Morning Journal
Centennial Wagon Train, Wyoming
Photographer Unknown |
Kathleen Meyer is the
author of the international bestselling outdoor guide How
to Shit in the Woods: An Environ-
mentally Sound Approach to a Lost
Art that has been widely embraced by the outdoor community,
with more than two million copies in print, in seven languages.
Her Montana memoir Barefoot Hearted: A
Wild Life Among Wildlife was published by Villard (a division
of Random House) in 2001.
Meyer was born in Manhattan, New York, the only child of a librarian
and a scientist, and raised on the Atlantic and Pacific coasts.
A water enthusiast even as a child, her passion as early as seven
was racing catboat-class sailboats. In a small community on the
New Jersey shore, a mile-long peninsula composed of families from
widely varied incomes—the Secretary of Labor at one end, a
diamond miner at the other—Meyer mowed lawns to pay for her
sailing club membership and crewed summers into her teens on the
boats of more affluent neighbors. Later, in the West, at a time
when she worked with troubled adolescents, she purchased a stray
New Jersey catboat and tried sailing the San Francisco Bay waters.
Forever a purist (in this case, no motor), her first day sailing,
with a new male friend on board, found her becalmed and drifting
with the tide into the dark of night and the Richmond freighter
channel, no lights on her boat, no flashlight to shine on the sail.
Trapped for those long hours of terror with a strange new man in
the open cockpit of a thirteen-foot boat, the day became the first
she can remember needing advice about what on earth gracefully to
do with bodily excretions.
When a freshman in high school, Meyer
moved with her parents in an abrupt relocation across the country
to a sprawling Los Angeles—a change that left an indelible
mark on her sensibilities and future career as an author. College
years took her north to the Bay Area: San Francisco, Berkeley, and
towns in Marin County where she dallied for twenty-three years.
She led wilderness trips for inner-city youth, and then with another
woman started up a drywall taping company called O Holy Mud.
A longtime outdoorswoman now, Meyer has guided white-water rafting
trips in the western U.S. and Canada and journeyed through three
Rocky Mountain states by horse and covered wagon. Her writing life
sprang at first from her river trips, in the days before backcountry
regulations required the use of portable toilets and the packing
out of human waste. Her aims were to ease the embarrassment and
clumsiness experienced by city folks trying to squat under an open
sky, as well as to save her favorite beaches from the likes of toilet
paper and diapers, and to protect mountain streams from fecal pollution.
Her last relocation, from California to the rural town of Victor,
Montana, supplies the grist for Barefoot
Hearted: A Wild Life Among Wildlife. She likes to describe
the move as “running away with the circus,” after
meeting a rakish actor and horseshoer, on tour with a Canadian
theater company
traveling by means of thirteen Clydesdales and five elaborately
painted gypsy wagons. In her white overalls, splattered with
drywall
mud, she had stopped to grab a midday sandwich when she spied the
tent-theater's promotional act—an antique medicine wagon
and two Clydesdales parked across the street. A tall Irishman's
unwinding
from under one of the horses sparked the meeting that eventually
lead to covered wagon journeys and living in an old Montana
dairy
barn. Barefoot Hearted is the tale
of this adventurous Western living, set against the author's ponderings
on the future of the world's wildlife as small towns everywhere
go to sprawl. Meyer has been a conservationist and political activist
for almost thirty years, focused for the most part on water politics
and issues of urban sprawl. In 1975, she was the founding editor
of Headwaters, a publication of Friends
of the River. Her travel essays have been published by Travelers'
Tales in the anthologies A
Woman's Passion for Travel: More True Stories from a Woman's
World and Sand in My Bra: Funny Women
Write from the Road.
And her work has appeared in the Professional
Farrier and Anvil Magazine.
She makes her home with farrier Patrick McCarron in the Bitterroot
Valley
of western Montana. |
