The Accidental Life

by Terry McDonell

  We sent him to Peru in search of the Lost City of the Cloud People, and he called in from Lima after three weeks in the Amazonas jungle. The assignment had started on the come. We had never expected him to find any “stinkin’ Lost Cities” (as in “stinkin’ badges”). The search would be the story; we had agreed on that. And if he got sick, as most travelers did in Amazonas, he would write about that. But he didn’t get sick, and with the aid of local coca leaves and shrewd management of his guides, the four Lost Cities of the Cloud People were no longer lost, and he would henceforth be known as the great explorer Don Timoteo.

  Our machetes swung by our sides….Old women gathered up the children and shooed them indoors as we passed. We had come from Congona, and something in the eyes of the people begged us to swagger. We were brave men, foolish men.

  Another early piece found him in a Northern Cheyenne sweat lodge chanting hi-how-are-ya, hi-how-are-ya, hi-how-are-ya with tribal elders. He also found exploding bat shit while spelunking in Kentucky. Cahill had range, too. In the winter of 1977, when he went down the west coast of Mexico to swim with the sea turtles, he came back with evidence of the slaughter of an endangered species: Thousands upon thousands of eggs, all rotting in [an] evil heap…90 million years of evolution going to waste on the beach at Escobilla.

  He hit hard again for Rolling Stone a couple months later with a dark reconstruction of the Jonestown massacre in Guyana, where 920 people died in a sickening mass suicide organized by Peoples Temple leader Jim Jones. This was the greatest single loss of American civilian life in a nonnatural, nonaccidental disaster prior to September 11, 2001. Cahill’s fine-toothed reporting of the gruesome details resonated with a horrifying humanity:

  A woman in her late twenties stepped out of the crowd. She was carrying her baby. The doctor estimated the child’s weight and measured an amount of the milky liquid into a syringe. A nurse pumped the solution into the baby’s mouth. The potassium cyanide was bitter to the tongue, and so the nurse gave the baby a sip of punch to wash it down. Then the mother drank her potion.

  Death came in less than five minutes. The baby went into convulsions, and Jones—very calm, very deliberate—kept repeating, “We must take care of the babies first.” Some mothers brought their own children up to the killing trough. Others took children from reluctant mothers. Some of the parents and grandparents became hysterical, and they screamed and sobbed as their children died.

  Like every good reporter I ever knew, a shocking first look at the dark side drew Cahill further into it. His book about the murderer John Wayne Gacy, Buried Dreams: Inside the Mind of a Serial Killer, was as riveting as it was disturbing, unmasking the motivation of a horrific madman. But adventure travel was the genre he would ultimately own. Traveling, as he put it, like a hysterical monkey, always with a bottle of Tabasco sauce because roasted beetles can be bland, he roamed from the Pantanal swampland in Brazil to the Hecate Strait in the far Pacific Northwest.

  I could go on and on…like Tim did—floating the Ganges River; riding horseback across the steppes of Mongolia; dropping in on the Karowai hunter-gatherers in what was then Irian Jaya (now West Papua); surveying active volcanoes, salt mines, toxic-waste dumps; tracking the Caspian “ghost” tiger on Turkey’s southeastern borders and finding that war between Iran and Iraq was, however absurdly, wildlife’s best ally against extinction. He wrote stories, not issues, but the politics always came through. All of the above, including the politics, is hard, often uncomfortable, and sometimes dangerous in very fundamental ways. But I have never wondered why Cahill did it. He did it because it was so much fun.

  Getting in and out of trouble was what made Cahill’s stories work, and that led him to his own definition of fellow travelers. A decade or so after we launched Outside, he and his professional partner, Garry Sowerby, set a world record in speed for driving the length of the American continents, from Tierra del Fuego to Prudhoe Bay, Alaska. By then he was already known for lines like my favorite: A journey is best measured in friends, not in miles.

  —

  WHEN OUR CAREERS TOOK US in different directions Cahill and I lost touch, at one point for more than twenty years. I kept up by reading everything he wrote. And then, when Susan McBride was dying in a hospice in California, Tim e-mailed a lot of us, letting us know the bad news and how we might contact her. Looking after her to the end.

  −ENDIT−

  Pygmalion (1,672)

  IN A LOG HOUSE on the Yellowstone River in the Paradise Valley, Arnold Schwarzenegger sat on the floor in front of a stone fireplace smoking a cigar. He would take a puff and then stare at the cigar ash, closed into himself. Charles Gaines, who had brought Arnold to Montana, was in the open kitchen working on dinner with friends who lived close by. A couple local writers were there too, all of them standing around Charles, reluctant to engage with Arnold.

  “What are you thinking over there by the fire?” Charles called into the living room.

  “I am thinking, ‘What a vunderous thing to be Charles Gaines,’ ” Arnold said, mocking his own accent. “He is so handsome, so brave…”

  Everyone laughed. Being Charles Gaines did look good: promising novelist, television sports correspondent and, now, discoverer of Arnold. The next day they were going into the Yellowstone backcountry to shoot a segment for ABC’s popular American Sportsman with Doug Peacock, who was known then for talking to grizzlies, even shouting them down. It was crazy, but Peacock had done it.

  The segment was about Arnold too, of course, part of the exposure and polishing Charles had been giving him, taking him home to meet his family in Alabama, introducing him to Andy Warhol at the Factory, having late dinners at Elaine’s in New York. It was 1984 and most of what I knew about Charles came from his novel Stay Hungry, about a son of southern gentry who finds his identity in the decidedly unliterary culture of bodybuilding. What I knew about Arnold came from Pumping Iron, the documentary Charles had made with George Butler. The film ended with Arnold being declared Mr. Olympia and celebrating by smoking marijuana and announcing his retirement. Butler was quoted widely calling Arnold “our Pygmalion.” Charles never said anything like that.

  Joints were passed at dinner, but Arnold smoked only cigars. The wonders of fly-fishing were discussed interchangeably with literary gossip and recent assignments. Arnold listened quizzically, refusing to be drawn in, but you could see his sharpness. At the end of the dinner Charles proposed a toast to him.

  “No,” Arnold said, raising his glass. “To Charles Gaines, and the rest of the American grizzly bears who want to eat me up.”

  —

  A COUPLE YEARS AFTER that dinner, Charles called with an idea. The “Survival Game,” as he explained it, had been inspired by “The Most Dangerous Game,” the 1924 short story by Richard Connell about a wealthy big-game hunter from New York who winds up in an isolated preserve, where he becomes the quarry of a bored aristocrat. In Charles’s game, players armed with those Nel-Spot pistols used by ranchers to mark trees and livestock with splats of paint would stalk one another through the woods, testing their various survival skills as they tried to capture a home-base flag.

  “And they blast each other?” I asked.

  “They can eliminate one another,” Charles said. “But I’m interested in which skills will win out.” The first players would include a Vietnam vet, a New England forester, a turkey hunter, a doctor and an investment banker. They would compete in the woods surrounding his farm in New Hampshire, and I was invited—or should at least send a reporter to cover it. (The forester won.)

  Paintball, as it came to be called, grew into a billion-dollar sport played by millions around the world, but Charles sold his interest after a year and never seemed particularly bothered by his timing. He said he would always be a writer first. For a while it seemed like every writer I knew wanted to write about fishing, but none more than Charles, and editing him became an exercise in channeling his angling enthusiasms. Most great fishers win ugly, which means they si
mply will not be denied their chosen fish on any particular day. Charles went the other way. He was not obsessed but, rather, so graceful in his fishing life as to pass from time to time into what his friend the sporting writer Vance Bourjaily called “the trance of instinct.” Charles said this was where his life was most vivid—sacred, even. But he was funny about it, calculating that the amortization of the market value of the fish he caught some years would run to $500 a pound.

  His writing alluded to Hemingway and Zane Grey in both anecdote and spirit, and he got them into the same piece with musical references to “Bayou Pon Pon” or Dion and the Belmonts. He would introduce you to the “Hegel of fishing guides,” and he knew his fish. For example, most saltwater game fish lived like Greek playboys, following pleasure and abundance from one sunny spot to the next. Charles had a lot of that in him, too. Beyond the reflective silences of the tiny trout stream, he knew all about the nonstop wet dream of fun in a faraway place catching huge fish to loud music with a buzz on, as he described it in an Esquire piece about marlin fishing in the South Pacific.

  As a sidecar to his journalism Charles started a travel business, identifying and booking high-end fishing and hunting destinations. His criteria for the lodges started with excellent game, but he also demanded that days spent have symmetry, excitement, and spiritual comfort to them. His job as CEO was both the scouting and the quality control—his market rich, middle-aged white guys eager to boast that they had enjoyed a drink with Charles at Ballynahinch Castle in Connemara or Wilson’s on the Miramichi, or maybe even Perry Munro’s smallmouth spike camp on the Black River. His life was so full of sport, travel and action that boredom had to be a sitting duck. If you looked at Charles from a distance he was like those playboy game fish, following pleasure and abundance from one sunny spot to the next. But he was writing less, and his time on the road pulled at the seams of his life.

  —

  LIKE HIS OTHER EDITORS, I was invited to visit, first at his New Hampshire farm, where he and his wife, Patricia, entertained streams of houseguests—writers, movie people, artists, athletes, charter captains, venture capitalists, academics…Patricia was beautiful, a former Miss Alabama, and an artist. Charles was tall and assured, vigorously handsome. When they separated, it was as if the good life was taking revenge on them—victims of the fast lane that had run through their farm.

  Charles stayed in New Hampshire, alone and depressed, brooding about his failures as a husband, how vain, feckless and bullying he had been. He called me once during that time. Painting alone in her apartment on the Upper West Side in Manhattan, Patricia had fallen into despair and given away all her jewelry, including her wedding and engagement rings, to homeless women on the street. Did I know anyone in the NYPD who could help get it back? More important, he wanted Patricia back.

  When she agreed to give the marriage another chance, they found 160 acres of wild land on the northeast coast of Nova Scotia and wove a plan. It had forests and meadows and cliffs overlooking the sea. They would build a house there with their children over the coming summer, and they would build it with their own hands.

  The book that came out of that summer, A Family Place, was careful, heartening. Charles’s narrative followed the house building, living in tents without electricity or running water, relearning the pleasures and limitations of a simplified life. It was as far as you could get from flirting with movie stars and the carelessness that left incriminating debris. Patricia had once walked in on Charles to find the wife of one of his best friends blowing PCP up his nose with a straw. Charles had found letters to her from another man not meant for him to read. Now, echoing on every page, was the story of two people who, unconsciously and not, had been bent on destroying their marriage but had found a way to save it.

  —

  IN 2009, WHEN THE MANUFACTURERS and promoters who’d profited most from paintball decided to establish a Hall of Fame, they wanted Charles to be in the first class. I talked him into writing a piece for Sports Illustrated. It had been almost thirty years since that first game on his farm in New Hampshire. His lede was One way of measuring a life—maybe as good a method as any other—is on the basis of how much peculiarity you have helped to generate.

  Perfect, I thought; not cynical but with an edge. It was the same voice you read in his sporting journalism, and it made you smile. His collection of pieces, The Next Valley Over, was the book Meriwether Lewis might have written about fishing if he had had a sense of humor— or maybe just been a better writer and as good a fisherman as Charles, which he was not. Reading it, you saw Charles leading his own personal Corps of Discovery, exploring life’s possibilities way beyond shooting jawbreakers of paint at your friends to get your adrenaline rush.

  Because I had edited many of the pieces, Charles asked me to write an introduction. I wrote that Charles was an animist who believed in the ritual of fishing, but I was thinking about that house in Nova Scotia, and what it had taken to rebuild his family with it. When Arnold was elected governor of California in 2003, Charles wrote a story for me at Men’s Journal that called Arnold a wizard of his own growth, saying that his story is like Gatsby’s…not because of its payoff of riches and fame, but because it says unequivocally what we all want most to believe about ourselves: that we can be our own Pygmalions.

  Like Charles, I thought, who in his own words had been caught and released.

  −ENDIT−

  P. J. O’Rourke (607)

  P. J. O’ROURKE LIVED IN A TRIANGLE-SHAPED apartment above the Queens-Midtown Tunnel in Manhattan. The living room came to a point like the bow of a ship heading uptown on First Avenue. Other writers knew P.J. as an editor at the National Lampoon, where they had put a dog with a pistol in its ear on the cover with the headline “If You Don’t Buy This Magazine, We’ll Kill This Dog.” I’m not sure why, but that cover line and that pointed apartment seemed to make sense together.

  We often wound up at the same bar or table or party—sometimes in that order over a single night. He looked a little like Ringo Starr, but in a handsome way, and he had lots of girlfriends and writer friends, too. He told me that whenever he had a little money in the bank he applied for higher credit lines and that I should, too.

  “It’s not like we’ve got a secure future,” he said, but it was also clear that he was going to figure out something smart for himself—maybe even as a writer. He had just gone freelance. “Time to grow up,” he said. “We’re screwed.”

  P.J. had been a liberal with long hair and underground newspaper credits—his politics formed by the Vietnam War, the subtext of which, he said, was “saving one’s own butt.” That changed at the Lampoon. His most famous piece was “How to Drive Fast on Drugs While Getting Your Wing-Wang Squeezed and Not Spill Your Drink,” which P.J. used as a liftoff to become what he called a “pants-down Republican”:

  I think our agenda is clear. We are opposed to: government spending, Kennedy kids, seat-belt laws, busing our children anywhere other than Yale, trailer courts near our vacation homes, all tiny Third World countries that don’t have banking secrecy laws, aerobics, the U.N., taxation without tax loopholes, and jewelry on men. We are in favor of: guns, drugs, fast cars, free love (if our wives don’t find out), a sound dollar, and a strong military with spiffy uniforms.

  P.J.’s work as an editor and writer at the Lampoon nailed a sensibility many of his colleagues cashed in on when they stepped easily into the movie business, starting with Animal House (1978). P.J. took his shot with a Rodney Dangerfield vehicle called Easy Money and used the payday as a down payment on a small house in New Hampshire and a Porsche. Problem was, he hated the work as much as he loved that 911 Turbo.

  “It’s just a stupid movie,” P.J. said when we were driving from New Hampshire to Boston. He was going to drop me at the airport and then spend the day working with Rodney on the script.

  “Come on…” I said. Like everyone I knew in journalism, I was envious of movie money.

  “I should know how bad it is
,” he said. “I’m writing it.”

  There were three other writers on Easy Money, including Rodney. The setup was that a hard-drinking, pot-smoking, obsessive gambler had to change his ways to inherit $10 million from his puritanical mother-in-law. The marketing language would read: No Cheating! No Gambling! No Booze! No Smoking! No Pizza! No Nothin’! We’re taking all the fun out of life—and putting it into a Movie!

  P.J.’s script called for Rodney to lose thirty pounds as he got healthy over the story arc.

  “He’s never going to do that,” P.J. said.

  “Good luck,” I said, getting out of the Porsche at the shuttle terminal.

  “No more movies,” P.J. said.

  I wondered how high he had pushed his credit lines.

  −ENDIT−

  Money (970)

  MONEY WAS ALWAYS A PROBLEM. There was never enough and it was always late, making the life of a magazine freelancer problematic at best and impossible for many—a special kind of pride-killing hell that grew out of the worst combination of ambition and disappointment.

  Money was key to making most assignments, although some established writers who were doing well with novels or in the movie business would sometimes work cheap if they liked the idea. They just didn’t want to feel stupid about the money. But many writers, some more than competent, couldn’t make enough writing for magazines to have anything like a sustaining career. Editors didn’t talk about this, probably because as editors on someone’s payroll they never felt that pain, even though they knew it to be real.

  Big talent was no guarantee of success, although sometimes everything worked out well if you had it. When she was just beginning to write, Elizabeth Gilbert sold me (at Esquire) a short story about a truculent cowboy falling for a female ranch hand in Wyoming. The story was called “Pilgrims” and under the title I put: “The Debut of an American Writer: The first unpublished short story writer to debut in Esquire since Norman Mailer.” I loved that story.