In Memoriam: Ron Moody, conservationist
“Dad was very willing to give Zinke a chance.” Then Ben added in his father’s voice, “‘But I’m not gonna take my eye off him. We got a helluva’ fight ahead of us.’”
(INSERT PHOTOS OF RON MOODY, BEN MOODY, BY LIDO VIZZUTTI HERE)
In a living room adorned with taxidermy and a wood burning stove in Lewistown, Montana there is a shrine to a dead man and a living monument.
An oil painting of antelope gathered inside Upper Missouri River Breaks National Monument hangs in this shrine. Next to the painting thrusts the trophy head of a bighorn sheep that came from the monument — the hunt of a lifetime. Beneath them stand shelves stacked with of books by and about America’s first great conservationist president, Theodore Roosevelt.
They all belonged to the man whose photo rests in the center of the shrine, Ron Moody.
He was a silverback grizzly for conservation in Montana. He held every speck of public land sacred. And repeatedly risked his life for the sake of protecting it. All of it. Over the years Moody wrecked one pickup and burned out a sedan crossing icy and treacherous roads en route to public forums and conservation group meetings, said his son Ben Moody, 43. Ron Moody made it his quest to bear witness anywhere in the state where any minutiae of public lands policy was discussed. He drove a half-million miles easy, his son said. That’s to the moon and back.
“No way to underestimate his importance in Montana or to conservation,” said writer Hal Herring, who lives in Augusta, Montana and whose work has appeared in Field & Stream and High Country News. “Ron was my mentor and friend.”
Like a modern Davey Crockett, Moody was born in Tennessee. Heart disease took his father when he was young. With his oldest brother, Ansel, he stole away down into the thickets of north Mississippi to hunt squirrels and deer. He was intensely introverted. Books made Moody’s young mind blossom, and as an adult he made his home a library. As a boy, his mother scolded him for devouring books past his bedtime, underneath his covers, with a flashlight. She thought it was the reason he had to wear glasses. All his life, Moody consumed books as a furnace consumes fuel. “He was very brilliant,” Ben said. “He wasn’t born that way, he grew into it. That’s why he was able to relate to people.”
Moody particularly loved true stories about adventure, hunting and ethics. He believed that if a hunter took an animal’s life, then the responsibility of keeping that species alive, and protecting its habitat, was borne by the hunter. It was inevitable, then, that in books Moody met the man whose ethic he dedicated his life to promulgating.
“Everything that inspired him to hunt came from Theodore Roosevelt,” said Ben, who has his father’s set jaw, and philosophical eyes.
Ron Moody backed Upper Missouri River Breaks National Monument to the hilt because he had watched with great sadness as the hunting grounds of his youth in the south were sold out, fenced off, and shot clean of big game. This included Holly Springs National Forest in Mississippi where with his Marlin 336C in .35 Remington rifle he took his first big game trophy, an 11-point deer.
After stints working as a newspaperman in Mississippi and as a stockbroker in New York City, Moody followed his love of open land and abundant wildlife to the Great West. He worked first in Sacramento, California for FedEx. The company then had an opening in the place that literally is the “middle of Montana” where Merle Haggard sang of wanting the big city to set him free — Lewistown.
Mountains are easy to love and Montana’s majestic snowcapped ranges with artists, consultants and colleges nestled at their bases have armies of defenders. Not so much the windblown and sparsely-populated two thirds of the state defined by bluffs, badlands and buffalo grass. The region exemplified by Upper Missouri River Breaks National Monument. Moody loved this land. He exulted that the monument was “mountains turned upside down.”
“That to him was the most precious thing left in America,” Ben said. “It’s just a magnificent wilderness to him.”
After Moody retired from FedEx in the mid-1990s, he poured all the knowledge he had distilled from libraries, all the passion he felt for the land, and a citizen’s commitment to democracy into speaking out for the wild and vanishing Montana prairie. He wrote articles for scores of hunting and wildlife magazines. He also started a newsletter that he named The Bull Moose Gazette, a homage to Roosevelt’s 1912 presidential run on the progressive “Bull Moose” ticket. It was required reading for conservationists. “When my stories started appearing regularly in the Gazette, that’s when I felt like I was doing some good work,” said Laura Lundquist, one of Montana’s premiere outdoor journalists.
Moody even ran for state office himself in 2014, though he couldn’t unseat the Republican incumbent.
“He was still very introverted in his later years,” Ben said. “He just got over it for the sake of the public.”
Montana Governor Brian Schweitzer (D) appointed Moody to the state Fish and Wildlife Commission in 2009 and he served for four years. He secured access for hunters and anglers. He knocked back proposals to transfer federal lands to the state, which would leave them vulnerable to privatization. And he stood firm against reckless oil and coal development.
But his leadership style was that of the empath, not the pugilist. “They have to know that you’re listening to them,” Ben said his father explained the way he engaged with people with whom he disagreed. Moody also deferred recognition. “He didn’t want to fix problems,” Ben said. “He wanted us all to come together and find the solutions.” Nevertheless, for his public service, the State of Montana awarded Moody that painting of Upper Missouri River Breaks National Monument that now hangs in his shrine. (Near the condolence note from current Montana governor Steve Bullock [D]).
Around the time the monument was established, Moody patiently listened to concerns by his neighbors that it was a government land grab. He explained instead how the designation actually meant that crucial wildlife habitat would keep from being ripped to shreds by off road vehicles and oil rigs. This would in turn ensure that species like sage grouse, elk and bighorn sheep could continue to live there — and be hunted. Doug Krings, 38, was a high school student in Lewistown when the monument was established. Some of his classmates opposed it, so he did too. Then he met Ron Moody.
“I realized we wanted the same things,” said Krings, one of many hunters and anglers whom Moody mentored. “Ron knew how to get things done.”
When in 2008 Moody finally drew a tag to hunt a bighorn sheep inside the monument, he readied himself for months. The hunt took him weeks. He stayed in the field for days on end. He spent long hours watching his trophy from afar before he finally got his shot. His son remembers that “he could have won Powerball and he wouldn’t have been any more excited.”
That was his last, great big-game hunt. The back cover to a life’s book that had on its front that big buck he took when such things still ran wild in Mississippi. Though his indefatigable commitment to all things conservation camouflaged it, Moody’s health had begun to wane.
Moody believed that as soon as Donald Trump was elected president in 2016 that the exploitation visited upon the south would charge West. Though his beard had turned snowier white, and his hair had pulled back from his brow, he readied himself for another fight.
He did it as a man who had read every word written by and about Theodore Roosevelt. Only to watch the Orwellian spectacle of Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke invoking Roosevelt’s name and iconography while attacking the man’s greatest conservation legacy — the Antiquities Act. Could a George Washington appropriator serving King George III be more outrageous? Or a Thomas Jefferson acolyte putting liberty under review to make sure tyranny didn’t get a bad deal?
Moody didn’t take ad hominem shots at Zinke. He chose to show Zinke the respect of making sure he had all the facts about national monuments.
“Dad was very willing to give Zinke a chance,” Ben said. Then he added in his father’s voice, “‘But I’m not gonna take my eye off him. We got a helluva’ fight ahead of us.’”
Moody spent his last days compiling documents about Upper Missouri River Breaks National Monument. He contacted trusted members his network to ready them, too. Men and women in whom Ben said, “I see my dad’s reflection.”
He was in this state of marshaling his power, in his hilltop garden in Lewistown on the morning of June 3, 2017, when his family’s curse — heart disease — killed him. He was 70.
It seemed cosmically unjust that a man who dedicated his life to protecting Upper Missouri River Breaks National Monument should die not knowing whether that monument would live on. Ben said, however, that his father would not have seen it in that way. Ron Moody, a sage in sagebrush country, was wise enough to know that while conservation defeats are final, the victories are all tenuous. And must constantly be repeated. The worthiness of a life, therefore, is measured by how much of it is invested in the fight.
Ron Moody lived his life to the fullest. This is how Ben knows he died at peace. And why he will give his ashes to the wind inside Upper Missouri River Breaks National Monument, and let him be enshrined there.