Lowbaggers
Like To Fish

By Josh Mahan

The other day Mike, myself, and the girlfriend joined our good rafting buddy Wayne Fairchild at the Flathead Brewery in the lakeside town of Wood’s Bay to listen to some honest-to-goodness beargrass music and to talk up the Idaho whitewater scene.

Those beargrass boys played it right, the Montana Beargrass Band. It wasn’t any of that syrupy, deep-south bluegrass business. There’s not enough rain in Montana to listen to that crap. No, up here people hoe-down to the hard-working sound of beargrass. Tunes you can fix your truck to.

What exactly is beargrass?

The actual plant is neither a grass nor an attractant of bears. Rather, it’s a member of the lily family and a favorite food of elk. It looks like saw grass and sits unassuming in low, green clumps on the ground. Then every seven years it sends a mighty stalk skyward that’s tip blooms into a thick series of tiny, tight, cream-colored flowers bursting with pollen. If elk had their way they would eat every stalk of beargrass in sight. And so to foil this greedy predator, the beargrass blooms simultaneously in great droves every seven years, covering hillsides in what looks like year-round snow and spreading its seed.

Unlike the noodley mish-mash of bluegrass, beargrass music is calculated and has great timing.

Sometimes things just need a bit of defining.

So, back in Wood’s Bay the beargrass plucked on in the back ground, boaters milled around with Triple Hole Ales in hand, talking about the beauty and fury of the Lochsa.

“That rag? No, I’m in online news these days.”

“Really, for who.”

“Lowbagger.org, an environmental journal in Missoula.”

Then she drops the inevitable.

“What’s a Lowbagger?” she asked.

It’s not the first time I’ve been offered the question. Tonight, maybe it’s the Triple Hole Ales, but I’m caught off guard.

“Uhhmm, these environmental activists who sleep on your couch and eat all of your food,” I respond.

I could tell by the blank look on her face that this sort of thing had never happened to her, and the conversation ended a short time later.

Roselle was on-hand to hear the whole thing.

“Next time just tell them that Lowbaggers really care about rivers.”

That’s all it took, pretty soon we were making up all sorts of Lowbagger fill-in-the-blanks.

“Lowbaggers are people who like to fish.”

“Lowbaggers recycle a lot.”

“Lowbaggers don’t cook in Teflon pans.”

That kept us busy for awhile.

But, really, what the hell is a Lowbagger. Sure we’ve talked about it before in this column. Lowbaggers are the legions of volunteer activists and ski bums who operate on sheer inspiration alone. It is this phenomenal energy that Lowbagger is named after.

But when we really look at how the word Lowbagger developed, it’s just a Missoula word for a floor-surfer. Lowbaggers travel in such packs that they never get the couch. Usually they are mooching off the couch-surfer, who is mooching off the home-owner. These Tortilla Flat type of circumstances of Steinbeck’s era occurred so often in Missoula during the early and mid-nineties that a word was needed just to save description time as to what the nature was of the characters strewn across your floor.

Our rafting-buddy Wayne-O says he was on the scene the first time Lowbagger was ever used, at a house on Pine Street in 1992. He credits the reputed and noted Missoula Lowbagger Thorny with the first usage of the word while describing to Wayne just the type of fiasco discussed in the previous paragraph.

“You know, these guys were low on the totem pole,” Wayne-O says, “sleeping low on the ground, with sleeping bags. It was obvious that they were Lowbaggers.”

The name stuck, and guys like Wayne and Roselle went on to institutionalize the use of the word in the regional dialect.

The reason they used the word so much is because at the time they both needed to harness the energy of the Lowbagger. (When harnessed properly this energy is rumored to be able to light a city of 100,000.) Wayne-O was in the business of raising a militia of guides to move his guests down the river. Being a new business owner, and light on capital, a place to throw a bed roll and a pot of food was his trade for a day’s work on the Salmon River.

He needed Lowbaggers.

And Mike. Well, you don’t stop illegal roadless logging in the wild heart of Idaho (i.e. the famed Cove/Mallard roadless campaign) without a citizen’s militia of Lowbaggers, ready to eat beans and sleep in trees.

Lowbaggers listen to beargrass music.