The notion of following your passion is a cheap instinct and a good instinct and it's worth indulging. Your passion is your source of power. In order to have power, you have to live a life of passion. You have to live a really full life. You need to follow those paths, no matter where they lead...in defiance of all things conventional, perhaps. And of course it is at a price. It's going to cost. You have to know that going in. But the price you pay, in my opinion, is not worth the time of day to think about. It is so important not to knee-pad around the world. You should never bow down to anything but those you love and respect. Ever. For anything.
- Doug Peacock
(This was from a Heron Dance interview, as are all the quotes below unless otherwise noted).
Douglas Arapaho Peacock: Free Spirit
Our civilization makes a basic proposition to each of us: give
over your freedom and we will give you a shot at happiness. Among us there exists
a tiny group, an immeasurably small percentage, who respond "If I give up my
freedom I have no chance at happiness. If I give up my freedom, I lose my spirit."
Of those "free spirits," a few are able to articulate their life experience.
They are worth hearing from.
I remember calling my wife in upstate New York from an all-night truck stop
in Arizona about six years ago. The reception I got was chilling. I had left
a career on Wall Street to write a book about the spiritual lives of people
who spent time alone in the wilderness. The book wasn't going anywhere. The
next afternoon I met Doug Peacock in his backyard in Tucson.
I had no idea who Doug was. Yvon Chouinard, founder of Patagonia Clothing, had
kindly suggested a dozen people I might interview. Doug was one. It turned out
to be a highlight of my life. Doug is an ex-Green Beret medic who, after two
tours in Vietnam, had returned to America and spent time in Wyoming wilderness
getting himself together, during which he developed an affinity for grizzly
bears. His friend Ed Abbey got him interested in monkeywrenching -- eco-sabotage.
Books have been written, and a film made, about Doug's misadventures. At the
time we met, Doug was supporting his family by writing magazine articles. His
strength gave me strength at a time of bewilderment.
Heron Whisper
Not long after that day, my marriage broke up. Then Doug's marriage broke up. We kept in sporadic touch. I saw him once in the next five years. A couple of times he invited me out to Montana to visit, but I had no money and no car.
For years Doug had been working on a book: Walking It Off. A number of major publishers were interested, but ultimately they all turned the book down. Doug more or less gave up. I asked him to send me the manuscript. It arrived accompanied by a letter describing it as a "worthless piece of shit." I read it. I found it to be powerful -- a story of a person living life on his own terms and paying the associated price. It explored the joy and sadness of living a free life better than any book I have ever read. I began to wonder how I might work some of Walking It Off into Heron Dance.
Then a car came into my life. To my surprise, it was mechanically sound, and I made plans to visit Doug in Montana. About the same time, I had decided to take Heron Dance on an exploration of the subject of creativity. Doug's friends include a number of authors, poets and musicians. He gave me their names and numbers or addresses. During the trip, I interviewed some of them. They talked about their work, but what they really wanted to talk about was the impact Doug had had on their life.
Doug Peacock is as close to pre-industrial, pre-corporate human as we hear from in this society. His life, his work show us that the assumptions under which we live our lives are a choice. He lives by his own code. And gets away with it. Sort of.
Doug's life is all wonderful. There is anger, paranoia, fear; ever-present loaded handguns occasionally used indiscreetly, the drunken rambles through Tucson and Katmandu, the fist fights, the car wrecks, the friendships abandoned over some slight (real or imagined.) The bullshit and bad manners. There are some funny stories mixed up in all that, but they kind of miss the point. This man is alive. He offers a perspective on the importance of wilderness to a society that has removed itself from the natural world. He has truly lived. He knows profound sadness and joy. He lives with an open heart -- open to the beauty of nature, open to the beauty in the spirits of others.
Some Background:
For readers not acquainted with the radical environmental movement,
Edward Abbey wrote twenty books, many of them centered around uninhabited landscape.
In the opinion of many, his best book was Desert Solitaire, about his summer
as a park ranger. Perhaps his best known book was The Monkey Wrench Gang, about
a group of environmental saboteurs who tried to slow the destruction of wilderness
by rendering oil, mining and logging machinery permanently inoperable. A principle
character in that book was ex-Green Beret Sergeant George Washington Hayduke,
a character based loosely on Doug Peacock. The last book he wrote before he
died was Hayduke Lives!
Earth First! was inspired in part by The Monkey Wrench Gang. Doug did not ever
actually join Earth First!, but the founders were friends of his, and many ex-Earth
Firsters describe Doug as someone who inspired them in their work, both farious
and nefarious. The FBI infiltrated Earth First! and arrested a number of key
participants. The group split up. Many found less risky ways to work for wilderness.
Doug has written two published books: The Grizzly Years and Baja!, as well as a number of articles for Men's Journal, Outside, Amicus Journal, Audubon and others.
I wish there was some way to convey that despite Doug's masculinity, he has a real feminine, gentle and caring side. Round River had a group of students at a place called the Triple X ranch. The ranch was at the end of about 27 miles of bad road. We had been down there about four days. Doug was supposed to show up early, but he hadn't. Late the forth evening, we are all sitting around this old ranchhouse. It is dark. The students are half playing cards after eating a spaghetti dinner. All of the sudden the front door gets kicked open. It is Peacock wearing a pair of old gym shorts and hiking boots. He is completely covered in sweat. The little wispy hair he has left is sticking out on all sides of his head. He says, "I have been smelling garlic and oregano for the last ten miles. I'm hungry and I need a drink." All conversation stops. I look around. The student's eyes are big. He is a little frightening.
So he and I go off somewhere and drink a little bit. In the morning, we were all supposed to meet a few hundred yards from the ranchhouse. Doug is already down there and he has his arms wrapped around this big old cottonwood tree. And he is talking to it.
Everything is perfectly quiet. We are watching this big, thickly muscled character hugging a tree. The whole idea of what a tree hugger is changes for these kids. So he hugs the tree for a while and then he talks to it and he turns around and starts talking to the students. Those kids got an enormous gift that day.
- Dennis Sizemore.
It is real important to have organic ceremonies. In my case it involves wild places and wild things. Sacred sites. My culture doesn't have a tradition of these things anymore but we badly need them, so I just make up my own. There is a lot to be learned from people who live closer to the land and who have a richer spiritual life than we do.
Every year there are places I go. The Cabeza Prieta. I go to the Grizzly Hilton. I go to Yellowstone. I have a giant circle of buffalo skulls, of grizzly skulls and other bones stashed. I am a caretaker of their spirits. This one particular circle of buffalo skulls are all bulls that knew each other in their life. Most came from a single herd. In severe winters they die. Grizzlies feed on them. Then the coyotes and ravens come. I drag the skulls back in the woods nearby. In this one area I have been doing this for twenty years. There are two grizzly skulls. I take my kids there and we leave little offerings -- salt balls from Salt Lake and shells from the Sea of Cortez and Sandhill Crane feathers from New Mexico.
I recently took some high school students to see a grizzly bear bed. I told them that afterwards I want no more talking. It was incredible. They didn't say a word. Not a question asked. Not a sound. They just kind of watched me do my weird shit -- go in my pack and put these little bundles and things out. Not a word. That was worth it. We need that. You need to honor your losses. Grieve your dead. We don't have any kind of relationship with animals because everything we eat is a farm animal. Even people who hunt a lot don't really have a relationship with the animals they kill. But I maintain those things. These kids -- whatever weirdness they saw that day -- they respected it.
- Doug Peacock (DP)
I love sand dunes. And I love waves. Simple phenomenon. Appreciation is an openness to the simplicity of these dynamic things that are so wonderful. The natural world sustains me, and others too. That is what I tell high school kids. You need to arm yourselves with love. There are all kinds of love. You can get all kinds of love.
- DP
I sometimes call the book the Arapaho Book of the Dead. Or Walking It Off. It is a book about death, but a happy book about death. Except I have been sort of down the last five weeks, so I haven't made too many inroads. And it is also about my friendship with Ed Abbey. But that's just the tie.
- DP
Abbey loved Comb's Ridge. It was one of those half-dozen places to which -- like the North Rim of Grand Canyon, Cedar Mesa, Lavender Canyon, Arches, Navajo Mountain, or the Cabeza Prieta -- he went when melancholy or despondent, to raise his downcast eyes to the sky, to mend or get over a lost love. Climbing the slick rock, I remembered a time when it didn't work, not long after Abbey and I took our first trip on the Colorado Plateau twenty years ago. Four months after our Escalante hike, Ed was on the eve of a broken heart. He was working as a fire lookout on the North rim of Grand Canyon. I returned to Tucson, moved into a tiny shack on the edge of the desert, and landed the only real job I ever had after Vietnam: substitute mailman. One day, Ed Abbey showed up alone on my doorstep. His girlfriend had left him. Ed stayed at my place for a month sleeping outside in the back of his VW station wagon until he found a stone house to rent at the foot of the Santa Catalina mountains.
By the time the monsoons arrived, Ed was still crushed and forlorn. In his desperation, Ed had sent the ex-girlfriend pictures of his new paramour -- a long-legged Las Vegas show girl, in full dancing regalia -- in a reckless attempt to win back the woman he was still secretly hooked on.
One day a letter from the girl arrived at the stone house telling Ed all about a fling with her new doctor boyfriend and how Ed ought to find a woman his own age. The tactic had backfired. Ed was now inconsolable.
"How could she be so cruel?" Abbey wondered aloud. I muttered something lame about how maybe he shouldn't have sent the provocative pictures of the Las Vegas showgirl, but he just wasn't listening. I tried cheering him up with some music, putting my favorite Mozart, the Sinfonia Concertante, on the turntable. Shortly into the slow second movement, Ed stopped the music. "Too sad", he said, "I can't stand it anymore."
We took a walk up Esperero Canyon. The torrential summer rains had scoured the bed of the dry wash and the bench above the bedrock gorge was covered with green grass. Where the bench terraced out against a low cliff of volcanic breccia, sculptured giant puffballs lay in recesses like misplaced soccer balls. The mushrooms were fresh and I was thinking about cooking up some for supper. But Ed wasn't interested. We continued up the wash startling a bobcat -- an unusual daytime sighting. Ed took out the girlfriend's letter and crumpled it on the bedrock. He struck a match to it. We watched the pages flare and curl with some ceremony. Our desert campfires were like that. It was still flaming as I turned and headed back down the canyon, already gathering mushrooms for dinner....
I passed a little ruin in a side canyon off to the west. An occasional Anasazi granary perched on high inaccessible ledges below overhangs. By and large, the ancients never lived in this lovely slickrock canyon to the extent or in the densities of Comb's Wash, Cedar Mesa, or Grand Gulch. Perhaps that was the result of the simple shortage of flat cultivatable land and suitable living sites. But -- for no recognizable reason -- what I was wondering about were notions of beauty. I could see wanting to live here merely because it was so lovely.
Lavender Canyon was a visual feast; it knocked your eyeballs out. The ancients saw what we see now. The psychological content of beauty lies outside culture. The canyon assaulted your senses: the easy and immediate apprehension of the presence of beauty, of the simple classical line of these Earth forms and colors, arrived with the swiftness of an emotion, at light speed. These were no superfluous details. This was the organic connection between Ed Abbey's slickrock cosmology and the quality of the sustaining life Native peoples had lived here.
It was easy to see why Abbey admired the beauty of Lavender Canyon, a true gem within a visually high-grade landscape. Ed thought that the more you look either at or under the surface of things, the more beauty you find, that beauty in nature is a reflection of the ultimate beauty of the universe, whose final explanation is composed of a few principals of compelling simplicity. My paternal grandmother, now departed, used to call this simple and pervasive beauty the reflection of the light of God.
- DP, Walking It Off
When we started I leaned on the reputation of Doug Peacock. It wasn't my organization or my work, it was Doug Peacock's. Even though Doug didn't know half the time what the hell we were doing. He just accepted it. And he has been willing to stand with me. I was trained in basic science but I had a great falling out with the scientific biology community. I burned a lot of bridges. Doug helped me out of that hole. All that mattered to him was that I care deeply about bears. That is mainly what he has done for me -- he gave me a chance.
He is amazingly strong. Doug is an individual that once you become close to him, he becomes family. You join what is known as The Peacock Clan....Sometimes you wish you could choke him. But you love him.
- Dennis Sizemore
We have respected and revered all the sacred cows: agriculture, religion, government, military power, wealth, commodities and technology. And none of those things are really doing us any good. A lot of so-called environmentalists still think that technology is going to save us. I don't believe that at all. That which does not have, cannot give.
We need a new way of thinking. You need to get out in order to see back in. We need places that are strange and different -- where what we know doesn't necessarily apply.
We need it individually and, I think, we need it collectively. We think we control everything. Wolves and bears in Yellowstone with radio collars being tracked by satellites. That is more than an illusion, it is delusion.
Indians believed that the success of the hunter was not due to his skill or shrewdness, but his humility. The hunter should always be grateful. The emotional posture behind reason, even today, is humility. Where do you get humility? You get it from being alone and unarmed in places where you are in the food chain. Where we can encounter grizzly bears and mountain lions. We need that humility.
Can you imagine a situation where you either learn or you perish, where you either have a fundamental receptiveness or you don't make it?
- DP
Doug is an inspiration to a lot of people that work on the front lines in wildlife protection. He doesn't do as much on the front lines himself anymore, but he lets you know that your efforts aren't going unnoticed. He is always there with a pat on the back and support in any way he can. It keeps me motivated. When things look particularly bad, he is there beside me with his sense of humor. Okay, maybe sometimes it is a sick sense of humor. It doesn't matter. He puts a smile on your face when you are working on issues where a lot of time you feel the odds are impossible. That kind of inspiration keeps us going.
- Mike Mease
The individual act of courage is really important. It can stop things. That is one reason I still have hope. I believe individuals are powerful. The power to question. The power to say no. The power to say this is wrong. The power to revolt. All people ought to be critical of their societies, their own towns, their own backyards, their own lives. That's hard to do and I respect it. I have always respected courage above all things. Not just physical courage, but also not going along with everything. Or anything for that matter. But you are not going to find out about that by going to a college or reading a book.
- DP
There are so few people of great energy and "purity of heart" (Kirkegaard's notion) such as Gary Snyder, Jack Turner, Ed Abbey....they help us fuel our dreams and visions. We are quite literally a part of all we have met, for good or ill. Individuals such as Peacock have ultimately a far greater influence than the countless organizations, always severely compromised as their main intent seems to be to further the presence of the organization. Only Peacock accurately painted the horror story of the Yellowstone buffalo while the eco-ninnies picked their noses in the safety of their lavish offices....
I've camped with Doug a fair amount from Utah down to the Seri coast of the Sea of Cortez. We pack along a lot of wine, tequila, meal and garlic, and hot peppers, so that none of our travels resemble committee meetings. One evening, when it was only twelve degrees, Doug tried to make putanesca while his gut groaned under the weight of the eighteen pieces of Italian sausage and a head of garlic he'd already eaten. This was leavened by seeing an oak tree full of elf owls....
Doug might not remember this, but late one night in an Arizona bar two louts were fist fighting and Peacock bellowed at them to stop because we were talking about poetry. They stopped.
Nothing is saved except in specifics, land, grizzlies, buffalo, birds....
- Jim Harrison
Have you ever been around old, geriatric white guys talkin' about their golf game? Well they sit there and pretend to listen, but they aren't listening at all. They're just waiting for their chance to talk about their great nine-iron. It's a sickness unto death as far as I'm concerned. Talk without action is the ruination of the soul.
Enough. Enough talk. People are craving a little tiny, pragmatic success in the so-called conservation business. People are tired of going to meetings, and hearing conservationists bray long into the night and reading articles about wolves from Maine to Mexico and grizzlies from Y to Y -- Yukon to Yellowstone. Which is just hot air, and I admit to having contributed to it. I am appalled how much money gets absorbed by these meetings and public pronouncements. Self-indulgent, esoteric essays just don't hack it after a while. This preoccupation with academics and professors. I don't understand it. Abstract eco-babble. This is the real world, moochachos, and you are in it.
You are never going to save grizzlies or wolves in Yellowstone until you link their habitat up to Glacier and Canada. We've had lots of meetings about this, but no one has ever actually done anything. Of course, we need a little money to make this happen. That is supposed to be my job. I'll get around to it eventually. But this isn't a time in my life when I want to bother with rich people. I mean, even rich people who give money away to good causes are often so deeply wounded in the soul from having made that money or gotten that money that they are really incomplete human beings.
- DP
I poked a mesquite stick farther into the fire and lay down in the cool sand of the wash. Hayduke was full circle. Most of him, in any case. Gone and buried. The real-life model for Hayduke, Green Beret Buck-sergeant Peacock, was still here. Sort of. I was confused, dazed, and not just a little crazy. I felt I no longer knew who I was, that I was none of the people whose mask I had worn: grizzly man, father, Earth-warrior, husband, Hayduke, drunk, Green Beret medic, nature boy. I was merely the balding man squatting in the arroyo by the fire, the tired, chunky man seen by the buzzards soaring above, filthy from grave digging, lying in the wash, not yet dying, but dimly desiring a new life....
It was the will to change; it seemed the gale of life force that had sustained nearly thirty years of fast living and had tossed me up on the desert shores of Tiburon had abruptly blown itself out.
Even a dolt like Hayduke can cry out for a new soul. I had waved a fist of anger at the world for 25 years. The aging warrior was less weary of the war than he was sick of his own bad habits, fixed patterns of behavior, set patterns of thinking, and limited range of emotional responses. There was also sporadic poor physical condition, intermittent alcohol abuse, the occasional matter of being an inattentive father and lousy husband, non-provider, estranged son and brother, and distant inconstant friend.
For the sake of my family and friends, I needed to move on. The few wise men I knew practiced meditation. Now, I craved to discover a calm center, using my primitive tools of self--examination -- walking, solitude, wildness -- to reach back in and touch the core of my domestic life. I was a poor candidate for a meditative life. My life was a catalogue of psychotic twitches and addictions: official VA-sanctioned Post Traumatic Stress Disorder disability, borderline Attention Deficit Disorder, marginal Tourette Syndrome, occasional depression, a schizoid paranoiac, a history of alcohol abuse. Guys like that don't become Zen masters.
- DP, Walking It Off
I have to spend time alone, time with bears or tigers or whatever. I have to go and see a flock of ten thousand Sandhill Cranes at Bosque Del Apache. Our great buffalo herds are gone, so I go to see birds. It really doesn't matter whether they are starlings, or sparrows, or cranes, or blackbirds, or bald eagles. It's the multitude of life. Free life. Wild life.
- DP
A lot of the measure of Doug is how many people care him. Some of the people that care about him are pretty incredible. And he moves them to fits of anger, or tears, of sadness or laughter.
He and I have had our moments and our spats. All of us who are close to Doug have gone through disagreements with him. His greatness in some areas is mirrored by his ineptness in others. Most of that ineptness is in dealing with the common, everyday situations we find ourselves dealing with in our lives. What is incredible about Doug to so many of his friends is that you would never put up with half of the crap that Doug does except it is Doug.
- Dennis Sizemore
Doug is the kind of friend that if the shit ever really hit the fan, you know he would be standing right beside you. If necessary, he would go down with you. That's rare. There are few people you can trust your life too.
- Rod Mondt
At my best, I take a lot of chances. I have been hurt. And burned. Betrayal. I fear betrayal. But at my best, I have lived with an open heart. A reasonably open mind.
- DP
He is imperfect. He is vulnerable. Incredibly vulnerable. But something in his compass, his moral and intellectual compass, is so intact. I follow his compass.
- Beth McIntosh
I like to bushwack. That is a metaphor for the thought processes that come most naturally for me. Spiritual bushwhacking. No set trails. No guidebooks. No maps. I practice that in the woods because it is the best way of learning about myself, probably. Not following any particular path, but going somewhere that is dynamic and new. Like the wilderness -- but it doesn't have to be the wilderness -- encountering something that speaks to you so powerfully that eventually it informs you about yourself. I am not that great a guy. I don't like myself a lot of the time. But I am certainly at my best in those situations.
It is spiritual. The source of my power is my visceral experience in the outer world. That is my source. I don't gather my power from cultural icons. If I was to live in a city for a year, and not venture out in the wilderness, to where there are wolves and grizzly bears, I would lose my power. I need to go on pilgrimages to wild, formidable places. That is a source of whatever wisdom or insight I have in life....Out there, I am at my best. In the woods, with grizzly bears I am as good as anybody. Especially alone.
- DP
It had been a year since either one of us had seen a grizzly bear, so we got in a car and hauled ourselves across the country to Glacier Park. We probably had been drinking a little wine the night before. More than likely. We got up early that day, got a little coffee, and we went to one of Doug's secret meadows. We are sitting there and Doug is doing his usual grunting, reading a copy of Bear News. Doug has to get up to take a leak. He pees, and literally ten seconds after he sits down, we hear this stomping. Pounding on the ground. There is a huge bear right behind us that had smelled his pee. It was revolted. It was snarling and rubbing its nose on the ground and grunting. And it looked at us with the most disgusted look. It was a giant grizzly bear. I was thinking later that if Doug hadn't taken that leak it might have walked right up behind us. We were hung over and not paying attention.
- Dan Sullivan
This last week I was in grizzly country. I was trying to get in touch with my intuition. I am working on a story about why we so desperately need bears. It is about a reverence for life beyond our control. Something we don't dominate. That is the native habitat of real humanity -- to expose yourself to things beyond your control.
I don't court vertical mountains and glaciers and wild rivers anymore, but I sure like hanging out in a thicket with a jaguar or a tiger or a bear. It is a very organic danger. It is an ancient kind of danger. I worry about a culture built on fantasy. Nothing is quite real. More and more we live through car windows and video screens.
Walking into a valley or a meadow and knowing there could be a grizzly bear there makes my life sing. They don't have to be there, but the possibility that they might be goes a long way to making life worth living. - DP
What is really exciting about children is not what you teach them, but what you share with them. More than anything else, I share my life and my love for things. The way children see the world is the way you should see the world. It's like William Blake's Songs of Innocence. The smell of discovery around every bend, every meander of the creek, and all of your troubles disappearing, like bubbles down a sunny river. I take my kids up in the canyon lands, exploring ruins that are virtually untouched.
Adventure is just a word I put off in the side of my mind. Like recreation. It's not a good enough reason for doing anything. But there is nothing I value more than an endless sense of wonder and discovery.
- DP
A way out, I thought, one way to break the cycle, the escape from horror of history and war, was to walk metaphorically beyond culture while treading over and upon the tangible land. The thing about walking it off is of course no big deal. Besides, in my own journey I had been taking at least one step backwards for every two forward. Walking is the most natural of human activities to engage both the body and mind in the land. Walking is no more than a positive alternative to stalemate and depression: if you can't figure out what to do, when things get you down, if you find yourself out of sorts or you need some time to reflect, go walk a hundred (or less) miles. These journeys were intended to be dangerous and the indisputable physical risks of homicide, bear, tiger, suicide, jaguar, river, mountain, alcohol are in some way parallel with the risks of emotional intimacy -- still a difficult arena for me. Physical death is but a part of this.
I think.
I could never be sure of these things. I was a bottom feeder. Where others gleaned knowledge from books and wisdom from mentors, I repeatedly smashed my face into the granite wall of experience in order to master the smallest detail.
- DP, Walking It Off
You find yourself by losing yourself. By not thinking about yourself all of the time. When I am in a slump with my writing, I'll go and walk for a week. Walk and not see a human being. Something happens after four or five days which is quite wonderful. It is an ancient thing. Your sense of smell. Your hearing. They come back.
- DP
I got shot at a lot by helicopters and our own people over there. I was out in the jungle, running around with Montanyards and mercenaries. I'd be the only American, or one of only two Americans of from six to two dozen people. We would sneak around the woods and get into trouble and run for our lives. So when I got out I was predisposed to crawling off into the bush.
At night I had an edge over everybody. I still do at night. In any kind of dangerous situation with human beings, where human beings are predatory, at night I have all of the advantages. Like when bad things would happen out in the field in Vietnam. You would wake up and there would be shooting everywhere. No matter what happens, you know you are going to be overrun because you travel in such small groups. It's pretty rare, because you usually don't mess up like that, but it does happen. Everybody just crawls off the ridge. It is every man for himself. That is where I have my best chance. Once I get off into the jungle I am home free. The circumstances under which it happens are really terrifying, but the comfort nonetheless exists. I'm even that way with grizzlies a little bit.
- DP
I would not spend one minute on a cushion, inside a house, meditating, when I could look out, ponder a great valley of cottonwood and aspens and mountains beyond. I party, I drink, I swear, I fight. I am a poor candidate for a Zen life. And yet, there is nothing quite so total as being completely tuned into the present. To the moment. How you get it really doesn't matter.
Human beings are complicated. You can live in the past, you can dream all the time of the future, but every now and again you need to be right there. But it's hard because most of the modern world isn't worth paying attention to. Who wants to pay attention to the traffic jam on I-10? The more you live in the suburbs or urban areas, the more you want to shut everything down -- see little, hear little, smell nothing. Who wants it? Who needs it? The total sensory experience of living in a shithouse.
When you walked by a period of life when you could have been really happy, you should have seized it. You should have leaped upon it. I just try to let myself go. It's not necessary to live in the moment every day, in the traffic jam with smog creeping in your window, listening to bad rap music on the radio. But when it's there you have really got to live it. The best reason for living it is knowing you are going to die. It's no big deal. I have had some sense of my own mortality for a long time. It's not a negative thought. It's just the way things are. If you want more life, that's fine. But you should get as much out of the life that you have got left as you can. I wish I had a clue as to how to find happiness, but I know it slaps you in the face all of the time. You just have to stop long enough to pay attention.
- DP
I am a hobbit. I like to cook for people. If I am by myself, I don't really care. But cooking dinner for your friends is just as important as any spiritual meditation. It is whatever you see as service.
- DP
Doug comes down to visit driving some old Honda or Subaru. It leaks toxic fluid that ends up all over my driveway. He'll have to add a quart of oil when he gets here, but he'll miss the oil tank, so that will end up on the driveway too. As he is bumming a quart of oil from me, he'll tell me that I ought to get my Ford serviced. Meanwhile he is driving this piece of shit.
Then he will bring his black hole bag in and all of the sudden, every room of my house will be completely full of his stuff. He will decide he has to cook dinner. He can't cook dinner just for my wife and me. We need guests. So he'll get on the phone and all we'll have a dinner party for twelve. We'll go to the grocery store. I will buy a lot of groceries. We will go to the liquor store. I will buy all the liquor. And he will go buy a couple bottles of good wine. We'll go back and he'll cook. And he always somehow manages to get garlic on the bottom of his shoes and walk all over the house. There will be garlic all over my tile floors. Totally destroy the kitchen. People arrive. It will be the most extraordinary meal. The conversation will be incredible. You will wonder why all dinners can't be like that. You usually pick up the tab at dinner. And you feel wonderful about it.
- Dennis Sizemore
I found a grizzly den up on the Washburn range, five or eight miles north of my home in Yellowstone Park. Late one autumn, during an early snow blizzard, Doug and I hiked in there. Walking the ridgeline, we found a freeze-dried bear scat with some seeds in it. I pulled one of the seeds out and munched on it. I handed a seed to Doug. So we both started eating these seeds out of bear shit. At the time it seemed completely natural.
Anyway, we carried on. We came across some white bark pine cones that bears had been feeding on, so we started eating those too. It was great to see Peacock with the wind blowing, sniffing the air. He has a real sense of the wild.
We came into fresh sow and yearling cub tracks. Obviously, she was getting ready to den. We approached within a hundred feet of the den and just sat for an hour. Snow swirling around us. We never saw the bears. Maybe they were in the den, or maybe they were close by. It was a wonderful, magical time. I am not sure that I would have done that on my own. But really wonderful.
Peacock does seem to have a way with bears. We will go to places that I have spent a lot of time in alone, places I've never seen a bear in twenty-five years, and bears will come out of the woodwork with Peacock. Not that he is finding them particularly. But they just show up.
- Steve Fuller
Beauty is the kind of thing you don't feel comfortable talking about all of time. Because....because it goes away, that's why. What a simple phenomenon. And how elusive. It comes and goes so swiftly, very much like an emotion.
A girl's bottom in the moonlight. But other things too of course. I have a whole repertoire of music in my head, which is basically the wind blowing through different trees and shrubs in different places, from the highest part of grizzly country to the lowest, hottest desert. And occasionally opening your eyes and seeing a glimpse of blue sky above. That is also beauty.
Pure beauty lies beyond culture. It is organic. In our souls. And yet look how much our flawed humanity gets in the way of beauty. Beauty is almost irrelevant in our culture. It is around us all the time, but you can go days without seeing it. A few impressions of beauty sustain me. Whether it is something remembered or touched or smelled or felt or put together. Or just a landscape glimpsed while the wind was blowing in my face.
- DP
It is a real comfort to have Doug in my life. I have been able to tell Doug things that I can tell almost no one else. It just feels safe. You know he will help you if he can. He has an uncanny ability to spot your intentions. It is not a far stretch of the imagination to think that he is so used to watching animals a lot that he has the ability to sense people, the little clues that people give you that we don't see anymore. Those skills watching animals transfer over. It is not intellectual at all. It is intuitive.
- Trent Alvey
I have known when a grizzly that is charging my ass will stop. I haven't known that all the time, but I have known that. That is it. That is the only insight I have.
- DP
Doug knows love really well. That is what saves him. A great, endless, extreme, appropriate love he has shown to so many people.
- Beth McIntosh
Just watching and listening to Peacock has made a big difference in my life. And also my work. He won't go along with anything he doesn't want to. It's not an obstinacy. Well, maybe it is, on second thought. It is an obstinacy for sure. You feel his determination when you are around him. It is great to be around that.
Peacock loves things so strongly -- all kinds of different things. He doesn't seem to hold anger or animosity...well, he does to some degree...but at the same time, I think he has gotten rid of a lot of anger. And anger, hatred, those things come from fear. They come from cowardice. I think he showed me that. He so freely admits his love of things. You can tell it is true. And it is accompanied by a sense of intelligence. By admitting that I was afraid, I raised my intelligence, my power, my sense of self worth. To feel love, to express it, to tell other people, to not turn away from it, not be frightened by it, and to have a profound respect for intelligence -- those are the things that he has shown me, probably as much as anybody I have ever met.
- Scott Carrier
If you want to fit in, and make a living, and raise your family, you have to be moldable, to play the game. Doug's unwillingness to be molded has affected his ability to make a living. Doug feels very strongly about his kids. Making a living is a constant battle for him. The easy way would be to go and get a job at the post office. He could play off his Vet benefits. But he can't do that.
- Rod Mondt
In 1990, on my way to collect mesquite cooking wood in a sadly overgrazed valley east of the Picacho Mountains, I stumbled across a coyote caught in a number-3 trap connected to a chain leading to a re-bar grappling hook attached to a mesquite tree. I slowly approached and the coyote, naturally figuring I was his tormentor coming to kill him, charged violently and desperately, then dislocated his paw tugging back away from me. At ten feet I stopped and spoke in a low, calm voice to show I meant him no harm. After a few minutes -- with me not moving -- the young coyote ceased his futile lunges.
I moved in slowly, a half step at a time, talking to the coyote constantly, much like I talk to grizzly bears. It took me at least ten minutes to reach the trap. I knelt and reached out towards the trap with my bowie knife, trying to pry apart the steel jaws. The spring was too strong; I couldn't open the trap. The pathetic animal leaned away from me. I dropped the knife and moved forward. I took the trap in my hands. The coyote took a step towards me and sat down, one paw raised (caught in the trap that I now held) like my old collie dog used to do. I worked my fingers into the steel jaws and touched his mangled paw. I pulled against the spring and opened the trap. The wounded coyote -- sitting on his haunches, paw in the air, his nose only four inches from my own -- didn't move a muscle. I leaned slowly into his face and whispered "go." My little brother -— God's dog -— vanished into the creosote.
- DP, The Patagonia Catalog
He would do anything for a friend. If you help him do the simplest thing -- a little carpentry in his backyard -- he is forever indebted to you. He won't say anything, but he will take you to the Grizzly Hilton, or take you to Mexico. Or bring you to see some great magic place, because that is his way of repaying kindness.
- Dan Sullivan
Peacock still lives the transient life that I used to live. For many years, it was good enough if you had a full tank of gas. Usually it was someone else's car that was full of gas. So let's go somewhere. Anywhere. Lets hit the road. Until the gas runs out. Most people who live like that are twenty-five years old. Not fifty-five. Doug shows us that it is never too late to follow your heart.
- Al Burgess
I met Abbey. He suggested I work for the Park Service. I would take these seasonal jobs. I worked in North Cascades as a backcountry ranger for three years. Objectively, from anyone's point of view, I was the worst park employee in their history. Horrible. Anarchists make lousy law-enforcement agents. The only thing I ever busted was an illegally parked Winnebago. I got in a fight with the deputy sheriff of Watcomb county and totaled a Ranger pick-up truck under highly dubious circumstances. I still hold the park record for property damage. So, with the support and encouragement of the Park Service, I left to find more suitable employment. That was twenty or so years ago. I am still looking, I guess. But apparently not too hard.
- DP
I am not a scotch drinker in general -- but last night I had a distinct nagging taste in the back of my head. It finally came to my tongue. And it was scotch.
The last time I had scotch I was with wild Indians in Siberia. They are Mongol natives -- hunters and trappers. I was traveling with Yvon Chouinard, Rick Ridgeway, Doug Tompkins, Jib Ellison and Tom Brokaw. We bribed an Aeroflot helicopter to drop us and our gear and kayaks at the head of a big river in Southeast Siberia. We land and are breaking out our tents and putting together our kayaks. At dusk these Udehe Mongols come over with a huge stew pot full of fresh moose meat -- liver and sirloin. It is just incredible. I love moose. Brokaw goes into his pack and brings out a bottle of Johnny Walker Black and pours shots for all of these Indians. So we shared dinner and scotch and watched the sun go down.
- DP
When I joined Earth First!, I started to study Abbey and found out about Peacock. Then I read that book he wrote, Grizzly Years. It was brilliant. So I wrote him a letter. My favorite bourbon at the time was Rebel Yell. I think I have learned more about bourbon since then, but anyway I sent a bottle of Rebel Yell with the letter.
Weeks later, I get a crumpled up postcard in the mail. It looked like it had been stepped on a few times, maybe ridden in someone's pocket for a while, and it was addressed to Lawman Mudd. It said,
"By the time I finished the Rebel Yell, I found myself in a blizzard in Montana. I got myself together and drove to Chouinard's place in Malibu where I am housesitting for Yvon. He gave me the key to the wine cellar. That man is dangerous." It was signed "Doug."
- Ned Mudd
I became a Green Beret medic by sheer accident. I volunteered just as the draft was closing in on me and the computer sent me military police school. That was schizoid city. I had been an outlaw all my life. I would be watching the training films on stockade duty and dreaming of going AWOL myself. Jumping the wall and running through the alleys. I knew I had to get out of that. The only way to get out of something like that in the army is to volunteer for more and more serious, dangerous shit. So I volunteered for the Airborne. Then I heard about the Special Forces and got interested in the medical training. I have a need to be self-sufficient and I wanted that training. In one year, they teach you everything a doctor is taught with none of the bullshit.
Anyway, I lived for a whole year looking at a road map of Wyoming, staring at the little blank spaces. This was when I was in the army and hated what I was doing -- before I went to Vietnam and had real things to worry about. I used to just stare at the map and take off like a bird. Soar like a bird above the peaks and the ranges and the glaciers and the basins.
A year and a half later, I was dodging bullets.
- DP
In my life, Vietnam and wilderness landscapes of the American West remain welded. At the exact same time Ed Abbey was making his first foray into the Cabeza Prieta desert of southwestern Arizona -- the place where the two of us would take our last walk -- during February of 1968, I survived the Tet Offensive in the relative security of a hospital in the former Republic of South Vietnam, where I was interned with thirty unfortunate Marines whose wounds were not sufficiently dire to get them medevaced back to Japan or the States. I spent my brief convalescence in the Danang Naval Hospital with the other grunts lying under our bunks listening to the war, mortar and rocket rounds exploding everywhere, gun ships screaming overhead, my fingers clutching an illegal .45 automatic, the only defensive weapon on the ward against the platoon of North Vietnamese sappers (explosives couriers) who were blasting through the perimeter wire only fifty meters away -- but still knowing I was infinitely better off than my Green Beret Strike-force teammates, who at the same time were being cut to ribbons and rolled over by NVA tanks at Lang Vei near Khe Sanh.
Five days after Tet, I returned to my A-camp located deep within enemy country in the Central Highlands of Quang Ngai Province. The Tet offensive in the countryside lagged behind the fighting in the cities a couple weeks but it did come and with a vengeance. Hundreds of civilians were displaced and killed. As senior medic on an A-team, I pieced together Montagnard children who had been caught in the crossfire for over a week until I began to lose my mind. I arranged to leave Vietnam then, in the middle of my second tour, as my Army enlistment was about to expire. The day I packed my bags for home, March 16, 1968, American soldiers ruthlessly murdered a minimum of 347 Vietnamese civilians forty miles to my north in a place called My Lai....The murderous potential of the political lies I witnessed during the Tet Offensive was confirmed a year later by the release of photos of the My Lai massacre: on that day, ex-Sergeant E-5 D. A. Peacock was forever shut out of heaven and home....
- DP, Walking It Off
I have my own twisted view of karma. I believe it does come back. The intent of what you do is very, very important.
I refuse to call it God, but I believe it is larger than yourself. That's all I know. If it exists it resides in between. And indeed it seems to. I was shot at I do not know how many thousands of times. Not 20,000 but more than 2,000. I had bullets go through canteens on my hips twice. I was only hit once. You can come to believe in arrowheads and invincibility and talismans. You believe in a lot of nonsense. But somehow, something works. I don't have any theories. I just believe in the Earth. I believe the wisdom resides on the Earth, in the Earth. If your intent is to serve the larger good, the Earth itself -- if you serve the Earth -- you serve yourself. Basically, you don't have to do this on a large level. You can just collect a lot of garbage from the side of the road. The sides of the roads of life, perhaps. That's power. That's karma. That's the best you can do.
And even if it's actuarial. Even if, perhaps, every good person doesn't get rewarded. Maybe some get hit by garbage trucks. Maybe some get hit by a hearse on the way to a funeral home on a motor cycle. Those are exceptions. I think, on the average, you can count on karma.
Except watch out for garbage trucks.
- DP
One night during our trip to the Honduran jungle, we were trying to do laundry and bathe and do everything all at once. Like the locals do. It was dark and Doug lost his pants. We were all feeling around in the muddy water. I remember him bending down and saying, "Oh God, I remember doing this in Vietnam looking for bodies. We had to reach under the water and feel around..."
- Trent Alvey
Our plan is to cross the pass and thread our way a hundred miles to the uninhabited plateau country between Mustang and Dolpo. I dream of a legendary journey, a trek surpassing all others: I'll lose the roll of belly-fat around my middle-aged gut. I'll stand face to face with a yeti. I'll sneak over the border to Tibet, drop my pants, moon the Chinese border guards, and then run like hell.
- DP, Outside magazine, August 1997
When I went over to Nepal I lost a couple of quarts of blood. I was there with a couple of friends and three Sherpas. It was just a buddy trip. We were headed for these wild valleys in Upper Dalagharie. Nobody lives in them. They run all the way into China. They are full of Blue Sheep and Snow Leopards. Maybe Marco Polo sheep, certainly wolves. Maybe bear. Maybe Yetis. Had I not died I'd still be looking for them. What I wanted to do, you could do. To get from one valley to the next takes a little technical scrambling -- but not like climbing Everest. You just get over a ridge, drop through a gorge, cross a glacier and you are there.
It looked like I was not ever going to get out of there. We were at 18,000 feet. Way, way back in. I had a chronic cough for four or five months. All the way through Siberia. I had somehow ripped a hole in my esophagus. I thought I was bleeding from my esophagal pheroquies. That was how Ed Abbey died. I was gushing out blood. In order to get back, we had to climb over a 19,000 foot pass. If I lost a lot more blood, I was going to die.
I had to make a friend of death over there, like Ed did. At that time, I think I thought that the edge above the abyss of death was a very sharp, sharp line and it was possible to regret having stepped over it on the way down, while on the way down. That's what I thought.
But I tell you, after my little trip into the Himalayas, I'm not so sure. Within that line there seems a lot of space. There seems to be a lot of space between what we call death and coming out the other end. And even going down to die, there is a lot of stuff going on. I don't think I can judge it anymore. There are lives inbetween. If you wanted to look at the whole thing as a metaphor, you can see your whole life that way.
- DP
Doug is very melodramatic. Everything is a major production. You can't just have dinner. You can't just sit around and drink a bottle of wine. Many toasts to all kinds of things are required.
We went to Nepal together and he tried to die over there. We got his ass back to the States. He thought he needed a blood transfusion but he wouldn't go to a hospital in Katmandu or Bankok. Or even LA. We came all the way back to Salt Lake City and got him to the Veterans Hospital. They didn't admit him. They just wanted him to come in for tests every day. He would start off every morning depressed as hell. He was sure he was going to go down there and they were gong to run some tests and tell him he was about to die. But they couldn't find anything wrong. Each day he would come back from the hospital thinking he had another day to live. So he would have to celebrate.
I'd come home from work and there would be twenty people at my house. Most of them I had never met. Some of them he had just met. This went on for a week. Every day he threw a party. He would go to the store. He maxed out several credit cards buying groceries.
RWM: Yours or his?
Both. We had seven last suppers. He would give a big talk every night about being glad to be alive. He was going to die tomorrow so thank you all for sharing my last night on Earth. Then the next morning he would leave depressed, and bring back a whole bunch more folks. That was exhausting.
I started to think, "Well then die. Peacock die. Let's get it over with. You keep promising."
- Dennis Sizemore
Ed Abbey made me a great gift when he died -- the gift of a good dying. That is the lesson I received. You can't die well without having lived well. People who hang onto life to the last minute, with any kind of technical fix, are people who haven't lived enough. The tubes in every orifice. To die well you really have had to lived life, lived it to its fullest. We live in a culture where death is an unexpected surprise. That is unimaginable. It's crazy. The only thing that is certain about life, is death.
- DP
The quarter crescent moon has set. The sky is alive with stars. I poke a creosote branch further into the fire. Old Ed struggled, or rather lived with his death for far longer than I thought. Struggle would be the wrong word. All of us will succeed at death very well despite our lack of preparation; Ed knew that. My own mortality is no longer tapping at the door though I know it's out there somewhere, just beyond the light of my campfire, waiting. But death is nothing, it's the living, the love, the unfinished work of the world, the joy that holds us here.
- DP, Walking It Off
Though I love the mountains and forests and rivers and seas, I possess a desert heart. A desert heart is not lofty or concealed but openly bears the cracks and scars of drought and privation. Out on the desert, we expect little, waste little. Everything is precious, precarious. You track the signs following doves flying from sunset canyons on the distant horizon imagining water and love.
And you will risk everything to walk towards it.
- DP, paraphrasing his friend Terry Tempest Williams
Life goes by so fast. And it is so lovely. And it hurts so much. And in the end you get a chance to open your arms to death. An endless marriage of loving life. And wrapping your arms around death. Especially as you get older. Everything is so quick. I am devastated by loss. I have had loss all my life. I never catch up with it. You blink your eyes...you outlive a friend...you wonder what happened. You didn't live fully enough. You have to keep that in mind all the time. It is really easy to blow life. Blow life by not spending the kind of time you need to with your children, or with the other people you love. Being inattentive. Lazy. To live fully in each day is an onerous responsibility.
Life is so difficult and so easy at the same time.
- DP
A lot of us put so much responsibility on Doug. You know the expression, you have to kill your Buddha? He is our teacher. I wish there was more discipline there. We always want more from him. We always want more words. We want him to write more because we get so much out of it.
It is time for us all to let Doug be Doug and stop trying to live our lives through him. We expect him to cook the best dinner. He has to throw the best party. It has to be a wonderful, unforgettable time. I feel guilty about finding more meaning in my own life because I know Peacock. A lot of his reputation comes from other writers bringing into the conversation the fact that they know him too. He helps us find our strength, and in turn we've tried to make him even bigger than he is.
- Dennis Sizemore
The only four star general I ever had the misfortune to be forced to shake hands with was General William C. Westmoreland, a bad general, a tactical dunce, a murderous idiot whose Normal Rockwell banality in his starched fatigues at Thoung Duc belied the bloodiest hands in Vietnam. This man, who wanted to use tactical nuclear weapons to defend his blunder at Khe Sanh and to this day thinks the Tet Offensive was great American victory, directly caused the deaths of thousands of human beings -- American and Vietnamese soldiers, civilian women and children -- and I will not forgive him. I hold General Westmoreland directly responsible for the killing of my friends and comrades at Lang Vei. He is accountable right now and to me for the death of Moreland, Dinh Pho and my other Hre brothers on February 7, 1968.
I look at my hands. Alone, thirty miles from the nearest human, I am shaking with rage and grief.... Walking It Off. (In retrospect, Doug would like to add McNamara's name to that of Westmoreland in connection with blood-soaked hands).
- DP
I can remember living back here in the whore house that first winter, waking up at 4:30 every black winter morning and not looking forward to anything. Nothing. Separated from my children. My father had just died. I was recently divorced, which was a blessing in some ways in retrospect. There was nothing to look forward to.
I wasn't totally successful getting out of that hole, but I didn't kill myself either. When you have children, you can't. But I had no great desire to live on earth. I am still not at the top of my game, but life is good, the world is beautiful. I love life. There are a lot of things I miss. I miss my kids. They are growing up. I am missing the whole thing.
To see the kids I needed to live in Tucson and get a job and get an apartment. That was the only kind of visitation I have. But in fact I couldn't do that. So I came up here and hung out with the bears. And that did help. But then the bears hibernated and I was all alone. So I lived in a whore house. Sadly the staff had departed. I was quite alone. The ghosts were wonderful though. Then I found this abandoned cat. That helped some. But until spring came, I died a little bit every day. Self-pity is the worst hole in the world.
- DP
Some quotes that appeared in Heron Dance Issue 22 – The Doug Peacock Issue
I am glad I shall never be young without wild country to be young in. Of what avail are forty freedoms without a single blank spot on the map?
- Aldo Leopold
Joshua Slocum was one of the breed who struggle against the world's arrangements.
- Walter M. Teller, The Voyages of Joshua Slocum
I rejoice that horses and steers have to be broken before they can be made the slaves of men, and that men themselves have some wild oats still to sow before they become submissive members of society. Undoubtedly all men are not equally fit subjects for civilization; and because the majority, like dogs and sheep, are tame by inherited disposition, this is no reason why the others should have their natures broken that they may be reduced to the same level. Men are in the main alike, but they were made several in order that they might be various. If a low use is to be served, one man will do quite as well as another; if a high one, individual excellence is to be regarded. Any man can stop a hole to keep the wind away....
- Henry David Thoreau
For most of his life, he not only avoided white people, he avoided people, spending many days alone on the prairies, dreaming, drifting, hunting....There was something of a hermit, the eremit, in him; he was known to walk through his camp without appearing to notice anybody. When, late in his life, his family began to worry about his tendency to wander off alone in dangerous country, he told them not to worry, there were plenty of caves and holes he could live in....
- Larry McMurtry, Crazy Horse
I admire the bull, the eagle, and man with such an intense adoration, that it will certainly prevent me from ever becoming an ambitious person.
- Vincent Van Gogh
Prophets do not come from cities, promising riches and store clothes. They have always come from the wilderness, stinking of goats and running with lice and telling of a different sort of treasure.
- Andrew Lytle, from his essay "The Hind Tit" (as quoted in Northern Lights)
The thing that attracted people to Pasternak was not a social or political theory, it was not a formula for the unification of mankind, not a collectivist panacea for all the evils in the world: it was the man himself, the truth that was in him, his simplicity, his direct contact with life, and the fact that he was full of the only revolutionary force that is capable of producing anything new: he is full of love....
Like Dostoyevsky, Pasternak holds that man's future depends on his ability to work his way out from under a continuous succession of authoritarian rulers who promise him happiness at the cost of his freedom.
- Thomas Merton, Disputed Questions
Pass world!: I am the dreamer
that remains;
The man clear cut
against the last horizon.
- Roy Campbell
Defiance is beautiful. The defiance of power, especially great or overwhelming power, exalts and glorifies the rebel.
- Edward Abbey
There are several ways of looking at Delicate Arch. Depending on your preconceptions you may see the eroded remnant of a sandstone fin, a giant engagement ring cemented in rock, a bow-legged pair of petrified cowboy chaps, a triumphal arch for a procession of angels, an illogical geologic freak, a happening -- a something that happened and will never happen quite that way again, a frame more significant than its picture, a simple monolith eaten away by weather and time and soon to disintegrate into a chaos of falling rock (not surprisingly there have been some, even in the Park Service, who advocate spraying Delicate Arch with a fixative of some sort -- Elmer's Glue perhaps or Lady Clairol Spray-Net). There are the inevitable pious Midwesterners who climb a mile and a half under the desert sun to view Delicate Arch and find only God ("Goldangit Katherine where's my light meter, this glare is turrible"), and the equally inevitable students of geology who look at the arch and see only Lyell and the uniformity of nature. You may therefore find proof for or against His existence. Suit yourself. You may see a symbol, a sign, a fact, a thing without meaning or a meaning which includes all things.
Much the same could be said of the tamarisk down in the canyon, of the blue-black raven croaking on a cliff, of your own body. The beauty of Delicate Arch explains nothing, for each in its way, when true to its own character, is equally beautiful (There is no beauty in nature said Baudelaire. A place to throw empty beer cans on Sunday, said Mencken). If Delicate Arch has any significance it lies, I will venture, in the power of the odd and unexpected to startle the senses and surprise the mind out of their ruts of habit, to compel us into a reawakened awareness of the wonderful -- that which is full of wonder.
A weird, lovely, fantastic object out of nature like Delicate Arch has the curious ability to remind us -- like rock and sunlight and wind and wilderness -- that out there is a different world, older and greater and deeper by far than ours, a world which surrounds and sustains the little world of men as sea and sky surround and sustain a ship. The shock of the real. For a little while we are again able to see, as the child sees, a world of marvels. For a few moments we discover that nothing can be taken for granted, for if this ring of stone is marvelous then all which shaped it is marvelous, and our journey here on Earth, able to see and touch and hear in the midst of tangible and mysterious things-in-themselves, is the most strange and daring of all adventures.
- Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire
Doug Peacock’s Foreword to the Heron Dance Back Issue Anthology
Six years ago a guy named Rod MacIver showed up in my backyard in Tucson saying he was on a search for truth. I mentioned a weekend course in Santa Monica where it was possible to get your shaman's license in three days. He wasn't interested. Rod had just left a career in the stock market to follow his passion. It would be an expensive journey. For one thing, he knew he'd soon be staring at divorce papers if he didn't get himself back on Wall Street. But this guy was dead serious.
It's curious how discovery, such as a significant friendship between two mid-life men, can begin with a single moment, an utterly truthful answer to a simple question offered by the unguarded heart. Had I chosen any other reply, our lives would have been diminished. Instead, I received an immense gift.
About a year later, my father's spirit departed his body. Nearby, from the bottom of Sonoma Creek, a Great Blue Heron lifted out of the muddy shallows and alighted on a stump in dad's backyard. Since that moment my life has been charted by water birds, a flock of giant White Pelicans disappearing high above as dust into the white cirrus and the ubiquitous Blue Herons of my life who represent the man I most loved.
At that exact same time, Rod too was struggling with mortality, his own, a disease for which there is no known cure called non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. He had started a little shoestring publication named Heron Dance. Somehow Heron Dance survived, Rod survived. The gray-blue wing beats blew what remained of the chaff free of his life. Those long legged birds of grace and beauty were parallel reincarnations.
Acceptance of death leads directly to the sensate awareness of the gift of life. And so ”Heron Dance's” search moved into glimpses of the elusive with a creativity sketched with the delicate feather of a plumed bird: beauty, freedom, love. There was no pomposity here. Above all, I admire Rod's courage in lying open these raw chucks of soul without guile or dogma, a physical courage far less esoteric than it sounds.
If you love life and want to live in the world, you must eventually travel beyond observation. The world we love is burning. Change is necessary. Rod MacIver took up causes: peace activism and deep ecology. Yet, the deeper evolution I see in the last five years of Heron Dance has been a steady unratcheting of tight doctrinaire approaches to issues and a conscious movement away from anger. This, I think, is a big deal: the presence of extreme anger among those of us who love the Earth has been a severely limiting factor in our ability to defend the same wild landscapes, especially in men. Projecting hostility outward misses the mark when the abode of rage is the self. Heron Dance explored fear and the letting go of anger with both creativity and elegance providing a great service to people like myself who knew that the hostile tendency to think poorly of others often prevents you from seeing what's really there.
Rod considers his greatest strength — and weakness — to be an intolerance of bull and hypocrisy, which has led him over time to a suspicion of people espousing high ideals. He is not always a pleasant animal to hang out with. But it also misses the point: freedom and searching for the truth come at a price. The trail winds through joy and sadness; danger may lurk just around the bend. This journey is Heron Dance’s victory, a triumph from which we must take heart to travel our own bold trails.
Heron Dance, like its winged archetype, reaches out to the wild earth with grace and gentle beauty. It is, like its creator Rod MacIver, full of great courage and generosity of spirit, a modern anodyne to despair and the desolation of industrial culture. Above all, Heron Dance reminds humans to honor, love and protect our original home, whose remnants we sometimes call the wilderness.
- Doug Peacock, author (Grizzly Years, Baja), grizzly bear man, eco-warrior, ex-Green Beret and model for the character Hayduke in The Monkey Wrench Gang.
Doug Peacock has had a significant influence on Heron Dance and on me over the years. My experiences with him, both good and bad, have been too intense for an impartial view of the man or the book. I’m glad that I’ve known the man. I enjoyed his book. It is uneven. It is as honest a book as I’ve ever read.
Walking It Off is an account of one man’s efforts to live a good life, be a good friend, a good father — sometimes succeeding and sometimes failing. He lives with a gusto that can be fun to be around. He dislikes the word adventure, but really lives it. Yet, at times, the book lapses into a remorse that is uncomfortable.
The book shifts back and forth between Doug’s wanderings through various uninhabited landscapes: the area he named the Grizzly Hilton in Glacier National Park, the Cabeza Prieta in Arizona, Tarahumara country in Mexico and an ill-fated trip to the Himilayas looking for snow tigers and blue sheep. He talks about his up-and-down friendship with writer Ed Abbey, of Abbey’s death after a long illness, the celebratory wake and illegal burial in the desert.
Ed Abbey wrote at least two books in which a character based on Doug is featured prominently, The Monkey Wrench Gang and Hayduke Lives! In Walking It Off, Doug talks of the effect Abbey’s Hayduke had on his life. At times, the character was a burden, a rabble-rousing reputation that was impossible to live up to, although Doug gave it his best shot at times. The real Doug Peacock is more sensitive, intelligent and vulnerable than Abbey’s Hayduke. Anyway, in the wilderness protection circles in which he moved, Doug acquired a notoriety that he enjoyed and benefited from, but that also was a burden at times. Doug writes about that in the book.
Book Review:
Walking It Off: A Veteran's Chronicle of War and Wilderness - Doug Peacock's Memoir, published in 2005.
I particularly enjoyed the nature writing in the book; it is beautiful because it comes out of Doug’s deep love for wild places. From page 193:
The wash below the well is alive with birds: flycatchers, pyrrhuloxias, hooded orioles, many hummers, and canyon wrens. It looks like someone has recently tried to pry off the lid of the watering trough. Probably desperate illegal aliens on foot. I consider finishing the job for them and look around for something stiff enough to lever up the plywood lid. I locate an old railroad tie and pick it up. A giant desert hairy scorpion is under it. I gently replace the tie without crushing the scorpion. A shafted flicker sounds an alarm, like they do in grizzly country when something is moving. I look around. Nothing. No sign of the ten antelope today.
By the end of the book, Doug’s writing acquires a deep peace which is good to read and wonderful to think about.
Doug Peacock is also the author of The Grizzly Years and Baja.
