tolerance for risk or suffering that any
accomplishment on that front would
require. My father had lost his father
and his sister to avalanches, twenty
years apart. The shadow of those trag-
edies had darkened the lives of my
relatives for decades.
I wanted to see the apartment my
wife and I had rented. When I pointed
out the house, Tate paused a moment
and said, “This is also where my wife
and I lived, when we first moved to
Bozeman.” The same house: the coin-
cidence was unnerving. He added, “We
moved out after we heard that the last
person who’d lived in the apartment
had hanged herself there.”
That afternoon, we spent some time
in his office. Tate sees clients on the
ground floor of an old brick house in
downtown Bozeman—“behind the
blue door,” as he often says. (He took
the blue-painted front door, his local
trademark, from his former office, on
Main Street.) He’s tall and fit, with a
white mustache and soul patch and
long, receding poodley hair that he
often pulls back in a bun. He wears a
tie in the office, on this day with a
checked shirt and hiking trousers and
boots. The space is decorated with
feathers, bones, and cowboy and Na-
tive American art. A deluxe edition
of Carl Jung’s “Red Book” sits on a
stand, open to a chapter about Hell.
He does as many as seven sessions a
day. “I burn cedar between each ses-
sion for a ceremonial purpose,” he said.
He harvests the cedar from a tree in
the Kootenai National Forest, close
to the Canadian border—the same
tree every year. “Lots of people are
New Age groovy people with sage and
all that stuff. I apprenticed with a ren-
egade Crow medicine man for twelve
years. So I come by these things hon-
estly. I earned this shit.”
Tate has never been a climber or a
skier, at least not of the calibre that
the North Face athletes who come tosee him are. He is, to them, a little like
one of those coaches who never played
the game but nevertheless grasp some-
thing fundamental about it.
Most of the athletes seem to know
little of Tate’s past, which is a color-
ful one. Behind the blue door, they
talk and he listens, but, when I got on
the couch, I was the one who got to
say, “Tell me about your mother.” She
was a Swede from Michigan, and she
met Tate’s father, a Presbyterian, at
the Moody Bible Institute on Chica-
go’s North Side, where they were train-
ing to be missionaries. “He was old
school, austere, a fiery man who de-
livered fire-and-brimstone sermons,
using no notes,” Tate said. “These were
always followed by an overdone roast.”
Tate was born when his parents
were in their forties, the youngest of
four kids, a mistake. Childhood was
“belt to the butt,” he said. “I wasn’t
allowed to go to dances.” Tate fol-
lowed an older brother to a Presby-
terian college in Dubuque, with plans
to join the ministry, and fell in love
with a cheerleader whose father, a
German, was also a Presbyterian min-
ister. The couple spent their junior
year abroad with her family, near
Stuttgart, and got married so they
could move in together. Tate was
twenty. That year, they had a son,
whom they sneaked through customs
and back to Dubuque at the age of
six days. “Then it was 1969,” he said.
“Senior year. That’s when I was rad-
icalized. I bailed on pre-seminary and
got a teaching certificate.” After grad-
uating, amid the chaos of student pro-
tests, he and his new family returned
to Germany, to Schiller College, where
he worked as an instructor and be-
came the dean of students. “I burned
through the mythology of my youth.
I replaced it with Heidegger, Goethe,
Wittgenstein, Nietzsche, and then
depth psychology—Jung.”
A mid-century apostate explores
the horizons of the mind and the sins
of the flesh: by the mid-seventies, Tate
was in Southern California, teaching
psychology and personality theory at
community colleges named Golden
West and Orange Coast. “It became
clear I wasn’t one for the marriage,”
he said. “All I got out of the divorce
“Oh, there’s Iza—I know her from my matriarchs’ group.” was my 750 Yamaha and an electric-