Recently, autor of Otters Dance, Bob Budd was interviewed at the Author Soiree through the Laramie County Public Library. The interview is available to listen to on Wyoming Public Radio.
"Most of my life lessons have come from ranchers." Bob Budd says. "Almost every one of them tried to control nature at some point in their life and nearly all determined that notion as foolish as the idea of training a wife. There have been many others along the way. Miners and loggers, merchants and beggars, environmentalists, truck drivers and lawyers, artists and hermits. They are not uniform in their ethnicity, political party, intelligence, gender, age or sexual preference. The people who inspired this work hold three important constants. They are honest, sometimes to a fault. At the same time, they are patient and tolerant of new ideas. Most common to all of them is a deep reverence for the natural world, and the place humans occupy in that realm. We are part of the environment and that will not change. At best we are all learning organisms. At worst, we quit thinking and cease to challenge ourselves. When you live a long way from the end of the pavement, you come to appreciate things you will never understand. And you come to revere them as much for the mystery as the elegance. In doing so you honor your own short existence, and give way to those who come later to prove you both wrong and right. In doing so you find not equilibrium, but balance, you find a way to remove chaos from your mind and leave it where it belongs in the natural world. Sometimes you walk home from the barn and stare at the dirt. Sometimes you walk home and see only the stars, but always you come home to the people you love."