OK, so this guy walks into a bar in small-town New Mexico. He sits at the counter, turns to the guy beside him and says something like, “Hi, I’m Tim Cahill, famous adventure writer.”
Their conversation changes the other guy’s life. He’s so moved, he zaps Cahill an email thanking him for inspiring him to follow his dream.
That’s very nice, Cahill shoots back, only I’ve never been to that bar, or that town, and I’ve never met you. The punch line? Tim Cahill is so cool, other people walk around pretending to be him.“Some guy is getting laid using my name,” Cahill laughs. “I’m not even getting laid using my name.”
Cahill has the job the rest of us dream about. As a travel writer, he has bounded across the planet in high-adrenaline pursuits. His writing is so funny it’s easy to forget how insightful it is, but by the end of his essays, readers find themselves transported not just across the globe, but into a whole new way of thinking about the world around them.
He’s so self-deprecating, it’s easy to forget the esteemed place that unshaven, ungainly, bespectacled guy in the Hawaiian shirt and ball cap holds in the genre. Cahill was one of the founders of a little magazine called Outside. (Maybe you’ve heard of it?) It’s become staple on supermarket shelves, but three decades and change ago, it was like nothing readers had ever seen.
A Montana resident, Cahill has trekked the world’s wildest places, but his most recent book, 
Lost in my own Backyard was centered just 50 miles from his back door in Yellowstone. When he talks about travel writing, he paraphrases fellow luminary Bill Bryson: travel writing begins as soon as you step out the door.
New West: What is it about Bill Bryson’s quote that resonates with you?
Tim Cahill: Travel writing is a forgiving genre. When we were at Outsidemagazine and looking to produce what we then considered to be a ridiculous product – that is, literate outdoor writing – we discussed that our readers would probably rather read a very well-written piece about a picnic in the backyard as opposed to some excretable writing about a guy who did cartwheels across the streets of Nebraska.
You have to cast your mind back to 1970 when outdoor readers were highly service-oriented – they were basically about gear and techniques, but they weren’t actual stories about the outdoors. When we started the magazine with our concept being literate writing about the outdoors, we had Pulitzer Prize winners writing outdoor stories. The pundits were making fun of us because it was believed literate people didn’t go outdoors.
Why did you devote your last book to writing about your own backyard?
It came as an assignment. There’s a whole series of walking books that Crown Publishers put out. They all look the same and they all had the exact same length. They asked me, what did I want to write about, and I said, “Yellowstone Park?” They said, “What a great idea!” I thought I put one over on them. It’s in my own back yard. But it’s our first national park. It’s everyone’s backyard.
What did you learn?
It’s such an overwhelming subject. There’s glaciology, geology, history, lore, microbiology, vulcanology. I learned a little bit about all those subjects. I didn’t know, for instance, that if you stood at the top of Mount Washburn and looked south, that plain there was where the majority of the mountains used to be. That was one of the evidences of the latest eruptions in Yellowstone. If you do the math, they seem to happen every 600,000 years. The last one happened 640,000 years ago.
You’ve traveled all over the globe. Why is Montana home?
Because I can live anywhere I want to. I like Montana. I like the mountains. The rivers. I like living in a small town. I grew up in a small town. I guess I’m just a small-town kind of guy. It’s got everything I want.
Some travel writers don’t like the label “travel writer.” Does it bother you?
I’m a writer first, a traveler second. What’s important to me is a story. The reason I travel is that there are endless stories in the world. Endless things to learn. I’m always very curious, and I like to learn new things. I think I have something the Germans call a schoolteacher mentality. I like to impart what I’ve learned, but I hope not in an encyclopedic way. I get you involved in the story so you have to know more.
Anywhere you haven’t gone that you’re dying to go?
The real question is, what places do I want to go back to? As a writer specializing in travel, you don’t want to be pigeonholed as “he’s the Italy guy.” But there are places I love that I want to go back to. Patagonia is one of them. Strangely enough, the place I like the best is the Southern Hemisphere’s mirror image of where I live. They’ve got big mountains with glaciers on their shoulders. They’ve got streams with big, dumb trout in them. They’ve got fields full of cattle.
What do you think about Outside magazine today?
Frankly, I haven’t read it for a while. It seems like they have a kind of hipper-than-thou attitude. And they’re not alone in this, but “the 10 great outdoor towns?” Why are they always different towns? Madison, Wisc., suddenly became a shithole? I have a suspicion that it has more to do with selling magazines.
I did pick up the 30th anniversary issue. They wrote their hits and misses of the last 30 years and talked about some of the ridiculous things they had written. They quoted me on things.
Like what?
Something like the Tetons being like a row of tits or something.
What’s next for you?
I got down to the Pantanal in Brazil. I’m on horseback with these guys going to work with cattle and every couple days there’s been cattle mauled by a jaguar. Then you see their tracks. It’s like a fist in the sand. They’re huge. Three-hundred-pound adults that can crush a skull.
What lessons has your life of travel taught you?
Avoid psychotic traveling companions. There’s a corollary to that. The most carefully-chosen traveling companion becomes the most psychotic.
How about big lessons? Big lessons the planet has taught you.
It’s inexhaustible in terms of stories and interest. I’ve been to Patagonia many, many times, but if somebody has walking one mile from my track east or west, they would have a very different experience. If you choose travel as a subject to write about, your subject matter is inexhaustible in a single lifetime.
In terms of people I’ve met, from Stone Age tribes in West Papua to people in the most populated place on the planet, in Kowloon, they all want pretty much the same thing. They all want a place to live, something to do in terms of work and some leisure time to spend with their family.
