J.D. Tuccille Says, Leave Room For the Mountain Men

Oliver Herold

2013 marked the tenth anniversary of the death of Bryan Clements. His obituary in the Arizona Daily Sun attributed his passing to "complications following brain surgery," though the reality of his end was rather weirder and more interesting than that suggests. So was his life. Bryan was a part-time mountain man, and a model for some of the attributes of Rollo, a main character in the novel, High Desert Barbecue. He mattered not just because he made the world a stranger and better place, writes J.D. Tuccille, but also because the room for his existence is an underappreciated feature of what can be an all-too stifling and rule-bound world.