the subcontinent. Now, in my letter, the association of that devastating faux pas was good enough for identification—and thanks to Paul’s innate kindheartedness, a correspondence began.
He took delight in my memory of the field trip whose purpose, he reminisced, had been to present the question of randomness versus order in nature; all I could think of upon reading his note was the miraculous randomness—or order—in my finding him twenty-five years later. We exchanged letters, sharing books, articles in print, articles under construction, and colleagues. I finally invited him to become what at The Tao of Physics Fritjof Capra’s think tank the Elmwood Institute was called a Peer, a position that resembled a Fellow. He offered quotes by others to explain his instinct to bow out: “I suppose I am somewhat like my friend, Ivan Illich,” he wrote. “Illich says, in effect, ‘I have spent my life trying to ask the right questions. As for solving the problems they bear on, it will take all the efforts of highly specialized experts of many different kinds—all beyond my ability.’” He also quoted Edward Abbey, who argued that he might make the right changes in his own life but was not a leader in social action.
In 1993 I received Paul’s alarming “Dear Friends” note requesting support, or at least cognizance, regarding the book he had written on his favorite topic: The Sacred Paw: The Bear in Nature, Myth, and Literature. As he explained the problem, he had originally conceived of it with his Viking Press editor, and he had written all the chapters on the mythic bear, constellations, archaeology, paleontology, linguistic materials, festivals, rites, and ceremonies of tribal peoples, etc.—while his coauthor had contributed but one chapter, on the bear in literature. “This book,” Paul explained, “is part of a lifelong study of animals in culture.” His current devastation stemmed from the fact that this coauthor had been proclaiming that it was he who had written the bulk of The Sacred Paw, and he had actually sold five chapters to another publisher for an anthology, each of which he had rewritten paraphrasing Paul’s sources to ensure escape from copyright litigation.
An even more alarming occurrence was Paul’s death by lung cancer in 1996. Thankfully, just the year before, I and others had had the opportunity to heap praise upon him in ecologist Max Oelschlaeger’s Festschrift The Company of Others: Essays in Celebration of Paul Shepard. “The most important thing I can say is [his books] gave the rest of us courage—courage to say what we are saying in our own books,” wrote historian Calvin Luther Martin. “I owe everything to Paul Shepard,” contributed deep ecologist Dolores La Chapelle.
“Paul was the only college teacher I ever knew to take the class into the wilds,” I noted, “all the while seeding our minds with dangerously holistic notions like ecology. Years later, Nature and Madness changed my work and days…. [Lewis] Mumford’s brilliance carved a crystalline picture of what is wrong with mass technological civilization and our lives within it. Shepard sanctioned this view, deepened it with rare psycho-historical insight—and then went on to open the door to what could be right. I remember the moment distinctly. I was lying on the couch in my office, a luscious July breeze blowing in through the door, alternately reading the book and dropping it in my lap to breathe.”
A few years later, at a writers conference in Prescott, Arizona, I met Flo Shepard, the woman with whom he had built a wilderness cabin in Wyoming, edited anthologies, and shared that last rich decade of his life. Shortly thereafter I received a letter from her asking if I might like to steward the Olivetti he had used to write his books. Amazingly, it arrived amid crushed newspapers and bubble wrap, a rickety little machine that looked wholly incapable of translating all those enormous thoughts into mere words. I held it in my hands, trying to take in the sagacity and panoramic vista it was still emanating.
IV. MAKE LOVE NOT WAR: BERKELEY IN THE ‘60S
LET’S TAKE THE PARK!
—DAN SIEGEL, PRESIDENT, ASSOCIATED STUDENTS UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, MAY 15, 1969
A protester against the shutdown of the communal People’s Park in Berkeley—in captivity. Photo credit: Ted Streshinsky. Courtesy of the film Berkeley in the Sixties ©1990.
THE DEITIES WERE WATCHING over my generation. An acquaintance from Cleveland who was studying at Amherst College—and would soon mutate into a rabid Communist Labor Party militant—said to me, “There’s something going on in Berkeley that has to do with our generation. You need to go.” The remark sunk in, and just a few days before my twentieth birthday, I threw work shirt, sandals and jeans into a little suitcase, bought a $75 plane ticket from Cleveland to the Bay Area, and made my break.
In 1967, Berkeley was a hub of youth culture and New Left politics—and was located right up Telegraph Avenue from Oakland, where the Black Panther Party was in gestation with its objective of protecting their communities from police violence via its own armed patrols. This was the first place inside the U.S. where I witnessed a flourishing street life, and indeed one of my first observations, at Moe’s Books on Telegraph, was how earthy, alive, and laid-back everyone seemed. Old jeans. Navy bellbottoms. Men boasting ponytails. Women in Mexican peasant blouses. Espresso and Gauloises. I heard jazz musicians and 1930s commie pinkos airing their radical sentiments on listener-sponsored KPFA-FM. Mario Savio from the Free Speech Movement was the postman. Richard Brautigan was penning his fish stories up in Bolinas; Julia Vinograd, her street poems at the Café Mediterraneum. Richie Havens belted out “Freedom” in the university’s lower plaza. The Free Clinic was overflowing with patients, the Free University with students. Books, books—everyone was devouring books. Karl Marx and Carl Jung. Anaïs Nin. Malcolm X, Eldridge Cleaver, Frantz Fanon. Wilhelm Reich. Simone de Beauvoir. Sylvia Plath. Allen Ginsberg.
I arrived in mid-June, and the tang of the 1966 Oakland Induction Center confrontation with the police lingered like Ripple wine on the tongues of the anti-Vietnam War activists. I found an empty apartment where the landlord let me crash gratis for the summer, got a morning job as a governess, bought a near-see-through dress made of burlap, hitchhiked from Berkeley to L.A., marched with Clevelander Dr. Benjamin Spock at the Century City anti-war demo, and when I took my first drag of marijuana, I saw satyrs galloping through the air. By September I filled out the forms to transfer from Smith College to the University of California, Berkeley.
Activist couple in the 1960s—expressing both their politics and their alternative way of life. Gratitude to the now-defunct Berkeley Tribe (1969–1972), which was more radical than the community’s original underground newspaper, the Berkeley Barb. Vol.1, No. 6, Issue 6, August 15, 1969.
When I got back to Cleveland to collect my things, my mother invited her movement friends to hear me talk about what strange goings-on were erupting in California. I was just delivering my analysis of the Beatles song “All You Need Is Love” when one mother, nearly quaking in fear, asked, “But, but … isn’t Berkeley just a big cesspool of sex, drugs, and radical politics?” I paused for a long moment, discombobulated by the alarm in her voice. I hadn’t really thought of it that way.
Finally, all I could do was answer: “Yes.”
MARTY SCHIFFENBAUER: MASTER OF POLITICAL INVENTION
(1938–)
I
