Remembering Chuck Bowden

Chuck was innately inclined to the erotic. The lyricism of his prose and the sensuous descriptions of landscapes, plants, animals, buildings, food, drink, and people—especially women—prevented me from ever describing him as "hard-boiled." That may have been his beat, but it wasn't his heart and soul. He hated pornography of any kind because it kept him from the truth, from what was real. It ran counter to his personal aesthetic grounded firmly in the natural world. "Porn," he said, "is for people dead from the neck up."

Chuck held a deep appreciation for photographers and photojournalists who could capture realistic images portending something inescapable. He liked collaborating on projects with them and showing their work to everyone he encountered. I don't recall a single time when he didn't bring out a fistful of photographs during a visit, and will never forget his sheer exuberance when he introduced me to the work of the Juárez photographers.

He loved Antonioni's film "Blow-Up," about a London fashion photographer who explores society's less glamorous side with his camera in his free time. He suspects he may have witnessed a murder after looking at blown-up shots he had taken in a park. The photographer becomes consumed with passion for his work, examining and re-examining, questioning what may or may not have taken place amidst the grass, trees, sunshine and shadows. The lack of certainty engages him and he is obsessed. Everything else in his life is eclipsed and no longer matters to him. Although Chuck didn't share the protagonist's contempt for women, he was Antonioni's hero in the flesh.

I paid him a visit early one afternoon in April 2008. We sat in the backyard and he talked about his current project. I had worked with Chuck for four years early in his book publishing career and was intimately familiar with listening to him process raw information and explore the narrative. We drank red wine while he talked and I listened. The stories were dark, disturbing, violent. He went to Safeway to buy more wine. There was a notable lack of humor that afternoon and I was concerned. When he returned and filled our glasses, I asked him, "Do you think all of this is getting to you?"

"This is what I do." He shot me a sideways look. "You follow?"

"I've known you for a while and I know this is what you do," I replied. "But this is unrelenting."

He shrugged.

I feel totally inadequate writing about Chuck Bowden. Probably how you would be if asked to compose a tune to be played at Mozart's memorial or discuss physics at Einstein's funeral.

Chuck could write like no one else I have known.

He pulled from the same toolbox of words that we all use. But he had a way of lining up those words and putting them together that told a story magnificently. There was nothing extraneous, nothing wasted.

Chuck was a master storyteller whether he was writing about his beloved Mount Lemmon, ruthless killers or Tucson paramedics' frantic attempts to save the life of a man who had a heart attack on a Tucson sidewalk.

Chuck wrote many books, but I have a special affinity for "Frog Mountain Blues," which this year is celebrating its 20th anniversary. Working with Tucson photographer Jack Dykinga, Chuck explored the history of Mount Lemmon ("Frog Mountain" to the Tohono O'odham).

So 11 years ago, when the Aspen Fire slashed across Mount Lemmon, charring the community of Summerhaven, I asked Chuck to revisit "his" mountain and write an update for the Tucson Citizen.

A sample of what he found:

The forest itself is a remnant from the last ice age, a green whisper of Canada floating over the Sonoran Desert. For 10,000 years, this tangle of pine and fir and spruce persisted as the earth warmed and the rains declined.

We've managed to damn near murder it in one century.

Here is how we did it: We suppressed fires in our effort to protect the forest, and by that act we let fuel loads—doghair thickets, deadfall—build up until fire escalated from being a natural cleansing agent of undergrowth that did not trifle with mature trees into a lethal crown fire.

Anyone who knew the mountain realized it was doomed by this act. Building Summerhaven on top was about as bright as laying out a subdivision inside an oil refinery. 

Wow.

Chuck wasn't your typical newspaper reporter. But that says more about the shortcomings of newspapers than it does about Chuck. He was the kind of reporter and writer that newspapers need if they are to attract and hang on to readers.

Chuck's skill with words masked the fact that he also was a persistent and prodigious reporter—an extraordinarily keen observer of what was happening around him.

It's a cliché to say that Chuck left his footprints on our community. But that is what Chuck did—literally and figuratively. I'll think of him every time I gaze up at our Frog Mountain.

Charles Clyde Bowden—"Chuck"—was a friend of mine for almost 20 years. We met early in my political career due to his love for the Pima County Public Library System. Chuck was a part-time resident of Arivaca, and the Diane Caviglia Library located in that small town was on his agenda.

Knowing that to solve a political problem, Chuck needed politicians. He invited the chairman of the Board of Supervisors and me to meet with family representative, Ronnie Caviglia, and hash out the details and the cost of the improvements they were requesting. Chuck was an able lobbyist and did most of the talking. After quick agreement, the business ended with a cork pop and the social hours lasted well into the night.

Born in Joliet, Illinois, Chuck then grew up in the bungalow belt of Chicago's Southside. After middle school, his family relocated to Tucson, Arizona. The Sonoran Desert had to be a dramatic and profound turning point in his life, but I know Chuck also had a fondness and nostalgia for the urban rhythm of Southside life because we bonded over our familiar and similar feelings about Chicago.

I grew up just an elevated train and a bus ride from the Calumet High School that Chuck would have attended had the Bowden family stayed in Chicago. In fact, I played football against Calumet High School years later for "rival" Chicago public high school, Morgan Park. In the Southside neighborhoods where you heard that "to reach your full potential, you need to leave here," Chuck was one giant step ahead of me, yet I arrived in Arizona just as soon as I could.

I know what Chuck felt when he saw his first shooting star or smelled his first stand of creosote after a monsoon rain in Tucson. What you stand on here is "holy ground," he said. Cold weather transplants are like religious converts. "Eco-fitness" was Chuck's year-round passion. He loved the desert and its radiant sun that allowed him a full year to roam in his newfound paradise, instead of spending six months living behind the Chicago storm windows of a drab winter bungalow belt.

Chuck was my political beachhead. I landed hard in a Pima County mine field in 1997 and Bowden showed me a path to the sunlit, upland fields where the business of politics should be taken seriously and not personally. An introduction over an Arivaca library led to a decades-long friendship and inspiration to preserve and protect not only libraries, but much of the sensitive desert via the Sonoran Desert Conservation Plan. Chuck was all in on the Sonoran Desert Conservation Plan and the Save the Scenic Santa Ritas, among many other environmental causes. He was a friend of the desert and a friend of mine. May Chuck Bowden rest in power!