Headed into the Wind: A Memoir

By Jack Loeffler

With the temperament of Santa Claus and the tenacity of a badger, Jack Loeffler reveals his compassion and concern for Southwestern traditional cultures and their respective habitats in the wake of Manifest Destiny. Working both as an individual and with comrades—including Edward Abbey and Gary Snyder—he was part of an early coterie of counterculturalists and environmentalists who fought to thwart the plunder of natural resources in the Southwest. Loeffler, a former jazz musician, fire lookout, museum curator, bioregionalist, and self-taught aural historian, shares his humor and imagination, his adventures, observations, reflections, and meditations along the trail in his retelling of a life well lived. In this honest memoir, he advises each and every one of us to go skinny-dipping joyfully in the flow of Nature to better understand where we’re headed.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
• Release date: Sep 15, 2019
• ISBN: 9780826361011

Jack Loeffler

Jack Loeffler is an aural historian, environmentalist, writer, radio producer, and sound-collage artist. He is the author or editor of many books, including Headed into the Wind: A Memoir, Thinking Like a Watershed: Voices from the West, Survival Along the Continental Divide: An Anthology of Interviews, and Adventures with Ed: A Portrait of Abbey (all from UNM Press).

Book preview

Introduction

A human lifetime creates a nest of conscious experiences we call memories, all of which take place in the present—a long, enduring present that ultimately fades at the end of life. Each human mind is itself a complete system, spawned by the greatest gift of life—consciousness. I myself have been apportioned a healthy serving of life from which I now partake more moderately than in earlier years. But I still remain absolutely fascinated by every aspect of existence. At the time of writing, I am eighty-two years old.

I love the view out the western window of my studio that encompasses ten thousand square miles of high desert landscape studded with mountain ranges. I walk a morning trail through the heart of my homeland, deeply breathing the clean air, emptying my mind, and luxuriating in the flow of Nature that spawned this great entirety.

In order to write this memoir, I’ve taken inspiration from both my own life experience and the reflections of many others who have shared their personal and cultural perspectives with me. Above all, I take inspiration from the flow of Nature that continues to unfold as the continuum within which my own consciousness has evolved. I believe in diversity and interrelatedness and am wary of reductionism as an end in itself. Reductionism has proved to be a fine scientific tool for determining the bottom line, the elemental fundament, the quark’s reason to be. But if practiced too rigorously, reductionism can thwart one’s perception of the bigger picture in all its resplendence.

When I look back over my life, I realize that I’ve had a truly great education. Each of the many diverse projects in which I’ve engaged has expanded my purview into a nonlinear system of perspective. As New Mexico santero Eulogio Ortega once said to me, Life is a miracle. I try to keep this in the forefront of my mind as I look at the systems within systems of life that surround me as I walk through my homeland. I’m part of that living cluster of systems, aware that my own body is itself a living system of cells, each of which (or whom) pursues its own destiny.

For me, writing a personal memoir is necessarily nonlinear. Basically, I’ve gone snorkeling in that reservoir of memory that life has accorded me. I’ve recounted some experiences from different points along the trail, but almost always as they have contributed to my consciousness. By now, I’ve experienced far, far more than would fit within this book or even within my memory. And while I have journals extending back in time for more than fifty years, I’ve rarely referred to them. Anyone who reads this memoir might puzzle over its nonlinearity. But, in retrospect, a chronological account of my life would seem to be akin to ordering my life beforehand, which I’ve done my best to avoid. My predominant motto remains: Trust to the inspiration of the moment. Thus, I’ve always tried to carry enough water and not worry too much about the next meal. I’ve found that listening and writing has been a good way for me to think. And finding food for thought remains a lifelong quest.

I liken my life to a wild river of seemingly infinite possibility and potential. My stream of consciousness has a fair number of rapids and side canyons. What a joy to be adrift in the flow of Nature. Indeed, the flow of Nature is the prevailing theme, the leitmotif of this memoir. Nature is enormous, totally encompassing, and always in motion. The flow of Nature spawned the universe, the space to contain it, and every macro and micro aspect therein, including life and consciousness, those windows through which Nature may perceive itself. Science has determined that our home galaxy contains one hundred billion to two hundred billion stars and is but one of as many as two trillion galaxies. This provides some perspective as to the relevance of this memoir. However, I was asked by my daughter and some of my friends to write it, and so I did.

This book is presented in two distinct parts. Part One is largely comprised of personal narrative, and Part Two includes both personal narrative and excerpts from recorded conversations with people whose minds I respect. Thus, this book is not just about me but rather includes a wide array of perspectives that I hope will provide the reader with glimpses into the greater commons of human consciousness. I’ve tried to write this book in accord with the way life happens.

In the main, I’ve supported myself as an aural historian and writer. My kit has contained recorder, microphones, notebook, pen, and canteen for over fifty years. I’ve stood well outside the realm of so-called monoculture since I was released from active military duty in 1958. My first job for pay was in the tobacco fields of Connecticut in 1950, the hardest work I’ve ever done. I’ve played jazz for the coin of the realm and lived in a forest as a fire lookout. I’ve regarded myself as a musician, an anarchist, an environmental activist, an aural historian, a writer, a sound collage artist, a green bohemian, and, finally, simply a naturist. My family is central to my life, and while they are mentioned only infrequently, their presence remains in the forefront of my consciousness.

I may have the demeanor of an elder, but there is a big part of me that remains a youth. I hope that this book will be read by both young and old. We each have our respective lifetime—Nature’s great gift. We get to select our own trail regardless of the dictates of the status quo. I would hope that each of us would pursue our own interpretation of the greatest good. It’s a worthy challenge just to identify one’s personal sense of the greatest good. I think that I’ve identified mine. Living up to it is the toughest challenge of all.

Jack Loeffler

Cañada de los Alamos Watershed

July 2018

PART ONE

Headed into the Wind

The North American Southwest is desert country, a vast mosaic of dry habitats where elevation, longitude, geography, and weather patterns interact to determine the nature of prevailing life-forms. Most life-forms are indigenous, but a few others roll in like tumbleweeds, like I did one night during the summer of 1957 by human reckoning. I camped in my car by the side of the road and woke up to blazing sun in the Mojave Desert, alien country to a native West Virginian. I was a private first class in the United States Army, ultimately bound for Camp Irwin, where for the next fifteen months I would play my trumpet in the 433rd Army Band.

I woke up parched, hot, muscle cramped, and underslept. I climbed out of my car to take a leak and was amazed that my pee didn’t evaporate before it hit the ground. I looked around and determined that I had two options—I would either grow to love this desert country or I’d go insane. I opted for the former, and the desert nurtured my fascination until I realized that I actually belonged to the American Southwest, that I’d been born in West Virginia through circumstances beyond my control, and that I was grateful to the military for re-storying the grand design of my life.

Over the next years I became intimate with the entire Basin and Range Province, which is home to the Great Basin Desert, the Mojave Desert, the Sonoran Desert, and the Chihuahuan Desert; I came to know the Colorado Plateau, the southern Rockies, and the Sea of Cortez. I gulped in the air, followed tracks in the sand, sipped from hidden springs, hiked many thousands of miles, ran thousands more of rivers, and camped thousands of nights beneath a firmament ablaze with stars.

I met and befriended Indians from Navajo, Ute, Hopi, Shoshone, Cherokee, Paiute, Nez Percé, Tewa, Tiwa, Keresan, Towa, Apache, Tohono O’odham, Pima, Yaqui, Seri, Tarahumara, and Huichol cultures. And by the late 1960s I was hauling around a tape recorder recording their music and lore. I met and befriended elderly Hispanos and recorded their music and lore. I met and befriended writers, artists, philosophers, scientists, historians, musicians of myriad persuasions, outlaws, politicians, activists, pacifists—recording their thoughts, their points of view, their music and lore. I met and befriended habitats throughout the American Southwest, recording their sounds, the songs of their wild indigenees, their ambience, the songs of the wind god, the rumblings of the thunder god, the music of the river gods, the sound of stillness, the breath of Paradise.

By the late 1960s I realized that part of my role was to try to put back at least as much as I took out of life, to thus reciprocate with this homeland that had claimed me and provided me with a lifetime of wonder, endless fascination, extraordinary beauty, and a love of life within the flow of Nature that could never have happened had the blistering hot Mojave Desert not welcomed me home so long ago. I have long since learned and digested the fact that this land and this community of life are kindred in their intensity of expression and to know the noumenon requires a reciprocal intensity; otherwise we miss the point of life, which is to become as conscious as possible and to use that consciousness with great enthusiasm and vigor on behalf of the Spirit of Nature that flows through homeland.

It was obvious that the American Southwest had long been under siege by mineral extractors, developers of every ilk, carpetbaggers attempting to perfect their Midas touch. Indigenous peoples who had resisted waves of westward expansion had been swept into captivity or killed by US soldiers and vilified. General Philip Sheridan coined a dreadful apothegm: The only good Indian is a dead Indian. Earlier on, General Sheridan ordered the extermination of over four million bison, thus depriving the Plains Indians of their primary food. By 1874 the Great Plains were littered with buffalo bones, a complex ecosystem robbed of its keystone species in the grisly wake of Manifest Destiny.

In 1864 some 7,500 Navajos were rounded up and marched to Bosque Redondo, where they were exiled for four years while easterners stalked through their homeland in search of riches. In 1886 the Indian Wars came to an end with the capture of Geronimo, the Chiricahua Apache guerilla warrior who rigorously fought Mexican and US troops for nearly three decades.

In 1964 I lived for several months in a forked-stick hogan at Navajo Mountain in Utah. It was there that I first began to perceive the degree to which environment shapes cultural perspective. The Navajo people who lived in that remotest region on the vast Navajo Reservation moved to the heartbeat of the landscape of red rock country in the folds of the Colorado Plateau. They herded their sheep and performed great ceremonials that lasted as long as nine nights where their collective spiritual intensity was directed to restore balance and beauty in the lives of the Diné, the People. They spoke softly in their beautiful language that encompasses perspectives incomprehensible to those to whom their language is inaccessible. Indeed, their coloration had taken on the hues of the landscape into which they had been born. Their homes were circular hogans constructed of stone, mud, and wood. They measured their wealth in numbers of sheep, horses, cattle, goats, and beautiful pieces of Navajo jewelry in which they bedecked themselves for their ceremonials and other festive occasions. The women wore velveteen blouses, long skirts, and bandanas over their heads. The men wore black wide-brimmed hats, often sporting a silver or horsehair hatband. In those days, many of the Diné still wore handmade moccasins, the better to tread lightly over the land that smelled of sage, juniper, and piñon. They rode on horses or in horse-drawn wagons over the rutted roads that coursed between landforms that evoked a deep sense of the spirit of place. Navajo Mountain, that great presence that dominates the landscape, is an entity that has witnessed the passage of many generations of humans, each of whom has beheld that mountain with greatest respect.

Over the years I have befriended many Indians. Indeed, some are among my closest friends of this lifetime so enriched by their presence. They have provided me with a coherence of perspectives of such magnitude that my very consciousness extends far beyond that system of mores and thought that comes from having been born into western culture. We are blind sided to that sense of the kindred nature of the community of life that surrounds us, that is cradled within the ever-shifting mosaic of landforms, water forms, and air forms that spawned us as one of millions of species likely descended from a single ancestor nearly four billion earthly years ago. That thought alone is worthy of deep intuitive contemplation on a daily basis.

In 1982 I was commissioned to produce a radio series for Public Radio addressing the proposed relocation of ten thousand Navajos from their homeland around Big Mountain. This was the result of an earlier move by Congress that fostered the Navajo-Hopi land dispute in order to forward their own hidden agenda of opening lands for mineral extraction. There was great resistance by many traditional Navajos both old and young. I interviewed many Navajos, including one young man regarded as an outlaw by the Feds. He, his wife, their newborn infant, and I were cloistered in a hiding place and had been talking about the long history of federal and corporate intervention in the lives of Native Americans. Where does all that murderous thought come from? he asked me. I had no answer.

In early 1970 it was revealed that the Peabody Coal Company of East St. Louis had signed a lease to strip-mine coal from the heart of Black Mesa, a great landform that is sacred to both Hopi and Navajo Indians. Several Hopi elders asked me to help them get their message to the American public that this endeavor was not only intrinsically wrong from their traditional point of view but was evil, an act of immense desecration of a sacred landform. In April of that year a small group of us started the Black Mesa Defense Fund and worked day and night for three years trying to bring this desecration to a halt. It proved a futile enterprise. We had taken on the Central Arizona Project, the greatest single environmental and cultural debacle yet visited on the American Southwest.

Many are the nights my great friend and I crawled around on our bellies between the piñon and juniper trees atop Black Mesa scheming on ways to thwart the debacle while he conducted research for his novel The Monkey Wrench Gang.

In the spring of 2016 the Peabody Coal Company of East St. Louis filed for bankruptcy in order to not have to pay for restoration of the many square miles of habitat they murdered to make money. Corporate outlawry on a grand scale.

Over the last half century I’ve been privileged to wander throughout this mythic landscape bearing a recorder, microphones, notebook, and pen. In the deepest sense, this lifetime has been a pilgrimage in quest of the Spirit of Place as perceived by those with refined sensibilities, honed consciousness. The message is clear. The Earth is a living organism and we are part of its consciousness. We are and could remain a spectacular aspect of Earth’s consciousness—if we don’t go extinct.

An Epiphany

Each life has its defining moments, and shortly after waking up in the Mojave Desert in July 1957, I had one of the great pivotal experiences of my lifetime. After getting to Camp Irwin, I checked into the 433rd Army Band headquarters and was issued my summer army uniform, which consisted of Bermuda shorts, a short-sleeved shirt, and a pith helmet. Thus attired like Frank Buck on a holiday in the Caribbean and armed only with my trumpet, I became a member of the so-called Atomic Band. Within days our band boarded an Army bus, and away we went to Desert Rock, a military base located at the Nevada Proving Grounds. We were lodged in a barracks where we had a hot meal and spent a hot night. We were rousted at four o’clock in the morning and donned our uniforms. Shortly thereafter we assembled out of doors in military band formation, and under the direction of Chief Warrant Officer Spud Shpakowski we started performing military marches. No other humans were in attendance. It was moonless and dark. We played Sousa marches from memory. Then, halfway through The Stars and Stripes Forever, the sky burst into light brighter than the sun, and an enormous mushroom cloud rocketed skyward, unfurling an array of colors, some of which do not otherwise appear in Nature in my experience. The band faltered, and we all stood spellbound as the atomic bomb took its lethal toll of its immediate habitat. Every bandsman stared at the top of the atomic bomb cloud that rose to a sixty-degree angle from where we stood. We were later assured that because we were seven miles from point of detonation we were out of harm’s way. Other soldiers, some of whom were my mates during basic training, were squatted in trenches or behind earthen barriers just a mile away from point zero.

As dawn silhouetted the climbing cloud of the explosion, I had my defining moment. I realized that I was totally sane, a human being born into a culture that was not totally sane, and that thenceforth I would pursue my own trail through this lifetime and that my trail would involve great resistance to any form of governing body that condoned the detonation of atomic bombs that blatantly destroyed spans of earthly habitat and all life therein, ostensibly in defense of the American Dream.

There were three aboveground detonations of atomic bombs that summer at the Nevada Proving Grounds. There was one nicknamed Smoky, so called because something like a hundred tons of coal dust were situated at point zero. The concept was to be able to trace the path of the coal dust that was blown into the atmosphere. We again played music, but this time the bomb was detonated after daybreak, and high-ranking officers from different branches of the armed forces were in attendance. After the detonation I was able to tear my eyes away from the mushroom cloud and look into the faces of my fellow bandsmen. Each face reflected expressions that ranged from horrific awe to extreme sadness. I was able to look at officers assembled a hundred or so yards away. I saw at least three of them faint. No photograph or even moving picture can come close to conveying the raw power of the explosion of an atomic bomb. One must see it with the naked eye to grasp its significance. It remains embedded in my memory as though it just happened.

Many years later I was attending an event celebrating the life of my dear friend, historian Alvin Josephy in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Others of Alvin’s many friends were also in attendance, including writer Terry Tempest Williams. Terry and I were off somewhere talking, and during our conversation, Terry revealed that she and her family were once driving homeward bound when a thick cloud of dust and debris began to fall on their car. The dust and debris were the remains of the great cloud of coal dust landing many miles away from where A-bomb Smoky had been detonated a short while before. Terry and I suddenly realized that we had been at either end of that explosion. Terry burst into tears, and for many minutes we stood there holding each other, seeking some sort of spiritual solace after that dreadful recollection of an event that caused many in Terry’s family to develop cancer.

These are life-defining moments. In my case, I sense that I became truly awake when I watched that first atomic bomb light up the dawn of a July morning in the Mojave Desert. I snapped into a far greater spectrum of consciousness than at any previous time, and thus have I remained. In a strange way, it took an atomic bomb to awaken me to the rest of my life, and for that I am immensely grateful. I have tried not to squander the meaning of that defining moment.

Early Childhood

One of my earliest memories is of having gone fishing with my father in southwestern West Virginia in the late 1930s. We cruised along a dirt road that devolved into a two-track trail. It was a sunny day, the maple, oak, and elm trees in full leaf; the humid air warm and humming with the sounds of insects; the rural air of Appalachia filling my nostrils. On the left side of the road we came upon a cabin constructed of hand-hewn logs. My dad stopped the car and turned off the motor. We sat there for a few minutes until the cabin door opened and an elderly man stepped out into the sunshine. He wore an old, stained, fringed leather shirt and carried a musket cradled in his arm. He walked down the path for a few steps and stopped. My father slowly got out of the car, walked toward him, and spoke to him. The man’s demeanor grew more relaxed and he spoke to my dad, generally waving in the direction we’d been heading. My dad nodded, extended his hand, and the two men shook. My father climbed back in the car and we drove on. I looked back through the rear window at the old man who watched us till we rounded a hill and were lost to each other’s view. We shortly came to a crick, as streams were called in the local vernacular, and my dad fished away the summer’s day in pursuit of his favorite pastime while I played, wading in the crick and immersing myself in the deep woods that prevailed across the land.

Looking back over the decades, I realize that I had wanted to be that man living alone in his log cabin, hunting his meat, tending a small but sufficient garden away from the outhouse. He was his own man, self-directed, accountable to himself, or so my childish mind perceived him. He wasn’t Tom Mix or Buck Jones of radio fame. He was quieter and preceded them somehow by living out his life in an earlier time.

Thirteen miles upstream on the other side of the Ohio River from where I was born is the town of Marietta, the oldest town in the Northwest Territory, the area that George Washington was said to have regarded as the most beautiful place to live. Marietta was home to Sam and Mary Brittigan, my mother’s parents. Until July 11, 1940, they lived on Cutler Street directly across from the Mound Cemetery, so named because of the great Indian mound surrounded by gravestones marking the graves of the more recently dead. Then, on my fourth birthday, they moved into their new home in the countryside just west of Marietta. Their newly constructed home was situated near the base of Cisler’s Ridge and was surrounded by forty-acre farms that thrived because of the rich dark soil that characterizes Washington County, where the best-tasting tomatoes in America were grown. There is nothing more delicious than a slice of fresh beefsteak tomato atop a piece of toasted salt-rising bread with two strips of thick-cut bacon, the toast slathered in homemade butter, especially if eaten in Marietta, Ohio, the paradise of my childhood.

I wandered over cow pastures, picked blackberries, whittled, sang to myself, avoided bulls, learned to shoot and clean my own .22-calibre rifle, caught fish and cleaned them, learned about catfish when one that my father had caught stuck its stinger clean through my hand when I was dislodging the hook from its mouth. I watched the mighty Ohio River flood on several occasions; watched baseball games with my grandfather; became the happy-go-lucky, all-round red-blooded American boy secure in the life into which I had been born. The radio played the news as delivered by Walter Winchell, Gabriel Heatter (There’s good news, tonight!), and H. V. Kaltenborn. I didn’t like to listen to the news as much as I did the hillbilly music, as it was then known. One day when I was about three years old I was stunned to hear a different kind of music. It took my breath away and brought tears to my eyes. It was Dvorak’s New World Symphony. Thus began my lifelong love affair with great music, a form of expression that has remained central to my life to this day.

After graduating from Marietta College, my parents moved to Parkersburg, West Virginia, where my father was employed by the Dils Brothers Department Store. I went to the first grade at McKinley Elementary School and was taught to read by Miss Rathbone, a skill that has served me extremely well throughout my life. On the very last day of school that first year, I entered the playground area after having walked back from lunch at home two blocks away. An older kid threw a rock into the tree that I was passing. The rock hit a yellow jacket’s nest and within seconds I was getting stung time and again. Life had instantly become a nightmare of pain. The school principal bravely picked one after another of the yellow jackets off my naked skin. They didn’t send me home till late afternoon when school was officially over. My mother counted twenty-six yellow jacket stings all over my body. Luckily I’m not allergic to bee venom; otherwise I’d have been dead at the age of six. Thus I learned to be wary—another great lesson in this lifetime.

My father’s parents lived in Wooster, Ohio. I went there rarely but often enough to be fascinated by my tall Grandfather Loeffler who had a great belly laugh, who sang his own basso profundo bass lines to choral works emanating from the