No. 191: DEREK HATFIELD / Long before working remotely gained its current cachet, the ex-Mountie was more distant & alone (& helpless) than anyone on the planet

The only boat I'd been on was the ferry to Centre Island, so I thought I was unlucky to get assigned a profile of a sailor. Then he told me his story. He was, in every sense, at sea.

THIS week I’ve been reading Little Big Man, a novel by Thomas Berger. I had heard of the movie adaptation starring Dustin Hoffman and Chief Dan George, but knew nothing about the source work until I read a glowing appraisal by Larry McMurtry. McMurtry, whose Lonesome Dove is frequently accused of being the greatest western ever written, expressed envy of Berger’s work and rated Little Big Man an American classic to be placed alongside Twain and Hemingway. It’s at least as good as both and, in fact, far funnier than either. One early line really landed with me:

In later years I grew greatly fond of Old Lodge Skins. He had more bad luck than any human being I have ever known red or white, and you can’t beat that for making a man likable [sic[.

There’s a lot of bad luck to go around in Little Big Man—consider that the pity for Old Lodge Skins was expressed by a narrator from his vantage point as a ten-year-old who had just been kidnapped, sorta the Stockholm syndrome on the plains. Anyway…