SPEAKER_02 0:21

Welcome back to the Byland Podcast. My name is Emery. Thank you so much for being here, and welcome to Better Backpacking. This is episode 181, and my guest today is Nate Jorgensen. I have had authors on the show before, but I'm pretty sure that Nate is the first fiction author that I've interviewed. And if I'm being honest, I was a little bit hesitant to have him on because when he reached out, I wasn't really sure what the connection would be or was. But after learning more about Nate, his backstory, and pondering a few of the lines in his emails, I it was pretty clear to me that fiction or nonfiction, he was trying to say something. And I really liked what that something was. You'd think that after almost 10 years of podcasting, I'd finally learned my lesson about what connects us all together. But apparently I still have some more work to do there. Nate and I could not be more different. He's long retired after a career in dentistry, he writes fictional novels, enjoys fishing and adventuring around in canoes, whereas I am nearing middle age, in the middle of my career, I'm from the West Coast, really don't enjoy fishing at all, and have done far more walking than I have paddling. Yet I think that we understand each other because we've spent so much time outside thinking and pondering and just kicking the tires. Being quote bored is a gift in the wilderness. Quiet times around a fire or in a tent with no distractions other than the meandering string of thoughts in your head that will lead you to some really interesting places. And I think that is where Nate and I connected. Podcasting has taught me a lot about how to connect with people over a shared mutual appreciation of something. And I never know what that thing uh really is that we'll connect on until it's there. And in this case, I personally felt a turn in the conversation that immediately allowed us to go another layer deep. And I'm curious if you guys thought the same thing or what you think about where this conversation went. I think Nate has spent a lot of time out there, but he's also spent a lot of time inside in a comfortable room doing comfortable things. And I think the contrast there is very clear. He knows it, he talks about it, and you can tell he spent a lot of time thinking about being in both places. If you've enjoyed the recent trend and episodes that I've been putting out, then I think you'll really enjoy this one as well. And if you do, I'd really love to hear about it. If anything in this episode sparks a thought that you feel like sharing, please let me know. You can leave a comment for others to see, or you can just email me directly at emory at byland.co. Either way is fine with me. I just enjoy connecting with you guys and hearing what you guys have to say. And lastly, if you want to help me grow the show and reach more people, the best way to do that is just to share it with a friend or put it out wherever you get your social networking done at. I know that I have said that I will be releasing an episode catching you guys up on life stuff, and I really want to do that. I have it drafted and kind of ready to go, but I think conversations like this one are way more important than my own mental meanderings. But I promise I will get to it eventually. I even have an episode prepared that I should have put up years ago, but I just didn't at the time. And I think it's time to finally let it out. All right, that's it for me. Please enjoy this episode with Nate Jorgensen. Nate, welcome to the podcast.

SPEAKER_00 4:41

Thanks. Thanks for having me.

SPEAKER_02 4:43

Uh, I'm really fascinated to have this conversation with you. And I'll be honest with you, I'm not really sure where to kick off because I like I was telling you before we started recording, I took down some notes uh based on um your emails back and forth and a couple of different things. And I'm looking at this, I'm looking over here at this outline of potential topics, and I'm looking at 50 years of fly fishing, uh, Northwoods of Minnesota, some time in the boundary waters. Uh, there's some floating of a river. Uh but then there's also these different, you're you're an author, there's a book that has an interesting premise to it. But then there's also this quote that you put in your email about uh it's like this. I'll put the quote in like this is bad. And it was in reference to when you don't allow yourself to spend time outside, basically, if you just allow yourself, if you live in a padded room. Um I'm not sure where to kick this conversation off because I feel like we could go into a myriad of different uh directions, but I guess top of mind, like where are you at today? Like, which one of those topics sounds like a good one to dive into?

SPEAKER_00 6:00

Well, uh I'm an old guy. Uh I I retired uh from dentistry a couple of years ago. And I guess you go through life, you're still kind of finding yourself as you get older. Um, you know, I've been thinking about you and the outdoors here. You know, I grew up on a farm in rural Minnesota, and uh, you know, then I spent the rest of my adult life sitting in a little room uh doing dentistry, and you you sit in a little room and you drill little holes and little teeth, and pretty soon you start thinking only little thoughts, and you also become sort of uh you start to assume that you're in charge of your environment. But if you grew up on a farm and you love the outdoors, I'm looking out at a beautiful little lake right here. Um, you realize once you're outside, once you're in a storm, once you're in the woods when it turns bad, you're not really very uh in charge of anything. And you're sort of at the mercy of what's out there and maybe your own wits. So I love that. And that's why I choose to live here because it's beautiful and it's reminds me of my surroundings.

SPEAKER_02 7:13

Um that transition from you you mentioned in an email that you you're you grew up on a cattle farm around these cowboy type characters, yeah. But then you transition at some point in life, to your point, into a dentist's chair. That's quite the and and yeah, maybe you're still fishing, maybe you're still doing some stuff outside, but the majority of your life is not outside. It's inside this padded room, essentially, right? When did you start noticing a shift in your or did you did you notice a shift in uh maybe you or your perspective and and how that room was impacting you?

SPEAKER_00 7:54

Oh, that uh knowledge was always there. Um, you know, you can go to work from eight to five and peer inside, and you know, it's your job. But man, um I discovered the outdoors. I grew up in the outdoors, and I loved it. Just so happened that the guys that sat around me in dental school and college were outdoorsmen. You know, we live about two hours from the boundary waters, canoe area. So we were there often, and um you start to find the love of the outdoors, and you when you're not in a little room thinking little thoughts, uh, you're there. You while you are in work, you're craving that time to get away. And that's been my whole life experience.

SPEAKER_03 8:40

Hmm.

SPEAKER_02 8:42

To to dovetail on the the little room thing and these small thoughts, the quote that you put in your email was when you sit inside in a little room where you control temperature and the wind and the conversation, you begin to think you're actually in control and this is bad, and it causes spiritual damage. What do you mean by that? Like, what is that what kind of spiritual spiritual damage um do you think happens when you think you're in control when you're actually not?

SPEAKER_00 9:14

Well, I I don't know if I'm allowed to say this, but I'm a Christian and I uh I I believe in the Christian Jesus story. And um what you start to find out as you get older is you you're not really in charge of anything. You you uh you pray for understanding and good health and you deal with what comes your way. And when you're in a little room, you're kind of in charge of what comes your way. When you get outside, not so much. And that's a real something that you need to feel, the sense of, well, I'll have to deal with what comes my way and hope it works out. Does that make any sense?

SPEAKER_02 9:56

Yeah, I'm I guess I'm wondering, like, do may what to the person out there that maybe doesn't even realize that they've that they're not in control, like what is that, how does that play out? Like, because pe we have our time managed so well throughout the day. Like we go from this to that, the other. And the people that are spend time in the outdoors, they understand, like, have you ever been caught in a storm or the weather changes or the wind kicks up, or maybe you know, all this forest fire stuff, like you guys had a ton of forest fires in in the north there. We had a ton of forest fires. Those are things that you cannot when it happens and something becomes like real in front of your face, you feel so, so small. But we've built this society around this idea that like when you post a thing to social media, it goes out it potentially millions of people, and you feel like you're this like you have you have a place, you have control over all this stuff. But some people, if you haven't experienced that like um loss of control in the wilderness, you don't know what it actually means. And like there's these different scales. So I'm curious how how someone can I guess how do they know that they're that they're blinded, you know? Like how how can they tell in their own life that they're like, oh, I think I'm in control, but I'm really not.

SPEAKER_00 11:25

Well, you have to have an event, I suppose, because uh it's like you're in control uh until you're not. And uh that's less likely to happen. I suppose if uh power goes out and the room goes dark, you have that sense, but you know, uh you're in the boundary waters and you're canoeing, and it starts to rain and lightning so hard that you have to bail your canoe because you're gonna sink if you don't do that.

SPEAKER_02 11:52

Oh, that's a thing.

SPEAKER_00 11:54

Yeah. If it rains hard enough, yeah. We've been with both of us baling because we had it wasn't up to the gunnels, but yeah, it can do that. Or you you're uh at a campsite and lightning starts to strike all over. Well, you're kind of vulnerable. Um and you have to deal. Storms. I've seen a storm come up and flip a canoe and roll it, you know, not into the lake, but close. Wow. Um, or animals, bears. Um, you know, you just have to deal with what comes your way. It's not as life-threatening as I make it sound, but it can be.

SPEAKER_02 12:31

But I I think what's interesting about that is that someone might be, say they've never experienced anything like that. They're like, why would you keep going back? Why would you keep doing this? Like it sounds too risky. Like anyone that climbs these big peaks and things like that and does anything risky, um, people would be like, Why are you doing this? So I guess why would you, knowing all the things you know and the things you've experienced, why keep going back? Why put yourself in a scenario where you're not in control?

SPEAKER_00 13:01

Well, nobody ever asked me that, but there's a certain adrenaline. Maybe I'm an adrenaline junkie. There's there's a rush with I survived that. I uh and there's things that you enjoy along with it, you know, the uh the campsite, the wood smoke, making coffee over a wood fire, um, all the little things. And not everybody likes that stuff, thank goodness. Uh, I wonder how people could live in Los Angeles or Chicago. I I I couldn't do it. Uh and I think that's way more dangerous than where I live.

SPEAKER_02 13:36

Do you think there's a do you think there's a odd spiritual connection to that idea of putting yourself in a scenario where you have to think on your feet like it's not climate controlled, you don't know what's gonna happen. Um do you think there's a like we're drawn to that for some reason? Because for most of human history, I mean we haven't really lived inside. I mean, we haven't had hot water and clean water. I mean, if you look back back in the day, I just I was just reading something somewhere that even you know the late 1800s, all these guys, like barely anyone, there was no clean drinking water. So like for majority of human history, we're we've lived in the elements. I'm wondering if there's like a weird spirit, not a weird, I don't see weird in a bad way, but like, is is there a spiritual connection that we're lacking that we find somewhere out there in this uncontrolled environment?

SPEAKER_00 14:38

Well, I think there's something that draws us to it. You know, there's a beauty in nature too. Uh sunrises, sunsets, uh, a nice day. Um, sure, there's beauty out there. And and yeah, the something draws us back to it. I guess maybe I'm not capable of answering that, but I feel that pull uh to get back. Um that's just a great question. And I think that's the kind of stuff you talk about while you're poking a stick in a campfire with your buddies. And, you know, we talk about the the answer to that question is probably written on the bottom of a bottle of scotch somewhere, but we haven't found that one yet, you know, as we're around the campfire. So that's just a great question, and that's just what we talk about when we're in the woods or on the way.

SPEAKER_02 15:21

Yeah, right. Sometimes you don't even need to have the answer. It's just like you just throw rocks at something until you figure it out, until you have some, you get tired of thinking about it. Where when did you start exploring uh the boundary waters? And how did you transfer from the cattle farm to fishing and canoeing and the boundary waters and all that kind of stuff?

SPEAKER_00 15:42

Sort of a gradual thing. Uh as a high school senior, I went to my girlfriend's house and her brother was sitting on the front steps reading the book. I said, What are you doing? He said, Well, I think I'm gonna go to medical school. Well, he was a senior in college, and I I remember thinking, Nobody goes to medical school. We're we don't nobody in my family had ever hardly gone off to college. So I thought, well, if you can do it, uh, maybe I could do that. So I kind of started to think about that while I went off to college, and I hung around people that were also thinking about pre-med, pre-dentistry. And then uh my first day in dental school, I sat right next to a guy on my left who was from Duluth that became my best friend, and we did a lot of boundary waters trips, probably too many. We skipped school a few times, which you shouldn't do in grad school. And we went to the boundary waters during the season change. Uh, we caught lake trout in shallow water on flies. Um, one time we forgot to bring food, uh, and we wound up uh eating fish over a fire on a stick, warming up over a fire. So yeah, uh but you just you learn and you grow and you learn to appreciate those times. And now we laugh about the hard times, you know, uh mosquitoes and critters, and you just deal with what comes your way. So that was a gradual transition. And then when I had a job, well, then I had enough money to start to make a little bit longer trips, maybe Montana, some fly fishing trips. And yeah, it was always there. I just was able to grow with it as time went along.

SPEAKER_02 17:33

Did you uh has it sounds like it's always been a part of your um life experience? What is there a specific thing about the boundary waters that always made you come back to? Or did you end up exploring different areas? Or how did how did that kind of grow as you grew?

SPEAKER_00 17:53

Well, probably the thing that drove it for me, and it's a little bit different for everybody. Uh one, I was probably a senior in high school, and my dad came home with a fly rod that one of his cattle buddies gave him. And he turned to me and said, uh, you know, this is kind of that's probably too difficult for guys like us. Well, that was all I needed. Uh so I went out and bought a $2 herder's reel and I started learning to fly fish, and I made every possible mistake that you could make. But the first time I set the hook on a trout, it was like, aha, it was that moment. And kind of, you know, the tug is the drug. Uh that did it for me. And that's kind of what I've been pursuing. The the idea that, you know, I can tie a fly and I can imitate some one of God's creatures, and I can do this correctly. And some a lot of times I don't do it correctly, and you fail. And maybe that's what brings you back. Um, there are some people, and probably I'm one of them, that uh when somebody challenges you and says, Oh, that's too hard, you can't do that. Well, that's why I'm gonna do it.

SPEAKER_02 19:09

What is it? Did you do fish fishing before you found fly fishing? Sure. And what what was it about fly fishing that was so different?

SPEAKER_00 19:18

Um well, uh, you know, it's just entirely different equipment. It's um if you're fishing for rising trout, you know, they're looking for one specific little bug, and you gotta tie a fly there or have a fly that looks like that little bug. And if you do, there's still no guarantee you're gonna catch them. But when you do, it gets back to that aha moment. You you put your fly in the right place, which isn't easy, and you the fish takes it and off you go.

SPEAKER_02 19:50

Sounds like more not that it's not the real fish or uh the whatever the other kind of fishing is. Like sounds like it's a bit of an art form.

SPEAKER_00 19:59

Yeah, I guess you could say that. You know, um fly fishermen get kind of a bad rap for being sort of elitist, and it can get that way too.

SPEAKER_02 20:08

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 20:08

You know, you start you get into fly fishing, you're probably better off to just go ahead and start a heroin habit right away. It's maybe better for your marriage, you know.

SPEAKER_02 20:17

Isn't that like addicting? Was it like you what what that's so funny because I feel like fly fish. I I'm in the Pacific Northwest, so fly fishing is like a really big deal. Like the Deschutes River is right around the corner for the most part. Good one.

SPEAKER_01 20:31

And that's world renowned for like fly fishing, from what I understand.

SPEAKER_02 20:35

And there's fly you can go out on any river, they have the rivers like sectioned off. I don't know how it works up where you're at, but there's portions of the rivers down here where like it's fly fishing only. Like you can't touch it with a different type of rod. And boy, I it's so funny that you say that because like fly fishermen get such a bad rap because they're like, you know, like snobby, you know, snobby fishermen. But it's so funny. It's like it's like the same thing um in archery. If you switch to like a traditional setup and you don't go with a compound, uh a compound bow, you know, like you have a traditional stick and string. It's like the same kind of thing. There's always that thing inside inside the the activity that's like, oh, okay, like you're and and people get really they nerd out on the arrow, right? It's like they they build their own arrow. Oh, you're you're using wood shafts or arrow, you know, the though they're painting them. I would imagine it's kind of the same thing with fly fishing.

SPEAKER_00 21:35

Oh, definitely. Uh it's like the the attitude and and anything that you do like that, whether it's golf or yeah, anything. The the sense of, well, if when you you really understand things, then you'll do them like I do them. You know, well, that's crazy. Uh it's what brings you joy.

SPEAKER_02 21:53

Right. Yeah. Hey, whatever brings yeah, exactly. Whatever brings you my my big thing is like If the backpack that you want to buy makes you go outdoors more, buy the backpack. Like if you look at that thing on the wall and you're like, man, that that inspires you to get outside or you want to figure out what bugs are flying around or whatever. Like if that makes you spend time on the water and makes you be quiet uh in your mind for a minute, like, yeah, let's do that. Let's do more of that. I think that's really magical.

SPEAKER_00 22:29

Yeah, you know, I at my age, I've had uh a knee and both hips replaced because of I imagine part of it is standing up to my butt in ice water for a gen two generations. And uh yeah, I'd do it again. It was it gave me great joy.

SPEAKER_02 22:47

Well, I've I've I've I'm curious, I'd love to hear your thoughts on um getting to know like your perspective on the boundary waters. That is a place that I have always wanted to go to. Um, I've interviewed a few people that have a passion for it. Um, canoeing's not in my vernacular. Uh we just don't have canoe-friendly lakes around here. Like where you're at, that's the thing, right? You portage around. But um, my understanding of the boundary waters, if anyone doesn't know about it, is it's a series of lakes. And there's different, you can just portage from one to the next, and some of the portages are really short and some of them are really long. Um but where what's your perspective on the boundary waters? What what do you think makes it so special?

SPEAKER_00 23:32

Well, first of all, I think it's a place, as I'm getting to know you, you better, you better get there. All right. Uh you we we start for my wedding present, uh uh, I gave myself a Grumman aluminum canoe.

SPEAKER_01 23:48

All right.

SPEAKER_00 23:48

Well, it's so heavy you about need an elephant to portage. It's just such a big heavy canoe. Uh at the time it was the best one you could buy, but now they make lightweight canoes. But you know, you there's thousands of lakes, and there's several entry points. And you go and you put in at the end of the gunflint trail or the sawbill trail or the echo trail, and you pick your route ahead of time, and you hope you pick nice weather, but it can be windy and rainy and it can be terrible. And you better be ready for whatever you get. And a lot of people go there and don't fish, they just want to paddle their canoe around, see the country. The portages can be murderous, you know, muddy, bugs, or it can be short and easy. You just get to pick your own route. So uh knowing you like I do, yeah, yeah, you better get there.

SPEAKER_02 24:42

I want to so bad. You know what's funny though? I feel like I want to experience it with someone that's been there, you know? Like that I want to experience like the boundary waters with someone that like knows the boundary waters. That I feel like that would be so fun. Um, because I'm I'm not gonna do it all the time, right? And I feel like I'd probably get it, maybe I wouldn't get it wrong the first time, but um well, hire a guide the first time.

SPEAKER_00 25:07

There's places, there's people that guide up there, and they'll get you in. You ask them, you know, do you want to see waterfalls? Do you want to see rapids? Do you want to go deep in the you know, and then they're right across the border in Canada, there's Quiteco provincial uh park, and that's more of the same. So yeah, hire a guide and make it as many days as you want to go. And boy, the camping gear, the stuff that's available now is so much better than when I started. You know, we had canvas tents and heavy canoes, and we we we didn't have these little jet fuel things that you could cook on. We were making trying to find dry wood, and yeah, it's different now. And yeah, I think it's the creature comforts are a lot better.

unknown 25:52

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 25:52

Well, maybe that's maybe that's uh maybe that's less of an experience. I guess we can all talk about that too, but you better get there.

SPEAKER_02 26:00

I plan on it. It is definitely on the to-do list. Um in your email, one of the messages that you had, like um the the wilderness gives you space to think. You're obviously you're a writer, you're an author. Um what about the boundary waters, or what about being outdoors allows you the space to think? Like, I even think one at one point there was a line about um like that's kind of where you come up with some ideas, is like to write about stuff. Like, how do you come up with how does that impact your your writing?

SPEAKER_00 26:38

Well, you write what you know about, and when you write, you try to connect um with the human experiences. So you write about fear and love and loss and what you look for. But when you do that, the way to bring a reader into the story is to talk about the smell of a wet dog, or the way the cold wind feels blowing down your collar, or what something looks like, or what the smoke smells like. So you use your senses to bring it into there. Uh, but you know, uh we I got involved in a canoe trip once from uh central Manitoba to Hudson Bay, about a 200-mile trip. Uh it was three Cree Indians and two white guys, and we ran this thing, and it was an adventure of a lifetime. We stayed on the same campsites where Radisson and Grozier and you know Henry Hudson and those explorers had stayed, not Henry Hudson, but um it was pretty wild country. And uh about halfway through it, we realized our biggest concern was polar bears. Yeah, because we were in the Hudson Bay Lowlands, and there's more biting insects and more birds in the Hudson Bay Lowlands than anywhere in the northern in the northern hemisphere. So it was sort of a wild experience. There was wild rivers, uh, it was rapids, waterfalls. It was a life changer. It was, can you do this? And then we got to Hudson Bay, and we went to a place called York Factory, which was the um, let's see, it's the oldest building standing on permafrost in the Western Hemisphere. It was built by the British Navy in about 1820, but it was a trading post that Henry Hudson opened up in 1687, I think. And it'd been there ever since. So when we got out of our canoes, the two Indians that lived there, Jimmy and Betty, were their names, they had a cabin there. They got out and said, Where's your guns? Well, we don't have any guns. They looked at us like we were crazy. Um, we were polar bear food. So uh we broke into a RCMP cabin and stayed there for three days because the airplane that was supposed to come and pick us up forgot about us. So that was an interesting stop. What year? When was this? What year? Uh 1990. Whoa.

SPEAKER_01 29:15

So it was not a whole satellite messaging back in the day.

SPEAKER_00 29:19

No. The apparently the the the wind blew a door shut and that blew the piece of paper off the guy's desk. No, it's pretty much traveling in the north, yeah. So there we did manage to get on a sat phone and called, and he goes, Oh yeah, yeah, I'll be there tomorrow. You know, that kind of thing. So and it worked, worked out fine. But it was quite the adventure. Um as we were going downstream, and the fishing was fantastic, by the way. But as we were going downstream, we met a canoe coming upstream. And I I asked Dave, our tree guide, um, yeah, he'd never been there before either. What's the deal here? And he said, Don't talk to these guys, don't look at them. These are bad men. They were these are moose hunters, don't talk. So we we just passed like two ships passing in the night and uh never saw them again. But there was that sense of, gee, this guy's afraid, and I should probably be afraid too. And you know, that's a little of adrenaline rush there, too.

SPEAKER_02 30:28

What's the story behind that?

SPEAKER_00 30:29

Like, what what made you think they were like they were also maybe he knew these two guys, they were Kree Indians also, and uh I don't know. But I knew I saw fear in his face, so I figured I should maybe be do what he tells me. So it worked out fine. Nothing bad happened.

SPEAKER_01 30:46

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 30:47

But it was like, don't uh, we're not gonna stop and be friends with these guys. So there's no point to that story.

SPEAKER_02 30:56

Well, what what was the what was the um how did that trip come up? Like what made you guys do this thing?

SPEAKER_00 31:04

Well, that was one of those things where one winter day I picked up the phone. I wanted to catch brick trout on a fly rod. And I knew that there was only a few places where you could do that around there. One of them was the Hayes River, God's River. They kind of join. Uh, and so I called a resort, uh a rich white boy resort on a great lake in the central Manitoba, and I said, Hey, you know, brick trout. And he said, Well, nobody fishes for those here, but we're gonna we're just gonna take an experimental run down the Hayes River to Hudson Bay with through our lodge, and we're gonna see what we can find and maybe start to offer this to other people. So, you want to go? Won't cost you anything, and you got to write an article when you're done. So I did. And it was a high water adventure of my life. Um, fishing was great, wrote a little article, had this adventure, and I saw some things I would normally not uh ever see. And um have you are you familiar with Eric Severide? Uh no. He wrote a book called Canoeing with the Cree. Eric Severide is a guy from Minnesota. He was the anchor man for CBS News back in the 1960s.

SPEAKER_02 32:18

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 32:18

Wrote a book called Canoeing with the Cree, and he took a canoe trip from Minneapolis down the Minnesota River over and then went north up through Manitoba all the way to Hudson Bay in 1931. Yeah. Yeah. Uh two guys, two high school boys from Minneapolis. And he wrote a book about it, and it's a famous book, another one you should read. Canoeing with the Cree. Okay. It's still around. You can find it anywhere. Canoeing with the Cree by Eric Zeveride. Okay. And um yeah, it's the the wilderness that you like, that you love, you need to read that book.

SPEAKER_02 33:03

When you were doing all this stuff, um do you ever are you like a history fan? Are you like a history buff? Yep. Do you ever wonder, like, because you it's not you're doing the same thing that people used to do, but like it's adjacent. Like you're kind of in a canoe, you're moving along. It's a little less wild, but like, did you ever wonder, like, how in the world did these guys do this?

SPEAKER_00 33:30

Oh, absolutely. You know, when we were on the Hayes River, we were going downstream. So our only concern was flipping a canoe over in a rapids. Sure. When we got to thinking about guys like, you know, the French explorers in the 1700s, they were coming upstream, which would have been arduous. And they had uh birch bark boats, which required repair and tenderness care because they smash them on the rocks. And they had black powder muskets, and we I know we stayed in some of the same campsites because you could look around for miles and you could see, well, this is where we better stay.

SPEAKER_02 34:10

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 34:11

And uh those guys, that was a tough trip coming upstream, and they were mapping out a new world uh for fur traders. You know, the fur trade made fortunes in Europe about that time. But yeah, you always got to wonder, think of these guys who got here first and didn't know what was around the bend, didn't have any maps, maybe a Kree guide who they could trust or not trust. Um yeah, the history was a fun part of that. And then you get to York Factory, and it check out York Factory on your map if you want to take a look. Um the the trading, the millions of dollars uh of empire that was built at York Factory. So yeah, I love that kind of stuff.

SPEAKER_02 34:58

Yeah, the the the types of canoes in my head while you were telling me that was like I'm a big I haven't mentioned this the last podcast, but I'm a big Lewis and Clark fan. I'm infatuated with the story of Lewis and Clark. But they had like, you know, the the canoes that they used. It's interesting how they they trans how they traveled was like the canoes that they used were dugouts, right? And then when they got to the west coast, the they were more like the the natives had like more seafaring, a lot more sturdy boats, right? Longer, more more paddlers in there, which is totally different than a dugout. But it sounds like the canoes that were kind of the uh made by natives uh up where you're at were birch bark canoes, which probably lighter for portaging or probably have to be.

SPEAKER_00 35:50

I guess I'm not an expert on that, but I I you sure see them around here. And um yeah, a lot of maintenance, a lot of uh tradition and skill involved in managing the materials. Yeah, but yeah, a difficult life experience.

SPEAKER_02 36:06

And these guys, it's interesting because I don't know how the natives lived up there, but like, you know, there's I don't know if they're traveling up and down the same waterways. I'm sure they are, but like when you talk about the explorers that are going to a new country that they don't know, they don't know what's around the bend. Like they don't know what's happening, they don't know about the polar bears or whatever it might be. Like they've never seen this stuff. The mentality that these people had to just keep going, and that's their that's their existence. Like that's what's normal to them. Um, it it's mind-blowing, and we we just barely get a taste of it when we go outside. You know, it's like they'd spend years doing it.

SPEAKER_00 36:44

The French voyagers in the boundary waters and all the way up into Manitoba, geez, they loved it so much. They are famous for songs that they sang while they were paddling canoe. It was just joy. I'm sure that had to be incredibly difficult work, but they loved it.

SPEAKER_02 37:01

I wonder what they, you know, when when you're sitting around a campfire on the boundary waters and you're dreaming up a book to write or a storyline or whatever it might be. I wonder what their version of your experience would be. Like, what did they talk about them around the campfires? Like, what did they dream about? Because this is their this is their office, right? This is this is what they do. They they paddle somewhere, they explore, they hunt, they they build a fire, they're doing it because that's what they're hired to do. But I wonder what they dreamed about. What did they create?

SPEAKER_00 37:34

Same things as you and me hunting, fishing, women.

SPEAKER_02 37:39

I mean, you know, that's it's like the same story over and over again, like whether it's like a thousand years ago or it's a hundred years ago. You think humans don't really evolve too much? Sing songs, whatever it might be. Yeah, yeah. They're probably thinking about man, that uh that lodge sounds pretty warm right about now. That's probably where they prefer to spend time.

SPEAKER_00 37:59

Oh boy, yeah. Think of the hardships for um sleeping outside, uh cold and hot, yeah, terrible. Yeah, but they loved it.

SPEAKER_02 38:08

So so this article, where did you get the bug for writing?

SPEAKER_00 38:13

Well, you know, I I always liked words, and I remember back in my day when you went to college, you took an entrance exam and it determined, and I'm going back about 55 years now, you either went to freshman or advanced English or bonehead English, and I was bonehead English based on my entrance exam. So I it was amazing I got the professor that I got because he said something I've never forgotten. If you want to be a writer because you think you have something to say, you'll never make it. But if you want to be a writer because you like words, you got a chance. And I I think he was kind of talking maybe somewhat about poetry, but certainly prose also. And you know, the you listen, you think of writers that you like or don't like. Uh a guy like Stephen King, and that guy makes great sentences. He knows how to use the language. Uh Mark Twain, um they just put great sentences together. When I read a book, I find myself sometimes thinking, damn, I wish I would have said that. That was good.

SPEAKER_02 39:33

You're looking at like the structure of like that's what you mean by fascination with the words. Like you're like, whoa, that's a good sentence.

unknown 39:39

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 39:39

Yeah, absolutely. And um in my case, well, I always liked that, but I was I'm still not uh uh that avid of a reader. You can tell behind me uh I do read. Uh but in my case, uh, when I was a long time ago now, my father was dying, and uh I went and sat by his bedside, uh, and everybody knew what was the end. And I thought, well, I want to read to my dad. I went ahead, all I took all my Fridays and sat with dad, and I thought, well, I guess I'm gonna read something that I wrote. So I started writing a story about two guys in a duckboat, because dad and I did a lot of that when I was a boy. And he died when I was on about page 20, 30. So um when he passed away, I thought, well, I had little children still at home. Uh I sat in my room in the basement, my little office down there, and I just kept writing. And uh it took me two years, but I finished the story, and I don't know why, but along the way I got closure with my dad, and I rediscovered the written word. I was having fun with the written language. You know, when you sit around the campfire, you got your hands and your eyebrows and your tone of voice, and you know, you can tell a story. Well, when you try and write a story, you got uh at that time I had a number two lead pencil, and you gotta write what you and if you write like you talk, it's just not very good. You gotta make better sentences. So I was having fun writing this story, and I would come back, I would think I wrote something good that night. I'd go to bed at midnight and get up the next morning and read what I wrote. And it was terrible sometimes. You know, I have well, I I gotta fix this. So I would write and fix it and write and fix it, and it took two years, and I'll cut out a lot of the story at that point. That book won a national book award for best new voice in fiction, and it was about love and death and loss and redemption. And, you know, every good story is the Wizard of Oz. Uh, it's a protagonist who's on the hero's journey. It's uh Star Wars, you know. It's uh, well, you pick it out, you know, it's somebody who is on the hero, the King Arthur legend, you know. They're seeking love, redemption, revenge. They're seeking something, and usually there's more than one protagonist, and there's an antagonist. And I didn't make this up and I didn't I didn't think about what I was doing, but my story is just the same as every other good story. It it involves someone on a journey, and in my case it was seeking redemption. So anyway, after that one was finished, I was sitting with my buddies at a duck camp about a year later, and one of them around a campfire, and one of them says, Well, Georgie, anybody can write one book. Can you do another one?

SPEAKER_02 42:59

Oh no, nothing. Yeah, it feels like they know you a little too much.

SPEAKER_00 43:02

Yeah, yeah. So I I wrote a story of 500-page novel about a 50-year-old dentist who hates his life, hates his wife, hates everything he's done, because he did it all to please a fat his father. And uh he winds up taking a mulligan. He leaves his wife, says, You can have it all, I quit, I'm done with you. And he takes a mulligan, you know, a golf term. A second it's about second chances. But it's the same thing. It's the hero's journey. This guy winds up uh working on a cattle farm in Montana. So I use it called on a little bit of real life there. And he winds up as a guide on a trout stream, and he's still seeking redemption. So anyway, and it kind of took off from there. And geez, I, you know, we we were well rewarded. We've, you know, we're on the 14th printing now for white horses, waiting for white horses. Versus was the first one. And Mulligan's doing well. So it it it has been a a long journey. And the fifth novel just came out, uh, Otto's Portal, and that's a whole different story there, but it's the same.

SPEAKER_02 44:15

But please, you the the premise you you told me in the email, like it it sounds really interesting. Can you dive into Otto's Portal and how did you come up with this concept? Why'd you come up with it?

SPEAKER_00 44:29

Like what was the well, what was the seed? You you touched on this earlier. You know, do you like history? Well, I love it. You know, and and a lot of times what we understand about history isn't really the way it really happened. And you have to study a little bit. So the the idea that the history that we know isn't really accurate, that's was kind of part of this story. But the other thing is, you know, I read a book called The Elegant Universe by Brian Green. I'm gonna get uber nerdy on you for just a second here, so kind of bear with me, because this is good stuff.

SPEAKER_02 45:09

Feel free to nerd out.

SPEAKER_00 45:11

Okay, here comes the nerd time. Um in 1687, um, Isaac Newton published a book called Principles of Mathematics and Natural History. And his work on gravity is still cornerstone of our modern physics. I mean, the stuff you, the math you get, the calculus, right on the money. Provable, verified. So in 1915, Isaac or uh Albert Einstein comes up with the theory of relativity. And his work on gravity and the fabric of the cosmos is right on the money, uh, cornerstone of our modern physics. Except the thing is, Einstein and Isaac Newton both sort of prove each other wrong. So now what? So along comes a thing called string theory in the 20th century. And string theory is where your weird shidometer starts a clanging because uh the physics are really weird. Uh and when it first came along, the the great thinkers, the scientists of the time said, Well, this is going to reconcile Einstein and Newton, and it's gonna reconcile uh history and the Bible. And this hasn't. It's been sort of a dead end. But anyway, that's kind of where my mind goes when I'm out paddling a canoe or when I'm outside like this stuff. So I began to think what happens when you die and your soul leaves your body? I mean, most cultures throughout history believe that. You know, there's a soul in your body that when you die, your body dies, but your soul goes away. So wherever that religion believes. So I started thinking, well, okay, well, what's holding your soul on your body right now? Why doesn't it just drift away? And maybe there is an actual physical force that no one ever thought about. Einstein never conceived it. It holds your soul onto your body while you're alive. And somehow that it's that's a bridge between this world and the next. And I just I made some stuff up along the way. But but that's what writers do. So anyway, I think that's a pretty plausible idea, and I built a story around that, but I involved um 20th century history. Uh uh a lot of for about the first hundred pages, every reader is kind of thinking, where's this guy going here? Because I went from World War II to LBJ's ranch to British Columbia uh and to a Catholic priest in northern Minnesota. And the whole story is a struggle between good and evil. Now, if you're not thoroughly confused by what I just said, you probably should be, because I just covered about 500 pages.

SPEAKER_02 48:18

That's awesome. How long had you been noodling around with this?

SPEAKER_00 48:23

I feel bad answering that one, but I I started about, I don't know, about 15, maybe 18 years ago, and I started the story, and I put it down to finish a couple other books because I was I loved the first part of it and I loved the history, and I was doing a lot of research, but I just didn't know how the story should end. And what you're looking for at the end of every book, movie, story, is resolution. And the story that I wrote for all those first few years kind of demanded a great big cataclysmic resolution. But what I realized when I got near the end of it was the resolution that these characters are seeking can only come on a personal, uh individual basis until the end of days, until we finally know the answer to this stuff. So yeah. Characters got resolution, and I'm not going to tell you what it was. Good. But um it's a whole certain it's characters that are each, everybody's seeking something. I have a priest who seeks redemption for something he did that's a secret that he has never confessed. I have a female physician who's kind of a strong character who seeks knowledge. Uh have a billionaire who's seeking advanced technology and is about to make a Faustian bargain. Kind of brought them all together at the end. And geez, I hope I didn't confuse everybody and make them hate the idea of this book.

SPEAKER_02 50:02

No, I think it's fascinating. Do you the when did you start kind of? I love that topic, by the way. I love the idea of noodling around with a with a topic that doesn't have a straight answer, though. We're all wondering what happens, right?

SPEAKER_00 50:20

Well, that's just it. You know, I I spoke to a book club a while back about this, and I was kind of surprised because I sort of assumed that everyone, when you're in the dark of the night or you're alone, or you have moments where you wonder about, well, how does this work? I mean, how how did we get here? Where are we going? What's going on with the fabric of the cosmos? What's happening here? But a lot of people don't wonder about that. But when you connect, what I the people that I connect with are the ones who will say, you know, damn, I I thought about that same stuff. I always wondered, how did that happen? And what about our soul? And what about all the topics that I brought up that that every man probably should wonder about?

SPEAKER_02 51:11

How does that interact with your faith? Does that yeah? What's the is there a balance there? Is there like a conflict there? Like how does that well?

SPEAKER_00 51:23

Okay. Um I gave this to a this what I'm gonna say next. I put these words in the mouth of a Catholic priest in the story. Um, you know, I asked a guy one time, well, do you we were in church? Do you believe that Jesus did what he said he did? You know, died and then wasn't dead anymore and the Christian doctrine. And the guy said, Hmm, I don't think so. I said, Well, what are you doing here then? You know, why do you bother? If you haven't thought it through any deeper than that, what are you doing here? So as I went through and asked all these questions in the book, yeah, it absolutely strengthened my faith. Um it certainly is not meant to be a uh Christian um story of you know where I'm going.

SPEAKER_02 52:20

It's not like a faith, it's not a faith-based book.

SPEAKER_00 52:22

No, no. But a Christian should be able to read it or a non-Christian and still think the same thoughts, like, hmm, I'm gonna have to think about uh the fabric of the cosmos and my soul and what happened, and I dealt with stuff like Roswell, New Mexico, that incident, and um some history, the Kennedy assassination, kind of briefly about I have people who kind of knew things that they shouldn't know throughout the story. Just to spice that up with what do you think? And it's been fascinating watching people afterwards at book events, what other people noticed. Um, I have one good friend who is studying to be a Catholic priest. Well, that was all he noticed. I'm not Catholic. That was all this guy noticed was the little little errors I made in Catholic priest behavior. Well, he missed the whole point. Yeah. So I I knew there'd be some of that. And that just goes with the program.

SPEAKER_02 53:31

So yeah, it's interesting that you say the I so I grew up in a in the Christian faith and all that stuff. I was very much raised Christian. But in and where maybe it was just the the area that I was in, I I'm not really sure. But there was almost like two sides to this uh thing, whereas like, and my my dad was way more liberal with the idea that he would entertain options, not options, but I feel like he would he would go down these rabbit holes, like you and him would have had like a good back and forth because he was totally willing to entertain possibility. But his underlying foundation was Christianity, and uh on the surface, it sounds like if you if you bring up like the idea of uh other intelligences in the universe and things like that, it just to the wrong person, it's very confusing. But to my dad, he was okay with it. And I think it allowed him to like kind of uh chew on it a little bit, and he used it as a reflector of his own faith. And I think over time it strengthened his belief uh his faith. Because he was able to ex he was able to like go outside the capsule, float around for a while, and then come back in and digest it all. And for him, I think it strengthened it. Now, I also think that in that same community, there were people that like, don't even let yourself do that because you're gonna be distracted. And I don't really know what the right path is there. I think it probably is dependent on the person. Like, don't think about aliens or don't let yourself think about other possibilities because it's very distracting.

SPEAKER_00 55:14

I dealt with some of that stuff. Uh, and I used the conversation between the priest and the woman physician uh at one talking about uh UFOs, for example. And this is kind of the over-the-campfire discussion between these two. Well, uh, at one point the priest says, Well, do you suppose God put all those stars out there and created this whole giant thing because he's just showing off, because he loves you so much, he wants you to see this? I mean, there's no proof that any of that is UFOs and stuff. It's just there, part of the fabric of this cosmos. Isn't it great? What? Well, I kind of like that. And I also had him talking about um a discussion between evolution and creation. So what if you're one of those people who you absolutely demand that we are here because of uh creation? God created the earth in seven days, boom, that's it. Well, maybe that happened, but what if you what if you're that guy and you die and you go to heaven, meet St. Peter at the Purley Gates, as the legend goes. And Saint Peter says, Well, hey, by the way, uh, Emery, it was it wasn't creation, it was evolution. Do you want to come in? Is that a deal breaker for you? You want to go to heaven or you want to not? And that's kind of where you get to, like, well, that really isn't the whole point of it all. Uh it doesn't, it doesn't, it's not salvation that doesn't determine salvation. Um, so I've had a lot of that kind of stuff in there just for people to chew on, because that's what we talk about around a fire. And the the thing that kind of brought this all together was as I had these two people standing beside a trout stream talking about something that happened in a church which is really disturbing. I never did cover yet. The woman is talking about um what they saw as far as was that a demon, or what what is that? And the priest starts to talk about the surface of a trout stream as the barrier between two dimensions. And he explains that, well, look, I can go, I can look into that other dimension, and I can kind of see fish down there, like in Corinthians, you know, through a glass darkly, but I can't go there and live. Uh, I can't go there. And they can kind of see me on this side, but they can't come here and live either. But I can do things, I can reach out into that dimension, maybe by casting a fly there to cause a fish to do something fatally stupid. Uh and it's just meant as an analogy, but that's the kind of stuff that I was working searching for that barrier between this world and the next.

SPEAKER_02 58:13

And that's a great example.

SPEAKER_00 58:16

Well, uh, it works for me, but I had a it's such a long, uh, convoluted story, but uh the heart and soul of it, what comes next is uh I have an ancient, an old 91-year-old scientist who comes up with the idea that, oh, there is this force that holds your soul onto your body, and he finds a way to quantify it and describe it. And the concern is immediate that, well, you just may have come up with the piece of the equation that solves Einstein's theory of everything. And now, if you solve this, do you open up that door that you don't want to open? Do you open things up to the end of days? And that's kind of the heart and soul. I know there again, I covered a lot of ground right there.

SPEAKER_01 59:07

Yeah, no, that's amazing.

SPEAKER_00 59:08

But the analogy between the trout stream and this other dimension, other dimensions, and to get back real nerdy again, and string theory postulates there might be up to 11 other dimensions, and maybe that's purgatory and hell and heaven. I mean, uh, that's just another campfire story. Topic.

SPEAKER_02 59:32

See, and I love that, like, this is what I love about it. You know, you could go out there and sit around the campfire and think about completely other things, but for some reason, like when you're quiet and you're kicking the tires, like this is the type of stuff that pops into your head. I I think it's so fascinating that the you know, those are such opposite topics, right? It's like, but somehow it's like connected. Did you come up with the idea? Did is that original to you where you're like describing dimensions? Because that's a hard thing for people to understand. Well, above and below, like that's so because it's such a great example. Like, fish can go in any direction you want. Like, that's amazing.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:14

That that's my the trout stream, the above and below, the barrier. That's so that's mine. But well done. Well, it kind of works, but you know, it kind of carries over into other things too. You know, um, are there other dimensions all around us that we just can't get to because of the matter that holds our body is made up of matter, but our soul isn't, and the two things are held together.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:39

So you know, uh I'm not sure if it's related, but the reason why I get so excited about this kind of stuff is I lost both my parents between like they were they're both they both passed away like two year within two years of each other. And I was there with my dad when he passed away, and it was in a hospital setting. It was very we'll say it was just a hospital setting. It's just not ideal. And it was especially during COVID, it was 2020, and it was very strange. I'd never experienced anything like this, obviously. Um, it's my dad, and it occurs, I'm there, and then we're basically like kind of I won't say ushered out, but uh business as usual, if you will. Like you're in a hospital, there's people, they have things they need to do to do the thing, and we didn't get to spend any time with him afterwards. It was me, my mom, and my sister. And we like leave the hospital, it was very discompobulating. We leave and we don't like I didn't really know how to digest it. And then I come home and I like get into bed with my wife, and we have like a baby, and it was like, I'm like, I just came from this experience, and I was like, I don't, I can't this doesn't make any sense. And two years later, uh, my mom passes away, and we knew it was happening, but at this point, she's in an apartment of her own. I wasn't there when she passed away, my sister was, but my sister in the middle of the night like lets my other sister know and myself that hey, she passed away. And that morning, like first thing in the morning, uh, we I go to her room and she she's still there and everything. And I got to like spend time with her and I remember it sounds weird if you haven't ever experienced it, and I understand that. Like it's it's very weird, but I had the opportunity to like sit with my mom's body, and it was very clear that that was not my mom. Like I don't know how there are other I don't know how to describe it other than I know it was her, like it was her physical body, but her, her, she, the thing that she is was not there. And that was like a very clear line in the sand for me. I spent a lot of time with her, and I was like, I it almost it almost to the point where I was like, I'm not really sure I have an interest in being in this room right now. Like, not because it's for just because she's not here. And it put me on this path to where I started I kind of started thinking about this stuff. Like, what what does tie you to your body? Like what is oper what is the operating system that's happening inside this thing? And it was like I was heartfelt, like there was a clear line, she was not there. Where did she go? And it opened up this question of like it was it's a warm feeling because I was like, oh, uh, she's still out there somewhere. I I I felt like she was still out there. And it was it was comforting, but it put me on this whole different thing. I started looking, I started looking into like near-death experiences. Boy, what a wild topic.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:14

I don't know if you've ever looked under the hood of near-death experiences, but it is that's one of the center issues of the story of Otto's portal is a near-death experience.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:23

Oh my gosh.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:24

Both both the science of it and the um mystical qualities of it. So yeah, I wrote about that extensively. So I do know something about that. And you know, it if you have an education in the sciences like I do, as you're young and you're taking biology and chemistry, you're starting to feel like God is kind of revealing how this works. And I think it's fascinating, and I want to learn as much as I can about this stuff. And then you start coming up on dead ends, like, well, what where does this morph into something deeper that I like? What is what is love? Right. Think about that. Where does that live? How does that uh that's an emotion, but how do we have that? And where is it in because it's now we're back to the campfire here. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:15

You can't look at it.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:16

No, no. Um, you know, when my father was dying, uh I'm gonna build on that a little bit. It was clear the end was near. And my sister, this is so touching, she leaned over to my dad and said, Dad, it's okay. Uh, you can get on that horse and ride it over the hill, and there's a whole bunch of cattle on the other side of the hill. You go take care of them, we'll be there, we'll join you later. And a short time later he passed away. And I thought giving him permission to give it up was I I couldn't believe it. Um, those are the moments that you write about that you hope to find words for. Um So just to back up a little bit, if you want to read about death experience, near death experience, that's kind of one of the cornerstones here in this story too.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:11

Oh, I love that.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:12

But that you know, when you write stories, when you hear something, what you what you hear when you when you're an old man like I am and you've have been around, uh my father, my dad's brother, was shot down over Tokyo in 1945. And he was 686 men were shot down that night, and 18 survived, and Thor was one of them. So years later, I was a high school kid, we're playing golf, and I was always told, Don't ask him about World War II. So I did what every kid would do. I said about it. So can I ask you? And he said, Yeah, what do you want to know? So he described this whole incident, this horrific, you know, bullets and shrapnel coming through the plane and bleeding and having to jump a bale out of a aircraft, flaming aircraft at night, you know, and his crew won all these uh medals for their bravery. And then he got kind of choked up. And the thing that he said that, well, I'll never forget any of it, but this was the humanity of it all. He said, I'm floating down in my parachute. It's dark, cold, I'm terrified. And he said, you know, he took, I said he took his service revolver and jacked all the bullets out of the his pistol, because he didn't want to get shot by his own gun, because he knew he was gonna get captured. And he said, as I was swinging down, I realized that tomorrow morning, tomorrow sometime, a car is gonna pull up in front of my house, my farm back in Minnesota. Someone's gonna get out and tell my mother that I was killed tonight. And then he got kind of choked up. Now that's the moments that you take to heart and you write about later, and they happen all the time. And that's what writers do. You can't make that stuff up. I mean, it's just all around us. But that's the sort of humanity. If you can find a sentence to describe that incident, you win. You you give that to somebody else.

SPEAKER_02 1:08:19

Boy. Yeah, that's interesting. You're almost like a oh, you can tell you're a writer, because you're always looking, you can tell that you're looking for these like small threads that you can just barely poking out inside the story and you just keep pulling on it.

SPEAKER_00 1:08:32

Well, that's where the connections, you know, we get you get email from people in Martha's Vineyard or Phoenix, and here I am with some guy in Minnesota because it connected with their father, their mother, their child, their story. And that's what you shoot for. You're trying to you're trying to make those connections any way you can. Usually it's with an emotional experience or your five senses.

SPEAKER_02 1:08:58

Wow. Well, it sounds like you are doing what you should be doing. Because if you're reaching people and you're feeling fulfilled, man, that's it's quite the gift. Thanks. I it's fun, but it's a lot of work too. I bet, yeah. Do you have a problem with sorting out your ideas? Are you does the universe throw them at you now that your antenna's all dialed in?

SPEAKER_00 1:09:19

Yeah, you know, there's a lot of that. And there's a lot of I still I sit and make notes and I'm trying to decide if I want to do the next thing. But what's really unfair is that I spent like 18 years on various stages of writing auto's portal. Not solid full time, but so you write this book and it takes off and it's ranked highly on Amazon and you're doing well, and you get an email and somebody says, Hey, I just finished your book, and when are you gonna write another one? That's not fair. You just did that too. Yeah, and you did you read it in a day. It's just not fair. Um my gosh, that's funny.

SPEAKER_02 1:10:00

Like these things don't that's so funny. That's totally a how perfect of a modern scenario is that? You're like, when's the next one, Nate?

SPEAKER_00 1:10:08

Yeah, how about you produce some more for me? I need to get more. Anyone can write five novels. Can you do another one? Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:10:16

Right, yeah. Well, good on you, man. Thank you so much for sharing the book and like the connection to the outdoors. And like, like I said, the the podcast is like, I love that I would have no reason to talk to you other than like this connection to the outdoors, and this and then turns out we do have a lot in common. Like, enjoy the outdoors.

SPEAKER_00 1:10:37

You get yourself to the boundary waters. You gotta get to the boundary waters.

SPEAKER_02 1:10:41

I will, man. I want to take, I would love to take my girls up there sometime. Like they're they're starting to become little outdoorsy. I have a I'm very young, daughters, uh, six and eight. So they are we're hitting this by a stride of like I introduced them to backpacking, and they that we do a lot of camping and things like that. And and I wonder, I guess I haven't thought about this before, but I'm imagining one day they're sitting around a campfire with their friends, you know, what are they gonna kick the tires on? You know, like what's the universe gonna make them talk about and and wonder about? And maybe they'll write, maybe they'll write music, you know, maybe they'll keep to themselves and write it in a journal or whatever it is. But I just you never freaking know, you know?

SPEAKER_00 1:11:26

You need to give them those experiences right now. You know, so they can look back someday and say, I wonder what was behind what dad was thinking about when he said that around that campfire all those years ago.

SPEAKER_02 1:11:37

Yeah, they're old enough. If you're listening to this in the future, there you go. It's funny I think about that. Like, man, one day if when I'm gone, like there's gonna be this audio record of me having these conversations. Like, what a weird like I'd probably listen to my dad's podcast if he were around.

SPEAKER_00 1:11:56

If he had one. Don't you start thinking, like, gee, is my life gonna amount to anything when I'm gone? Will people even notice that I'm not here anymore?

unknown 1:12:10

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:12:11

I mean, uh I mean we do. Well, I mean, I had a really weird experience when we were getting rid of all the things from my mom and dad's house. To this point exactly, I just remembered. There's these, you know, when you grow up in your home and there's like your parents' things, and then you're just like your parents' parents' things, there's one or two things, or maybe there's a few, and then like your maybe your great grandparents, maybe there's one thing from your great-grandparents, and then they just slowly start dising up disappearing. And then when we were getting rid of my parents' house and all the things, like it just gets like I remember my mom had this piano bench seat. It was like a quilted something rather, and it was her great-grand, it was her grandmother's piano bench, and it was framed, right? It was like the seat, and it was framed, and that meant a lot to her. But like we were we were looking at all this stuff, we're like, this doesn't mean anything for me, and I felt really bad about it. I was like, oh my gosh, this is how it happens. Like, pretty soon, like generational gets closed, it's the the chapters closed. I took a few things from my mom and dad that I was gonna bring with me that I have inside the house, like a guitar, a record player, very small things. But pretty soon, my kids are gonna, it's just all gonna filter away to your point. I'm like, eventually people forget.

SPEAKER_00 1:13:31

Like, well, those are all just things, you know, and they'll pass away. Jackson Brown had a great line uh at the end of uh one of his songs nothing survives but the way we live our lives.

SPEAKER_01 1:13:46

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:13:48

That will live on how you yeah, and here we are collecting things, and we should worry about not that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Interesting. Well, sir, thank you so much. I really appreciate your time taking the time to do this. Um yeah, Otto's Portal is your latest book. I will put uh I'll try to find your other books as well and put them in the show notes in case people want to look them up. Um I love the fact that it took 18 years to put together. Um that makes it even more special. And I and just hearing you talk about your writing process, I it just seems really sincere. I love I I'm I'm imagining I love the idea of you writing words down and not liking them and then and then doing them over and the stories look the same. And what a happens every day. What a what an absolute gift to like care that much about the words that someone's gonna read. So good on you, sir. Thank you. Uh, do you have any closing thoughts? Do you have anything else for the audience or anything we covered at all?

SPEAKER_00 1:14:51

No, I think I got everybody pretty confused the way it is. So good. We'll let it ride. All right, perfect.

SPEAKER_02 1:14:56

Well, if anyone's interested, auto's portal, and I'll put it in the show notes to check it out. So um, yeah, man, thank you so much. You're welcome back on the show anytime to kick the tires about things that don't make sense.

SPEAKER_00 1:15:07

All right, thank you for having me. This was great.

SPEAKER_02 1:15:18

All right, that is it for episode 181 with Nathan Jorgensen. Thanks so much for tuning in. To follow up on anything we mentioned in this episode, I have included links to all of it in the show notes. So be sure to check those out when you have a chance. There's book mentions, Nate's book, all of it, it's all there. So check those out. And if you haven't introduced yourself, please do. I love hearing from you guys. So please hit me up anytime you like at emory at byland.co, even if you just want to say hi and whatever else. One of these days, I will come up with some way for us all to connect so you don't have to email me and we can have a discussion. Um, if you have any ideas, send them my way. I'd love to hear about it. Uh, but in the meantime, if you are headed out on an adventure anytime soon, be safe, make great decisions, and we'll see you next time.