I got into bird watching because I discovered I could be on a murder scene and there’d be birds. So I got these little binoculars I’d carry in my pocket because I had to have some connection to the natural world – or the sane world – if I was going to do this.
The other thing you learn is that you have to take time out. When I was covering sex crimes and homicides for a daily newspaper for three years, every couple months I’d crack; crack up. And I’d just disappear with a backpack and walk a couple hundred miles. And I never said anything. And then I’d come back and go back at it.
You have to do that; you have to take care of yourself; because if you really break, you’re no good to anyone.
– Charles Bowden on The Conversation
Charles Bowden is an award-winning journalist and author. Among his works are Murder City; Ciudad Juarez and the Global Economy’s New Killing Fields, Some of the Dead Are Still Breathing, the trilogy Inferno, Trinity, and Exodus / Éxodo, many other brilliant and brutally honest books.
More of his reflections on nature and natural history can be found among the essays collected in The Charles Bowden Reader.
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