Left To The Turkey Vultures - The Bizarre Vanishing of Lew Welch | Society Mysteries

[00:00:00]On the evening of the 23rd of May, 1971, on a wooded ridge above the South Yuba River in the California foothills, a tall, red-haired man walked out of a friend's house and into a silence that has never given him back.

[00:00:13]He was carrying a.22 he had lifted from a footlocker that afternoon, and he left a note of 90 words that ended with the finality of a man closing the door. I went southwest. Goodbye.

[00:00:26]Search parties would crawl the chaparral for 5 days and find nothing. No body, no blood, only the rumor of turkey vultures wheeling over Bald Mountain, which was, if you knew the man, a private joke of the darkest kind.

[00:00:40]His name was Louis Barrett Welch, Jr., a poet good enough that the ones who were famous knew he was better than them. And to this day, no one can say for certain whether he was a runaway, a self-destruction, or a set of bones too tough for a buzzard's beak.

[00:00:55]Welcome to Society Mysteries.

[00:00:59]>> [music] [music] >> Lew Welch was born in Phoenix, Arizona, on the 16th of August, 1926, the son of a dissolute salesman and a formidable mother, and his family taught him early to deal with trouble by moving.

[00:01:24]His father married his mother three separate times and would be dead of cirrhosis at 48 when the boy was 19. His sister, Gig, went the same way at 47.

[00:01:34]His mother, Dorothy, was the family riddle. She held a Stanford degree, a Berkeley social work degree, and a Cornell doctorate in, of all subjects, child development, and this made her a woman professionally certified in the raising of children who could not stop uprooting and destabilizing her own.

[00:01:53]They hopscotched from town to town and new surname with each of her marriages, and by Palo Alto High School, the boy was enrolled under her maiden name as Lou Brownfield.

[00:02:03]He was a track star, halfback, snooker champion, a dashing kid in a bow tie.

[00:02:08]Walking away, as one biographer put it, ran in the family. He enlisted in the Army Air Forces in 1944 at 17 and never saw combat.

[00:02:18]It was at Stockton Junior College that the thing which would define and finally unravel him arrived in the form of Gertrude Stein.

[00:02:26]Reading her long story, Melanctha, Welchs decided to become a writer.

[00:02:31]In 1948, he went north to Reed College in Portland, where fate roomed him with a wiry mountaineer named Gary Snyder, and threw in the company of a genial Buddhist in waiting named Philip Whalen.

[00:02:43]Welch wrote his thesis on Stein, and when William Carlos Williams came through to read in 1950, the old doctor admired the boy's poems and tried to place the essay in print.

[00:02:55]Even then, Welchs knew what he was after. "We talk American," he wrote to his mother that November, "and the poet's job is to intensify this dialect, sharpen it into poetry, keep the words clean and sharp, and make things out of them."

[00:03:09]Then came the crack-up, and it was the first of many.

[00:03:12]Welchs left the Northwest for New York and then Chicago, and for the better part of a decade, he was a copywriter in a gray flannel life.

[00:03:20]Here a myth emerged, the claim that he wrote the slogan Raid kills bugs dead.

[00:03:25]Though he actually worked for Montgomery Ward and never for the makers of Raid, and no one has ever proven it.

[00:03:31]What is documented is the damage he suffered. He submitted to Freudian analysis, dabbled in Dianetics, made a marriage that did not last, studied philosophy at the University of Chicago, and somewhere in there his mind simply buckled.

[00:03:45]He was flat on his back recovering in October 1955 when Snyder and Whalen read at the Six Gallery in San Francisco alongside a young man named Allen Ginsberg with a new poem called Howl.

[00:03:58]This was the night the Beat Generation detonated and Lew Welch missed it.

[00:04:03]Out of that purgatory came his own detonation, the Chicago poem, his rebuke to Carl Sandburg, which ends with a vow that reads now like a rehearsal.

[00:04:13]I know what I'm going to do about it.

[00:04:15]I'm just going to walk away from it.

[00:04:18]Writing to Williams a few years on, Welch reduced the Chicago years to a phrase that could be his motto. He had been learning, he said, how to crack out, not up.

[00:04:29]He cracked out in the late 1950s, quitting the Midwest for San Francisco, where Snyder helped him into the scene, where he lost the advertising job and took work on a salmon boat.

[00:04:40]He sat one afternoon on a boulder in the surf at Muir Beach, feeling the Pacific flood against it, and wrote Wobbly Rock, posing the kind of Zen riddle that became his signature. Waves and the sea.

[00:04:52]If you take away the sea, tell me what it is.

[00:04:55]In the winter of 1959, he drove from San Francisco to New York with Jack Kerouac and the poet Albert Saijo, scrawling haiku the whole way.

[00:05:04]Kerouac, who missed nothing, was already writing Welch into literature. The big-hearted, hard-drinking Dave Wayne of the novel Big Sur is Lew Welch, down to the manic tenderness and the gathering doom.

[00:05:17]By 1960, the wider world was catching a glimpse of him. Donald Allen, the editor who would become his champion and in the end his executor, put Welch in the landmark anthology The New American Poetry, and Marianne Moore singled him out in review. It should have been a launch. Instead, he settled into the role he would play for life, the brilliant, beloved, chronically undercapitalized poet whom everyone rated and no one could make famous.

[00:05:43]He drove a cab for the Yellow Cab Company and turned the fares into his taxi suite. When he read the poems to the other drivers, they told him, he liked to say, "By gosh, you write like that, huh? That's good."

[00:05:55]Which was the only review he ever wanted.

[00:05:58]He worked at docks as a union ships clerk, a self-styled two-card man. And from 1965 taught a poetry workshop for the University of California Extension, where his whole pedagogy fit on a bumper sticker, "Write like you talk." His students adored him.

[00:06:16]He billed his readings as one-man plays, and the critic Grover Sales, watching him in 1967, concluded that Lew Welch is funnier by far than many of the comics who played the hungry eye.

[00:06:28]For some 15 months from 1962 into 1963, he lived in a broken-down miner's cabin near Forks of Salmon, deep in the Trinity back country, where he wrote the spare and luminous hermit poems.

[00:06:42]One of them takes the measure of the man with terrible economy. "Not yet 40, my beard is already white. Not yet awake, my eyes are puffy and red like a child who has cried too much."

[00:06:55]In 1964, he met the woman who would give him the steadiest 7 years he ever knew.

[00:07:00]Magda Craig was a Polish refugee, warm and unsentimental. And though they never married, he called her his wife and her two boys his sons.

[00:07:09]The younger was a drummer, the elder Hugh was away at prep school back east, a kid with a harmonica who worshipped his mother's poet, and who would, when he needed a name to put on the marquee, borrow his poet's.

[00:07:21]The world came to know Hugh Anthony Craig the III as Huey Lewis, and one of the biggest-selling pop acts of the 1980s would carry, all unwitting, the first name of a vanished beat.

[00:07:32]Craig's house in Marin City became a salon for poets and painters and musicians, and inside its warmth Welch grew into the full public life of of writer.

[00:07:41]On the 12th of June 1964, he stood once more beside Snyder and Whalen.

[00:07:47]The old Reed trio reassembled for the celebrated freeway reading at Longshoreman's Hall.

[00:07:53]But the demon that shadowed him was not a metaphor.

[00:07:56]Lew Welch was an alcoholic of the daily grinding kind, frequently [snorts] drunk, cycling through hospitalizations, recoveries, and collapses.

[00:08:05]He tried everything to stop, including disulfiram, sold as Antabuse, which makes a single drink a torment of nausea and blinding headache.

[00:08:14]His waterfront doctor, Asher Gordon, known to the longshoremen as Dr. ILWU, wrote the prescriptions, and would himself be found dead of an overdose within a month of Welch's disappearance.

[00:08:27]Whalen, who loved him, called him sort of bipolar and noticed a sadder thing still.

[00:08:33]Welch, quote, kept falling in love and enjoying that feeling, but I don't believe he often felt the love which other people ex- pressed for him.

[00:08:41]When Snyder, hoping to shock him sober, walked him up Mount Tamalpais to take LSD, vultures gathered overhead, and Welch, in a despair that would prove prophetic, tried to summon them, then muttered, "I'm not edible."

[00:08:55]Death was becoming his great subject, and he approached it not with dread, but with a kind of ecstatic Buddhist appetite.

[00:09:02]In Song of the Turkey Buzzard, he asked in dead earnest that a friend one day carry his corpse up a mountain and lay it out for the carrion birds. A Tibetan sky burial transplanted to the Sierra.

[00:09:14]"Let no one grieve," he wrote. "I shall have used it all up, used up every bit of it. What an extravagance, what a relief."

[00:09:22]He pressed the request on Snyder in person, and on his old Reed mentor Lloyd Reynolds, who admitted it gave him the creeps.

[00:09:30]Around the same time, he wrote the poem that would one day name a zendo, beginning, "I saw myself a ring of bone in the clear stream of all of it. And in an unsent letter to the poet Robert Duncan, he explained where it came from with a candor hard to read now. Whatever it is that chooses to flow through me is so powerful that it will destroy me if I resist in any way, that I must open to it and die, and the death will be a suicide.

[00:09:56]The stability broke in January of 1971.

[00:10:00]Worn down by the endless cycle of his falling apart, Magda Craig told him he was no longer welcome in her house. You don't need a lover, you need a nurse, she said, and left to travel alone in South America. She had seen it coming.

[00:10:12]Years later, she said she had known he would kill himself the moment he swapped his shotgun for a revolver that winter.

[00:10:19]Cast out and broke, Welch drifted around the Northwest for months.

[00:10:24]He went back to Reed as a guest, where a student who put him up remembered a legend on the doorstep in a lumpy overcoat, days of stubble, reeking of Jim Beam, who touched none of her cooking, yet drove the students to campus by taxi through a blizzard.

[00:10:38]He worked the docks in Vancouver, Washington to fund a plan that had seized him, go south to Snyder's Ridge, and build a cabin on land Alan Ginsberg was deeding him, and have one final attempt at life.

[00:10:51]He arrived on the San Juan Ridge in the middle of May into Snyder's raw new community of Zen students and back-to-the-landers, and threw himself at the cabin.

[00:11:00]The letters of those last weeks flicker between mania and dread. Some terrible depressions, then straight days, then absolute bewilderment, he wrote to Craig. It's funny, but everybody seems somehow a stranger. To the volunteers helping him build, he offered a line of rueful comedy. Everything is harder than it looks, except water skiing.

[00:11:20]He was thousands of dollars short, wheedling loans from his mother, from Craig, from Ginsberg, all too late.

[00:11:27]Then came the wildflower walk, days before the end, on which Welch used a.22 to blow the head off a small animal in front of Snyder's children. Snyder, who did not permit gun play in his new community, dressed him down in front of everyone. "Lou, you'll never change," he said.

[00:11:44]It must have gone in like a blade because change was the entire reason Welch had come.

[00:11:49]On the morning of Sunday, the 23rd of May, at breakfast, Snyder read aloud, of all things, Samuel Johnson's fable The Vulture, about the birds that grow fat on the men slaughtered in war.

[00:12:01]Three large birds appeared wheeling over the compound, and Welch grew agitated.

[00:12:07]Snyder told him they were not vultures, though his own journal would later concede they probably were.

[00:12:13]At 3:00 that afternoon, Welch came down and retrieved his.22 from Snyder's footlocker, then walked back toward his van past the deck where 3-year-old Kai Snyder stood. "Where you going?" the boy called.

[00:12:25]Welch turned, stared at him a moment, turned again, and kept walking.

[00:12:30]He did not come to dinner. The conch that called the ridge to supper got no answer, and no one worried. Lou liked his own company.

[00:12:38]In the morning, when he missed breakfast, too, a carpenter sent to check the van found its doors open and a note on the floor. The note was dated, apparently in error, the 22nd of March, and it was the plainest thing this most plainspoken of poets ever wrote. "I never could make anything work out right, and now I'm betraying my friends," it began. "I can't make anything out of it, never could. I had great visions, but never could bring them together with reality.

[00:13:04]I used it all up. It's all gone." He named Donald Allen his literary executor, pointed to the manuscripts at Snyder's and at Grove Press, itemized the $2,000 in his account to cover his debts, absolved Ginsberg and his mother of any obligation, and signed off with the words that have haunted everyone who loved him. "I went southwest. Goodbye, Lou Welch."

[00:13:28]Snyder, 41 and never wanting the job, became the man in charge of finding his friend. For 5 days a ragged army of poets and Zen students and painters, none of them trained in search and rescue, crawled the Black Diamond slopes of Bald Mountain toward the raging South Yuba, firing rifles to mark the ground they covered, shouting his name into brush so dense a man could pass within 3 feet of a corpse and never see it. They found nothing.

[00:13:56]The spring-like weather turned to cold rain and then, absurdly for late spring, to snow measured in feet on the crest.

[00:14:04]On the 28th of May, with the dailies finally breaking the story "Bay Poet Missing" ran the Chronicle, and the search yielding not one thread, Snyder called it off.

[00:14:14]The county undersheriff spoke for everyone. "Frankly, we don't know whether he's a suicide or just a missing person." Then the mystery deepened. On the 1st of June, someone reported seeing Welch alive in Nevada City doing business at that same Bank of America, and the sheriff closed the case. Not dead, merely missing, and no longer their concern.

[00:14:36]Snyder never bought it. "None of us believed it," he said decades later.

[00:14:41]"Why walk around in the brush for 3 or 4 days and then go to town? Makes no sense."

[00:14:46]And a detail quietly demolished the sighting.

[00:14:49]Among the possessions Snyder later found stashed in a drawer in his own house and returned to Welch's mother were the poet's wallet and address book. The man supposedly banking a week after he vanished had left behind the very ID he would have needed.

[00:15:03]Magda Craig, asked to make sense of any of it, gave the only answer that ever fit.

[00:15:08]"Live people have bodies, dead people leave bodies," she said. "But Lew has no body, so Lew is neither alive nor dead.

[00:15:15]He is disappeared."

[00:15:17]The vanishing did to Welch's reputation what fame never had. It made him permanent. Snyder dreamed him back and wrote the dream down, Welch turning up live as you and me to admit he did shoot himself, then to leave one last instruction, teach the children about the cycles.

[00:15:35]The friends who kept hunting for him were searching in the wrong register.

[00:15:38]The man had told them he meant to be used up and handed back to the food chain. His mother went to her grave unable to say whether her son had known what he was doing, which is maybe the one honest thing anyone can say of him.

[00:15:50]He'd walked into the buck brush with an underpowered pistol or a bolt action rifle and a double bit axe. The details are a rash one of contradictions to this day, and he had simply deliberately subtracted himself from the world.

[00:16:04]What he left behind was small and nearly perfect, some 180 published poems, a book of essays, the Stein thesis, two volumes of letters, and the collected poems Ring of Bone that Donald Allen at last shepherded into print.

[00:16:18]The musicologist Samuel Charters judged Welch's work, quote, among the purest and the most precise of all the Beat creations. And the novelist Maxine Hong Kingston, who revived him in her own books, paid him the compliment that cut closest to the bone. Not everybody who writes poems knows what a poem is. Lew Welch knew.

[00:16:39]City Lights sells him from a window on Columbus Avenue, a Zen Hall on the San Juan Ridge, his name for his Ring of Bone, and on the anniversaries of his disappearance, his devotees still hike to a granite overhang they call Welch's Point and salute the passing turkey vultures with a cheerful, ridiculous, heartbroken "Hey Lou."

[00:16:59]A boy who idolized him carried his name into every jukebox in America.

[00:17:04]Not bad in the end for a man who spent his life certainly was a failure. Peter Coyote, who knew him, offered the closest thing to a verdict. He was a luminous being. He gave off a bright light, and he knew some profound things about the universe, and maybe he couldn't always live up to them. But in emptiness, there are no contradictions.

[00:17:24]Welch himself, in a poem called Theology, had left an instruction that reads now like the epitaph for his whole disappearing act, a koan for anyone still trying to work out what happened on Bald Mountain.

[00:17:37]Guard the mysteries, constantly reveal them.

[00:17:41]He guarded his own and revealed nothing, and in doing so, he made certain we would never stop looking. He went southwest. He is out there still.

[00:17:51]I hope you enjoyed this look at one of the great mysteries of American poetry.

[00:17:55]These days, poets aren't seen as exciting in the way rock stars or socialites are, but we forget how radical and important poets were right up to the Beat era, and Lew was one of the most important, if also one of the most underappreciated.

[00:18:10]In his strange death, I find his words carry even more resonance. Be sure to share with me any lines of his you enjoy down in the comments. I've been Johnny.

[00:18:19]Thanks for tuning in. See you next time.

[00:18:21]Cheers.

[00:18:25]>> [music]