Author Philip Burgess

Philip Burgess grew up on his family's ranch in Eastern Montana with his sleep haunted by the cries of wild geese and the wail of the last of the Great Northern steam engines across the Missouri River valley. Leaving behind an extended family of souls damaged by war, the Great Depression, mental illness, bad medical care, and reservation violence, Burgess went off to pursue higher education. He followed up four years of college with a less formal but somewhat more intense education as an army officer in Vietnam, where he managed to avoid being a hero. Afterwards, Burgess fulfilled a childhood dream by going out on the road and living a minimalist, drifter's life until he wound up in the mountains of Western Montana in 1980 where he has remained ever since, trying his best to earn his oats as a veteran's spokesman and therapist/poet and storyteller.

No place to rest*

A grieving young Irish immigrant puts his motherless infant son in the hands of strangers and sails away, never to be heard from again. An old cowboy turns his ranch over to his wife and rides off into the sunset. A glimpse of a hobo waiting by muddy waters to board a west-bound freight train, the stuff of a young boy’s dreams.

I went out on the road in pursuit of angels and some crazed notion of perfect freedom, after I returned from Vietnam. I disappeared for ten years into the drama that was America in the sixties and seventies. Among other things, I learned that visions are not confined to saints and schizophrenics, I could be violently seasick for a week and survive, and not everyone wants rescue. Unable to sustain the degree of rootlessness and isolation that I found out on the road and yet unable to see a place in society to rest my head, I let the road become my prison.

*bunch quitter: a colloquial expression generally used to describe an animal, usually a cow or steer, that resists being herded or controlled. This resistance can sometimes take the form of violent and even self-destructive behavior.