Charles Bowden's Fury

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This article by Scott Carrier first appeared in the October 13, 2014 issue of High Country News.

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People & Places 7 comments

Charles Bowden’s Fury

The Southwest loses its strongest voice.

Scott Carrier Oct 13, 2014 From the print edition

The house where he’s been living is in some cottonwood trees beside a stream, 16 miles north of the border with Mexico. We’re sitting on the porch and Bowden is telling me about the whale, the white whale. We’ve been here all day and I’ve been listening all day, but now it’s dark and I can’t see him. Now there’s just his voice, like a low growl from the long grass, the pulsing of crickets, fireflies and the flicker shadows of bats against the stars.

He first saw the whale nearly 20 years ago, in Mexico. He was standing watch, so to speak, and the dark ocean exploded in foam and spray and there in front of him was the monster he’d been pursuing, the source of all the violence and corruption he’d seen. It scared the hell out of him and he turned away. He didn’t go after it.

Then, a few years later, the whale came back and killed a friend of his, and Bowden blames himself for this. If he would have fought the whale in the beginning, he believes, his friend would still be alive.

“I was a coward,” he says.

It didn’t happen quite like that. The whale is an allegory, because I promised I wouldn’t write the real names and places. But his friend did die and the thing that killed him is the thing Bowden saw, and it was like a horrible monster. The allegory fits. Bowden is Ahab and he’s going after Moby Dick.

* bowden1-jpg *
Charles Bowden in Arizona’s Sycamore Canyon, July 2013.
Courtesy Molly Molloy

He’s 69 years old, in fair shape from lifting weights and going on long walks, but he’s losing some teeth and is pretty much penniless. His possessions consist of a sleeping bag, a cot, a stove for coffee, a Honda Fit and a pair of Swarovski binoculars — high-quality glass. This is the way he wants it, having nothing to lose. He knows his only real asset is more than 40 years’ experience as an investigative reporter, and also he knows that the whale is not Evil, that Ahab was wrong. The whale, for Bowden, is part of nature, our nature.

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Adiós Charles Bowden Adiós Charles Bowden

Comments about this article

Ricardo Small Subscriber
Oct 13, 2014 08:47 AM
The black & white photograph captioned: "Ed Abbey, center, introduces Chuck Bowden, left .... " says the person on the right is Doug Peacock. I'm pretty sure the man on the right in the photo is Dave Foreman, not Peacock.
Cindy Wehling Subscriber
Oct 13, 2014 11:10 AM
Ricardo: Thanks for writing. Dave Foreman says that is, indeed, him, and that he introduced Chuck Bowden to Abbey back in 1972 or '73. Thanks for pointing out our error; we'll correct it.

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