The ernie Chronicles: Fishing Without A License

The ernie Chronicles:
Fishing Without A License

The public calls him by different names and captions. Some call him the “Montana Living Man”; to others he is the “Montana Natural Man”; and some call him the “Montana Mountain Man”. His lady friend, Jeanette, simply calls him “ernst”. I call him “ernie”. By any name, ernie is a controversial character who is generating an expanding, accelerating, and escalating interest in the public mind.

Why did I mention that ernie is “controversial”? It is because since November of 2013 ernie has managed to aggravate court officials, law enforcement, jury pools, and the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC).

Usually, when a varmint is brought before a judge in Montana he already knows he’s guilty, that he got caught, and that he will have to accept (grudgingly or not) the court’s judgment.

But ernie is not that kind of varmint. In ernie’s view of things, the court system itself needs to be judged. He is not very quiet about it. He has a loud, deeply resonant voice which I have described elsewhere as tatamount to speaking thunder to tall mountains. And that is when he is being friendly. When he is agitated, his voice can be downright frightening.

To illustrate ernie’s controversial approach to dealing with a court, and how his voice can be unsettling, I will introduce you to ernie in this video which I filmed in November 2013 at Three Forks, Montana, in the courtroom of judge Wanda Drusch. Please understand that I did ask permission from judge Drusch, prior to the hearing, to film in her courtroom, and she granted her consent, even suggesting the best place for me to stand in the small courtroom. I did not know ernie very well at that time, but I did know him well enough to assure judge Drusch that she was about to witness one of the more colorful moments in the Three Forks court’s history. She smiled, and gave me permission to video. I was as stunned as the judge by what followed.

This being the first in an ongoing weekly series designed to give readers a comprehensive understanding of the life and times of ernie-wayne: ter Telgte, I will book-end ernie’s courtroom antics from November 2013 (above video) with the most current courtroom moment, which saw ernie get himself arrested on contempt charges in Eureka, Montana on March 22 2018. (See video below)

Between those two fiery moments in 2013 and 2018, shown above, exists a very colorful and adventurous story about ernie’s strategic bouts and jousts with “the law” which I want to chronicle. I am interested in chronicling ernie’s plight even though I do not condone his rash behavior and his general rudeness to officers of the court. I see him, over-all, as a “symptom of our times“. During the course of this series on ernie we shall look at contemporary American governance and its effects on traditional American culture. Don’t miss our next action-packed installment!