Remembering Chuck Bowden

Nobody could write about Tucson like Charles Bowden because nobody could quite defamiliarize it like him—to write about its desert civilization in ways that were completely truthful and yet strange and mystical.

Bowden was moved here from Chicago when he was 12 because his father Jude, a lawyer, was fascinated with cowboy literature and wanted to move his family to the "wide open spaces." The rocks and air and plants of the Southwest made an immediate sensory impression on Bowden and he wound up a chronicler of Arizona himself, though not in the arrows-and-teepees style that his father had adored. His thinking was shaped by the headstrong adventures and conspiracy-mongering of the 1960s, a decade in which he plowed through the UA in less than four years (a feat nearly impossible today) with a degree in history, attended anti-war marches, watched Janis Joplin sing on the streets of San Francisco, smoked his share of marijuana, then did work toward a Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin-Madison before flirting with a life of scholarly comfort teaching history at the University of Illinois–Chicago Circle. That last gig was not for him.

He moved back to Tucson, bounced around various jobs at the UA before landing at the Office of Arid Lands Studies, where he was fired for producing a introduction to a bibliography of water policy that was just too rangy and lyrical. That unwanted document was the seed of his first book, "Killing the Hidden Waters," published by the University of Texas Press. It also marked the public launch of the Bowden sentence—his immediately recognizable mixture of the sensory, the prophetic and the doomed.

About a cave of bats near Morenci, he wrote this: "The sound tightens now, a shrill spike of screeches and squeaks. The mites scramble across the skin. The larvae writhe like shiny stones at our feet. We stand inside a brief island of life, a hiding place of our blood kin." In the hands of another writer, this scene might have come across as purple or composed under the influence of Queensrÿche. But Bowden made it work because of his ferocious sense of connection with the natural world, and his way of forcing the reader to see herself as a part of it.

He could be mordantly hilarious. A buffet dinner in Laughlin is a "casino cheap feed." Of a woman in a SUV he writes: "It is not easy being both rich and original." About a load of cocaine dumped into the Sea of Cortez that killed two hundred porpoises, he wrote: "The law of the sea has always been there is very little law at sea." He said of himself that he "was born to fill the cheap pages of newspapers," a reference to his stint as an inverted-pyramid-shunning crime reporter for the Tucson Citizen in the early 1980s, a time when he almost single-handedly made child sex crime a major issue of local discussion and when he drove himself to the edge of sanity by contemplating kidnappings, throat-slicings and 8 year olds with gonnorhea of the mouth. "I have entered a world that is black, sordid, vicious," he wrote in Harper's, years later. "And actual. And I do not care what price I must pay to be in this world."

His personal life was famously disarrayed. Until he found his partner of 10 years, the graceful and patient Mary Martha Miles, there were layers of pork grease on his kitchen windows to make them translucent. He was used to sleeping in his car and letting mail pile up for weeks. Few people ever saw him wearing anything but a brown safari shirt. He could exhaust and bore and frustrate some of his closest friends with his monologues on what was right and wrong with the world—tangled discourses peppered with obscure philosophical references and quasi-paranoid theories in which you were not expected to speak but listen to The Great Man hold forth. They got worse later in the afternoons as he got drunker. The same impersonal lusts that perverts held for children was what Bowden felt for grown women—this is part of what drove his post-Citizen crack-up—and he justified his peccadillos with appeals to evolutionary appetites. He had multiple girlfriends of the wrong kind, both secret and open; a love of cigarettes, thick coffee and liquor ("strong waters," he called it); a yen for disappearing into the desert for weeks at a time; a compulsive need to push himself and his body's engine until it hit what he called the "red line" of extremes. But under the image of a rawboned priapic ecowarrior was a yearning for a life of tranquility, a seeking of decency, a deep conservatism of humane values.

This irreconcilable tension fueled his best work. In "Blood Orchid," his wandering but brilliant meditation on the human conquest of America, he wrote: "Now I dream of the soft touch of women, the songs of birds, the smell of soil crumbling between my fingers, and the brilliant green of plants that I diligently nurture. I am looking for land to buy and I will sow it with deer and wild pigs and birds and cottonwoods and sycamores and build a pond and the ducks will come and fish will rise in the early evening light and take the insects into their jaws. There will be paths through this forest and you and I will lose ourselves in the soft curves and folds of the ground."

The last sentence is telling. Did Bowden have a death-wish? Did he want his own downfall, even despite his lusty ways and bottomless need to get it all down on paper? He would have shared this brew of libido and thantos with John Keats and—arguably—his friend Ed Abbey. Going over repeatedly into Mexico (the parts not listed in Lonely Planet) to ask probing questions of assassins and drug couriers is not playing the right side of the actuarial tables. There were said to be enough connected people in Juarez who would have liked to have seen him dead that all he needed to do to commit suicide would have been to have gone over in broad daylight and walked down certain streets. He treated his own body like a skateboarder treats asphalt. I rarely saw him without a cigarette either fired up or ready to go and his tolerance for vast quantities of red wine of any quality (he was not picky in this department) was enough to inspire as much pity as awe. Yet he was up at 3 a.m. most mornings at his word processor emptying himself, feeding that base craving, which for him was stronger than the pull of food, sex, wine, friendships or the reckless marches through the Cabeza Prieta desert that he used to consume for weeks at a time. He was drowned in the beautiful sentences, which were his supreme repository of self-adoration—he almost never wrote in any style other than the first person—and yet his greatest generosity to everyone who came across him and will continue to find him.

 Bowden is lost in the soft curves of the ground that he cherished. He gave the city a narrative it desperately needed: He helped us see the "hidden waters" of love and blood that create what we see around us. Tucson will not be the same now—not just because he is gone, but because he was here.

Chuck Bowden was a ferocious and tenacious writer. His words could have the intensity of a Tucson monsoon. He was also mischievously funny and loved to irreverently poke at people and institutions. As he famously pointed out to me, with a sly smile, "Given enough time and film, even a chimpanzee could win a Pulitzer."

There was no such thing as "halfway" with Chuck. It was always "balls to the wall," and there was no mute button. He and I froze in February's ice-filled Paria Canyon, and fried our brains trekking from Yuma to Palm Springs. In both cases we were recreating forced marches from a different time. Chuck wouldn't write about experiences gleaned from journals without enduring the hardships himself. He seemed to revel in the suffering. Reading his words, you knew he'd been there.

For a photographer, he was the perfect collaborator. There was no hype, because he didn't need to imagine. He was there. That translated into a level of trust I've never had with any other writer. He also had a photographer's eye for detail. One time in the Goldwater Bombing Range on a long march, I watched Chuck literally interview a tire on a wrecked car half buried in the sand after he pointed to the sidewall's name—"Life Saver Radial." He loved images and was such an amazing wordsmith, and he'd tailor and edit to accommodate my images.

That's not to say we didn't argue. At times we nearly came to blows over some perceived slight, like me not reading his copy soon enough. Espresso and red wine soothed both egos, and we always soldiered on.

For a time Chuck lived in Alamos, Sonora. He would eek out a living writing for USA Today and race to Tucson periodically to file stories. On one such race back to Alamos, jacked up on caffeine, Chuck tried to pass a slow moving pickup on the winding road to Alamos. Suddenly the truck stopped dead in the middle of the road, and the driver came walking back to Chuck's truck­­—with his hand menacingly behind his back. Chuck was sure he was dead. Suddenly the large Mexican man produced a beer and said, "Relax, gringo!"

A normal person would have soiled himself. Chuck was elated and began scribbling one of his favorite quotes. That's what Chuck did. He "hoovered up" such moments that no one else saw. He was funny, profound, profane, irreverent and honest. He was incredibly loyal to his friends.

While in the Mayo Clinic in Phoenix with my life slipping away, I decided to contact Chuck to urge him to write my obituary. He said he would, and a couple of days later I opened my drugged-out eyes to see Chuck's hulking frame bent over my bed. I had just received new lungs after an eight-hour surgery at St. Joseph's Heart Lung Institute. Not believing what I was seeing, I asked him, "Why are you here?" Not missing a beat his retort was, "Generally when someone asks me to write their obituary, I'm told, there could be a problem."

I smiled. Such was his loyalty.

I knew him as more than a genius, though no doubt he was. He was a friend. He was also a prophet, preaching to the great "unwashed." He didn't suffer fools and always gave you his opinion—whether or not you wanted it. My guess is that whenever you're seeing a massive monsoon storm ripping across the desert full of bluster, if you listen carefully, you'll hear Chuck's thunderous, raging profanity. Savor the moment.

Chuck and I spent a lot of time together when he was writing "A Shadow in the City." We had met through a former DEA higher up, who had directed him to talk to me about what it was like to work long-term undercover cases, where you actually got to know the traffickers, their lives, their families, and their reasons for what they did. Both of us were very cautious, very suspicious. He wanted the truth. He wanted me to reveal to him the darkness of the big heroin traffickers' world. I told him this was it. I was finished. I had seen enough loss and carnage and the complete failure of our war on drugs. It hurt too damn much to care ... but we both did.

What he wrote was really about the human heart. In his frightening, beautiful poetic way he revealed his own need, as well as my own need, to find meaning in the chaos. He asked that we look deep within our hearts and confess that our frustrations are from a lost sense of spirituality. He asked us to admit that to feel whole, we must feel the pain of our fellow humans and to help them or at least be their voice in the darkness. That caring is the medicine that heals the soul.

I introduced him to "Man's Search for Meaning," the writing of Viktor Frankl, who survived the death camps to help so many understand that there is dignity in their pain and that the pain can be transformed into good. My friend Chuck was the voice for the unwanted, the hurt, the forgotten, and the impoverished. He took their pain and asked us to remember that they are there—they are part of us.

Chuck introduced me to the beauty of the desert—so hostile, yet so incredibly beautiful. He believed, as I do, that the stars have a healing effect on us. In the magnificent beauty of a starlit night, a person can feel so tiny, yet a part of something more vast and eternal. He knew that we come from stardust, and our souls long to return.

Men like Chuck are rare. He was just visiting this damn place. I know he is at peace now, with the desert night stars. His soul is free, his pain is gone, and I, as you, will miss this beautiful friend.