Bridging Generation Gaps

by Roland Cheek

I’m a high school dropout; a know-it-all, arrogant, cocky, self-absorbed, certain that continuing education offered no further benefit to assist me in gliding through life. That was me! Stupid!
A love for reading rescued me by exposing most things taught in the school I failed, in the university I never attended, and certainly throughout a life filled with wonder and adventure.
I read the Journals of Lewis & Clark, of pioneers trekking to Oregon, of Stanley’s search for Livingstone through the jungles of Africa. I read of wild animals and wild peoples. I read about grizzly bears and of men hunting elk and moose and mountain sheep and man-eating tigers. History turned fascinating and I wanted to live it. I broke horses and used them to pack far into the wildest of wilderness mountains where, to quote Robert Service . . . “the rivers run God knows where.”
Eventually I began guiding folks to those wilderness places, and finally to writing of my adventures, telling others of wild animals and wild places, extolling the virtues of living the kind of life of which Henry David Thoreau wrote, and that infested the dreams of Aldo Leopold.
I wrote stories for America’s top outdoors magazines and crafted an outdoors column carried in newspapers in two states. I scripted and broadcast a daily radio program aired in upwards of seventy-five stations from the Atlantic Seaboard to the Pacific Ocean. And I wrote books, both fiction and nonfiction.
Reading, it seems, wasn’t only my ticket out of a prison of my own making, but a means to excel in my career.

There’s no more fervent evangelists than the converted. Think Paul on the way to Damascus, think Thomas Paine on the American Revolution, think Mikhail Gorbachev on the failures of Soviet Communism. But who takes serious a high school dropout extolling the virtues of reading?
As it turns out, those most affected!
Trevor Allen, who reads my “Wild Trails & Tall Tales” newspaper column was but eleven years old when he wrote asking for tips on surviving in “the wild.” Trevor said, “I love to go camping and hiking. I would like to learn more about how to ‘survive’ in the ‘wild’. I was wondering if you could please write back and tell me some things I should know.”
An eleven-year-old boy reads my newspaper column! Will wonders never cease!
Shortly thereafter Havre High School’s librarian, Kathryn Holt, confirmed that reach by saying to my wife, Jane: “Tell Roland that what he’s doing is important; that he has a special way of reaching our boys who are close to falling through the cracks.”
So, imagine my surprise when three high school girls from a far Northeastern Montana town told of starting a Roland Cheek “fan club,” providing evidence that my reach transcended more than just the masculine gender.
Then Alexa Mrgich, a 6th-grader provided affirmation by writing to say she was reading my book about elk (The Phantom Ghost of Harriet Lou and Other Elk Stories). “I am probably the only girl you know that loves loves loves hunting. I go almost every day of hunting season, except for the week days.”

What is going on! I asked myself? I’m not writing down for these kids. In fact, writing for any age group was never a deliberate consideration. In fact, upon due analysis I concluded that I actually wrote only for me, employing my values and thought processes to tell stories in my own unique way. Still, Sue Zan Gnas, Media Specialist at Tse’ Bit’ Ai’ Middle School in Shiprock, New Mexico said, “You may not realize how difficult it is to find books like these.” She waved a hand at our wildlife/nature and Western adventure titles. “These are things my students know and care about.”
A seventeen-year-old high school senior from Missoula, Montana supported Sue Zan Gnas’s analysis by writing of The Phantom Ghost of Harriet Lou and Other Elk Stories. I’ve read the book three times, certain chapters many more times, and both of your books o

13 pages, Kindle Edition

First published October 3, 2013

About the author

There are, I suppose, febrile savants who reject any notion that a person can acquire the writing art outside those hallowed halls of academia. Yet storytellers captured audiences for millenniums before Oxford or Harvard were more than forest enclaves where wild turnips sprout.
There's dissent, of course, holding the cloistered academic life to be poor training grounds for the kinds of riveting stories audiences wish to hear or read. My particular PhD came from God's own university of wild places and wilder things. My Culture might best be described as the Campfire kind, backed up against the inky black of star-filled nights, regaling saucer-eyed guests with tales of wilderness adventure, while horses stomped at picket lines and coyotes howled at a rising moon.
My doctoral thesis came during three decades of narratives about those wild places and wilder things; wonders saw, heard, smelled, tasted, and felt; crafted for Outdoor Life, Field & Stream, and Sports Afield. My column was syndicated over two decades to 17 newspapers, and I hosted a coast-to-coast radio show with 210,000 listeners airing on 75 stations across America. Then I turned my attention to books: a baker's dozen novels and wildlife and adventure nonfiction titles, all self-published to great success, all flavored with real-life experiences.
What's my point? That one can have adventure AND learn to write very well indeed (despite academic disdain for anyone outside their comfortable inner circle); well enough indeed to tell the conventional publishing world to go to hell--that I'll publish my own stuff.
More successfully.
And at greater profit