Open Letter To Chuck Bowden

Dear Mr. Bowden –

You likely did not remember me as you slipped away from those of us who remain. We met once or twice and talked a bit about writing. You read some of my work and called it weak and wordy. I didn’t disagree.

But I knew you from your words. A man or woman can find comfort and friendship and kindred spirit in the words of someone else. That’s what I found in your writing. Stubborn love. Love of sun, wind, freedom, possibility born of emptiness. I saw you.

For one thing, you stared.  You saw the open, empty, shimmering expanse of desert for what it was: a reminder of nothing. In that you had some sparse company, but more than you may have known.

You wrote from direct, lived, sometimes harsh experience. You were not a writer of abstraction, though there is much to admire in your ideas. You were one of the few writers who did not turn their backs on unpleasant facts, and, like a good firefighter, you ran toward the flames of them.

Instead of writing an abstract argument about migration through the Sonoran Desert, you and Bill Broyles, in your essay “Blue,” got blisters walking – in June – through the Cabeza Prieta Wildlife Refuge. Your account, told in the clipped prose of the seasoned journalist, brought the harsh beauty to light. “Everything is blue,” you wrote, “luminously blue.” You ruminated on aches, on physical decline, lost love, mortality, and the cold finality of dehydration where there is no back-up plan. You saw the steel walls, what we academics call the “militarization” of the border, but you dodged the trap of well-trodden arguments, the loops of the ideologues. You walked where others had died, through a land of shadows, in the company of bats, owls, nighthawks. You put yourself there and you listened, observed, felt, imagined. You got thirsty, sore, and hungry. You got a taste of what it is to walk oneself to an end with no way out, no way home.

That was a theme, that no-way-home thing, the edgy domain of a mind strong enough to entertain brutal and beautiful reality. Yours was the role of the kick-starter, cage rattler, alarm bell. You called us to wake up to streets on fire, to lives hanging in the balance. If it were you, your work said, you would want someone to tell the story, to record, to broadcast the urgency to do something.

I wanted you to take a side, to be one of us who lobbied on behalf of refugees for sanctuary, but you stuck to your independent, curmudgeonly guns. “I have no interest in Central America,” you said.

I see that. It was not your way. Yours was the way of action, movement, names of places – Tacna, Lechuguilla, Tule – and people, always people, unguarded, unpolished.

You were no bleeding heart, no hand-wringing potted plant.  

Your nature was not the Emersonian, benevolent, healing eyeball, but one that could and would hurt you. You courted that and lived with a rattlesnake you named Beulah in “Snaketime”. You kept her, like some of your demons, close enough to goad you on, close enough to keep an eye on, like one’s enemies, because it was peace you wanted. Even if she was dangerous, her life was worth the risk. Her presence brought you some relief from the abundant sorrows of hot, dry, indifferent places and wounded hearts.

You did not come in from the light or sun or heat, but pulled down your hat, refilled your glass, that always ready glass, and turned your eyes to what mattered, what needed to be said, even if some didn’t want you to say it, or others didn’t want to hear it.

You brought us the news. You did. You bore witness. That unvarnished honesty felt cruel sometimes, but I saw between the words a deep and abiding love. Yours was not the un-crafted, irate rant of knee-jerk outrage, but the study of how to make shadows beautiful. You put forward the best of your words, the ones drawn from up from the cold, deep well of caring. You paid the price for not looking away, taking the easy path.

So, thank you for your damnable persistence, your gift for precision -- for the right names for things – for the vivid, hard-to-swallow, and impossible-to-digest, truth.  

Yours,

Erec