In this month’s Canyon Commentary, author Scott Thybony reflects on past assignments and his appreciation for all the people he’s met along the way. They’ve ranged from a firefighter overtaken by a wall of flame to a Mescalero woman gathering water from a sacred spring. Thybony remains thankful for those who were willing to open their lives and tell their stories.
At some point I made the choice to cut the tether and begin writing full time. The decision drew me into a world far different than the one I had known growing up. It meant interviewing the first black Texas Ranger and one of the last Navajo Code Talkers. It involved talking with an astronaut on one assignment and a UFO abductee on another. It found me sitting with a governor in the marble chambers of a state capitol and in a canvas-covered wagon as an old-timer scratched out “Soldier’s Joy” on his fiddle. Everywhere I turned, people were willing to tell their story. And I listened.
To a Paiute singing a Ghost Dance song in the dark of a sweat lodge and to monks singing Gregorian chants in a remote monastery on the Chama River. I listened to an imam at an Abiquiu mosque announcing the call to prayer and to Zen monks chanting the Heart Sutra high in the Sangre de Cristo Wilderness. Next to Old Faithful I listened to a firefighter describe the terror of going into the black as a wall of flames swept over him. And below the Tetons I talked with a woman who had covered 500 miles by dogsled on her honeymoon.
On one occasion I put aside my writing when a serial killer knocked on my door wanting to talk about the Grand Canyon [Robert Spangler]. And another time a man who took three years to complete an epic, 28,000-mile exploration of North America by canoe confessed he couldn’t swim. Writing for Smithsonian I listened as Miss Charles, matriarch of the Black Seminole Indians, described how her people sacrificed everything, generation after generation, to remain free. An assignment for Men’s Journal meant traveling down fifty miles of dirt road with a treasure hunter armed with a pistol who suspected I was a federal agent. For Outside I sat deep in a remote canyon at midnight as Paul Winter improvised a haunting piece on his saxophone.
National Geographic sent me on assignments and explorations from Canada to Central America. They included a search for ancient rock art in the Grand Canyon and for much older fossil tracksites. And I once spent an evening talking books with a woman who ran the finest Southwestern bookstore in the country from her ranch house in the Arizona desert. On other assignments I shared moose jerky with a band of nomadic Indians in Canada’s Terminal Range and helped Mescalero women collect water from a sacred spring. One of my first assignments involved exploring the Spanish missions of Sonora with a Jesuit priest whose license plate holder read, “Damn, I’m Good.”
Often I found the past lying close to the present. In Mexico I came across an old man who had guided Pancho Villa in the Sierra Madre. And a Utah rancher told me how his mother had danced with Butch Cassidy. I interviewed an Apache woman born in a tipi and the next day a Texas cowboy born in a log cabin. At the epicenter of the Dust Bowl I saw fear return to the eyes of a woman as she remembered being overtaken by a dust storm so massive it turned day into night.
Writing taught me to appreciate the world in all of its wild beauty and wonder. The work brought me into contact with people from many different parts of society, and I soon realized everyone had something to teach me. If I came away from an interview without having learned something, the fault was mine. Each person encountered, each landscape crossed revealed another strand in the pattern of our lives, a pattern as bold and colorful as a Navajo blanket.
Scott Thybony is a Flagstaff-based writer. His Canyon Commentaries are produced by KNAU Arizona Public Radio.
