The Accidental Life

by Terry McDonell

  “The Black Panthers are criminals,” our host said. “ ‘Thugs,’ ” he had read in the Saturday Review.

  I said the Panthers did a lot of good things, although some of them were gangsters for sure.

  “And you know all about that, I suppose,” said our hostess.

  “I was in SDS at Berkeley,” I said, compounding my silly truculence.

  “How unattractive,” said our hostess.

  My memory of the details of what followed fails, but I may have mentioned Tom Wolfe’s Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers. Perhaps I said something more aggressive. What I do remember, distinctly, was the reddening beautiful face of our hostess.

  “You’re insulting,” she said. “You should apologize to everyone here, including our guest of honor.”

  “I should just go,” I said. “I’m sorry to have ruined your dinner.”

  The hostess smiled tightly and stood up, making it clear that this would be fine with her. Karen and I stood up too, but all eyes were on Ed.

  “Well, then,” he said, also rising. “I’ll be going, too.”

  —

  WHAT SHITS WE WERE, I thought, getting into my car, and I could see that none of us were feeling especially noble. Ed said he thought that the Buddhist kid had been about to cry, and he was sorry about that because he kind of liked Buddhists. Academics not so much. “I only asked about Naropa because I was interested in the sex,” he said.

  We drove to one of the bars on Colfax Avenue, and ate pickled eggs and drank boilermakers. Ed spent the night at my house, and we were up late, talking radical talk about what was wrong and maybe a little right with blowing up dams to save rivers. The Monkey Wrench Gang was about that, and so was Jim Harrison’s A Good Day to Die, an earlier novel Ed admired. None of this was ironic except that Ed did say what he was thinking when he first saw the flaming globe, blazing on the pinnacles and minarets and balanced rocks. He said he hadn’t been thinking at all.

  He also said he thought the FBI might be keeping a file on him because when he was in college at the University of New Mexico he had posted a letter urging other students to throw away their draft cards. “How paranoid is that,” he said, and poured another drink.

  —

  NOT LONG AFTER, I sold a novel and left Colorado and Rocky Mountain Magazine for Montana, where I planned to write for a while. Ed approved and blurbed the novel when it came out, saying, with his characteristic kindness to other writers, that “California Bloodstock is most stylishly composed, in the cool, nihilistic manner of Joan Didion.”

  Ed knew I loved Didion, and I loved nihilistic too, because it was not one of Ed’s words and he had obviously thought about it—even though he’d just been composing a blurb. His own writing was never that mannered. He hid the craft but never the beauty of the words—words like chaparral and blue columbine and mosquito—that he set in place, all in the voice of an outraged populist poet. Ed was against development and tourism and earnest engineers, nostalgia for the lost America, cattle shitting in the watersheds, daily routine, and, in his own words: the insufferable arrogance of elected officials, the crafty cheating and the slimy advertising of the business men…the foul, diseased, and hideous cities and towns we live in, the constant petty tyranny of automatic washers and automobiles and TV machines and telephones!

  I reread Ed often, like I did Mark Twain, grinning at the contrarian spirit and showmanship. He threw homilies like roundhouse punches: One man alone can be pretty dumb sometimes, but for real bona fide stupidity, there ain’t nothin’ can beat teamwork. He didn’t talk like that, but he wrote that way when it served his purpose—like here, from A Voice Crying in the Wilderness that he published in 1989: When a man’s best friend is his dog, that dog has a problem.

  As the Other Bob Sherrill would sometimes say when he liked the way the words worked: “There is a small revolution going on in that sentence.”

  —

  SEARCH FOR EDWARD ABBEY on the FBI website (fbi.gov) and you can find a 1952 memo from J. Edgar Hoover outlining “A Loyalty of Government Employee investigation” to be conducted when Ed was working for the National Forest Service. It was triggered by that college letter about throwing away draft cards. Ed was on the FBI’s watch list from then on, and when I looked it up years later I found notations like “Edward Abbey is against war and military.” And the agency continued adding to his profile, keeping track of him, although probably not at Boulder dinner parties. Toward the end of his life, when Ed’s FBI file became public he told friends, “I’d be insulted if they weren’t watching me.”

  The day Ed died in his home, Fort Llatikcuf (read it backward), near Tucson, close friends put his body in his old blue sleeping bag and loaded it into the bed of a pickup packed with dry ice. After stopping at a liquor store in Tucson for five cases of beer and some whiskey to pour on the grave, they drove deep into the Cabeza Prieta desert—all according to Ed’s wishes, and disregarding all state burial laws.

  I want my body to help fertilize the growth of a cactus or cliff rose or sagebrush or tree, Ed had written. And for his funeral: No formal speeches desired, though the deceased will not interfere if someone feels the urge. But keep it all simple and brief. He also requested gunfire and bagpipe music, a cheerful and raucous wake, and a flood of beer and booze! Lots of singing, dancing, talking, hollering, laughing, and lovemaking. Doug Peacock wrote later in Outside that the last time Ed smiled was when Peacock told him about the place he had come up with for Ed to be buried.

  That location remains secret, but there is a hand-carved marker on a nearby stone:

  Edward

  Paul

  Abbey

  1927–1989

  NO COMMENT

  —

  KAREN EVANS HAD STAYED in loose touch with Ed and interviewed him by mail not long before he died. I don’t think that interview was ever published, but I found Ed’s long letter to her in a posthumous collection of his correspondence, Postcards from Ed. Apparently, like the guests at that unfortunate dinner party, Karen had asked him to characterize his work and what he was going for in his writing. But Ed liked Karen, and he answered:

  What I am really writing about, what I have always written about, is the idea of human freedom, human community, the real world which makes both possible, and the new technocratic industrial state which threatens the existence of all three. Life and death, that’s my subject, and always has been—if the reader will look beyond the assumptions of lazy critics and actually read what I have written. Which also means, quite often, reading between the lines: I am a comic writer and the generation of laughter is my aim…

  …I now find the most marvelous things in the everyday, the ordinary, the common, the simple and tangible. For example: one cloud floating over one mountain.

  At the end of the letter, Ed instructed Karen to revise and colloquialize what he had written, as she saw fit, to make it read like a conversation. It was all up to her. And she could write and ask for more if she thought she needed it. Or Karen could just come to Tucson for a day or two, because it didn’t look like he was going to be getting out of there that summer.

  −ENDIT−

  Sans Serif (1,120)

  I OFTEN PAGED THROUGH MAGAZINES wondering why some editors would run headlines over dark, muddy photographs that made the type difficult to read, or insert a gigantic drop cap that overpowered the lede paragraph of their cover story. Then I’d run into the editor and he or she would bring the layout up as evidence of the difficulty managing the belligerent art director or design director or creative director or whatever the top designer was called at that particular publication. Sometimes I felt sorry for these editors, but it was a feeling that never lasted.

  The art directors I worked with were always co-conspirators and often my best friends on the masthead. The art director at LA was Roger Black, who was then a fresh-faced twenty-two-year-old with a d’Artagnan haircut and preppy clothes. He was just out of the University of Chicago and Print Pr
oject Amerika, a hip, politically radical (or trying to be) magazine I knew from Mayday—which was what we called one of the last Washington anti-war demonstrations, held in the spring of 1971. Roger had been the editor of Print Project Amerika, an experience that had convinced him that design was by far the most fun part of publishing, so he’d immersed himself in typography and a year later, there he was in Los Angeles. He told me this when we met, sharing a joint in the parking lot of the LA offices in Westwood.

  I was still a reporter then, though I also took pictures and was increasingly interested in design. I had never worked closely with an art director before, but I figured I wasn’t coming into it cold because my degree was in art, which I told Roger. He told me his was in English and he might write something if “you don’t watch out.” I didn’t know quite how to take that but Roger struck me as amplifyingly cool. He was married to a sweet, red-haired woman of perhaps thirty called Pinkie Black who liked to talk about fashion as art and once came to a party wearing pots and pans over a bodysuit—which everyone thought was way hip. Roger was also starting a little business on the side called “the FBI” which stood for “the Font Bureau Inc.” I started stopping by Roger’s desk to look at his layouts, in various stages of progress, and cover mock-ups. Very quickly I began to think I knew why I liked this or that graphic, not just that I liked it. I also learned what sans serif meant.

  One day, after clearing it with our boss, the Other Bob Sherrill, I told Roger I was going to be LA’s photo editor, along with my other duties. We hadn’t published our first issue yet, still doing run-throughs, and I was enjoying the time I was spending in the art department.

  “Good,” Roger said. “Or we can just have an in-box.”

  I didn’t have to think much about that. Roger was telling me that he wanted to make the decisions about which photos were used, no matter where they came from, as well as choosing the caption length and typeface—in other words, he wanted complete control of all visuals. I learned later that the best art directors are all like that.

  I also learned that if you’ve got great images, you win easy, but typography can save you if you’re stuck with bad ones. Then again, even great photos sized to the same aspect ratio on every page make the pages seem identical no matter what else you do. You also need scale shifts to differentiate the notes you want to hit, story to story, in your mix. So-called white space (empty space on a page) can help too and is the key to running those gigantic drop caps I usually don’t like much. And you need hierarchies and protocols—I still love using those terms—and a distinctive color palette, but one with colors that exist in nature or whatever you do will look like you’re selling cheap toys or fast food.

  For designers, making decisions about what to do with what you have to work with is infinitely more interesting than collecting the various elements of a page. A lot of magazine work always was (and still is) about fetching—especially in fashion and at service magazines, where sub-editors deliver cupcake after cupcake of Must-Haves, How-Tos, Where-Tos and What-Fors. Roger was right about that. And putting what has been fetched together with other ideas was (and still is) where editors and art directors get to show off.

  For a profile of “Jimmy the Greek,” a popular commentator who was bringing gambling to the mix of TV sports, the art director at City magazine, Mike Salisbury, simply paper-clipped the Greek’s cheesy business card to a lame PR photo of the weird old bookie and thereby transformed the piece. It was like the layout was winking at the reader. The card had Jimmy’s Vegas phone number and that was it, so…Give The Greek a call if you feel like it! You didn’t even need a headline. I admired Salisbury for that but knew the layout had needed editor Warren Hinckle’s final approval and thought maybe it had been his idea. He was the one who had gotten the card in the first place.

  “Of course it was my idea,” Warren said when I asked him about it a few years later. “I was the editor!” I was running a magazine by then myself and felt eerily proud of how clearly I understood what Warren was telling me.

  Editors and art directors pivoting off each other’s ideas is a beautiful thing, but the editor has “the conn,” as we called it at Newsweek—a goofy reference to being in command of the Enterprise on Star Trek. And that was the way it had to be, as I learned over and over, not just working closely with Roger—as I did at five magazines—but with every other art director I came to know. By the late 1980s, I was sitting side by side with them at their computer screens. They all wanted to make the decisions, and that’s the confidence I wanted from them.

  There was one designer I tried to hire at least twice. He said he had heard how “hands-on” I was as an editor when it came to design and that he’d rather we just stayed friends. I felt a little busted for maybe grabbing too much credit or perhaps, as Roger once put it, “riding designers like racehorses,” but, like feeling sorry for editors who lost control of their art directors, that didn’t last, either.

  −ENDIT−

  Peter Matthiessen (2,157)

  WE WERE IN A CANOE on the Yellowstone River, near my house in Montana. Peter pointed to the riverbank, where a bird with a tough-looking black bill and a rufous band extending down its flanks was perched on a cottonwood branch overhanging the water. We had fly rods with us but were mostly watching birds.

  “Belted kingfisher,” Peter said.

  There was no wind. The kingfisher shifted on the branch.

  Peter’s voice dropped. “Watch,” he said. “She will probably fall.”

  We watched, our canoe sliding slowly in the current, and the bird did fall, recovering to the bank after a noisy splash. I had lived on that river for a year and had spent time on many others and had never seen a bird fall into the water, never thought of such a thing.

  “Young birds have to learn simple lessons,” Peter said, feathering his paddle in the water. He told me he’d known it was a juvenile female because that reddish-brown band was mottled thinner than on adult females.

  All of Peter’s bios said he’d been obsessed with birds as a small boy, and that he took ornithology, zoology and marine biology courses at Yale alongside his work as an English major. There was more to it. Peter had many obsessions, and his connection to what he called “the transience” of what is wild and beautiful was something you saw just watching him scan the horizon beyond the river, but you saw it other places, too.

  Peter was born in 1927, the day after Charles Lindbergh landed in France after flying across the Atlantic in his Spirit of St. Louis. This meant that Custer’s Last Stand was closer to Peter’s birthday than his receiving the National Book Award for The Snow Leopard in 1979—a calculation that amused him as he got older. He had grown up before television, mostly outdoors overturning rocks, listening to birds and catching snakes, as he described it. When his mother found out he was keeping poisonous copperheads in homemade cages she told Peter to kill them, but he let them go.

  When he told me about the snakes, he smiled. Maybe the inevitable momentum of Peter’s life started there. The work that trailed behind him echoed the loss of every extinct creature and ruined habitat he learned about, and he learned about all of them. His Wildlife in America, published in 1959, grew out of a Sports Illustrated assignment to report a three-part series on the connections between extinction and disappearing habitat. When the series ended, the unused reporting resulted in the prototype of modern environmental journalism, and even calling attention to global warming as well as the ruinous relationship between man and animals.

  There’s an elegiac quality in watching [American wilderness] go, because it’s our own myth, the American frontier, that’s deteriorating before our eyes. I feel a deep sorrow that my kids will never get to see what I’ve seen, and their kids will see nothing; there’s a deep sadness whenever I look at nature now.

  You didn’t get that sadness from him in person, especially surrounded by nature, like on the Yellowstone River. He was in his early fifties then and his parallel careers as a naturalist and writer
had come together in commercial success with The Snow Leopard, his meditation on the wildlife and landscape of the Himalayas, made lustrous by his deeper contemplation of life and death as a student of Buddhism. There were several of us on the river with Peter that day, and we had all read The Snow Leopard and found it to be full of lessons that took work to understand. Yet that night, drinking wine and soaking in a hot spring in one of the creeks that fed the Yellowstone, there was only celebration of where we were and what we had seen. That was the work.

  —

  LAUNCHING ROCKY MOUNTAIN MAGAZINE in 1979, I had called Peter’s Sagaponack number and spoken with his future wife, Maria Eckhart, who was appropriately skeptical and protective: “Another new magazine, really—well, Peter’s not only not here, he’s out there somewhere and, as you can imagine, very, very busy.” Her words were discouraging and a little ironic, but she had a lovely Tanzanian accent and a kind tone, a combination that I learned eventually to translate into advice. She took my number.

  Peter did call back, from a gas station on the Hopi Reservation in Arizona. He was in the middle of three years of reporting—traveling Native American reservations gathering stories and details that would become In the Spirit of Crazy Horse in 1983 and, a year later, Indian Country, both expressive and painful looks at Native Americans. With him much of the time was Craig Carpenter, a self-described “half-baked detribalized Mohawk from the Great Lakes country trying to find his way back to the real Indians.” It was the disappearance of traditional cultures, along with the loss of wilderness, that most interested Peter, and his outrage was making him enemies, especially his defense of American Indian Movement leader Leonard Peltier.