Desert Connections

Librarians believe that there is a book for every reader and a reader for every book.   One way we hope to facilitate their mutual discovery is with the library catalog.  Catalog records are meant to offer a short-hand description of the item and what it is about.   We tag each one with specific subject headings to help our readers connect.

Recently I was cataloging a book with an intriguing but uninformative title:  Some of the Dead Are Still Breathing: Living in the Future by Charles Bowden.  Librarians don’t have time to actually read the books they catalog – they look instead for clues in the “front matter” and the dust jacket.   I ended up assigning nine subject headings to this book.  In other words, I was clueless.

So I checked it out and I read it.  By the time I was done, the book was bristling with little bits of paper, torn napkins, paper clips, whatever was handy at the moment when the sheer power of the writing took my breath away once again.  It’s been a long time since I’ve read anything with that many “wow” moments.

Bowden is a journalist in Tucson, Arizona.  Reviewers often use “gonzo” in their descriptions of his work.  In other words, it is writing that is undeniably talented, male, alcohol-fueled and riddled with references to past sexual exploits.  I’m usually in the camp that finds this self-indulgent and wonders what happened to the editor.  Not this time.

Though this was my first Charles Bowden experience, he is a prolific author who has been on the scene for many years.  In addition to his own books and magazine articles, he’s a frequent contributor of text for coffee table books and photo essays about the Southwest.  He started out covering crime and during the past ten years has been largely occupied with investigative reporting on the drug traffic along the Mexican-American border.  He’s been in deep and his experience with this netherworld of human behavior and appetite infuses his work.

He also writes extensively and splendidly about nature and the environment and the relationship between people and the land.  He doesn’t like the word nature or any other word that implies that we are “other,” that we are in control and can live as we do without consequence.  He’s an angry man, he’s on the Earth’s side; but he is neither a fool nor a hypocrite – he lives in the world and he likes to drive fast; he looks forward to a good dinner and a glass of red wine at the end of the day.

So, what about Some of the Dead are Still Breathing?  Half-way through I would have called it a collection of essays; by the end, I considered it one organic work.  It’s a mixture of memoir and natural history and journalism; it covers a lot of territory but is grounded always in the desert Southwest.  Floods, cardinals, drug dealers, rattlesnakes, elephants, drift-nets, murder, Melville, and women weave in and out.  There is the devastating story of a Greenpeace-like expedition and an examination of the psychic toll of knowing the underbelly.  Somehow it all comes together.

I look back at my marked pages and realize I can’t use them to entice you.  I can identify the “wow” moment, but I can’t lift it out.  Snippets won’t work – they only serve to make clear how carefully crafted this writing is, how the author took many pieces and made them into one.

Bowden, in an epilogue, says that Some of the Dead Are Still Breathing is book three of an “accidental trilogy” – the conclusion of writing he’s been doing over the past 15 years, asking one single question:  How can a person live a moral life in a culture of death?  There is an undeniably bleak side to Bowden’s vision.  There are not 50 simple things we can do to save ourselves and our planet; we may go down and if we do, “our hands will be on our own throats.”  But his final answer is not bleak.  He simply says yes.  Yes to life, yes to love, and yes to the rain that eventually comes to the desert.

Some of the Dead Are Still Breathing now has just four subject headings – that’s closer to the norm.  I don’t know if they explain this work, but, then, it’s not my job to explain – only to connect.

(Photograph from PhillipC, Creative Commons, Flickr.com)