CALL OF THE WILD

Modern-Day Hunter-Gatherer Steven Rinella ’00 Turns Passion for Outdoors into Adventurous Career

Story by Nate Schweber
Photos courtesy of Steven Rinella

TOP: Rinella rafts out a load of moose meat in the Alaska Range.
BOTTOM: Steven Rinella glasses for blacktail deer on Prince of Wales Island in southeast Alaska.

It’s part of author and journalist Deirdre McNamer’s job to hear wild stories. After all, she teaches creative writing at The University of Montana.

One story she overheard in the late 1990s still stands out. A charismatic student who regularly brought her “little bloody packets of deer meat for my freezer,” a guy who wrote a memorable essay for class about once expecting to die after eating a mess of mountain mushrooms, said he had a big snapping turtle that he planned to make into soup.

“He was a big hunter, forager, and gatherer,” McNamer says. “He had a fervent and detailed interest in where food comes from and the outdoors, and he had just fallen in love with Montana.”

The student was Steven Rinella, author of two books and host of The Sportsman Channel television show MeatEater. Rinella is a Michigan native, who now finds himself living in New York City, whose zest for the outdoors met its perfect match in Montana’s wilderness. While earning his Master of Fine Arts degree in UM’s Creative Writing Program, Rinella made the outdoors his second classroom. His adventures under the Big Sky were the template for a career spent circling the globe, writing about hunting and advocating for the habitat that wild food needs to grow.

“There’s an energy and urgency to his writing that’s almost as if there wouldn’t be anything for dinner if he didn’t get it done,” says best-selling author Ian Frazier, one of Rinella’s early mentors.

Rinella’s exploits have taken him from an unexplored river in the Philippines on assignment for Outside magazine; to South America, Vietnam, and Hawaii to film TV episodes; to the Alaska wilderness for a bison hunt that became the hook for his second book, American Buffalo: In Search of a Lost Icon. His career trajectory was set, says his brother Matt Rinella, by his move from the Midwest to Montana.

“Steve’s interests were pretty much galvanized by the time he was twelve,” says Matt Rinella, a U.S. Department of Agriculture scientist in Miles City. “And he came to Montana because it seemed like the ideal place to chase those pursuits.”

“I actually wanted to be a professional trapper until about the time I was twenty,” Steven Rinella says, leaning back on a furry couch cushion made from the pelt of a beaver he caught in Wyoming. It’s unusual décor to see, and an awfully unusual statement to hear, in New York City. The traffic route to Rinella’s fashionable Fort Greene neighborhood in Brooklyn courses through the borough’s gritty, urban downtown, where the only trace of Rinella’s writing subjects is a storefront chicken shop called Buffalo Boss. He lives on the ground floor of a handsome brownstone building that is far more Cliff Huxtable than, say, Jack London.

And street parking? Fuhgeddaboudit.

The irony isn’t lost on Rinella.

“My life’s goal was to spend time in wild places. It’s been the guiding principle of my life, so it’s perplexing to me how the achievement of that, the fulfillment of that, is to live here,” says Rinella, age thirty-eight. “I spend more time outdoors than anyone I know.”

Rinella’s conversation is like his prose: open, autobiographical, and filled with funny anecdotes. Dressed in Levi’s and an untucked button-down shirt, Rinella poured rum and coconut water over ice and cooked snook that he caught two days earlier on a fishing trip with his brother in Belize. Less than a week earlier, he’d given a speech in Missoula.

He was born and raised in rural Michigan, where he figured out early that selling two muskrat pelts paid better than mowing a lawn.

“He was always just real comfortable outside, very gung-ho about it,” says his brother Dan Rinella, a freshwater ecologist at the University of Alaska.

While his brothers opted for careers studying ecology and biology, Rinella felt he didn’t share their aptitude for science. After he earned his undergraduate degree in English from Michigan’s Grand Valley State University, the price of muskrat pelts nosedived. Rinella thought he might try his luck writing.

He road tripped to Montana, and it set his mind reeling. He remembers gazing from Interstate 90 out at mountains bigger than any he’d yet seen and wondering, “What is the delivery mechanism by which you go from being on the road to being on the top of those things?” He fished Rock Creek one day, and at night he and his brother caroused downtown Missoula, ate a MacKenzie River pizza, and shut down Charlie B’s, that quintessential North Higgins Avenue dive. The next morning, on a whim, Rinella walked over to the UM creative writing department, took an application from program director Kate Gadbow, and applied.

Gadbow says Rinella, who was in the program from 1997 through 2000, proved to be a great student because of his gunscope focus. He just wanted to write magazine articles about the outdoors, not fiction, not poetry. Rinella helped revitalize the program’s nonfiction curriculum, which had atrophied some since the recent retirement of heralded professor and Montana wordsmith William Kittredge, Gadbow says.

TOP: Rinella and the buffalo skull that inspired his second book, American Buffalo: In Search of a Lost Icon
MIDDLE: Rinella surfcasts for striped bass and bluefish on Fire Island, N.Y.
BOTTOM: Rinella bowhunts for elk in southwest Montana’s Lee Metcalf Wilderness Area.

“Steven had a real directed idea of what he wanted to do,” she says. “He was really helpful in nurturing the idea that nonfiction could be a separate part of the Creative Writing Program, and a valid one.”

For Rinella, the classroom came second to that big Montana wild. He set about trying to walk every game trail in the state. His partner in exploration was his brother Matt, then a student at Montana State University in Bozeman.

“We lived in the mountains,” Rinella says. “We hit it so hard that by the time I finished grad school, I knew that state better than a lot of guys who grew up there.”

Rinella hunted black bear near Thompson Falls and scoured the Sapphire Mountains and the Lee Metcalf Wilderness Area for elk. He picked morel mushrooms by the North Fork of the Flathead River and thought he might die by an Idaho riverbank after eating seven different species of wild fungus. He ate sushi made of Flathead Lake mackinaw. Fatefully, in September 1999, he found an old bison skull deep in the Madison Mountains, kickstarting an obsession with that animal.

“Steve was a guy that you could always have a great outdoor adventure with,” says Ben Bloch, a Madison Valley artist who was friendly with Rinella when they both lived in Missoula. “And he carved out a pretty interesting niche for himself as an honorable sportsman.”

One day, working as a range picker at the University Golf Course for extra money, Rinella says he had “a nervous breakdown,” driving inside a cage, getting pelted by little white balls. He suddenly was struck by the notion that modern American society had “traded the fecundity of the wild for pleated pants and manicured greens.”

He quit, rode his bike to his girlfriend’s apartment in the Wilma building, sat down and typed the first article he ever sold, this one to a trapping magazine. With guidance from Frazier, whom he recently had taken mule deer hunting in a canoe along the Missouri River Breaks, Rinella sold his next story to Outside magazine for a considerable hike in pay. Soon, that magazine sent him to Montauk, N.Y., to write about a shark fishing tournament, and then to the Island of Luzon in the Philippines to raft the mysterious Chaco River.

With his magazine career gaining speed, his first book project sparked when he invited McNamer and some classmates to his Rattlesnake neighborhood apartment to eat that snapping turtle. McNamer gave him her copy of Georges Auguste Escoffier’s Le Guide Culinaire, a collection of gourmet French recipes from the turn of the twentieth century. One was for turtle soup. Rinella used that text as a muse for his first book, The Scavenger’s Guide to Haute Cuisine, where he chronicled his quest to harvest ingredients for a forty-five-course Thanksgiving feast using only Escoffier’s recipes.

In the mid-2000s, Rinella entered an Alaskan lottery for a license to hunt a buffalo in a remote river valley that held a small herd descended from overflow stock introduced from Montana’s National Bison Range in 1928. Though his odds were less than 2 percent, Rinella scored one of the coveted tags and set forth to complete a story arc that began when he found that old Montana buffalo skull in the Madison Mountains.

His books were heralded by critics, teachers, friends, and family. Frazier described Rinella as “the best writing student I ever had.” His brothers both complimented his grasp of science and his ability to write about ecology.

Looking back, Rinella described his journey as “luck journalism.” He reflected on the odds of his drawing that bison tag.

“If something happens that’s too lucky, it’s like, are you a good writer or did something lucky just happen?” he says. “Looking back I’m astonished at how accidental it was.”

A few years later, he had another funny, lucky break. Rinella wound up on TV in New York City.

Around the time Rinella’s first book came out, he met in New York with his publicist, a fellow Michigan native named Katie Finch. The idea of him starring on TV came up.

“I remember thinking, no way, he’s too rough around the edges,” says Finch, who married Rinella in 2008. Together they have a two-year-old son named James.

After Rinella moved into Finch’s Brooklyn apartment around 2006 and finished his buffalo book, TV producers started calling. He hosted a show called The Wild Within on Travel Channel in 2010. In 2011, he shot episodes for MeatEater, and the show premiered on The Sportsman Channel in January. Director Morgan Fallon says Rinella’s energy and enthusiasm make the show compelling.

“We get moments of absolute magic,” Fallon says.

From his metropolitan home, Rinella says he is amused by the funny paradox by which living in the city allows him to spend more time in the wilderness.

“As much as I like to hunt and fish, I work in the entertainment business,” he says. “And there are certain benefits to being in New York if you’re in the entertainment business.”

He says he just finished edits on his third book, a hunting memoir that will soon take its place on the bookshelf in his dining room that also holds volumes with titles such as The Roadside History of Montana and Visions of the Big Sky, plus that Escoffier cookbook from McNamer.

Between the books sits a Montana black bear skull and that storied bison skull from the Madisons. His other bison skull, a porcelain Alaskan trophy, hangs in the living room. Beneath it lies a toy train that belongs to his son, who’s sleeping in a back room not far from the closet with the extra freezer where Rinella stores meat from his hunts.

Wait, an extra freezer? For wild meat? In New York City?

“Well, yeah,” Rinella explains. “I give a lot of it away to friends.”

You can take Steven Rinella out of Montana, but you can’t take Montana out of Steven Rinella.

Steven Rinella

Tell me about where you grew up, how you discovered the outdoors, and your father’s influence on you. From your book American Buffalo: In Search of a Lost Icon, he sounds like a tough character. How did your upbringing affect your decision to become a writer?

My dad definitely had the call of the wild, even though he grew up on the South Side of Chicago. But where we lived in Michigan had pockets of woods all around, or what we referred to locally as “swamps.” I never had any awakening about the outdoors. I can’t remember not doing it; it was always there. I was born into a house of hunting and fishing partners. My brothers and I, that’s just what we did. In the summers, we fished and in the winters, we hunted. In my area, it was cool to hunt. We had girlfriends and bikes and snowboards and we listened to music, but my old man always took us hunting with him. My dad sold insurance after World War II and he said, “You spend a third of your life working, so you have to find an occupation you enjoy.”

Tell me about how you wound up in Montana.

I had no business applying to The University of Montana, but I did, and I was accepted. At the same time, I was accepted with a full-ride scholarship to Colorado State University. But it seemed laughable that I would go there. Everything I’d heard was that Colorado was tapped out and Montana is the last frontier in the lower forty-eight. For hunting and fishing, you have to go to Montana. When I got there, I hit it so hard core it took me three years to finish a two-year course.

Your brother Matt, who went to Montana State University while you were at UM, was your partner in adventure. How did you guys explore the state?

We liked to walk, and we were gung-ho. We didn’t grow up [in Montana], and we didn’t have a buddy with a ranch. What we had were feet, and we just wandered. Montana has that vastness. In Michigan I killed a lot of deer on two farms, both of them within eight miles of where I grew up. In Montana we would walk nine miles back from the trailhead to start hunting. I would walk farther in Montana to begin hunting elk than I ever went hunting from my home [in Michigan].

What was it like being in UM’s Creative Writing Program?

I was trying to write magazine pieces and a number of professors there, like Dee McNamer, understood that I was trying to do something that wasn’t unobtainable. A lot of students were trying to write as therapy. I had a more pragmatic approach. I wanted to write magazine pieces on a subject, and my subject was the out of doors. If someone asks me now, ‘How do I get into writing?’ it’s an impossible question to answer. You’ll never meet two people who took the same route.

How did you come to be fascinated with bison?

There are just some animals that are hard to reckon with. I found that buffalo skull in September of ’99, and I wrote part of my dissertation about it and actually just cut and pasted that right into my book. When all that was going on, I knew I was going to write something about buffalo. Then I drew that tag and spent ten days hunting my buffalo, and then after that, sold the book. Then I spent two years researching my buffalo book. I got to a point where I assembled a story of the animal through history and pop culture references and was able to draw this weird picture of it. I knew more buffalo trivia than anyone.

What was it like making the transition between being a writer and being a TV personality?

People look at TV as being the end-all, be-all. But it’s not true. TV is a great way to cover a massive amount of material very quickly. I’ve always had a lot of wanderlust, and I get agitated if I’m not on the move. I run a general backlog of ideas and there’s a lot more things I want to do than I ever will do. TV was a way to get to do a lot of things I wouldn’t otherwise be able to. Writing is a solitary existence, but with making MeatEater, for the first time in my life I have colleagues and we have a blast. Plus I’m able to travel around and justify it. As a writer, TV is a level of exposure that you’re not accustomed to. If you’re on a prime-time TV show, more people are going to hear what you have to say than will probably ever buy your book.

You’re a guy who loves the outdoors and the wilderness. Yet you live in New York City. How do you reconcile that?

In reality, I’m on the road hunting and fishing more than 50 percent of my time. If I wasn’t in the line of work I’m in, I might just be someone who has two weeks of vacation every year and does a little hunting. It’s funny. The earliest feelings of guilt I remember are from one day not waking up to go hunting with my dad. It was early, it was gray outside, the wind was blowing, and I didn’t want to get up in that tree stand, and I remember feeling guilty about feeling that way. Now I feel all the time as though being [in New York City] is something to be ashamed of. As much as I love aspects of it, I love to be outside so much. But being here enables me to spend so much time outside. I think about that every day. It’s sick, but it’s true.

What’s next for you?

If you had asked me at any point in my life, ‘What’s going to happen next?’ I wouldn’t have been able to answer. At fifteen I wanted to be a damage-control trapper. At twenty, I wouldn’t have had an answer. At twenty-five I wanted to be a magazine writer. I would have never in a million years imagined I’d be doing what I’m doing now. After that pattern repeats itself so often, I know it’s not wise to take a stab at what I’ll be doing next. I can tell you that my kid is going to be two in May, and I’m going to want to spend a lot of time with him and have adventures. My brother has a kid the same age. I can picture him being along with us.