About The author

First memories:

First memories:

I was unaware of having shape or form, but, that said, I was lying on my back in an enclosure. I knew that which enclosed me was not a part of me. To my left was a bloom of light. The bloom of light was not part of me either. A gray shape appeared above me. It was moving and making sounds. I knew the moving shape was like me, but different from me. And I knew the gray, moving shape didn’t know that I knew. I seemed to like that.

Four years later: Standing on the lawn, a long ways from the house. There was a leaky faucet on a pipe that stuck up from the lawn. I saw a shiny round metal thing in the grass and picked it up. Father reached down and took it from me. He held the thing in his hand, near my face. “It’s a 50-caliber machine gun bullet. It’s dangerous. Probably dropped out of  the bomber that buzzed the house yesterday.” Then he straightened up. “I’m going into the Springs to get your mother and your new baby sister.” Baby sister?

I was born Adam Michalo in Denver, Colorado, in 1939. My mother was Icelandic; my father was either Russian or Slavic depending on which family member you asked. Mother was the superintendent and Father was the medical director of the Woodman Tuberculosis Sanitarium near Colorado Springs. When a cure for TB became available in 1947, the sanitarium closed, and Mother and Father separated. Father started a medical practice in Gunnison, CO, and mother, my little sister, Vicky, and I moved twenty miles north to the Spring Creek Resort. Mother kept horses for the overdressed dudes from the East Coast who came out West on vacation. In the fall, she guided hunters who came, primarily, to drink. We lived in an Army Surplus tent with barely room enough for the three of us and seven or eight horses.

I was shuttled between Mother and the horses in the tent and my violent, morphine-addicted father in the New Allen Hotel in Gunnison. Living with Father in that hotel was a challenge. Before he went to his office in the morning, he injected a mixture of morphine and nicotine between his toes. That lasted until he came back to the hotel in the afternoon and I’d come back from third grade. Then he went berserk. But he was so irrational that I never seemed to take it personally, besides, I wasn’t a bad kid. Not that bad. I knew he couldn’t help himself and I don’t think he had the strength to hit hard. No bones were broken. In any case, I’m sure he suffered more than I did. At the height of his frustration he managed to destroy the venetian blinds and cause a disruption in the smooth operations of Gunnison’s finest hotel. Mother and Father got divorced. He died a year later at forty-eight from a morphine overdose and a bad heart in a rooming house in Ouray, Colorado.

Mother married a rancher named Sam Wolfe who adopted me and Vicki. Even though he owned a huge ranch on the Taylor River, we lived in a tiny, one-room log cabin with a large wood stove. Sam said we were “land poor”, but the ranch was a paradise for me. I explored every ridge, drainage, and creek in all six thousand acres on my horse, Joe. I learned to work with draft horses—mowing, raking, and stacking hay. In winter, my job was to harness the huge horses, then Sam and I hitched the team to the big sled and fed hay to the cows. When it got down to minus fifty-two, the cows still needed fed.

Below the cabin, next to the blacksmith shop, was a partially buried ice house. In winter Sam and I cut river ice into blocks, hauled them back on a one-horse sled, and buried them in sawdust in the icehouse. We needed ice to keep the milk cool until it was sold, and we used it in our icebox, since we didn't have electricity for a refrigerator.

We moved to Missoula, Montana in the early fifties, where I finished grade school. During high school, I got a night job stacking boards off the chain at Delaney’s Lumber Mill. I also worked the log pond at Hamilton Lumber where the Missoula’s South Gate Mall sits today. After high school, I spent the fall and winter in the Lolo Forest setting tongs for Cameron’s gypo logging outfit. Gypo was shorthand for small, desperate, and slippery outfits that bounced checks.

When I worked in the woods, I became intensely aware of trees, and it felt as though the trees were aware of me. At one point, I believed they were talking to me. Hunter-gatherers believed the natural world was alive and aware of them. I have a sense of what that may have felt like.

Later, I moved to Butte and worked a series of jobs for the Anaconda Copper Mining Company in the Badger Mine east of Walkerville. I found underground miners to be the most observant, keenly intelligent, and fatalistic group of men I ever met.

After you work underground for a while, you begin to think of a mine as a latticework of tunnels and shafts. And you can hear the horrible groan from the pressure of granite moving against thick stull timbers, the roar and bang of ore cars, screech of steel against steel, and the explosive hammering of the drills. And there’s the acrid odor of blasting powder and copper oxide, along with the memories of men maimed or killed who worked the same job as you—all these pervade everything from the bottom level up to the changing room on top.

Underground you begin to get a feel of how the ore flowed eons ago—its hardness, softness, and color. And you get a queasy fear in your gut when you first realize that the tracks are messed up because the mass of stone that surrounds you is slipping sideways, and there are those things you know but have no words for. You hear stories, fantastical and true, because the mines harbor the world’s best storytellers.

Then a strange thing happens. One day after work, you drive over to Anaconda to see your girl, and as you look out at the landscape, you realize that something is very different. It is this—you cannot see the surface without imagining what’s beneath the surface. Like water seeping through sand, that sensation invades everything—the way you see and the way you think is changed forever. 

While I was in Butte, the Junior League started a foreign film series with films by Bergman, Resnais, Antonioni, and Fellini. Those screenings, coupled with the mines—the sounds, images, men, and stories—made me decide to make films.

My first films were surreal art films, including The Bowler Hat and The Violin People. I made a wide variety of films from the life of migrant Mexican children in the fields of Eastern Montana, to a film about the effects of logging and mining in the state, which led to my interest in cultural anthropology and the making of Energy & Morality—a film about the effects of British Thermal Units on human behavior. 

In 1985, I made Phantom Cowboy, about how adversarial groups or individuals can hijack a socially beneficial idea but use it for their own purposes to establish an exclusive sense of identity for themselves—and then, consciously or not, through arrogance, bullying, violence, and other repellent behavior, they sabotage the wider acceptance of the idea. Wide acceptance means everyone owns the idea, but that would rob the in-group of their special identity. The result is to delay the acceptance of an idea, sometimes for decades. Many good social change issues have succumbed to overzealous leaders in search of an identity. Too often, the leaders end up doing the work of the opposition. A case in point being the multiple failures, since the 1960s, of the anti-nuclear energy movement. The nuclear waste issue has still not been addressed.

The most high-profile individuals who ran to the head of the antiwar parade in the 60s and 70s were Abbie Hoffman, Jane Fonda, and Jerry Rubin, whose political theater against the Vietnam War was brilliant and devilishly entertaining, but a case can be made that their antics reinforced the beliefs of the politicians and generals that continuing the war was the right thing to do.

I’ve had two showings of my films at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, twice represented the United States in international film festivals, and had two films in the Sundance Festival. Beginning in the 1980s, I gave a series of talks at universities and energy conferences exploring the fact that an extremely low-energy environment was the evolutionary soup for our intellectual and emotional tools of survival, which include anger, hatred, fear, and paranoia—and that today it should be considered delusional to believe we can negotiate our survival by wielding hydrogen warheads with the same emotional and intellectual tools that were designed for a hand ax. The Cuban Missile Crisis is a mind-numbing example, during which we were saved from a third world war by a single, sane Russian submarine officer who violated established protocol and prevented the launch of a nuclear missile. Had he been assigned to a sub in the arctic, you would not be reading these words for I would not have written them.

Various film projects have taken me to the American Southwest, to Cairo, Egypt, to a Bedouin shantytown on the Gulf of Aqaba, and to Morioka, Japan. The film, The Sacred Bear, took me to Saskatchewan and the Yukon Territories, and to Admiralty Island in Alaska, where I filmed the brown bears on Pack Creek. Later, in a small dwelling surrounded by giant spruce trees near an ancient Tlingit town once called Kootznoowoo—the stronghold of the bear—I recorded the Chief of the Tlingit Bear Clan telling the story of “the man who married the bear” and singing a song to honor the spirit of the bear. The Sacred Bear was meant to explore the ingrained understanding of nature that was the realm of early hunting-gathering people as opposed to that mind-set held by contemporary, modern cultures—with these respective worlds portrayed in art, film, stories, prayers, and songs about the bear. 

My research into the habits and behavior of brown bears resulted in some unforgettable experiences. One in particular—on a fall morning, on an island in Alaska, in a meadow by the sea, I woke to the sound of grizzlies sniffing and woofing. I opened my eyes to discover I was surrounded by five extraordinarily large bears. They were indifferent to me. When I sat up, I realized they were digging chocolate lily bulbs. The smell of new lilies and the taste of the bulbs seemed to overcome them. They were possessed. All these years later, when I’m just waking on a particular day in the early fall, when the air is crisp and right, I can feel those bears around me—large, dark, possessed bears.

Politics and lack of funds ended that project and my filmmaking career. After thirty years as an independent filmmaker, I decided to go into the publishing business. As a test, I published my own book, The Woman Who Lives in the Earth, which was based on a film script I’d written a decade earlier. The book was much more successful than I’d anticipated. Harper Collins bought it and gave me a contract for three more: The Lake Dreams the Sky; The Parrot Trainer; and a memoir, The Boy Who Invented Skiing. The Harper Collins edition of The Woman Who Lives in the Earth was translated into fourteen languages. I’m currently working on a fourth novel and a second memoir. 

The 25th Anniversary Edition of The Woman Who Lives in the Earth is a revised version of the Harper Collins edition.