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.
Penguins. In the … desert?
Indeed; it’s true. Not a hot desert, of course, but the windswept edge of coastal Patagonia – Punta Tombo, Argentina, to be exact – where every year hundreds of thousands of Magellanic Penguins (Spheniscus magellanicus) congregate to breed and rear their young.
“No man is an island entire of itself; every man / is a piece of the continent, a part of the main” So wrote John Donne in his oft-quoted Meditation XVII. Theodore Fleming, we can assume has, at least at some point in the past, likely read Donne’s famous meditation, and perhaps was even thinking about it as he examined the discoveries he made in his study of cactus pollination and pollinators near Sonora, Mexico.