Matt and I were watching Anthony Bourdain's "Parts Unknown" from our place on the peaceful peninsula just off the beach in St. Petersburg, Florida. It was the time in our lives when we could hear the waves crashing into the surf just past our balcony.
Despite the tranquility of our little stretch of paradise, it was Bourdain that brought us to places where we felt alive. Places like Barcelona, Paris, New York City, Montreal, and even Montana's wide open and breathtaking cowboy frontier.
There, in Montana, he spoke about the breathtaking beauty in art, forged from the hardships of the frontier and the vast solace of wide open space. He spoke of life - perhaps more than in any other episode.
In a moving CNN essay piece, he then wrote about it. From Parts Unknown Montana he penned, "We show you a lot of beautiful spaces and very nice people in this episode, but its beating heart, and the principal reason I've always come to Montana, is Jim Harrison -- poet, author and great American and a hero of mine and millions of others around the world.
Shortly after the filming of this episode, Jim passed away, only a few months after the death of his beloved wife of many years, Linda.
It is very likely that this is the last footage taken of him.
To the very end, he ate like a champion, smoked like a chimney, lusted (at least in his heart) after nearly every woman he saw, drank wine in quantities that would be considered injudicious in a man half his age, and most importantly, got up and wrote each and every day -- brilliant, incisive, thrilling sentences and verses that will live forever."
Yes, Matt, the man was was about so much more than food. You could feel something different in that episode, a transformative shift in the man. Bourdain was emotionally stirred by his time with Jim Harrison. In the picture above, you can see him, staring off into the big-sky distance, thinking about life and art and his place in the everything of it.
Bourdain, oddly, would also write, how he spent time with Joe Rogan on that trip, who flipped him on his back (while wrestling) and he found himself wrestled into looking at the wide Montana sky.
I wonder if this man's soul was destined for so much more than celebrity television. He'd often seem as if he longed to transpose his lives for theirs; to experience what it was like to live through them. At times, he seemed almost embarrassed that he was intruding on their nostalgic perfection.
I think it was especially true there, in Montana. When he seemed existentially thoughtful and poetic. Sad, even. Wistful.
In his writings about the episode, Bourdain finished with this:
"There were none like him while he lived. There will be none like him now that he's gone.
He was a hero to me, an inspiration, a man I was honored and grateful to have known and spent time with. And I am proud that we were able to capture his voice, his words, for you.
I leave you with a poem Jim wrote. We use it in the episode, but I want to reprint it here. It seems kind of perfect now that Jim's finally slipped his chain."
BARKING
The moon comes up.
The moon goes down.
This is to inform you
that I didn't die young.
Age swept past me
but I caught up.
Spring has begun here and each day
brings new birds up from Mexico.
Yesterday I got a call from the outside
world but I said no in thunder.
I was a dog on a short chain
and now there's no chain.
Bourdain, however, did die young. Perhaps his was a soul that longed to be off the short chain.
The one Harrison wrote about.
Off the chain, into Parts Unknown.
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