One Nation, Under Ted (Cont.)

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Outside Magazine December 2001

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One Nation, Under Ted (Cont.)


	Star of the restoration drama: a gray wolf penned up at the Flying D

WHEN BEAU AND I sit down to dinner in the formal Avalon dining room that night, the cook serves osso buco—but of course the shanks are bison, not veal. Heavy with meat and bones, the fine porcelain plates are delivered by servants. “Do y’all eat the marrow with the meat like ya supposed to?” Beau asks, all chummy, as if he’s not so sure about this fancy-ass osso buco stuff. He makes you feel like you either could eat the marrow and sip the exquisite cabernet at the table of a billionaire, or just put your elbows on the table and chew damn good meat with Beau. Whichever.

It’s a southern thing, too. Any relationship, no matter how strained, weird, or antagonistic, has to be grounded in the habits of friendship—the back slap, a private detail, booze. After dinner, Beau asks me to put down the pad and just have a drink. We polish off another bottle of wine and talk about friends, wives—Beau married Texas interior designer Gannon Hunt in 1999—and family. I learn about his sister’s heartbreak, a gravely ill child.

His ease can be disarming. At one point, I motion to a portrait of Vivien Leigh as Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind. The thing is nearly life-size, I say, just like the one in the movie.

Raising woodpeckers back east is one thing. Bringing wolves and their chilling howl to western ranchland is another.

“It is the one in the movie,” Beau says, as if he’d just learned it himself. Then he jumps up to show me the purple stain where a drunken Rhett Butler shattered his wineglass just before he took Scarlett upstairs for what we might now call date rape. Beau says that his father “picked it up,” as if Ted had found it at a yard sale.

When the weather comes up, I talk about the strange winter we had in Connecticut, and Beau cites the rainfall totals for northern Florida before dilating on the inaccuracies of the precipitation forecasts for the Dakotas. Rain was pretty good in the Northwest, he says, but he’s concerned about the Southwest, particularly Arizona and New Mexico. There have been rain shortages in those states, which means the possibility of catastrophic fire.

There’s a way to talk about the weather that marks you as a local—a knowledge of the immediate past, of the way it’s supposed to be right now. Beau talks that way about half the country. He looks at tracts of land, entire states, the way I look at my backyard vegetable patch. As a garden.

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