"I am poor at remembering the past and much better at inhabiting it. Things that were actually exist to me. I am the enemy of history and yet a card-carrying member of the dead."
~ Charles Bowden
The poet and novelist Jim Harrison called Charles Bowden America’s Most Alarming Writer. He was a writer who wrote about things that “everybody apparently thinks is too raw or difficult to talk much about.”
In Bowden’s own words:
"My life has been spent inside a culture of constant war and of vast slaughter of the beasts of the field and the grasses and forests of the land and of the fish in the sea and of the blue sky I was born under at the tail end of one of those wars.
I am of that culture and yet I am against that culture.
I am of my time and yet out of my time.
I drive fast down freeways but I have no belief that these roads lead to a future. Nor do I fear or dread the future. But I do fear for my culture and the human beings within and the beasts and plants without it that suffer in silence."
Charles Bowden was a tall, intimidating man who preferred the hot dry wastelands of the West to any inkling of a seaside paradise. He was a drinker and a smoker who wasn’t too keen on the insatiable appetites and the apathetic sensibilities of much of the modern world. And he wrote about it. Brilliantly.
"The problem is that we cannot imagine a future where we possess less but are more."
Chuck, what his friends called him, had a taste for red wine, the rich scent of women, and wrangling with the powerful. When he wasn’t writing and shit got heavy he was known to shoulder a 50-pound pack and venture off on foot across 110-degree deserts with a jug of water and a notepad.
“The desert sweeps on and on and the silence of the desert erases our egos. We finally begin to exist as something beyond our everyday cares and worries. The border of our body vanishes and we become one with the land.”
Bowden cherished the flora and fauna of the natural world and wrote poetically about it. But he was no nature writer. He never did feel comfortable with that prosaic term.
He was a modern-day Thoreau with a chip on his shoulder.
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