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Robert Wehrman - Walking Man: The Secret Life of Colin Fletcher

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Walking Man: The Secret Life of Colin Fletcher
Author:
Robert Wehrman
Publisher:
BookBaby
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Books / Non-fiction
Year:
2016
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Walking Man is the only biography of Colin Fletcher, the man who walked through time.

He was an iconic American folk hero best known as the first person to force a passage through the length of Grand Canyon National Park in one arduous solo journey. He was the worlds most famous long-distance walker.

He was the first thru-hiker.

Called the father of modern backpacking by Backpacker Magazine and others, Fletcher was the one who showed us the waymore than a million people followed his shadow into the green world.

Born in Wales, he was in the first wave of British Marines to hit the beachhead in Normandy on D-Day. After the war he farmed in Kenya, prospected in British Columbia, and then began his writing career in California where he wrote and published ten books.

Fletchers was a preeminent and powerful voice for environmental concerns on par with Edward Abbey and John Muir. He was to the outdoor world and its preservation, what Leonard Bernstein was to music, or Walter Cronkite to reporting. When Colin Fletcher had something to say, people listened.

The impact of his work, while unacknowledged, is seen far and wide today.

Although most of them dont know it, the hordes of hikers on the Pacific Crest Trail today would not be there without Fletchers pioneering work.

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Robert Wehrman 2016

Print ISBN: 978-1-48357-228-4

eBook ISBN: 978-1-48357-229-1

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

Books by Robert Wehrman

Beyond the Extremes

The Secrets of the Mirage

The Unnatural Act Rock, Rhythm, and Blues in The Nam

Walking Man The Secret Life of Colin Fletcher

A Few Words about Colin Fletchers Personal Notes

As you read this book, you may wonder how I came to know details regarding certain private conversations, events, and even some of Fletchers thoughts. For example, how did I ascertain what his wife, Sonia, said to him in bed one night in 1946? How did I learn he worked in the nude at home and kept a pair of blue shorts by his front door in case he had an unexpected visitor? He never mentioned this practice to anyone. Although it may seem likely, I have not created any dialog, or fabricated any of the events presented in Walking Man. There was no need to do so, for Fletcher documented almost everything himself.

He chronicled his thoughts dailynot in a diary or a journal, as did Edward Abbey and other journal keepers. Instead, Fletcher wrote his ideas, thoughts, plans, dreams, even conversations, in small spiral bound notebooks or on yellow legal pads from which he tore the sheets and stuffed them into a pocket, or whatever was convenient, to be filed or acted upon later.

Today, these scraps are in various stages of decay. Sometimes he taped or glued tiny bent or folded 3 by 5 inch paper fragmentsoften stained with fish or Welsh blood, smudged with dirty fingerprints or the imprint of a Vibram waffle-soled bootonto a larger sheet of paper. Notes made during his three Grand Canyon walks still have pink canyon-dust stains.

At first I couldnt read much of what hed written. The penmanship was horrible and the ink was blurred or faded. Over time, the acid-based paper deteriorated to the point where all that remained were small, yellowed fragments, which I dead-sea-scrolled together with soft tweezers.

For a while I despaired that I would not be able to make out what he had written. In the end, using words I could read, I created a key with examples of how he made each of his letters. This enabled me to untangle most of Fletchers notes.

Many hundreds of these odd little pages, often containing something important, have been preserved in his papers. From them I gleaned heretofore-unknown conversations and events in his life. The chronicle of the night he lost his virginity or the time he encountered nude damsels, prancing and singing, deep in the Ventana Wilderness come to mind. So when you see a citation stating something came from Fletchers personal notes, it is probably from one of these revealing little gems.

Sometimes I was able to follow the germ of an idea through various stages of gestation until it arrived on the scene round and shinning, fully developed, ready for Fletchers action. Last Summer the Clock Stopped was the title of a book he planned to write after living alone for six months at an undisclosed lake in the Sierra. He worked on the plan for 20 years, awaiting the right combination of circumstances that would enable him to undertake this adventure. His thoughts about the exploit, which he often referred to as The Lake, are strewn throughout his papers spanning the two decades. I pieced the notes together and followed Fletchers thought process as his ideas evolved over time, and watched various extraneous events impact the final outcome.

I reconstructed conversations and scenes from numerous letters, articles, interviews, and the like. There was quite a bit of previously unknown information in his four unpublished books and their outlines, and Fletcher himself included some dialog and documentation in the synopsis prepared for his unfinished autobiography.

To produce this comprehensive biography, I spent countless hours reading correspondence, articles, papers, Fletchers private writings as well as the published works. I followed leads, delved ever deeper to learn who said what, when, and where. Along the way I verified as many of the facts as possible. In addition to scholarly research, I conducted fieldwork by trekking to most of the places mentioned in the book, including walking alone across the Mojave Desertafter all, Walking Man is about the worlds most famous backpacker. My work culminated when the field and literary research came together. The result is the story of Colin Fletchers large, custom-made, life. - RW

Table of Contents

Musical terms and references throughout the book are intentional, for Fletcher felt strongly that orchestral works and books represented the same universal rhythms expressed in different dialectics. There are many examples found throughout his writings. Nearly everyone interviewed said that Fletcher would have loved to have his biography written by a composer. Et sic factum est.

In the beginning were the feet.

-COLIN FLETCHER

I looked down at the rattlesnake coiled about six inches from my left ankle and asked, how the hell did I get myself into this? The question was purely rhetorical, for I already knew the answer. It was Colin Fletchers fault!

I was sitting on a boulder atop a low hill in the midst of the Chihuahua Desert in Mexico when I first saw the snake. To be more precise, I was sitting on a boulder atop a low island in the middle of the Rio Grande. It had been a hill in Texas about a quarter mile north of the river. But three nights earlier, the skies had opened somewhere upriver, sending extra water down here. It must have rained like mad up there, for the excess water caused the river to spread far into the lush riparian greenbelt that lines its channel. This flooding had occurred in silence while I slept on the little hill.

When I awoke, it was still dark and I didnt notice the changes around my camp. Just prior to first light, as I lay in my sleeping bag watching the stars fade away, a thin sliver of light on the eastern horizon began to glow. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, it grew. As the sky transformed from indigo to scarlet I reached for the coffee potwhich Id filled with water the night beforeand put it on my little one-burner camp stove. I pulled a wooden match from my bedside boot where it had spent the night, struck it and lit the stove. Then I sat back to watch the sunrise while the water heated.

Puffy clouds of a color somewhere between pink and maroon, backlit by low-angled light, drifted overhead toward the ominous black, rugged Chisos Mountains. I heard the rustle of wind passing over wings as a pair of ravens checked me out. When steam began to jet out of the pot, I sat up and poured the boiling water over the coffee grinds in my Sierra Club cup. The delicious smell of the coffee mingled with the early morning desert scents. Another odor drifted in and out. It seemed familiar but I couldnt quite put a finger on what it was.

Now, as the planet turned to face our star, the scene grew brighter as though one of the technicians was adjusting the lighting by gradually raising a dimmer somewhere backstage. When the sun lipped up from behind the edge of the earth, the whole desert burst into a brilliant emerald green, which morphed, in less than five seconds, into a buttery yellow.

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