Enlightened Exile Reclusive Author Irving Petite Discovers Prose And Cons Of Life On The Colville Indian Reservation
Author Irving Petite is a man who doesn’t need much.
A wood stove keeps his isolated, one-room log cabin warm in the winter. A propane-powered refrigerator keeps his food cold.
He has a fine outhouse with a molded seat and no door. There used to be a door - a fancy one with a window - but it blew off four or five years ago.
“I just put it out behind the barn and that was it,” Petite said.
True, the outhouse is a little drafty in winter, but the view is better.
“It’s very seldom you can see an eagle from your outhouse,” he said, “and, besides that, it discourages long visitors.”
Sitting in his outhouse, Petite watched a nearby eagle’s nest and was inspired to write an essay he called “Eagles in the Outhouse.”
It’s the sort of thing a person can get away with when he lives, as Petite’s stationery proudly proclaims, on a primitive road with no telephone. “Little Bear Retreat” is the name he gives his wooded homestead along the Sanpoil River on the Colville Indian Reservation.
People who want to communicate with Petite need to write him a letter. They’re likely to get a reply, on a “Little Bear Retreat” letterhead, that offers some cheer before getting down to business:
“Fifteen degrees F. here this morning; chicken waterers have frozen in the barn, but the first two eggs hadn’t frozen yet. Plenty of coyote sign when I walked out over frozen snow to unlock my gate …”
In the lower right corner of the letter, there’s an intriguing little picture of a man sitting outdoors in an overstuffed chair with a dog and a bear cub at his feet.
The bear is Mr. B., an orphan who inspired Petite’s most successful book, a 167-page volume titled “Mr. B.” First published in 1959, “Mr. B.” is a charming, amusing and touching account of an ungainly bear cub that insinuated his way into Petite’s former home on Tiger Mountain, near Issaquah, Wash.
“When he was treated offhandedly, merely as one member of the household and not a visiting dauphin, he remained well behaved, for a bear,” Petite wrote.
A couple of efforts to repatriate the cub to the wild failed miserably. Before Mr. B. came ambling home, Petite was miserable about abandoning the unprepared cub to the elements. There was a downpour and Petite envisioned the soaked cub trudging through the rain “like two bow-legged cowboys walking tandem.”
The story ends tragically when someone shoots Mr. B. after he’s a year old.
Still, Mr. B. had a good life and his story sold 20,000 copies in four U.S. printings. Petite said elementary schoolteachers all over Seattle read the book in class, and he was invited to address a college class and appear on television.
“People wrote to me from all over saying it helped them deal with death,” he recalled.
The Doubleday & Co. book also was published in German and Japanese. Petite doesn’t know how many of the translations were sold, but he was still getting royalties from the Japanese edition when he moved to the Sanpoil near Keller in October 1984.
His other books include “The Best Time of Year,” “The Elderberry Tree” and “Meander to Alaska,” which in 1970 was the last to be published.
All of them went through at least two printings, but “it means nothing these days,” Petite said. “These Danielle Steel things are selling like crazy.”
He said all of his writing is factual: “It’s just a terrible situation. I can’t lie - except about my age.”
Officially, he’s been 58 since he moved to Keller. Before that he was 54. In reality, he’s about 72, give or take a few months.
Petite was 19 when he and a friend, Bill McCauley, bought 165 acres of logged-over Weyerhaeuser Co. land on Tiger Mountain in 1942, which they farmed and used for salvage logging.
Petite dropped out of the University of Washington, where he was studying zoology.
The United States had just entered World War II, and Petite was a conscientious objector. He said draft board officials threatened to lock him up, “but then they found out I was 4F.” Aside from discovering a physical problem, Petite said military doctors diagnosed him as “kind of a psycho.’
That may have been because he answered yes when the Army doctor asked whether everyone stared at him on streetcars.
Everyone did stare, he said, but “I just ‘yessed’ everything. I’m good at questionnaires.”
After the war, Petite devoted himself to writing and running the farm he and McCauley, a ship’s electrician, shared. Free-lancing feature articles for the Seattle Times and other newspapers didn’t pay the bills, so he also delivered a rural mail route for 18 years.
His big break came when another writer introduced him to Carolyn Rogers, a Reader’s Digest editor from Spokane. He got $1,500 when the magazine bought a story called “The Deer That Came to Breakfast.”
Rogers told him in a two-page letter that his “Bear Tracks in the Bathtub” was “deadly dull,” but offered advice on how to fix the story. She signed the letter with “love.”
“It’s very seldom nowadays that you get a letter from an editor that says ‘love,”’ Petite said. “Editors now, as human beings, they stink. They won’t give anything away. They will not instruct.”
Rogers encouraged Petite to write “Mr. B.,” and referred him to Ellen Roberts, a similarly helpful editor at Doubleday. Both eventually retired, and Petite’s literary career was never the same without their help.
Rogers passed him to another Reader’s Digest editor, “but I never got any love out of him,” Petite said with a rueful grin. “I never sold another article.”
His partnership with McCauley ended when McCauley got married. Petite, who remains single, left Tiger Mountain in 1984 when property taxes that started at 80 cents a year rose to $1,300. He quickly settled near Keller.
He ekes out a living at Keller mainly by doing without a lot of things other people find necessary.
“I’m not into promoting a society that wants different kinds of computers every year,” he said. “Typewriters are OK.”
He’s fond of the old wide-carriage Royal manual typewriter he salvaged from a bank. Keeping it in ribbons can be a problem, though.
“One store went out of business so I went down and bought all of their typewriting ribbons because you can’t even buy typewriting ribbons anymore.”
Petite doesn’t shun all modern conveniences. He’d like to install solar panels so he could have electric lights instead of oil lamps that are too dim for reading. An avalanche of books that buried two couches leaves no doubt Petite likes to read.
A telephone also would be nice, but extending a line would cost at least $6,800. Lack of a telephone has been one of his biggest frustrations in trying to get two new books published, he said.
“But most of all,” he said, “you need a personal contact: someone who sees you as a human being and sees the potential.
“What I miss is Carolyn. She should come out of retirement and tell me what to do.”
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