Into the Desert and Wilderness with Charles Bowden

Chuck Bowden's enigmatic friendship with me began with my first assignment at Arizona Highways. I had quit the newspaper business to become a wilderness guide and went to meet with Wes Holden, then the managing editor of Arizona Highways magazine, trying to get a story on my fledgling business. He knew my work as a photographer and offered me a counterproposal, saying, "Instead, why don't you shoot this assignment? We're doing a story on Ramsey Canyon, and there's some new writer we're thinking about using, named Bowden."

So I went out to shoot my first story for Arizona Highways. And, lo and behold, up at Ramsey Canyon I meet this abrasive, Fess Parker-looking guy. We circled each other like a couple of dogs peeing on a fireplug. During the shoot, I found out he was from Chicago, my hometown, and we had a lot of things in common. And, we got along pretty well. That was 1981, the first Highways assignment for both of us.

I had come and gone from the newspaper business in Chicago and Tucson. When I quit, Chuck was just beginning the newspaper business, and he'd tell me all these stories about the hard-hitting journalists in Tucson. He would always portray himself as this grizzled newspaperman. But I'd been ten years in Chicago, through the riots, been shot at and everything else, so I just rolled my eyes and said, "Oh, sure." I gave him a lot of time to explain, but I just always kind of pooh-poohed it. I really had, by that time, seen a lot and done a lot and wanted to get away from it. I knew enough to know that there was a lot of bad stuff out there.

I was into "rocks and ropes" by the time I met Chuck, but then we did several projects that were crossovers or collaborations between a photographer and writer. For the San Francisco Examiner, we did a writer-and-artist-in-residence gig with Will Hurst—we covered the historic trail of the Texas Argonauts across the southern desert route to the California goldfields. We walked from Yuma to Palm Springs—in August. Initially, we did projects that were straight journalism. Then Chuck got deeper into that end of it, and I went the other way. I went "towards the light" of scenic photography, while he went into the dark, and from the dark to the abyss.

But life and relationships with people are always a series of one step forward, two steps back, and a lot of missteps. Chuck and I have had a few arguments—one of them was really major. I can't even remember what it was about, but it was something about him wanting me to read some copy that he had written, and I just didn't have time. He really got pissed that I just wouldn't take time to read it, because it was his baby. "Okay, pay my rent!" he roared. For a month we didn't talk to each other, but then that just went away, as most futile disagreements do, and we put it behind us.

And we built ties of trust, too. On one story, we went out to cache water for his walk across the desert east of Yuma, from Mexico across the border to Wellton. The road was a jeep trail, and I kept assuring Chuck I could make it across every sandy wash with my two-wheel-drive pickup truck. On one, I buried the truck in the sand. We faced a walk of 20 miles, at night, to find a tow. And I was expecting him to have another snit then and there.

But, actually, it turned out to be great. It was great for Chuck, too, because he wrote about it in both Blue Desert and the Tucson Citizen. As we marched back to the highway to get a tow truck, we watched an aerial bombardment with flares, tracers, and airplanes by the U.S. Marines doing night maneuvers. I had to...