Doug has had a profound impact on my life. We’ve been on a number of adventures together, had many ups and downs including an ill-fated sea kayak trip in Baja. He helped me find my courage when I needed it most — in the very early days of Heron Dance.

Doug Peacock is the real life person on which Ed Abbey’s Hayduke is based (The Monkey Wrench Gang, Hayduke Lives!). He is also the author of several interesting books himself including Grizzly Years: In Search of the American Wilderness, Was It Worth It?: A Wilderness Warrior's Long Trail Home and others.

The notion of following your passion is a cheap instinct and a good instinct and it's worth indulging. Your passion is your source of power. In order to have power, you have to live a life of passion. You have to live a really full life. You need to follow those paths, no matter where they lead...in defiance of all things conventional, perhaps. And of course it is at a price. It's going to cost. You have to know that going in. But the price you pay, in my opinion, is not worth the time of day to think about. It is so important not to knee-pad around the world. You should never bow down to anything but those you love and respect. Ever. For anything.

When you walked by a period of life when you could have been really happy, you should have seized it.  You should have leaped upon it.  I just try to let myself go.  It’s not necessary to live in the moment everyday, in a traffic jam with smog creeping in your windshield, listening to bad rap music on the radio.  But when it’s there you have really got to live it.  The best reason for living it is knowing you are going to die.  It’s no big deal.  I have had some sense of my own mortality for a long time.  It’s not a negative thought.  It’s just the way things are.  If you want more life, that's fine.  But you should get as much out of the life that you have got left as you can... I wish I had a clue as how to find happiness, but I know it slaps you in the face all of the time. 

Doug’s Note Of Caution To Me Prior To One Trip Out To Visit Him

"Beware of homicidal lesbian motorcycle gangs in the Dakotas." Sage advice from Doug when I called him from Kalamazoo. Women in black leather on Harley-Davidsons, terrorizing defenseless pilgrims such as myself -- that image overtook my imagination... I made the only reasonably prudent decision available and circled south through Iowa and Nebraska, avoiding the Dakotas altogether.

On Making A Living As A Writer, And On The Book He Was Then Working On, Walking It Off, Inspired by His Friendship with Ed Abbey

I have never wanted to be anybody else in my life.  Even when I have absolutely nothing to say.  Who gives a fuck about this shit I am writing?  And I think about that plenty, but I don't think anybody else any more to say.  There are times when I have an utter failure of confidence, and I just think I can't imagine why anybody would want to read this shit, but the converse is not true -- that I think that other people have the answers. 

It’s easier to write the fuckin book than tell you what it is about.  I could never do a book proposal, ever.  I just don't work like that. 

If you are going to write books long term, just forget about agents.  Publishers and agents are not important.  They don't create a fucking thing.  The writer creates things.  You just have to remember things like that.  The important thing is just to work.  I have probably gone to my first and last literary workshop.  People are used to having adulation.  Students around their knees.  They make too much out of themselves.  It isn't about that.  Its about producing art.  That's all that counts.  Publishers are just not important.  Agents . . . Jesus Christ . . .

    I'm not really a journalist.  If you read my stuff you'd know.  I am a liar.  I just look at the world the way I look at the world.  I would never get things straight by having to quote people and fact check -- that's really not what I care about.  I respect the heart of truth, but I would never let a bunch of unimportant facts get in the way of a good story. 

    I can get all of the magazine work I want.  I get no less than $5,000 for a piece.  But on the other hand, it ain't worth it.  It ain't.  Esquire, Rolling Stone, Outside.   The others don't pay quite so much.  Men's Journal, Backpacker.  Audubon is calling me up all of the time.  But I told them:  I'm not an objective journalist. 

    I decided I was going to write this book, and i decided I was not going to deal with anyone in the world, who had ever offended me or said no to me in any way, publishing wise.  Its a book that did involve Ed Abbey in a way, because of his death.  Because Ed was my friend.

    I don't like to talk about it much though.  It’s like shadow-catchers.  I could never do that.  It would kill it.  If I wrote a book proposal, I would never be able to write the book, or it would be a piece of shit.  I could not ever do that.  Whatever energy there is has got to be saved for the real thing.

    I signed a contract, and as soon as the ink was dry and the advance was issued, and i cashed the check and spent the money, all notions of what the fuck the book was about flew away like a flock of ravens.  Like a pack of javelinas into the night.  At the same time, within that contract there is time confines, but I'm not ready to write the fucker now so that's why there is more leisure than there should be.  But I am going to have to put some heat on myself.

    You have to buy the groceries, but waiting for the confirmation that your work is worthwhile is utterly unimportant.  You create this thing and you lay it out there.  Its not yours anymore.  Other people like it or hate it, but you can't worry about it.  The only thing a writer should care about from a publisher is keeping his books in print.  People can buy em or not buy em, read em or not read em.  That's up to you, its not up to anything else.  You can't let it affect your life in any way.  You have to do what you have to do.

    As a person, as a writer, as a stockbroker you have to do that.  That is the only way it will be of most value.  You have to have a sense that it is the right thing to do, and if it is real important, believe me it will show.

    Anxiety--fuck it.  You can't let money get to you.  It’s like people blackmailing you, or people that could black mail you.  The more you worry about what people could do to you, the more they get to you.  You should just not let it get you.  The world is basically fucked.  Where it appears that the people in People magazine, the people that write the garbage make all of the money.  But there is enough of a market out there that if you have something serious to say, you can buy your groceries, in a half-way intelligilble way, not a slick way but an understandable way, you will buy your groceries, and you should not worry about any of that other garbage.  Shouldn't give it a thought.  If you need to waste some time on it, spend a whole afternoon on it at once, and never think about it again.

On Children 

The really exciting thing about children is not what you teach them, but what you share with them. More than anything else, I just share my life and my love for things in the out of doors. The way children see the world is the way you should see the world. It's like William Blake's Songs of Innocence: The smell of discovery around every bend, every meander of the creek, and all of your troubles disappearing, like bubbles down a sunny river. You can learn about that from kids and it's really wonderful. But you share it. You don't teach it. You don't dispatch it. You don't even borrow it.

We often go to the ocean and camp on the beach. Sometimes, we tow along a thirty-year-old drift boat and bottom fish for food and catch crabs. At low tide we gather clams and oysters. We make huge chowders. You learn about the world that way, and it's a good way to learn. You don't force anything. You get hungry and you go out and satisfy your hunger. I pack along the mere basics for food: tsampa, a bag of lemons and some condiments, but unless we score some fish or something we won't eat much. That’s a real incentive. Catching trigger fish off the reef, then returning to share the catch. I make a sauce with chile, olive oil and some lemons. It's incredible. A little feast night after night.

Every year I take my kids up to the canyonlands, exploring ruins that are virtually untouched, or down to the Sea of Cortez. There hasn't been anyone in some of these places for hundreds of years -- since the Indians disappeared. But a lot of practical and traditional wisdom resides in that land, in the ruins and middens. It's possible to go back and touch those roots -- our roots as human beings.

What were the lives of those people like? Not bad, by all indications.  They stored up food for lean times. They had lots of leisure -- lots of time for a spiritual life and just to enjoy life. They had all the clams they could eat, giant leatherback sea turtles, desert cactus for vitamins. Their middens are full of broken moon snail shells, so we know they're good to eat and have spent afternoons diving for moon sails. We boil them up for fifteen minutes, them pry out the escargot with Swiss Army knives, dipping them into a garlic-oregano sauce from our garden. That is such a great way for anyone to learn -- a kid, an adult, anybody.

On Wandering Around Wild Places

... You find yourself by losing yourself. By not thinking about yourself all the time. I love new country. Wild country especially forces you to look outward. It's so important to walk metaphorically away and out of your own culture because a lot about our culture isn't great. Wilderness is the quickest exit, apart from your own life, your own culture. A place that is different -- where what you know doesn't necessarily apply. You need to get out in order to see back in.

That's what I need to do when I am in a slump with my writing. I'll go and walk for a week. Preferably where I won’t see another human being. Or go for a walk through one of the few places on earth where the people still live as hunter/ gatherers ...

You need to get out in order to see back in. We need places that are strange and different — where what we know doesn’t necessarily apply. We need it individually and, I think, we need it collectively. We think we control everything.

Wolves and bears in Yellowstone with radio collars being tracked by satellites. That is more than an illusion, it is delusion. Indians believed that the success of the hunter was not due to his skill or shrewdness, but his humility. The hunter should always be grateful. The emotional posture behind reason, even today, is humility. Where do you get humility? You get it from being alone and unarmed in places where you are in the food chain. Where we can encounter grizzly bears and mountain lions. We need that humility.

Can you imagine a situation where you either learn or you perish, where you either have a fundamental receptiveness or you don’t make it?

Doug’s advice on my inclination to interview others, rather than
tell my own story:

One of the best things anyone can do is write their own story.  If they have really lived, they indeed have a story to tell.  Anybody that can tell a story can write a book.  Just write the story.  The story of your own life.  You have to stick yourself in the middle of it all the time.  You don't just start out with an introduction, and end with a conclusion.  You are--the way you interact with these people you are interviewing--is as much of the story as any of their stuff is.  Its the thread that carries it through.  The way you see it all is the way the reader is going to see it all.  We need to know all of the way through what you think. 

You can't render it through the tape recorder.  You are going to offend some people.  That doesn't matter.  You are going to take a chance of being wrong.  But that doesn't matter.  You have to stick yourself in the middle of it.  You have to arbitrate it.  You are doing a really cosmic mix here.  These people would not get along in a bar, or on a helicopter.

. . .

Doug Peacock’s Foreword to the Heron Dance Back Issue Anthology

Six years ago a guy named Rod MacIver showed up in my backyard in Tucson saying he was on a search for truth. I mentioned a weekend course in Santa Monica where it was possible to get your shaman's license in three days. He wasn't interested. Rod had just left a career in the stock market to follow his passion. It would be an expensive journey. For one thing, he knew he'd soon be staring at divorce papers if he didn't get his ass back on Wall Street. But this guy was dead serious.

            It's curious how discovery, such as a significant friendship between two mid-life men, can begin with a single moment, an utterly truthful answer to a simple question offered by the unguarded heart. Had I chosen any other reply, our lives would have been diminished. Instead, I received an immense gift.

            About a year later, my father's spirit departed his body. Nearby, from the bottom of Sonoma Creek, a Great Blue Heron lifted out of the muddy shallows and alighted on a stump in dad's backyard. Since that moment my life has been charted by water birds, a flock of giant White Pelicans disappearing high above as dust into the white cirrus and the ubiquitous Blue Herons of my life who represent the man I most loved.

            At that exact same time, Rod too was struggling with mortality, his own, a disease for which there is no known cure called non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. He had started a little shoestring publication named Heron Dance. Somehow Heron Dance survived, Rod survived. The gray-blue wing beats blew what remained of the chaff free of his life. Those long legged birds of grace and beauty were parallel reincarnations.

            Acceptance of death leads directly to the sensate awareness of the gift of life. And so ”Heron Dance's” search moved into glimpses of the elusive with a creativity sketched with the delicate feather of a plumed bird: beauty, freedom, love. There was no pomposity here. Above all, I admire Rod's courage in lying open these raw chucks of soul without guile or dogma, a physical courage far less esoteric than it sounds.

If you love life and want to live in the world, you must eventually travel beyond observation. The world we love is burning. Change is necessary. Rod MacIver took up causes: peace activism and deep ecology. Yet, the deeper evolution I see in the last five years of Heron Dance has been a steady unratcheting of tight doctrinaire approaches to issues and a conscious movement away from anger. This, I think, is a big deal: the presence of extreme anger among those of us who love the Earth has been a severely limiting factor in our ability to defend the same wild landscapes. Especially in men. Projecting hostility outward misses the mark when the abode of rage is the self. Heron Dance explored fear and the letting go of anger with both creativity and elegance providing a great service to people like myself who knew that the hostile tendency to think poorly of others often prevents you from seeing what's really there.

Rod considers his greatest strength – and weakness — to be an intolerance of bullshit and hypocrisy, which has led him over time to a suspicion of people espousing high ideals. He is not always a pleasant animal to hang out with. But it also misses the point: freedom and searching for the truth come at a price. The trail winds through joy and sadness; danger may lurk just around the bend. This journey is Heron Dance’s  victory, a triumph from which we must take heart to travel our own bold trails.

. . .

Excerpts from Doug’s memoir of Vietnam, The Grizzly Years

When Tet arrived, I was in all the wrong places, un­consciously swimming against the tides of battle. I could not have planned it any worse.

A week earlier, I had gotten medevacked to Da Nang for malaria, intestinal bleeding, and an ignominious foot wound I had received on my last patrol, when I had rolled out of a jungle hammock to take a leak and sleepily stepped in a punji pit. When the Tet Offensive hit the big cities, I was a patient in the Da Nang Naval Hospital. Bato was quiet while the offensive raged in the cities. I spent my hospital stay sleeping on the floor under my bed, unauthorized .45 automatic in hand, NVA sappers on the wire fifty meters away.

I went AWOL from the hospital and jumped the first chopper back to Bato. I had missed a strange sort of attack on our A-camp on February 1 by seven hun­dred Montagnards, half of them carrying spears and knives. By the time I got back the Vietcong had killed my friend Dinh Rua and cut his head off.

I learned to distinguish the personalities of about fifteen individual grizzlies. The animals formed a so­cial hierarchy with a huge brown grizzly, the alpha male, at the top. When he arrived at the feeding site, all the other bears scattered. Otherwise, the bears fed together without a great deal of conflict.

Another dominant grizzly, a female who was subor­dinate only to a couple of big males, showed up on the scene in August with four cubs. This group constituted the biggest family I had ever seen. Sow grizzlies usually have two cubs, sometimes one, and occasionally three, but hardly ever four. This mother bear was the most protective I encountered.

| One day I decided to spend an afternoon watching this unusual grizzly. I circled the feeding flat down-| wind until I could approach to within a couple hun- dred feet of the open pit dump. An easily climbable snag made viewing bears relatively safe.

I pulled myself up into the limbs of the dead pine tree until I was about twenty feet above the ground. Two hundred feet away the sow fed with her four close-kept cubs in a corner of the dump away from the other eight bears. I had been sitting there for maybe twenty minutes when the wind changed directions. I looked at the family. The sow reared and spun slowly until she was facing my tree. I made an involuntary reach for a higher perch in the dead snag. The sow turned slightly, looking directly toward me. She had caught the movement. Grizzlies are not supposed to see well, though, as I would learn many times over in the years to come, they can pick up slight movement at a surprising dis­tance, sometimes as much as a hundred yards.

Without hesitation the sow dropped to all fours and broke into a charge. In a heartbeat she covered half the distance to my tree, slid to a halt, turned, and loped back to her cubs, whom she nosed into a tight bundle. Leaving the alarmed but obedient knot of cubs be­hind, she charged me again, this time covering all but a third of the distance to the tree.

I clung to the upper branches of the snag, knowing that adult grizzlies were not supposed to be able to climb trees. If I did not fall out of the dead lodgepole, I was probably safe. The female kept her offspring balled close together. She picked up her head and, once again, charged across the open ground a hundred feet toward me. Over a period of about half an hour she charged in my direction sixteen more times, usu­ally coming only thirty or so yards across the meadow.

I waited until the grizzly resumed feeding with her back turned toward me, then slid down the smooth trunk of the snag and retreated through the trees. I crossed the hot creek as the afternoon shadows reached out, and walked the timbered ridges, which were seldom used by bears, back to camp.

That was the last time I visited the dumps. The place depressed me. The fact that these beautiful beasts had been eating human garbage here for some eighty years gave me no historical consolation.

We worked the south fork of the Nuoc Ong in Sep­tember of 1967. A helicopter inserted us just at dark after making several false passes with four others fly­ing in trail at treetop level. A six-man team jumped off into the elephant grass, then quickly regrouped and crawled off into the darkness.

We were moving by early morning, stopping every couple of minutes to listen for the VC. Within an hour they had a tracker on our backtrail. It was impossible for six men not to leave a visible trail in the jungles of the Central Highlands. Every fifteen minutes or so the tracker would fire his K-44 rifle in the air so all the other VC in the vicinity could get a fix on us. I guess these VC did not have radios for such things. The tracker appeared to be about a half hour behind us. No matter how fast we traveled, we never left him very far behind.

By noon, the crack of the Kalashnikov was less than twenty minutes behind. We had to stop to eat "indige­nous rations" — freeze-dried fish and rice. Our four Asian teammates were inflexible on that one. The first time the little people insisted on stopping for lunch with the NVA in hot pursuit, I almost shit. I could not believe they would take a chance like that. What was worse, there on the Song Nuoc Ong they also wanted to take poc time — meaning they wanted to sack out for two hours—a kind of Vietnamese siesta. The four of them lay down in a tight circle facing out and went to sleep. Me and the other green beret watched as they slept, nervously fingering our CAR-15s and listening.

At 1400 hours, the rifle went off. The tracker was still twenty minutes away. We moved on and he kept up, never falling much more than a half hour behind, firing his weapon every fifteen minutes or so.

This went on for three days and I sort of got used to it. Nobody moved from 1200 to 1400 hours. Every­body observed poc time. The war stopped and the tracker never tried to catch up with us. The second day out, the VC could have set up an easy ambush for us if they had circled around us during poc time. But they did not. It was a kind of truce: as if by mutual consent we all agreed to grant the other side two hours of grace.

By early morning crisp cold air settled into the draw in which my tent was pitched and I stepped out into the golden light of approaching autumn. I packed up a bag of gear, throwing in my .357 Magnum at the last minute. I still carried the gun out of habit although I had long known I would not need one in grizzly coun­try.

I planned to spend the day exploring a long series of creek bottoms, finger meadows, and narrow defiles leading back into the heart of the plateau some fifteen miles away. The dew glistened on the grasses as I hiked up a tiny creek over a timbered divide into a long, nar­row meadow. I looked for sign of bears along the way. There were old tracks along the bottoms. I found areas of digging along the strip of grass adjacent to the tree line, and anthills torn to pieces. Each time I crossed a reminder of the presence of grizzlies, I scanned the tree line, listened to the forest, and scented the air.

By midday the narrow finger meadows pinched out and the small creek bottoms gave way to a dense stand of timber. I did not want to go any farther and sat back against a tree. I rested for about an hour, figuring that was all the time I could spare if I wanted to get back to camp by dark. I had come maybe a dozen miles.

The finger meadows were in shadow as I ap­proached the small creek I had followed that morning. I rounded a corner of trees and stepped onto a game trail leading down the defile. I took three steps down the meadow corridor and stopped dead. Thirty yards away on the opposite end of the clearing, walking to­ward me on the animal trail, was the huge brown grizzly, the alpha animal of all the bears I had watched.

I froze. The grizzly paused, catching my movement, then lowered his head slightly and, with a sort of stiff-legged gait, ambled toward me swinging his head from side to side. I knew from having watched this bear in­teract with other animals that the worst thing I could do was run.

The big bear stopped thirty feet in front of me. I slowly worked my hand into my bag and gradually pulled out the Magnum. I peered down the gun barrel into the dull red eyes of the huge grizzly. He gnashed his jaws and lowered his ears. The hair on his hump stood up. We stared at each other for what might have been seconds but felt like hours. I knew once again that I was not going to pull the trigger. My shooting days were over. I lowered the pistol. The giant bear flicked his ears and looked off to the side. I took a step backward and turned my head toward the trees. I felt something pass between us. The grizzly slowly turned away from me with grace and dignity and swung into the timber at the end of the meadow. I caught myself breathing heavily again, the flush of blood hot on my face. I felt my life had been touched by enormous power and mystery.

I did not know that the force of that encounter  would shape my life for decades to come. Tracking griz would become full-time work for six months of many years, and it lingers yet at the heart of any annual story I’11 tell of my life. I have never questioned the route this (journey took: it seems a single trip, the sole option, driven by that same potency) that drew me into grizzly country in the beginning.

 I returned to camp and kindled a fire, tending it into the night. I threw a pile of lodgepole twigs on the em­bers and poked at it with a stick. I thought about my old road map and the huge brown grizzly. In Vietnam the primary predator was man. If I had salvaged a grain of wisdom from the agonies of combat, it had nothing to do with knowledge of killing or of waging war. There was no enlightenment in homicide. What was burned deepest into my consciousness was the little acts of grace, lessons that had lain dormant in memory and now were retrieving themselves from anesthetized corners of my brain. It never mattered why. The granting of quarter itself was a transcendence.                                       

The grizzly radiated potency. He carried the physi­cal strength and thorniness of disposition that allowed him to attack or kill most any time he cared. But, al­most always, he chose not to. That was power beyond a bully's swaggering. It was the kind of restraint that commands awe — a muscular act of grace.