Bowden’s Need to Walk

Chuck Bowden loved the land and he loved the female body. Perhaps he loved both too much. Chuck was a passionate writer about his love affair with the natural landscape and how it was being raped by mankind. He was also a man who admired women’s bodies from afar, while trying to cope with the women in his life. I learned this as our lives intersected in the mid-1980s, when I directed a southwestern literature program to which Bowden contributed. We were an intellectual odd couple.1 What could I, a women’s history scholar, and Bowden, tough journalist and Ed Abbey