On the Trail of Jeremiah

EXT. WASATCH MOUNTAINS—AFTERNOONTHREE MEN stand huddled together in deep snow, beneath a great wall of mountains. Blue sky overhead, mountains a blinding white. The men are discussing something we can’t hear. One of the men wears a beard and a long fur coat, almost like a pelt, a costume from another time.The two other men walk over to a HELICOPTER and climb in. The bearded man stays behind. The helicopter starts up with a noise like a giant lawnmower, the blades blowing great clouds of snow. The helicopter rises from its own white mist. The bearded man shields his eyes with his hand. The copter rises straight up, 100, 200, 300 feet. Far below, the bearded man starts to trudge through the snow. The helicopter follows as the man in the passenger seat leans out and tries to film him.Suddenly, the man leaning out with the camera stops filming. Looks down at the camera.MAN WITH CAMERA Damn it!It is hard to hear him over the roar of the helicopter.PILOT What? MAN WITH CAMERA We’re out of film. We’ve got to go back to town. PILOT What about him?The man with the camera looks down at the man below, a speck in a field of white.MAN WITH CAMERA He’ll be okay.CUT TO:The bearded man stares up at the helicopter as it suddenly dips its nose and flies off toward the far mountains. We still hear the lawnmower rotation of the blades, but the sound is fading now. A minute later, the helicopter disappears over the mountains. A look of consternation comes over the bearded man’s face. What the hell? he thinks.The man tramps back toward the spot where he had been talking with the two others not long before. But then he stops and looks up. The sky is pure blue, and some of that blue is splashed on the snow in long, stretched shadows. The bearded man lies back in the snow, savoring the quiet. Nothing, no sounds, but the occasional echo over the tip of a glacier. He realizes now that he is completely alone.The man smiles.During his 89 years on earth, Charles Robert Redford acted in more than 80 films and directed 10.

Though he sometimes wavered in later years, for decades he most often contended that Jeremiah Johnson (1972)—about a former soldier who goes west, leaving civilization behind—was his favorite of all those films.One reason that it qualified as his favorite is that he shot parts of it in the shadow of Utah’s Mount Timpanogos, on land he had stumbled upon as a young man and that later became his home, a place he eventually named Sundance.Not long before he purchased the land, Redford met Sydney Pollack, who would later buy a place at Sundance and direct Jeremiah Johnson. Pollack saw right off the way his new friend was pulled in two directions: “I was dumbfounded. I said, ‘Wait a second! You want to work in movies and you want to live in the wilderness! How do you reconcile these two lifestyles?’ I told him he was nuts.”This was a story that spoke directly to him, a mythic story of turning your back on the known world and finding an unknown one. In a life of artifice, here was the authentic.He would have to have been a little nuts to try and do both. In the years ahead, the pull in these two directions would get so strong, Redford sometimes felt he was being torn apart. It couldn’t have been easy: wanting to be a solitary mountain man when you also happened to be the world’s most famous actor.Jeremiah Johnson brought these worlds together. The film came after Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) had launched Redford into megastardom, and he should have had no problem calling the shots. It wasn’t that way though, not exactly. Redford wanted to make the movie at Sundance and in nearby Utah parks. But Hollywood pushed back. The heads at Warner Bros. first insisted that the movie be filmed on its own backlot, in the tradition of many classic Westerns. Redford was appalled. Authentic was an important word for him, and these suggestions were anything but. He refused to budge, despite the financial risk. He had already spent the $200,000 advanced to him, and he was putting Sydney Pollack at risk, too.

Though the executives at Warner Bros. relented on filming locations, they stipulated that if Redford went a penny over his $4 million budget, it would come out of his pocket, with a lien “put on Pollack’s production company as collateral,” according to Redford’s biographer, Michael Feeney Callan.Redford decided it was worth the gamble. He was famously stubborn, and that stubbornness got him into trouble at times, but this time he was right. Take away the landscape—the real landscape of Utah—and the film is nothing.The script excited Redford from the start. It was, he said, “closer to the real West than anything I’d ever read or seen.” It was written by John Milius, working off Vardis Fisher’s 1965 novel Mountain Man and the 1958 biography Crow Killer by Raymond W. Thorp and Robert Bunker. That the film took place in or near the mountains Redford had grown to love added a deeply personal resonance. Consider what Jeremiah Johnson says when he eyes the land where he will build his new home: “River in front. Cliffs behind. Good water. Not much wind. This will be a good place to live.” Redford could say pretty much the same about the A-frame house he built at Sundance before fame really hit. This was a story that spoke directly to him, a mythic story of turning your back on the known world and finding an unknown one. Of starting out as a greenhorn, new to the wilderness, but gradually learning what is needed to survive, then thrive. In a life of artifice, here was the authentic.“Finally, you don’t ‘act’ a movie like Jeremiah Johnson,” he later told his biographer. “It becomes an experience, into which you fit and flow. It was grueling and I was changed by it, no question. We re-created a way of life that real people lived in these real mountains, the same now as they were then. You learn by immersing yourself in their reality.”For Redford, Jeremiah Johnson was a “pre-western Western. It had a lot of things that I really cared about. Nature. Living in wilderness, and what it took.” The reason he considered the film a “pre-western” is that it features not a cowboy but a mountain man.

He remembered reading Bernard De Voto’s The Year of Decision 1846, with its description of the life such men led:He had to live in the wilderness. That is the point. Woodcraft, forest craft, and river craft were his skill. To read the weather, the streams, the woods; to know the ways of animals and birds; to find food and shelter; to find the Indians when they were his customers or to battle them from stump to stump when they were on the warpath and to know which caprice was on them; to take comfort in flood or blizzard; to move safely through the wilderness, to make the wilderness his bed, his table, and his tool—this was his vocation. And habits and beliefs still deep in the patterns of our mind came to us from him. He was in flight from the sound of an axe and he lived under a doom which he himself created, but westward he went free.Redford had loved mythology ever since he discovered it during local library visits as a seven-year-old, and this is the myth that he found himself inside. In flashing images up on the screen, he would help create and redefine the images of the mountain man just as he had, to some extent, the cowboy. But the experience of making the movie, which was filmed in deep snow in Utah and somehow came in under budget, felt surprisingly real to him, authentic even despite the requisite artifice.Filming a mountain man and being a mountain man are not the same thing, but there were days when these worlds happily, if confusingly, collided.The first day Robert Redford called, I was napping.The second day, too.But on the third day, I did not rest.By then he had left two long messages, a number—“my home number”—and a good time for me to call him back. On the first message, he had said, “Boy, am I anxious to talk to you,” and then ended the call with: “Very anxious to talk to you.”He ended the second message by saying, “Calling to see when you might be out west to see when and where we might hook up.”Of course, I entertained thoughts that it was a prank, a friend doing an imitation. But the voice on the machine sure sounded like Redford. And the funny thing is, he actually did sound a little anxious.

So on that third day, I fortified myself with a beer, grabbed a second bottle, and walked the 100 feet from my house to my writing shack overlooking the marsh. Not long after we’d moved to our house in coastal North Carolina, I’d built the eight-by-eight-foot, cedar-shingled shack myself, forsaking power tools, which meant that the place tilted like the lair of an old-time TV Batman villain, nothing quite level.I didn’t know it then, but Redford had once had a shack of his own. Back in 1971, after Jeremiah Johnson wrapped, his first wife, Lola Van Wagenen, enlisting the aid of the Sundance caretakers, had given him an unusual 34th-birthday present: a replica of Johnson’s mud-and-wood cabin, situated in the woods above the A-frame house where they lived. When he escaped to Sundance from Hollywood or New York, the cabin became a retreat within a retreat. Back in the 16th century, Michel de Montaigne wrote, “A man should keep for himself a little back shop, all his own, quite unadulterated, in which he establishes his true freedom and chief place of seclusion and solitude.” Redford, I would learn, agreed. Throughout his life, even at the times of his most intense fame, he would keep a back shop.I cracked the second beer and dialed.The voice that answered the phone was the same one I’d heard in numerous movies since I was a kid. Soon he was telling me more or less what he’d said on the messages he’d left. That he had read my most recent book, All the Wild That Remains, about the writers Edward Abbey and Wallace Stegner, and that he “knew those people and that landscape” and “had hiked, ridden on horseback, and paddled with Ed” during a trip down the old Outlaw Trail from Wyoming to New Mexico in October 1975. We talked for almost an hour about western writers, wildness and wilderness, what the West meant, and the fight to save it.For whatever reason—maybe it was the subject matter or perhaps that second beer—I felt perfectly at ease. Though I couldn’t bring myself to comply when he said, “Call me Bob,” it all seemed oddly normal.