.  Perhaps, too, I’ll come out of retirement as a Golden Gloves boxer and return to a symbolic ring to help others fight for the things that have come to mean so much to Janie and me.  In a nutshell, that would be the diminishing quality of life I firmly believe we have lost because of our vanishing wildlands.

In another quarter of a century I’ll provide a tally detailing those birthday years.  I hope you will check in, for I expect to be wise beyond my years.  Some of you already are, I know, and I hope for no less.

——————-

 

THIS TIME LAST YEAR:

Raccoons At Our Feeder

This entry was posted on Friday, July 10th, 2015 at 6:32 am and is filed under Outdoors. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.