On the Trail of Jeremiah

THREE MEN stand huddled together in deep snow, beneath a great wall of mountains. Blue sky overhead, mountains a blinding white. The men are discussing something we can’t hear. One of the men wears a beard and a long fur coat, almost like a pelt, a costume from another time.

The two other men walk over to a HELICOPTER and climb in. The bearded man stays behind. The helicopter starts up with a noise like a giant lawnmower, the blades blowing great clouds of snow. The helicopter rises from its own white mist. The bearded man shields his eyes with his hand.

The copter rises straight up, 100, 200, 300 feet. Far below, the bearded man starts to trudge through the snow. The helicopter follows as the man in the passenger seat leans out and tries to film him.

Suddenly, the man leaning out with the camera stops filming. Looks down at the camera.

It is hard to hear him over the roar of the helicopter.

The man with the camera looks down at the man below, a speck in a field of white.

CUT TO:

The bearded man stares up at the helicopter as it suddenly dips its nose and flies off toward the far mountains. We still hear the lawnmower rotation of the blades, but the sound is fading now. A minute later, the helicopter disappears over the mountains.

A look of consternation comes over the bearded man’s face. What the hell? he thinks.

The man tramps back toward the spot where he had been talking with the two others not long before. But then he stops and looks up. The sky is pure blue, and some of that blue is splashed on the snow in long, stretched shadows.

The bearded man lies back in the snow, savoring the quiet. Nothing, no sounds, but the occasional echo over the tip of a glacier. He realizes now that he is completely alone.

The man smiles.

During his 89 years on earth, Charles Robert Redford acted in more than 80 films and directed 10. Though he sometimes wavered in later years, for decades he most often contended that Jeremiah Johnson (1972)—about a former soldier who goes west, leaving civilization behind—was his favorite of all those films.

One reason that it qualified as his favorite is that he shot parts of it in the shadow of Utah’s Mount Timpanogos, on land he had stumbled upon as a young man and that later became his home, a place he eventually named Sundance.

Not long before he purchased the land, Redford met Sydney Pollack, who would later buy a place at Sundance and direct Jeremiah Johnson. Pollack saw right off the way his new friend was pulled in two directions: “I was dumbfounded. I said, ‘Wait a second! You want to work in movies and you want to live in the wilderness! How do you reconcile these two lifestyles?’ I told him he was nuts.”

He would have to have been a little nuts to try and do both. In the years ahead, the pull in these two directions would get so strong, Redford sometimes felt he was being torn apart. It couldn’t have been easy: wanting to be a solitary mountain man when you also happened to be the world’s most famous actor.

Jeremiah Johnson brought these worlds together. The film came after Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) had launched Redford into megastardom, and he should have had no problem calling the shots. It wasn’t that way though, not exactly. Redford wanted to make the movie at Sundance and in nearby Utah parks. But Hollywood pushed back. The heads at Warner Bros. first insisted that the movie be filmed on its own backlot, in the tradition of many classic Westerns. Redford was appalled. Authentic was an important word for him, and these suggestions were anything but. He refused to budge, despite the financial risk. He had already spent the $200,000 advanced to him, and he was putting Sydney Pollack at risk, too. Though the executives at Warner Bros. relented on filming locations, they stipulated that if Redford went a penny over his $4 million budget, it would come out of his pocket, with a lien “put on Pollack’s production company as collateral,” according to Redford’s biographer, Michael Feeney Callan.

Redford decided it was worth the gamble. He was famously stubborn, and that stubbornness got him into trouble at times, but this time he was right. Take away the landscape—the real landscape of Utah—and the film is nothing.

The script excited Redford from the start. It was, he said, “closer to the real West than anything I’d ever read or seen.” It was written by John Milius, working off Vardis Fisher’s 1965 novel Mountain Man and the 1958 biography Crow Killer by Raymond W. Thorp and Robert Bunker. That the film took place in or near the mountains Redford had grown to love added a deeply personal resonance. Consider what Jeremiah Johnson says when he eyes the land where he will build his new home: “River in front. Cliffs behind. Good water. Not much wind. This will be a good place to live.” Redford could say pretty much the same about the A-frame house he built at Sundance before fame really hit. This was a story that spoke directly to him, a mythic story of turning your back on the known world and finding an unknown one. Of starting out as a greenhorn, new to the wilderness, but gradually learning what is needed to survive, then thrive. In a life of artifice, here was the authentic.

“Finally, you don’t ‘act’ a movie like Jeremiah Johnson,” he later told his biographer. “It becomes an experience, into which you fit and flow. It was grueling and I was changed by it, no question. We re-created a way of life that real people lived in these real mountains, the same now as they were then. You learn by immersing yourself in their reality.”

For Redford, Jeremiah Johnson was a “pre-western Western. It had a lot of things that I really cared about. Nature. Living in wilderness, and what it took.” The reason he considered the film a “pre-western” is that it features not a cowboy but a mountain man. He remembered reading Bernard De Voto’s The Year of Decision 1846, with its description of the life such men led:

He had to live in the wilderness. That is the point. Woodcraft, forest craft, and river craft were his skill. To read the weather, the streams, the woods; to know the ways of animals and birds; to find food and shelter; to find the Indians when they were his customers or to battle them from stump to stump when they were on the warpath and to know which caprice was on them; to take comfort in flood or blizzard; to move safely through the wilderness, to make the wilderness his bed, his table, and his tool—this was his vocation. And habits and beliefs still deep in the patterns of our mind came to us from him. He was in flight from the sound of an axe and he lived under a doom which he himself created, but westward he went free.

Redford had loved mythology ever since he discovered it during local library visits as a seven-year-old, and this is the myth that he found himself inside. In flashing images up on the screen, he would help create and redefine the images of the mountain man just as he had, to some extent, the cowboy. But the experience of making the movie, which was filmed in deep snow in Utah and somehow came in under budget, felt surprisingly real to him, authentic even despite the requisite artifice.

Filming a mountain man and being a mountain man are not the same thing, but there were days when these worlds happily, if confusingly, collided.

The first day Robert Redford called, I was napping.

The second day, too.

But on the third day, I did not rest.

By then he had left two long messages, a number—“my home number”—and a good time for me to call him back. On the first message, he had said, “Boy, am I anxious to talk to you,” and then ended the call with: “Very anxious to talk to you.”

He ended the second message by saying, “Calling to see when you might be out west to see when and where we might hook up.”

Of course, I entertained thoughts that it was a prank, a friend doing an imitation. But the voice on the machine sure sounded like Redford. And the funny thing is, he actually did sound a little anxious. So on that third day, I fortified myself with a beer, grabbed a second bottle, and walked the 100 feet from my house to my writing shack overlooking the marsh. Not long after we’d moved to our house in coastal North Carolina, I’d built the eight-by-eight-foot, cedar-shingled shack myself, forsaking power tools, which meant that the place tilted like the lair of an old-time TV Batman villain, nothing quite level.

I didn’t know it then, but Redford had once had a shack of his own. Back in 1971, after Jeremiah Johnson wrapped, his first wife, Lola Van Wagenen, enlisting the aid of the Sundance caretakers, had given him an unusual 34th-birthday present: a replica of Johnson’s mud-and-wood cabin, situated in the woods above the A-frame house where they lived. When he escaped to Sundance from Hollywood or New York, the cabin became a retreat within a retreat. Back in the 16th century, Michel de Montaigne wrote, “A man should keep for himself a little back shop, all his own, quite unadulterated, in which he establishes his true freedom and chief place of seclusion and solitude.” Redford, I would learn, agreed. Throughout his life, even at the times of his most intense fame, he would keep a back shop.

I cracked the second beer and dialed.

The voice that answered the phone was the same one I’d heard in numerous movies since I was a kid. Soon he was telling me more or less what he’d said on the messages he’d left. That he had read my most recent book, All the Wild That Remains, about the writers Edward Abbey and Wallace Stegner, and that he “knew those people and that landscape” and “had hiked, ridden on horseback, and paddled with Ed” during a trip down the old Outlaw Trail from Wyoming to New Mexico in October 1975. We talked for almost an hour about western writers, wildness and wilderness, what the West meant, and the fight to save it.

For whatever reason—maybe it was the subject matter or perhaps that second beer—I felt perfectly at ease. Though I couldn’t bring myself to comply when he said, “Call me Bob,” it all seemed oddly normal.

That conversation took place in 2016, and though I wish I could have recorded it, I did, suffice it to say, save the messages he left me, which I played for almost everyone I encountered over the next weeks, including a couple of near strangers.

As a result of my conversation with Robert Redford, I was invited to do a reading from my book at Sundance the following December. By “Sundance” I don’t mean the big festival in Park City, 45 minutes up the road, but the relatively small ski resort below Mount Timpanogos in Provo Canyon, the place where Redford first fell hard for the mountains of Utah. The film festival is what most people think of when you say the name, but the resort is the place where it all began for Redford.

My wife, Nina, and our daughter, Hadley, joined me in a lodge unit right on the mountain. We were thrilled to be there. Our room was wealthy rustic, with the skull of a bighorn sheep over the fireplace and old-fashioned snowshoes pinned to the wall. As if following stage directions, snow fell on our first day, and though it was wettish snow, that didn’t matter, not to Hadley, who at that point had witnessed snowfall in North Carolina a grand total of six times.

My reading took place at the base of Sundance in the Tree Room, so named because a tree grew right in the middle of the room. The reading went well, the audience was responsive, and the questions were great. There was only one disappointing aspect to the day, one that seemed small then but significant later on. Redford’s daughter Shauna, a painter, and his grandson Conor Schlosser were in attendance, and it was a delight to meet them as well as Chad, who ran the resort. But the main Redford, the one who had invited us and promised to attend, was missing. Something had come up. He sent along a note of apology. I kept the note for a while but can’t find it now.

Jeremiah Johnson may be a fantasy, but the myth it is based on is attractive to many. The idea of retreat has always had, and continues to have, especially in our hypercritical and hyperconnected age, a deep lure. It’s hard not to fall for the image of the mountain man heading out into the wild, truly getting away from it all, whatever it all is. In many ways, this myth is much more romantic and appealing than that of the cowboy. In fact, for those of us of a particular taste, the cowboy pales in comparison to this earlier figure.

Of course, retreat—so central to the film and Redford’s life—was also one of the founding myths of the United States. Even as we were advancing across the country like the military force we sometimes manage to forget we were, murdering and subjugating the Native people we encountered, we dreamed of retreat. The idea of retreat, and all that works against retreat, was with us from the country’s beginnings, in forms that were both gentle and extreme.

In his seminal book, The Machine in the Garden (1964), the historian and literary critic Leo Marx traces how the idea of retreat from a suffocating civilization shaped society from the start. People fled Europe for the New World, a place that they saw as mostly unpeopled despite all the people. A place to start anew. Marx describes the two prevailing images that dominated in the early writing about this country. It was a garden. And it was a howling wilderness. Or it was both. It was Arcadia, the dream of perfection, and it was a place of dark woods and beasts and demons and savages with none of the refuge or solaces of civilization.

On the side of the garden, two themes dominated. The pastoral image, which had been lifted from the bucolic Eclogues of Virgil and then Americanized, held out a dream, nurtured by Thomas Jefferson and Michel-Guillaume-Saint-Jean de Crèvecoeur, of a nation of small farms, independent and free of the “manufacture” of England and Europe. A place in between the stifling, enervated civilization of Europe and the wildness of the lands beyond the farms, the land to the west. In the cowboy archetype, the myth would turn more rugged and primitive, but it would still retain a direct line back to the pastoral poetry of ancient Greece and Rome, to men who lived in nature away from the controlling forces of cities and the mass of other men. In fact, cowboys made fine pastoral shepherds, right down to the flocks they watched. It was a life that Theocritus and Virgil would have recognized, if a bit bloodier and more action packed.

But before the cowboy came something else, a different kind of myth about different kinds of men. These were no shepherds. They were hunters, trappers, roamers. The myth was neo-primitive, featuring a return to the primal self and a more direct encounter with nature. These men had left corruption and restriction behind and embraced freedom and wildness, or so the legend went. Mountain men were loners who didn’t concern themselves with events in the civilized world. “Would you happen to know what month of the year it is?” Johnson asks his wilderness mentor, Bear Claw, when they reunite late in the movie.

For a certain type of person, one who is likely but not necessarily male and who practices today the same arts that the film’s protagonist masters, Jeremiah Johnson is not just a good film or a great film but the best film. “Ask hunters and trappers to name their favorite movie, and many say ‘Jeremiah Johnson’ without pause,” writes Patrick Durkin, a frequent contributor to MeatEater, a wildly popular hunting website.

“In fact, a working knowledge of the film is nearly a prerequisite for many hunters and trappers,” he continues. “No other movie makes them fantasize quite as much about the Old West and mountain men, and wonder if they could have cut it in the early to mid-1800s.”

Sydney Pollack said Jeremiah Johnson was “almost a silent picture.” Durkin agrees: “The movie runs 1 hour, 55 minutes, but its script contains only about 3,600 words.” The film may not have much dialogue, but outdoorsmen love to quote from it: “You fish poorly,” Bear Claw says to the novice Johnson. “Great hunter?” Johnson says, pointing to himself. “Yes!” Some have watched the movie dozens, even hundreds, of times. For a select few, the movie is a life-changer, leading them to move out west or into the wilderness.

But for all its attractiveness, the myth is easily deconstructed. Once we peek under the hood, we find dozens of inconsistencies, ironies, and unsettling truths. That these men were killers is the most obvious one. Frontmen in a genocide that the settlers who came after them continued. Then there is the rapacious destruction of the animals in their midst, starting with the beavers they all but wiped out. And that their great retreat from the world was really an advance, the first wave of a colonial march that would lay claim, and waste, to the continent. That is the stark reality behind the myth.

And yet, the myth still resonates.

I moved west at 30 after a bout with cancer. This was in 1991. In Colorado, in the town of Eldorado Springs, I felt myself growing stronger, and I associated this recovery with my surroundings. My nature is a skeptical one, but for those first months, I embraced the idea of the West as a region of retreat and regeneration. You could say that I fell hard for the place. During that first autumn, I read Vardis Fisher’s Mountain Man, about the adventures of a 19th-century fur trapper named Sam Minard. At the time, I had no idea that the novel had been an inspiration for Jeremiah Johnson. I read:

It was in his thankful moods, induced by thunder’s magnificent orchestrations or the witchery of high-mountain snowstorms, that he would climb to the spine of a range and stride along it, flinging his arms toward heaven and pouring song from his throat. The wonder of being alive and healthy and free was for him such a miracle that only in song could he express his gratitude. “Thank you, thank you!” he would cry, his red face and golden beard turned up to the storm. Then he would go on long strides, singing into the thunder or the snow … exploding his loud cries in his effort to develop his theme of joy-in-life over the theme of death-levels-all.

I wasn’t a mountain man, just an eastern boy playing at being a westerner. But when Sam exults, “God how he loved it all!” I laughed and wanted to yell, Amen! I felt a lot of different things, having escaped the East and landed in the West, but certainly one of them was gratitude. It was there that I got healthy again. There that I changed. That, at least, is my myth.

I lived in Colorado for only seven years before moving back east. For the past two decades, I have been a professor in North Carolina. Though I have been happy here, I never stopped dreaming of moving back to the West.

The trip to Sundance stirred all this up. The success of my reading left me high, that feeling bolstered by a late-afternoon ski. I spent time each day skiing some harder runs, having the slopes largely to myself. I also discovered the bar in the small restaurant at the top of the chairlift. The restaurant was called Bearclaw, in honor of the grizzly hunter played by Will Geer, and I occasionally fortified myself before taking on the black diamond runs. All in all, it wasn’t that hard to get over my disappointment that Bob, as they all called him, had not been able to make it.

During the week at Sundance, I experienced bursts of something close to euphoria while riding the chairlift alone up toward the mountains. I felt rejuvenated, as if I were returning to my earlier, athletic self, and that it was the West that had brought about the transformation.

Robert Redford had a lifelong love affair with Sundance.

I had a fling that lasted less than a week.

But I didn’t want to leave. I didn’t want the week to end.

I rewatched Jeremiah Johnson a couple of years ago. Early in the film, Johnson has an unspoken truce with the Indigenous inhabitants, whose lives in nature mirrored his own. But after he leads a group of soldiers through their sacred burial ground, members of the Crow Tribe kill his Indigenous wife and adopted child. Johnson seeks revenge, killing many Crow warriors during an attack on their camp and, later, in man-to-man combat.

Not long after I watched the movie, I called up my friend Louis Williams. Louis owns Ancient Wayves River and Hiking Adventures, one of the few Navajo-run adventure businesses in Utah. I was calling him to give him a homework assignment: I wanted him to watch Jeremiah Johnson and let me know what he thought.

I was curious, hoping to get an Indigenous take on a film about a great white hunter, particularly a great white hunter who kills a lot of Native Americans. I guess I had hoped that Louis would be appalled by all the bloodshed against Indigenous people in the movie. I guess I thought he might even break out a phrase like white savior complex.

But Louis foiled my plans. He loved the movie.

“Oh, I thought it was really impressive,” he said. “It seemed accurate to me. He really puts his heart and soul into his character.”

Louis is far from politically naïve. A couple years before, while on a rafting trip, he had told me about taking a trip to Mount Rushmore. He wasn’t a fan of the men whose heads were carved up on the mountain and reserved particular disdain for Abraham Lincoln. His anger was understandable: During the Dakota War of 1862, Lincoln had authorized the largest mass execution in American history—the hanging of 38 Dakota warriors. So I had expected a different answer when I asked about the movie.

I didn’t want to lead the witness, but I asked whether the slaughter of so many Crow had upset him.

“No, I didn’t get ticked off or anything. I admire the cat. I liked when he asked, ‘What month is it?’ That’s kind of like being on the river.”

It was clear that Louis at least was not going to be offering an anticolonial perspective. When I called him again recently, he said he had rewatched the film multiple times. He then told me what he admired most: “In order to survive out there, you’ve got to become Indigenous.”

My window of opportunity to meet Robert Redford closed when he died on September 16, 2025. I wanted a way to pay my respects, and so, 13 days later, I returned to Sundance. The afternoon I got there, a small herd of moose blocked the entrance to my room and I had the thrill of watching them loiter in front of my cabin, the cow standing guard as the youngsters nibbled on leaves of water birch and white fir, the bull lounging but staring right at me, his rack huge and magnificent.

Before dawn the next day, I started up the mountain in the dark, intent on morning services, some early-morning sun, and possibly a cold bath in the creek. And of course, a reunion with the mountain itself.

I hiked in the dark for a while, reaching forward like a blind man with my ski pole. Gradually, the sun broke through the branches and revealed a new world. I had woken to a cold rain, but it wasn’t raining up on Mount Timpanogos. The day before, the autumn mountainside was filled with red maple, yellow beech, and lines of gold aspen topped with red like a candle flame. But now, above the colors, snow covered the rocks and the peak of Timpanogos itself was lost in the clouds. It was like walking out of one season and into another.

I reached Stewart Falls and stared up. Water came tumbling down, loud and splattering, spouting out of the great cracks of limestone above, between the firs and the snow. Water was everywhere, surging, gushing, emanating a sweet cold music. A rainbow arced across the falls as water splattered down the limestone ledges, and I stood on a dirty snow patch staring up at the prism, mist rising all around me. I watched the water take its various routes down the rock wall, some of it heading directly down, other streams dropping and filling a pool before spilling over again.

How must Redford have felt when he first saw these falls?

He was a young man then, and the tidal wave of fame that would follow with Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid had not yet rolled in. He still thought it possible to get away from the world. He was constructing his first home in the canyon. He worked alongside a local builder and the builder’s son, planning the house himself. The A-frame was inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright’s organic use of local wood and stone, with windows that stared out at Mount Timpanogos. He lost weight, his hair grew long and shaggy, his beard filled in. Not unlike the character he would later play, he retreated from the so-called real world.

Looking back at that exhilarating time, he told Michael Feeney Callan, “We had moose and deer, a mountain lion, bald eagles, every sort of wilderness creature—but no running water. When the winter snows came, we boiled water to cook and bathe with.”

He believed he had found not just a home but also a sanctuary, and the rest of his life would be a pulsing between advance and retreat. Later, he moved to Santa Fe, but Sundance is where he came back to die.

After lingering at the falls, I pulled myself away and started down the trail. Since I was already wet from the mist, after about a quarter mile, I decided to immerse myself entirely. At a spot where the creek eddied, I stripped and took a dip. It was snowmelt cold, bracing. I dried off with my sweatshirt and started the hike down. The sun grew stronger, and I noticed a large grassy meadow across from where I took my bath. Ignoring the “No Trespassing”sign, I jumped across the creek, strolling into a field of high grass and aspens.

That evening, after a nap, I headed down to the base of the mountain to have a drink at the Owl Bar, where, almost a decade before, the bartender had regaled me with Redford’s origin story. Later, I walked down the hallway, its walls covered with large black-and-white photos detailing the history of Sundance. The one that caught my attention was a photo of Redford and Will Geer, who also portrayed Grandpa Walton on The Waltons. There they were in buckskins, Jeremiah Johnson and Bear Claw, like little boys playing dress-up. Something about the place looked familiar, and I realized that the two men were standing in the same grassy meadow below the falls that I’d walked through earlier. I leaned in close and read the accompanying caption, learning that parts of the movie were filmed right there, below the falls, and that Bear Claw’s cabin was built where I had trespassed. Which means that I’d been walking where Jeremiah Johnson was created. And that the fantasy landscape and the one I hiked through that morning were one and the same.

If the appeal of Jeremiah Johnson is primal, there is also a postmodern aspect.

Consider the role of storytelling in the myth of the mountain man. The myth suggests that these men were all alone, away from society and its stories, individuals who didn’t care at all what others thought of them. This is laid out in the preface to Crow Killer: “The farthest thing from the minds of such men as … [John] Johnson [the real-life inspiration for Jeremiah] was the thought that they would ever grace a printed page. They did not set out into the wilderness to build empires for posterity but to hunt, trap, and trade.”

Maybe. But from the start, there was an element of show business to the mountain man myth. It came through in the annual rendezvous, when the men gathered to trade and drink whiskey and swap, along with beaver pelts, stories of their exploits. James Beckwourth, one of the most renowned of those storytellers, describes the gatherings as filled with “mirth, songs, dancing, shouting, trading, running, jumping, singing, racing, target-shooting, yarns, frolic, with all sorts of extravagances that white men or Indians could invent.” You can imagine that some of those men, who spent the better part of the year alone with their imaginations, cared quite a bit about their reputations. More than one could be found, a couple decades later, acting in Wild West shows, portraying themselves and recreating their heroic feats.

John Johnson, born in 1824 and living to the end of the 19th century, is a perfect example. He was a trapper who roamed the Rockies and became known as “Liver-Eating Johnson.” That much is true. As Nathan E. Bender—a librarian and archivist who works at the Albany County Public Library in Laramie, Wyoming—writes of Crow Killer, “Rather amazingly, historians and folklorists for decades uncritically accepted the spectacular story of a mountain man in the 1840s fighting a one-man war on the Crow Nation with his Hawken rifle and Bowie Knife, routinely cutting out and eating the livers of his foes, in revenge for the murder of his bride and unborn child.” Written in the 1950s, the book makes a hero of the genocidal Johnson, conveying a “bluntly racist nineteenth-century Western frontier perspective.” Bender asks, “If this book is so fatally flawed by confused, erroneous, and outright invented and unapologetically racist stories touted as a true history based on a pure line of oral tradition that managed to hoodwink even the brightest and the best, why has it not faded into obscurity along with other discredited tomes?” It turns out that one answer is simple: It is a good read, an over-the-top yarn full of blood and gore and liver eating. (If Redford had stayed faithful to the original text, he would have made a very different movie, a Silence of the Lambs in the Rockies.)

A few scholars have recently worked to discover the sources of the stories about Johnson, and it turns out the main source seems to be Johnson himself. Far from not caring a whit what others thought of him, John Johnson was a fairly tireless self-promoter. Maybe he was not so unlike us and would have been snapping selfies in the mountains if he’d had an iPhone. Bender writes, “Historically, Johnson savored his reputation as an Indian killer and portrayed himself as such in period newspaper interviews. In fact, Johnson had quite a bit to do with manipulating his public image.” The truth is that Johnson’s life was portrayed by an actor long before Redford, though the first time around, it was John Johnson playing the role. Starring in a traveling Wild West show with Calamity Jane, Bender writes, “Johnson reenacted and greatly dramatized his one-man Indian fights of the 1860s and 1870s and the eating of a Sioux warrior’s liver, though using Crow Indians as paid actors.”

After that, the Johnson myth would rest for almost a century until Crow Killer revived it. Then in 1965, Vardis Fisher would use Johnson as raw material to create Mountain Man, the story of Sam Minard, whom Bender describes as “a much more reflective, non-cannibalistic mountain man character.” From Fisher’s Minard—who, inspired by the mountain, flings his arms toward heaven as song pours from his throat—it was only a short decade’s leap to another Johnson, a much kinder, gentler, non-liver-eating version now named Jeremiah. Appearing on the silver screen, this Johnson was watched by millions. And though the movie might have faded from the minds of many, its pacing slow in the 1970s style, a remnant of it came back to life in 2012.

“Robert who?” my then-12-year-old daughter asked when I first told her that I’d had a nice phone call with Robert Redford. But her generation would come to know Redford, and Johnson, differently, in the form of a meme: Redford bundled in furs and smiling his approval, shorthand for, “Yeah, I get it.”

Somewhere John Johnson, the great self-promoter mountain man, is also smiling.

You can’t be a mountain man with a cell phone. Part of the appeal of Jeremiah Johnson is that his life is lived away from others, away from prying eyes. We are attracted to the fact that the mountain man’s existence is completely different from our own. “The life that men praise and call successful is but one kind,” wrote Henry David Thoreau. Johnson’s was another kind.

I still dream of living out west, but with each year’s passing, it seems less and less likely. My wife and I now spend a month in Colorado each summer. It is not enough, but it is something. I understand the fictional aspect of my dream, that I am wanting to go back not only there but also to the age I was when I lived there. That will not be happening.

As Leo Marx points out in The Machine in the Garden, the purely pastoral, in both life and art, tends toward the sentimental. What is more interesting, and more artistically fulfilling, is the tension between the pastoral and its opposite, between the garden and the machine, the primitive and the civilized, retreat and advance. That was the age-old war in a country that was simultaneously bucolic and industrial. And it was a war that, whether he liked it or not, waged inside Robert Redford.

You want to work in movies and you want to live in the wilderness. How do you reconcile these two lifestyles?

That was the question Redford would try to answer with his life and art. Making Jeremiah Johnson helped with the reconciliation, but that was just the work of a few months, and soon his world became more complicated. There was his growing family, with needs quite different from his own. There would be the fight to save the West, which would complicate his life, and the creation of the Sundance Institute and then the Sundance Festival, which would complicate it further. Not to mention the movies, which came fast and furious.

The reality was messy at times. There was an obvious irony when it came to his home in Sundance: He wasn’t there much.

“We humans are an elsewhere,” wrote the western poet and essayist Reg Saner.

Redford was more elsewhere than most. He had an apartment in New York, spent time in Los Angeles, was on location in movie after movie. And it turned out that loving the West meant spending a lot of time in D.C. lobbying for its preservation. If he dreamed of settling at Sundance, he was anything but settled.

He was a man, like his most famous character, who did better in movement. But as he moved, the original idea of Sundance, the vision and myth of retreat, stayed with him. If it didn’t give him an answer, it gave him a place to start.

True, the myth got dinged up a bit. But that didn’t mean the original dream didn’t serve a purpose. Maybe its real purpose was aspirational. The myth reminded him not to forget, even as reality pulled him in a hundred different directions. True reconciliation might be impossible. But maybe the effort to do this seemingly impossible thing could lift his life, with all its messiness and contradictions, a little higher.

The bearded man lies back in the snow, stares up at the mountains, takes it all in. They loom above him, massive and white.

He laughs out loud.

The helicopter is nowhere in sight.

A different life will return when the copter does. But for a moment, maybe for a few moments, he looks just like a man at peace.

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