When it came to prisoners, Charles Bowden took none. Fools? He suffered none. And as for quarter or fu… well, none of either were given. Bold, sometimes brash, fiercely loyal, a blood enemy or the cruel and the greedy, with a heart as big as the wide open spaces of the American southwest that he came to call home and a mind with the seemingly limitless capacity to instantly recall a bewildering assortment of fact and figures, he was truly an original.
Word reached me just this very morning about something I have long been anticipating: the publication of new editions this October of Charles Bowden’s classic works “Blue Desert” and “Frog Mountain Blues” by the University of Arizona Press.
When Charles Bowden’s Killing the Hidden Waters was first published in 1977, the population of Arizona – the U.S. state in which he was then living and part of the region in which so much of his narrative takes place – was a little under two-and-a-half million people. In 2003, the year in which his new introduction “What I Learned Watching the Wells Go Down” was added to the fifth paperback printing of the book, the state’s population had risen to over five million. Most who read it thought it both inspired and brilliant, but according to his opening words in the new introduction, he “went wrong.”
“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.”