ROY BEDICHEK —Ever Penetrated

The one great rule We will serve no of composition is to group or party but will hew hard to the speak the truth. truth as we find it and the right as we —THOREAU The Texas Observer see it. An Independent-Liberal Weekly Newspaper Vol. 51 TEXAS, JUNE n, 1959 10c per copy No. 12 ROY BEDICHEK —ever penetrated. It will be der on the ground instead of hav- a great deal easier to show ing to go in the house and empty The Natural Man Roy Bedichek in the simplic- it into a mechanical contrivance. ities of naturalness than to I've heard him say that some- Nature is the complex of express him in the natural- times in the obscurity of before- all complexities. One part of ness of the highest intellec- daylight he would dig a hole in a man may be as simple and tual and emotional complexi- the ground out in the yard near serene as the cow chewing ties. "the shack"—his study—and ex- her cud in the noonday shade His going to bed with the of a tree a thousand miles chickens in summertime and not and a hundred years away too much later in the wintertime J. Frank Dobie from any milking machine ; and getting up with the morning and yet the whole of this star at all times made his friends crete into it, covering the place same man may be as com- smile. He favored several kinds with dirt like a cat. It gave him plex as the genius of Shake- of independence common to the a satisfaction .Ao fertilize the speare—that is to say, the country. It did him good, he said, ground. He liked to cook outdoors, greatest genius in the world to walk out and empty his blad- eat outdoors, sleep outdoors, look and listen outdoors, be at one with the unexplaining wind from the south, with the swing of the ere id at fectoi Great Dipper around the North n Star, and with the first bob-whit- ing at dawn. He preferred camp- ing on a hill so that he could one Itiff man watch the firmament, rather than down in a shady valley by water. The last car he bought, in 1951, Two things are inextricably mixed : Bedichek himself and was a Dodge pickup truck in Bedichek as a symbol. which he could carry enough Some of us who never spent much time with him still water to make his camp on a more or less realized ourselves in him. He was what we hill comfortable for a day or two. tried to be : Artist, scholar, and primitive all in one. He must This pickup was for camp pur- have been well aware of this. There is a letter on the table poses, but he used it to run, about from my old-time roommate and blood brother Ted Thomp- in also, his wife owning a sedan. son— He got an immense satisfaction Tam lo'ed him like a vera brither ; out of trucking in cow manure, They had been fou for weeks thegither !— also occasionally chicken manure, telling of a debate that he and Mr. Bedi were having on a for his compost pile, with which familiar theme. Ted was contending that although there was he annually fertilized his garden. a real Socrates—a stonecutter who went barefoot in the He got a satisfaction out of haul- streets of Athens and disputed philosophy with all corners ing his own wood in from the and perhaps even drank all the others under the table at country; he liked especially ce- Agathon's banquet—the Socrates of the Dialogues is Plato's dar stumps that he wouldn't have idealized image of man as the lover of wisdom. to cut for the fireplace. He had —Neal Douglass Photo But it does not really matter. Maybe Plato overidealized complete camp equipment, in- Socrates and maybe we have overidealized Mr. Bedi. Even cluding a tent-fly to go with the Bedichek in his Tomato Patch so, we shall do better for loving the myth we ourselves have truck. Part of the equipment was helped to make no less than the man himself. a field guide to the flora of the I knew Mr. Bedi for years but because of time and chance country and a field guide to the I knew him better through Ted than by being with him my- birds. He always took along self. Only once did I spend a full day with him. That hap- something to read as well as to The respect of pened when I went to Austin to write a rather trivial news- consult; above all, he took along paper story about Frank Dobie. the most richly and variously The three of us went out to a little ranch that Mr. Frank stored mind I have known. Not had in Burnet County. He had offered to bet that one of the for him the dream of retiring to intelligent men' wild cherry trees growing along the creek was at least a foot some primitive land and mating in diameter. For Dobie, the claim was astonishingly modest. with "some savage woman" to This is a special issue on Roy sion of greatness it inspires." To The three of us measured his tree and found that, it was rear his dusky race. For him Bedichek, who died May 21 at the t h e league's competitions in more than two feet in diameter. We hunted for flint chips on back to nature was not back to age of 80. sports, speech, music, and writ- the creek flat—one bunch of Indians or another left flakes the primitive, there to be saved He was born in Illinois in 1878 ing he gave most of his life. on nearly every creek flat in the whole Edwards Plateau from "poring over miserable and brought to Texas at five by Along the way he became a country—but we found only two chips of flint and one spent books." his teacher parents, who tutored naturalist, a camper, a gardener, .30-30 bullet. him until he entered the Univer- and an intellectual steeped in the We watched two birds having a fight. Mr. Frank and I IS FATHER, James Madison sity of Texas. classics. With $5,000 from the knew that one of them was a scissor-tailed flycatcher but H Bedichek, an ex-Confederate For 15 years after college he Texas Historical Society and Mr. Bedi had to explain that the other one was a cowbird soldier, quoted philosophers and bummed around the country and sanctuary at Walter Webb's Fri- and she was trying to lay an egg in the flycatcher's nest. talked philosophy at the family the world. He picked cotton in day Mountain camp in his late And I blew a dog-calling horn that was hanging on the back dining table. He proved up on a the South, peeled potatoes on. a sixties he began to write his porch of the house, just to see if it would really blow. It quarter-section of land near the river boat, picked berries in New books. In the last dozen years of would. village of Eddy, not far from Jersey, washed dishes in a Chi- his life he completed four of But the thing I remember best is watching Mr. Bedi wash Waco in central Texas. Here he nese cafe in New York City, them: Adventures with a. Texas the dishes after we ate dinner and took a nap. This is a and his wife ran what they called tramped over the English, French Naturalist (Doubleday 1947), Ka- simple act. Millions of people, mostly women, wash the the Eddy Scientific and Literary and German countrysides, as- rankaway Country (Doubleday dishes every day. But it is not often that you see an artist, a Institute, dubbed the Bedichek sisted a fake divine in Boston, 1950), Educational Competition scholar, a naturalist, and a teacher of young men wash the School by the public. Mrs. Bedi- dug coal and scouted rivers in (University of Texas 1956), and a dishes. chek boarded and roomed some West Virginia, cut off hogs' book on smells, publication pend- Knowing how to do the simple things has got to be a sort of the pupils. Roy's aptitude for heads in a Chicago slaughter- ing. of desperate, lost-soul cult with me in the past few years : books was as congenital as that house, and homesteaded a dugout About 11:30 on the Thursday How to use an axe, a shovel, and a hoe ; how to call the dogs for milk. The atmosphere of lit- in Oklahoma. morning of May 21 he asked Mrs. with blowing horn ; how to climb the tree and kick the coon erature and of thought was as Mrs. Bedichek says he had Bedichek for his lunch a . little out ; how to build a fire with one match in the middle of a natural to him as the atmosphere "lots of yella hair, and green early as he was excursioning into thunderstorm. in which a lone buzzard soars eyes with lots of spots in them." the country. "I've got some So I watched Mr. Bedi wash the dishes and I thought, over a cedar-covered hill or in With a wife and children, he corn bread almost done, you want without ever saying so : There is at least one full man left in which a coyote trots through the worked as editor of a newspaper to wait?" she asked.

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