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6 Ranch Podcast
6 Ranch Podcast
The 1948 Los Gatos Canyon Plane Wreck
In this episode I interview Tim Hernandez, who has dedicated years to researching and locating the families of all 32 passengers killed in the famous 1948 plane wreck at Los Gatos Canyon.
This episode is a reflection on the power of writing, the importance of honoring memory, and the journey from procrastination to inspiration as we tackle the final, often elusive, last line of a book.
Learn more about Tim and his writing.
Check out the new DECKED system and get free shipping.
Check out NICKS BOOTS and use code 6ranch for a free gift.
writers don't come upon the first line as the first line. You don't write the first line in your first line. You know what I mean. You just don't. That's after you've written hundreds of pages and suddenly you go that is a first line, material, right, and you pull that all the way to the front again and that becomes the first line. And you know a lot of folks who are at least starting out writing too. We don't realize that. They just kind of think and I'm like that's not how it works.
Speaker 2:Yeah, your first line is going to just let you just jump into the story, start telling it. You'll figure out the line later. These are stories of outdoor adventure and expert advice from folks with calloused hands. I'm James Nash and this is the Six Ranch Podcast. This episode of the Six Ranch Podcast is brought to you by DECT. That's D-E-C-K-E-D.
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Speaker 1:Well, you know, I like to think of everything as poetry, to be perfectly honest, and I don't even just mean, I'm not just saying that because I'm a writer, and by that I mean the way that I just move about the world, the way that I see things. You know, for me it's always like through the filter of language, always, you know, I mean even now, just walking in here, it's like. You know, for me it's always like through the filter of language, always, you know, um, I mean, even now, just walking in here, it's like, you know, there's so many textures. I know the listeners out there can't see this, but uh, but there's so many textures inside this room and instantly my mind starts to want to attach words to things. You know, like it's just, uh, it's a way to it, doesn't? It does several things at the same time.
Speaker 1:I feel like, in one way, I want to honor the spaces that I'm in by just kind of acknowledging and making a sort of mental list of things I see, but also as a way for me to just sort of make sense of new worlds that I'm entering in, spaces. You know, it's the way I see things, it's like a lens, basically. But and so for me to, for me to sit down and decide, oh, I'm going to write something today sometimes, sometimes it just these things that I don't, I don't, even I'm not paying attention to necessarily. I just come to me in that moment and start to spill forth on the page and I'm like, hey, I already knew that. I captured those things in my memory a while back. You know if they make it to the page or not, that's a different. That's a different story.
Speaker 2:But so, yeah, I think everything is in and it's just a matter of when I set it down. Yeah, yeah, I took more poetry classes than any other type of class in college, right, and by the time I graduated, I felt like I was farther away from understanding what poetry was than when I started.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And I think that that's true. That's not to say that I wasn't learning. I think what I'm trying to say there is that anything that you learn more about part of that process is understanding how little you understand about it.
Speaker 1:For sure.
Speaker 2:But it is a difficult thing to describe or certainly to define.
Speaker 1:You know what? Yeah, I agree with that out the gate. I think that a lot of the difficulty, though, comes by probably a lot of our conditioning. If you've gone through public school systems, you know or just a lot of the way in general, people perceive what poetry is and what it looks like, and it doesn't have to be that way, and poetry really is very easily accessible if we are taught how to look for it.
Speaker 2:You know what I mean. So how would you teach somebody how to look for poetry Right?
Speaker 1:right. So again, you know, like. So I teach in a creative writing program and I think a lot of writing programs specifically tend to like want to perpetuate this idea that poetry needs to be complicated, intellectual, you need to have read this and that and the other in order to understand it. I don't believe that that's how we should be. That's one way to look at poetry. It's not the way.
Speaker 1:I think that poetry is something that all of us feel and are touched by in our everyday lives in one way or another. It's just that we're not attuned to that. We don't know that until someone points it out to us, and I mean one perfect example, as I was driving up this long, beautiful drive right now, is music. I mean, you know, music is one thing and I'm hearing the song playing and I can tell you that there's probably nowhere else I can hear that song and take in the scene that I'm taking in as I'm driving this, that feel that doesn't.
Speaker 1:I can't put words to it, but all of it just makes sense. It's, there's no words, I don't even want to describe it, it just I'm like the language, the music, the tone, the instrumentation, the guitar, and listening and watching the scenes, the green and the mountains. All that, to me, is poetry and it is informing you, know it'll, it'll. You'll feel different driving up this driveway than you will feel driving through new york city you know what I mean like we don't have to put words to it, but we know that it's working on us.
Speaker 1:And that's how poetry, I think, tends to work, which is a real, I guess you could say it's a real, instinctual way of life, an instinctual process, and I think sometimes we think poetry is stuck in the brain, it's in the head needs to have these fancy words or whatever else, but it's not. It's something that we feel every day. There's something about that feeling, Um, not just in music, Um, but you know, we're always seeking words for people we love, or a description for something that we that has hurt us and we are angry about. You know, we're seeking poems inside of that. We feel that too, and that's where poetry exists. It's those spaces that you know we don't we're seeking poems inside of that. We feel that too, and that's where poetry exists.
Speaker 1:It's those spaces that, you know, we don't think we pay much attention to generally because we're so busy trying to survive every day, but it's there and it's working on us every day. You know even the tender way your child or your daughter comes up to you and, I don't know, offers you a flower because she picked it out of the front yard, or or offers you a dead bird because she found it in the front yard. There's some sense of poetry inside of that. I think that's the space where poetry lives, which is like this is a gesture of love and it's very tender and yet at the same time, it's kind of weird. She's giving me a dead bird or whatever that is you know.
Speaker 1:So I think that poetry has room in those spaces.
Speaker 2:We just aren't trained to think in those ways yeah, normally sometimes in in some of these classes and in in lit theory especially, I felt like I was probably put in a situation where I was having to look into it a bit much, yeah, rather than just uh, kind of see, see where it takes me and and then go with that it. It is oftentimes for a consumer, for a reader, it's a portal into something else and it has nothing to do with what the author was experiencing or intending. If they even had any intention in the first place. I think a lot of good poets don't. That's right, I agree with that.
Speaker 1:In fact, I think that sometimes you know our mind again, our mind wants to enter poetry the way you would enter, i't know just any anything else. If you see a pamphlet with language on it. You want, you want it to make sense to you in some way. And that's how a lot of people want to enter poetry, like they can read a poem and think to themselves well, I don't get it, you know, yeah, but that's okay, yeah, and that's okay, yeah, maybe it's not for you, maybe that poem is not for you, or maybe you're also entering it with, with this sort of idea of like a pamphlet.
Speaker 1:You're trying to figure out what the message is, when in fact, maybe it's not even about a literal message. Maybe it's like jazz music, maybe it's just about the feeling of the language coming out of your mouth, or maybe it's the feeling of the sort of music that's, or the rhythm that's created inside of a poem. Poems also exist like jazz music in many ways. You know where you can hear or not even just jazz, just any instrumental song. You can hear an instrumental song and it touches you in some way. You don't have words for it, there's no words that are a part of it, but yet it touches you in a way, and that's, I think, also how poetry exists. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Well, why don't you introduce yourself and tell people why they should be listening to you talk about it? They shouldn't be. I don't even know. I don't even like hearing myself talk about it, man.
Speaker 1:No, you know, my name is Tim Hernandez and I'm a writer. I write in different genres poetry, fiction, nonfiction but the reason why I write in different genres is because I don't care about genres, I just write.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And however the thing comes out, I'm okay with what that creature looks like and I'll let others call it what they want to call it. You know that's my approach to writing, because for me writing has always been more about. It's always felt like an urgent. There's always been like this kind of an urgency for me about like how do I describe my situation? And you know it started for me. Let me go back a little bit in my life. I grew up in the San Joaquin Valley in Central California, all ag land. I grew up the son of migrant farm workers. My folks were farm workers, my grandfather was a farm worker. We traveled California, oregon, washington, colorado, the sort of big circuit. We did this big circle when I was a kid, growing up, picking crops, all different types, berries, everything.
Speaker 2:So mostly based around harvest? Yeah, exactly, it was following the harvest.
Speaker 1:In fact, yeah, absolutely. And then you know, and as a kid growing up and traveling a lot, uh, you know we were bored as hell in the cars and so my mother would read us books a lot you know, and um, and my dad.
Speaker 1:It's kind of funny. My dad would just get sick and tired of hearing the same story over and over as he'd be driving. He'd say, well, that's not how. That's not how goldilocks and the three bears really went. Let me tell you the real story. And then he starts spinning the whole story or something else.
Speaker 1:And, as kids, you know, we just my sister and I were the only two siblings. It's um, we, we love that sort of moment, that that time, you know, and of course I didn't know that that would affect me or have any role in my life years late, it's dormant. Years later, um, you know, I'm living my life, uh, young adult in the world, and, uh, things start to happen. You know, just in my life, just you know, shit hits the fan as life will throw at you and I felt the need to gravitate, I felt the need to find words. I was like you know how do I describe this?
Speaker 1:Or the frustration of not having the words to say what I wanted to say, or to speak to the powers that be, or to even just respond to my family at times and fill in some of the blanks. There was a lot of silence in my family, you know, when they'd feel something painful, they would just clam up and not say a word for weeks and that kind of thing really affected me to the point that I I don't know, but naturally probably because I had storytelling sort of parents growing up but naturally I gravitated towards wanting to find the words. And once I did, and I started to put words down, it felt good, it felt like like medicine to be honest, I don't know, there's no other way to describe that for me and I wanted to keep doing that, keep doing that. And then something else happened which, once I started sharing those words with people and communities and audiences, you know, I'm surprised that I could talk about something painful and people start clapping Isn't that weird.
Speaker 1:They start clapping and I'm like whoa. That's a whole other level. And then they even do something different, which is like they start talking to you about it and then sharing their stories, and that blew my mind. I didn't expect that.
Speaker 2:Uh, it can be a lot to take on as well, right?
Speaker 1:Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 2:Um, especially during reads, I I've I've been in some situations where I read something that was like hurtful or personal to me, and then people want to come up and and then share their story. It's like I'm a, I'm spent right now. I'm, you know, I'm, I'm a raw nerve, I'm a pile of meat and this is. I don't have the, I don't have the capacity to deal with my own stuff, much less yours. That's right, there's times when you can, but, yeah, it can be a lot. It can be a lot. Something that I find very interesting about you, and the reason that I started with asking about poetry, is I find investigative journalism to be almost on the other end of the spectrum of poetry in a lot of ways, but still very much connected. Right, they're on the same spectrum. You know, if you go farther down that road, then you end up with, like you know, scientific or technical writing that is you know, unreadable except for people who already understand the information that they're reading.
Speaker 2:right, yeah, but investigative journalism and investigative nonfiction? There are some guardrails that are around that for how you can attack it.
Speaker 1:There are, there are, and you know what. I'm grateful that I don't call myself an investigative journalist or don't align myself with that. I take some of the tools from their toolbox and use them for what I do, because they have some pretty stringent ethics and you know, like you said, these boundaries around journalism that I'm too much of an artist to abide by. You know what I mean, like my loyalty. If I have any one loyalty in all of this, it's to telling a great story, you know, and, and journalists don't, I mean they, they, they have different loyalties, I think, different alignments, and then probably, if you ask every journalist, they have a different answer. But, um, but they abide by certain rules and you know ethics and codes.
Speaker 1:That I don't, you know, um, and one thing for sure, too, is that journalists, for the most part anyways, um, you know, are on a deadline. They're always a quick turnaround. They've, they've only got like one shot to get an interview. Maybe they can return back for another, second interview or something, but that's rare because the turn, the deadlines, are so quick. In my case, I can investigate something for 10, 15 years and yeah, yeah, and I apologize if I use the wrong word there but yeah, the the deadlines are quick.
Speaker 2:So you, man, you just don't have a budget to be able to go back and you know, meet somebody else and talk again. That's a real thing and if it's a story that is currently happening, you've got to be on it because you know the national attention span is pretty short, getting shorter by the minute.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely. And you know, and no, no, no shade at all to you know I would be honored to be a journalist, but you know they do the work and I don't do that work, you know, and that's out of respect for them I say that. But I definitely have studied a lot of investigative journalists and their books and taken the tools that they use. In fact, the way that I write takes tools from a lot of different toolboxes. You know, journalism is one of them. Fiction writers are another thing, historical fiction's another. I read these things and I'm like I'm going to borrow this tool.
Speaker 1:That's pretty cool, even like some radio and oral testimony interviews that I've done, like Studs Terkel, you know, who was based out of Chicago back in the day and was just interviewing everyday folks about their stories. He publishes them Great. He publishes them Great. That's powerful document of the time and the people he's talking about. But as a story it can tend to bore you if you read some of his books. I say that with any Stud Circle fan out there listening to me. You know all respect to them also, but it's important. It's important what he was doing, but as a story it tends to, you know, just kind of be a little boring to be honest and I thought but I like that technique.
Speaker 1:How do I use that technique? Interview people use their own language, but do it in a way that creates a compelling story still. So I'm borrowing from a lot of different people in different fields, I think.
Speaker 2:And that's perfectly fair, and it's great to be honest with yourself about that too. Yeah, the Six Ranch Podcast is brought to you by Nick's Handmade Boots, a family-owned company in Spokane, washington. This year, nix is celebrating its 60th anniversary of making quality work boots for men and women in America. I recently visited their factory to see the boot making process from start to finish. As a rancher myself, it was a rewarding experience for me to see, feel and smell the quality leathers processed in hundred-year-old tanneries throughout America. This leather is cut, sewn, lasted and sold by skilled craftsmen before ending up on the feet of folks ready for a day of honest work.
Speaker 2:I'm currently wearing my Knicks Boots Game Breakers on the 6th Ranch as I work cattle, plant my garden, build fence and prepare for the upcoming hunting season. Knicks has a full assortment of men's and women's work boots to serve wildland firefighters, ranchers, tradespeople, military personnel and anyone else who values quality footwear made in America. Visit knicksbootscom today to find your next pair of quality American-made work boots. Add a pair of boots and a work belt to your cart and use the code 6RANCH that's the number 6 and the word RANCH to receive the belt for free. I listened to a great interview with Ted Nugent and he was talking about how he was inspired and used so many of the tools that he got from Chuck Berry. And these are wildly different artists, right yeah totally.
Speaker 2:He was specifically talking about Stranglehold and he picked up a guitar during this interview and he showed the process of taking Chuck Berry music and turning it into Stranglehold. And once you see it, then you can connect all that and be like, wow, that makes sense. And a lot of artists are that way. Right, they're creative people and they're geniuses in their own right, but not everything that they do is original genius to them Like they're picking up tools that they've learned from other people, and it's a great way to go Like why not, it is?
Speaker 1:It is. And you know what I'll. I'll be honest, like I'm glad that we started this, this conversation, with poetry, because I think and I know I know it's because poetry was my first sort of entry point into all this that now you know you can, you can do anything with poetry. Poetry can be all kinds of wild, weird things with language and you know the U S poet laureate, uh, the last one he says, his quote is you know, poetry is whatever the poet says it is.
Speaker 1:And that's kind of true. It's like you see, 101 ways to write a poem and I love that freedom to utilize pieces of this and do that and and I think having that as a foundation has is what has allowed me to play with all these different tools and techniques and see what I come up with. I kind of still approach writing as poetry, even if it's prose or anything else, but the way I see it and piece it together is like a poem.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, I've been trying to figure out how to even start to ask this question and I'm just going to do it knowing that it's wrong, but I want to get into this plane crash, oh yeah, and I think that it's crazy. I think it's crazy that we talk about the death of a bunch of people as the death of an airplane foremost, right, like, that's a little bit nuts. It is nuts. Um, who cares about some aluminum? Right, right, but that's what we call it. We call it a plane crash, right, oh yeah, right, we do, you're, right's what we call it.
Speaker 1:We call it a plane crash, right? Oh, yeah, right, we do. You're right. Tell me the story Instead of calling it like something else you know, You're right, we do call it a plane crash, I think too. That goes back, though, to the fascination of what airplanes?
Speaker 1:began to do in 1948, what they began to do for us in 1948. For us in 1948. We're talking specifically about a Douglas DC-3 airplane, what they call the war horse. It was the workhorse of the war in World War II. It was a resilient airplane. It could take rounds of fire at it, it would load up jeeps and ammunition. It was just a workhorse of the war. A lot of historians have said that the war wouldn't have been won without the Douglas DC-3.
Speaker 1:But for the first time now, after the war's over in 45, then we have a surplus of a lot of these airplanes, and so they start to give them a new paint job, take away the war smell outside of the seats and then put new seats inside of them and they started to use them to transport people. So to this day, a lot of um, you know, uh uh, historians will consider the Douglas DC three the grandfather of all the transportation flights that we have today. Because of that reason it was one of the first airplanes that really was transporting people in mass Like, and so since all that's brand new at that time, um, there were several plane crashes that were happening right around that period of a few years. They were really starting to use Douglas Douglas, six DC threes, you know. In fact they changed the name because for the war it was called a C 48, that airplane, right it was. After the war they they started using it for civilians. They called it a DC three. So you know, we have America has a fascination with a new form of transportation. Before then we had trains and buses. Mostly, whenever they were deporting folks it was always either by bus or by train.
Speaker 1:And so now we're using airplanes for the first time and the thing crashes in California on January 28, 1948, kills everybody 28 Mexicans that were here working as part of the program that the United States had with Mexico at the time. They were all killed. The 28 Mexicans were killed while being transported, and so were the four American crew members, the pilot, co-pilot, stewardess and immigration officer all killed. So it makes headlines. In fact they called it at the time the worst plane crash in California's history. And then the Mexicans were buried in a mass, unmarked grave, no names on there, just not transported back home, they were just put there into a big hole in the ground, never to be heard from again, and that was also at the time the largest mass grave in California's history. So that was breaking some historical ground, that one incident alone. But I think that's why the fascination with the idea of a plane crash, or the largest plane crash, because that was pretty new at the time.
Speaker 1:There was a dc was it a six maybe I think that crashed in utah three months right before that crash, in october of 1947, and that one killed more people. That was in utah, bryce canyon, and I killed, I think, like 50 something folks and the newspaper accounts for that one were way different than the one three months later. Uh, that one had profiles of everybody that was killed on. It had the names of all 50 something passengers it had. It had most of their photographs of who they were, talked a lot about them. It was just several pages in the newspapers. Three months later the same kind of accident happens with mexicans and there's nothing, there's no mention of any of them.
Speaker 2:So what was the national sentiment like, or the Californian sentiment like, towards migrant workers in?
Speaker 1:1948? 1948, you know it was kind of. It was always it was like a bipolar situation because on one hand, you know, the United States had a deal with Mexico how Mexico could be an ally for the United States in the war. A lot of the war at the time, a lot of our, you know, boys at home were were who were normally in factories and, you know, working doing a lot of this, railroads and all that. The war happened and they ended up having to take off to go do the war right, and so obviously a lot of jobs were left. And so what the deal was was the Bracero program, which is, you know, let's bring in Mexicans in train loads and as much as we can to fill in these job gaps. And so they did. They opened up recruiting stations all throughout central Mexico and the United States did this, the government and recruited workers in, and workers all came in as part of the program and pretty much if you just stood in the line long enough, you'd get a card to come work. Anybody could come work. So they all came in with their worker cards.
Speaker 1:The visa works working visas that they had at the time were anywhere from the range of some.
Speaker 1:Some were three months, some six months, sometimes a year, but then they'd have to what they were doing at the time too, because they weren't sure how long the war was going to keep going.
Speaker 1:What they would do is like if someone's visa expired, like, say, for example, you're a farmer and you have all these workers and they got working cards to work here and their cards are about to expire, but you know that the war is still happening and all that.
Speaker 1:So what they would do is they would actually tell their workers, like, let's send you back, tell them that this is the field you're going to come back to, and then basically just renew your card and then you'd come back. So there was a lot of that happening, a lot of gray territory and all of that. If you stayed past your date, well then you were here technically illegal. If one of the farmers were treating you bad and say, just mistreating you, not giving you breaks at all, working you like a dog all day, not paying you enough, and then the farmer you heard on the other side of the highway Highway 99, is treating is treating his workers good, you jump ship and go work for that guy and now you're technically breaching your contract okay so there was a lot of this kind of gray zone happening.
Speaker 1:Um, but uh, for all the research particularly to this incident, the workers were were here with their cards and their work visas had expired, their contracts had expired, so they were being sent back to mexico at the time. It's kind of crazy because as they're sending workers out, you know the government's sending, or they're sending, they're deporting some of the workers of our set of workers who are here. As they're deporting them, the farmers love the program. The farmers are like, keep bringing that those workers here. You know they're, they're good workers, are hard workers and they don't stop man, and let's keep bringing them here. So, but the government saying, no, we're sending them back.
Speaker 1:War is over. Now it's 1948. Now the war has been gone for three years, why are they still here? Let's send them back. So they're sending them back in droves now, but the farmers are trying to find loopholes to keep bringing them here. So that's what I mean by this little bipolar situation almost. So some farmers are telling their workers hey, you know, you have a job, come right back here. So the workers are going back and finding incentive to come all the way back again, you know. So there was a lot of that happening one hand not telling the other what it's doing. And that's where, in the middle of it all, we have the 28 mexican passengers getting this plane take off, crash and everybody's dead.
Speaker 2:Yeah okay, why did it crash?
Speaker 1:uh, the accident reports say that a fuel uh leak on the left engine. Uh yeah, there was like a pipe that busted, basically leaked fuel everywhere and it acted like a blowtorch and it torched off the wing. When the wing fell off it opened up a big gaping hole in the left side of the airplane. The plane spiraled down nose first into the canyon, spilling people out. Eyewitnesses saw that actually unfolding at about 5,000 feet before you know up in the sky and they followed it down to one of the ranchers' property there. Plane crash killed everybody.
Speaker 1:That's what the reports say, but there's a lot of controversy around that that nobody wants to tell me more about. As I researched because I showed the accident report is like hold on a second Frankie. Our brother, frankie Atkinson, was a World War II hero decorated pilot who has so much experience in that specific airplane. He actually he's actually flown two Douglas DC-3s during the war, one time over the Himalayas where a wing caught fire and he crash landed that sucker and survived, and he's done that twice before. There's no one who's got more experience in that scenario than Frank Atkinson. So then they ended up just to clear their brother's name. They ended up hiring their own investigation.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:And that cleared his name. So then the officials say, okay, frank Atkinson's off the hook, it's a busted, leaky, you know fuel pipe. But then a year later, a year later, the co-pilot's wife is in a courtroom and she's shouting at the courtroom. I happen to know that that plane was overloaded with people and that's what brought the plane down. She says this in a courtroom and she says she claims there were 39 people inside the airplane.
Speaker 1:The pilots I consulted with, they were two pilots who have experience in that Douglas DC-3. They read all these reports and they said you know what, it's just curious, I can't imagine how just even a fuel line would have taken off the wing. They said, because that plane is known, it was known for its engines catching fire at the time and it created and it had a built-in firewall. And they said too yeah, we've flown, we've landed, uh, with one engine alone too, because the engines have caught fire in the douglas dc. So it sounds pretty common. And they explain how there's this firewall that contains the sort of fire around the engine the moment it happens. And they have all these different things that they do you know, feather the prop and you know, shut this engine down and doing all these things that are made to do that, and that's why you're able to survive fires like that. There's like it's no way. There's no way that that fuel line would have ripped off through the firewall at least that's there and they said we, we can't.
Speaker 1:They scratched their heads and they're like we can't figure out why that would have happened yeah don't know why, said well, do you think it could have been that there were too many passengers in that airplane? They said maybe. Uh, one of them said, though probably unlikely. He's like I don't know unless there were a lot of passengers. He said because that thing was carrying Jeeps and what he's like there had to have been a lot of people, um, but here's something strange.
Speaker 1:So I'll conclude this by saying this here. Here's what's strange is, when I first started doing this research in 2010, the first articles I found online had the names of they didn't have the names of all the passengers, but had the names of some of the passengers and it said three people specifically, three or four people specifically, and it had their names and it said their bodies were found on the ground in the crash site. And then it said that they pulled their identification cards out of their pocket or their wallet and that's how they identified these three men. They give the names, yet in the final report, in all the death certificates, I've seen those three men never show up again. You don't find those names anywhere again. So that led me to think.
Speaker 1:Well, I wonder if those three men I wonder what happened why aren't they in any of the other reports? Ever again and in fact, you don't see that appear in the newspaper ever again they don't mention it. It was just like within 24 hours they mentioned that. After that they didn't mention it again, and it made me think. You know, there could have been a lot more, probably on that who knows? We don't know how many, to be honest.
Speaker 2:Would you know, an additional 10 or 11 people really make the difference?
Speaker 1:I don't know. I don't know, that's, that's the question.
Speaker 2:I don't know and this is this is a very, very cold case, obviously, with a lot of aircraft, uh, aircraft issues and really all kinds of emergencies. It's never, one thing.
Speaker 1:Yeah Right, it's never one thing.
Speaker 2:Yeah Right, it's the Swiss cheese model have you heard that before.
Speaker 1:No, explain that to me Okay.
Speaker 2:So let's take a block of Swiss cheese and cut it into slices and then shuffle it like a deck of cards. Yeah, there's not going to be any holes anywhere, right, right, but if you get the right combination, then these holes are going to start lining up. And If you get the right combination, then these holes are going to start lining up. And if you have an overloaded aircraft and you have too many people on it and you have people on there that aren't on the manifest, and then you have some other mechanical failure, then you've created a situation where all those things are insurmountable even by a very skilled pilot.
Speaker 1:And that's very likely. What happened? That's very possible. That's very likely. What happened, that's very likely.
Speaker 2:It's also incredibly common during situations like this for the pilot to get the blame because these aircraft companies. They certainly don't want people to lose confidence in them as a company in their aircraft. It's much easier to blame the pilot.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it is, and that's another curious thing you mentioned. Is that so a month after the accident happened that or maybe it's two months, it's like a month or two after the accident that specific airline company goes out of business, dissolves the company and within six months reopens in their new name? Yeah, so they? Were really trying to wash their hands of it all.
Speaker 2:A little rebrand, new name? Yeah, so they were really trying to wash their hands of it all. A little rebranding campaign yeah, exactly so is what happened illegal?
Speaker 1:Well, that's a big question.
Speaker 2:Is this a crime?
Speaker 1:That's a big question, because when we say is what happened, we have to specify what we're talking about.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Is the plane crash illegal? No, that was an accident. Yeah, is sending plane crash illegal? No, that was an accident. Yeah, Um is sending them back illegal? No, that was part of the contract. Yeah, that was part of the deal. Uh, for these passengers, is not sending them their remains back home to their families Illegal? No, I'm sure that was legal, but does that mean it's right?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:That's another question. You know, I think, that I mean just to give you an example. Um, that year I asked the Mexican consulate consulate this in in Fresno County, there where it happened. I had an interview with him early on and I said how come you didn't send them? You know, these are your citizens. Why didn't you send them home? You know, let's, let's forget the United States government for a minute these are your citizens. Why didn't you take the responsibility of sending them home?
Speaker 1:And then the first thing he said as well first he said actually he cleared himself of it. He said I wasn't even born when it happened. That's what he said. How would you have known who to send where All the remains were just annihilated? And I said I agree with that, that's what the reports say. Then, who did they send home to the Atkinsons back in Rochester? You know what I mean. Who did they send home to the American crew member in Berkeley and in Long Beach? Because all of them, and in fact they were probably the most, because they were at the front end of the nose where, according to the news reports, it hit nose first and all the bodies went through like a sieve of all the gears and everything else.
Speaker 1:You know, what I'm saying and if you're at the nose of that, you're not going to be identifiable. We don't know. But they were sent home back to Rochester, which is geographically almost twice as far as sending some of the passengers home where they were from. And that same year and this is what I told the Mexican consulate you know that same year there were over 200,000 Mexicans that were sent home by train. That same year you couldn't fit the remains of 28 more people inside of a box, put them in a train and send them home. Like, why were they not sent home? You know, and I don't think that that's any one system or any one entity's responsibility, I think anybody who was a human being at the time, who had the power to do something about it, should have done something about it. Just sent him home. That's about human dignity, right? That ain't about policy or anything else, just about human dignity okay, so the plane crashes, yeah, everybody's dead.
Speaker 2:Who who's showing up and dealing with? And you know this is a very overwhelming situation for anybody to walk up on.
Speaker 1:Yeah, what happened next? So it landed on the home on the ranch cattle ranchers who were the Gaston family. The Gaston family were originally from Oklahoma and they had been there for a couple of generations now. That was their property. It crashed down on their property across the street from minimum security road camp. So prisoners had actually I witnessed it happening About 100 prisoners. I witnessed it happening and unfolding. They opened up the gates, gave everybody shovels and all that and said go out there and put out the fires.
Speaker 1:Prisoners run down the hill, probably about a mile maybe down the hills from where the accident happened. The Gaston family, they get all their family members together and go straight down there. They're the first ones to arrive. Actually, the Gaston family Prisoners came right after that, the Gaston family. A man named Red Childers shows up first and immediately he's looking for survivors and obviously he doesn't find any survivors. But he sees bodies hanging in trees. He sees body parts laying around everywhere, just a gruesome scene. And he steps back because the plane is still in flames. Part of the mountainside, there is all in flames and he just starts to try and help put out fires.
Speaker 1:More and more obviously people from the Los Gatos Canyon start to circle and hear about it. They start using the party line because they had the party line system back in the day. You know, I would just get on the phone and you can hear other people's conversations, start telling them what's happening. News starts to spread quickly and um, and within that afternoon the associated press, the united press international, they're all there reporting on it. And they're reporting it, you know, for american crew members. Here's who they are. And then there are 28 deportees and that report makes it all the way out to new york, all the way you know, from, as I like to say, from california to the new york islands. And it lands on the ears of the folk icon woody guthrie. He hears about it and the radio and he decides that he doesn't.
Speaker 1:He wants to restore the dignity of the passengers because they weren't called by names and he's a big advocate of names. He had songs about the sinking of the Good Reuben James, a big Navy ship that got sunk and killed like 80-something soldiers. This is years before the plane crash and he writes a song, a 20-minute song, and the whole song is just what were their names? Tell me what were their names that you have a friend on the Good Reuben James. What were their names? Tell me what were their names. That you have a friend on the good ruben james what were their names? And then he recites all their names of all the passengers for 20 minutes, you know, um, so he was huge on names, so he was trying to do that and he wrote a song about it and never published it as a song but it went on to become a song and, uh, recorded by everybody under the sun bruce springsteen, bob dylan, dolly parton, willie Nelson, everyone, yeah.
Speaker 2:Interesting, yeah, okay, so that didn't get immediate traction obviously. Right. Where did you come into contact with this story in a way that made you decide to work on it for so long?
Speaker 1:I tried to push it away for so long. First I was like I'm not working on that, I'm not touching that. I was working on a book that took place in 1947, um, in the San Joaquin Valley where I'm from, and it was that book was about, uh, you know the great, what some consider the great American novelist, Jack Kerouac. Excuse me, Jack Kerouac's book on the road, and he had he had talked about in his book, uh, spending two weeks in Central California and the agricultural farmlands with a woman, a Mexican woman named B Franco, and he talks about her. My book was about her and her life. I was trying to find her at the time, so I published that book. It's done. It was before all. They will call you this next book and so.
Speaker 1:But as I was researching that book, I saw this newspaper article come up this is 2010. See newspaper article come up and doing research for that other book, 1947. And this newspaper article comes up 1948, a couple months later, January 1948, and it says, you know, very dramatic headlines. It says farm labor accident, 100 prisoners see an airplane fall out of the sky, kills everybody. And I was like, what is this about? So I started to read it. Now here's what's crazy. I was at the right intersection at the right time because I've been listening to woody guthrie's music. Well, I've been a fan of arlo and a lot of other folks music woody's family and I was listening to his music at this moment and, uh, and it was like is this the accident that he wrote that song about?
Speaker 1:you know, and I was like my dad has always been a fan of, like, classic country. My father growing up, he just played country all the time, so I heard all the outlaws, you know, and, and so I heard version of that song by the highwayman when I was younger didn't know anything about it, though, and so it made me rethink it. I heard the song again. In that moment, I said this is the accident that this happened. Holy shit, you know. And so I started to read the whole article and I thought, man, that's pretty heavy. Um, that's cool, I'm gonna just file that away into a folder and not think about it ever again, you know, and that was my first thought focusing on this book. So I kept writing, and every time I kept working on this other book, I'd find information about this plane crash accidentally. It just kept popping up, popping up, popping up. So finally, it was like okay, maybe the universe is trying to tell me something, or maybe not, I don't know. I'm going to just put this into a file and keep all this stuff. And that's what I was doing in 2010 and 2011.
Speaker 1:Finally, in 2011, I think, I finished that other book, sent it out to the publisher and I just said. You know, I had this itch like I need to just go find where they were buried. I just want to go look. And I had never, I've never seen a mass grave before. You know, and I don't know how many people have seen that.
Speaker 1:But when I went and found the cemetery where these Mexican passengers were buried, standing in front of a mass grave, it'll move you, you know, it'll shift something inside of you. You can't help but feel for the people who you know that there's this giant, so this giant patch of lawn with no marker on it at all except this little tiny plaque and it just said 28 mexicans killed in a plane crash rest in peace. That's all it said on it. Don't know who they were and I just, I just was like I need, I need to know the names of them, that's all. I'm not writing a book yet, I'm just, I just need to know the names and that's where it's at. Man, that was 14 years ago. I'm still here working on it, yeah, okay.
Speaker 2:So how do you even go about finding out who they were? How do you get started?
Speaker 1:Well, the first thing I did was and you know, I should say this, I should preface by saying I didn't. I don't have any background in investigation or journalism, any of that. I studied poetry, you know, and that's like we talked about. But I do have one thing that we all have, I think, in common, and that's insatiable curiosity. You know, I'm like I wanted to find out who they were. So I said you know what the hell I'm going to go. So I went over to the cemetery office, the director's office, and I literally just drove that day and went over to the office and I said, hey, who's the director here? And they said a yeah, yeah, I'm new here. He says but I'll look and let you know. I said okay.
Speaker 1:About two weeks later, no, nothing from him. I call him again, I bug him a little bit and he says yeah, yeah, okay, I'll look. So one day he finally calls me and says come, take a look at what I got. So I go to his office. At first he's like who are you, a student, or what are you doing? Like what are you asking me questions for? And I was like no, I said you know, I'm an author and also a bit of a historian. I'm just kind of, I'm just curious, that's all. So he does, he entertains the idea and so he shows me this, what he found in this catalog, and it shows the list of all the it single plot and it just says Mexican National, mexican National, mexican National, 28 times, that's it.
Speaker 1:And I said to him well, have you ever went to the Hall of Records here, the County Hall of Records, and asked if they have the names, since you all like have them buried here, but no names? And he said no, no, I said you should do that. So he does that. Calls me back and he says they gave me a list of names and I said meet you out there. So I met him at the headstone, at the cemetery, I mean, and. But right away I can tell that the names had a lot of errors, you know, because back then during the bracero program, a lot of the mexicans would come across. They were in, uh, you know, processing stations. They weren't writing out their own names. They would tell somebody their names and the typist would type the name and hear it phonetically right, so it's an l an L-O-S-I-L-E-N type deal, totally.
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly, and so a lot of names were mistakes, but at least it was a start. And long story short, that's when I began looking for the names, for the accurate list of names. Finally, one day, two years later two years pass, I'm looking, two years, nothing. 2013 is finally here and I'm like you know what Hell with it? I'm not going to look anymore. It's. I don't even know where to look, how to do this anymore. You know, they're probably all living in Mexico. I don't know Like, and I don't have family in Mexico. You know, I'm third, fourth generation. You know, uh, born here. So I don't, we don't have any relatives, so I don't have any connections.
Speaker 1:To go back, reporter. I said hey, he's a reporter of a bilingual newspaper. I said let me tell you this story, let's see, it's a shot in the dark, let's see if somebody knows anything about the story. So I tell him puts an ad in the paper or like an article in the paper. Paper is out for like three weeks. By then it's dead, nobody's reading it anymore. And I'm like, well, I gave it a shot. All of a sudden, late one night, I get an email. Gentleman says my name is Jaime Ramirez. I've had your newspaper, this newspaper article. For the last three weeks I forgot to call you, but I wanted to contact you and tell you that my grandfather, my uncle, were killed in that plane crash and if you need to know anything, contact me. And I went holy shit, this is unbelievable.
Speaker 1:So, where are you at, where can I meet you? And he says meet me at my restaurant here in Fresno, in the city of Fresno. And I said where is it at? He says it's on the corner of Shaw and Blackstone Avenue. And I said there's only one restaurant I know there. I said is your restaurant, ole Frijole.
Speaker 1:He says that is my restaurant, do you know it? And I said my parents have been taking me there since I was a little boy. I said I do know your restaurant, you know. And so, anyway, I show up. He's the first family member and he's the first one to say to me do you have a list of the names? And I said I have a list. It's got a lot of errors. And he says I have a list too. And I said what list do you have? And he pulls out this old, sippy, rattled, torn apart newspaper from 1948. He lays it on the table. He says I have this list.
Speaker 1:So what happened was a Spanish independent newspaper that was like a newsletter for just the farmworking community at the time. They ran an article and listed everybody in that crash. So there's the first, middle and last name of every passenger and then it says here are the names of their surviving relatives, tells me their relatives' names. And then it says here's the last known address that they lived in in mexico. And I said I don't have that list, man. And he says well, it's yours. I've been waiting for you, someone like you, to come along, and that's how I've been able then to find every family that I've been looking for. Now it's that list, that one piece of clue that the first family I met had.
Speaker 1:Have you found all the names? Found all the names in 2013. We put them all on a proper headstone there and you know it was a memorial headstone. Now that's there at the burial site and we listed all the passengers, including the American crew members. We, you know all the passengers who died. We put their names on there and the story of what happened. But now it was about finding their families and telling the stories of who they were. So that's when my first book was about. All they Will Call you was about their families and their stories and to date, so far, I've been working on it since 2010. Here we are, 14 years later. I've found 14 families of a total of 32 passengers 14 of them.
Speaker 2:And for some of these families did they have multiple family members like this yeah, you know what's interesting?
Speaker 1:So far the Ramirez family is the only one that had two. Well, I shouldn't say that because the Atkinson family had two also their wife, Bobbie, who was a stewardess, and Frankie, the husband. They were a husband and wife that were killed, so them two also. But aside from that, everyone's had only one member. But recently I discovered and separately, they didn't realize, but two of the people on there were cousins and the families didn't realize that because they just have never talked to each other and it was like they found out through this research that they're actually cousins. Yeah, Two cousins were on the plane together, didn't know it. Interesting.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, that's almost comical right. Yeah, like if we're're gonna whoop on a stereotype, that's funny, like for sure there's gonna be cousins involved.
Speaker 1:yeah, you know there's probably a lot of folks who didn't know they had, where they were, one degree of separation from each other you know in that situation, um, yeah, it's crazy. It's crazy, man. Yeah, and that's that's how it's been, yeah, and so it's been quite a journey, you know, it's been a real journey, uh yeah, one of my roommates when I was in the Marine Corps ended up with a job.
Speaker 2:Marines rotate you through jobs right so you've got your primary job that you're trained for. You'll do that for, you know, two to four years, and then they'll roll you into what's called a B billet and then you'll go do some offshoot job. Roll you into what's called a B billet and then you'll go do some some offshoot job. And one of his jobs was to go to places in the Pacific like Iwo Jima, Guadalcanal, and try to find and identify remains of Marines who are still there and try and get them back to the States, back to their families, and that that's an ongoing effort, still from the same time period.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Wow, really, I didn't know that. Yeah, and that's an ongoing effort, still from the same time period. Yeah, wow, really.
Speaker 2:I didn't know that. Yeah, I didn't know that. Has that been written about? I don't know, do you?
Speaker 1:want to write another book, yeah, we write a book in collaboration.
Speaker 2:My friend.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, that's you know. Yeah, that's important work. You know it's important work for closure, for their families and also to honor the dead. You know what I mean. Like, everyone deserves to at least die with their name on a headstone.
Speaker 1:You know at the very least, you know, no matter who you are, what your beliefs are, don't matter, you at least deserve to die with your name on a headstone. Why is that important? You know, I feel like because it's a representation that we once existed. And it's important that we know that because our names and who we are is the link in the chain to all of our past. You know, and we need to know, where we come from, the lineage, the people we come from, the struggles they've come from.
Speaker 1:That's our story, you know, um, you know, to give you an example, back in the, you know, the Roman Senate, way back in the days, the Romans, you know, they're always, they're never short of creativity for ways to torture people, you know. So the Roman Senate had ways, different ways of condemning somebody for their crimes, and one of them was damnatio ad bestias, which was a death by beasts, you know. And so if you did something wrong, they'd put you in the, in the, in the center ring, and, before the audience, let the lions have their way with you. That was one of the ways, but they didn't consider that to be the worst. The one that they considered to be the worst was damnatio memoriae, which was death by erasure. So they didn't only kill you, but then they erased every bit of evidence that you ever existed, so nobody could come find you, and so there was a break in the link of the chain.
Speaker 1:And so you know, just by contrast. This is why our names and the fact that we existed, that evidence is so important to us, you know, and so yeah, and it's also about just basic, it's about human dignity at its most basic. You know you lived. You might have been a. You know you might have been a flawed creature, like most of us, or whatever it is, or whatever your beliefs, but at the end of the day, you were somebody's brother, you were somebody's brother, you were somebody's sister, somebody's father.
Speaker 2:You know you had your people and that's it, you know I can think of of one case where there's tremendous power in in the anonymity of death, and it's it's one that we're all vaguely familiar with, but but not too specifically. That's the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, right, yeah, like that's a very important national monument and it's such a solemn place and such a sacred duty for the troops that continue to guard that tomb 24-7. My friend, tim Butler, created the pistols that they carry um, so when the when the pistol contract changed in the military, then those guards of the tomb had to have that same same pistol. But they get special ones, right, wow? And he, he incorporated um some script that is inside those guns and places that only the people that carry them will ever see. Um, there's granite from the mountains of New Hampshire, where the company was based that that uh made these guns there's. There's parts, um, like they came from dust from the world trade center. Yep, um, yep, um.
Speaker 2:What I think is special about the tomb is that we feel like it's part of all of us, right? Whoever that is is us too, and I think it is an interesting contrast to what we're talking about here, which is the nature of wanting to be remembered, having made a difference, yeah, having the sense of being significant. And I struggle with that a little bit myself, if I think about the size of the universe, if I think about how brief this moment of time is. On one hand, it makes it feel very special to be able to exist now and then, you know. On the other, it's like yeah, it probably doesn't really matter.
Speaker 1:Right, I struggle with that too. Yeah, I do yeah.
Speaker 2:It's hard not to if you think about it, yeah.
Speaker 1:I absolutely struggle with that, you know, and that's not something I have any answer to.
Speaker 2:You know what I mean.
Speaker 1:And with that you know, and that's not, that's not something I have any answer to. You know what I mean and I don't. I don't know if I'll ever have an answer for that, but but you're absolutely right, because, as you're talking about all the sort of ingredients that go into those memorials that you're talking about, they're, like, you know, the dust from from the towers, twin towers, things like that. What we're talking about really is symbolism. All these things are powerful symbols as a way to honor the people the fallen Does.
Speaker 1:is that going to change lives? I don't know. Maybe, maybe not, maybe it doesn't matter. You know what I mean. Like is this headstone, now that we've put all their names on it? Is it going to? You know, I'm sure it matters to the families, but I keep asking myself, like you know, in the big picture, is it changing anything? Is it? I don't know? Is it affecting lives in some way?
Speaker 2:Does it need to? Does it need to? Is that the goal? I don't know, yeah.
Speaker 1:You know? I don't know, but I think for me, the quickest answer that I pull from is it's the least we can do to honor human lives. Sure, that's it. Sometimes that's just enough.
Speaker 2:It's noble.
Speaker 1:Yeah, undoubtedly, it's knowable what you've done. Oh, thank you, gosh. Can you imagine the guy that had to dig the hole? Yeah, there's photographs of that Several guys digging that hole. Really, yeah, brutal.
Speaker 2:Yeah, were they Mexican.
Speaker 1:You know, here's the thing. I don't know if they were all Mexican, but I do know that one of them was Mexican and he. So there's a man who contacted me His daughter actually contacted me, I want to say, a couple years ago and she says you know, my dad was there digging the hole that day and I said I'd love to speak to your dad, you know. And she says, yeah, he'll speak to you. She says he was a boy. He was probably about 12 years old at the time, but it was his father who was really the man digging the hole.
Speaker 1:And she said but he, but he knows that whole story. He remembered it vividly. I'm sure he'll talk to you and for some reason man, it's a mystery he just decided to not talk with me.
Speaker 2:I don't know why but yeah. It was probably a horrible experience. Could have been.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's probably it, yeah.
Speaker 2:I bet he was scared. Yeah, you're probably right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, probably scared, probably could, probably could have been, you know, just a real impactful experience for him. Doesn't want to revisit it yeah why? Why should he just so some guy could write a story about it?
Speaker 2:yeah, no thanks, yeah, yeah, literally dig up, you know yeah man, you know what might have been the worst day of his life yeah, and you know what that that's.
Speaker 1:It raises a good point, like I've had to really check myself in this whole thing because it's like, oh, you know I there's a moment where I'm like I'm going to be the hero, I'm going to, like you know, put names on a headstone and go find the stories and write about them. You know this sort of naive approach to all this, and it was one time when I finally went all the way to Jalisco, mexico, met one of the families, sat there with them all day, man, recorded interviews, talked with them all day long. They knew I was an author coming in in in the at the very end of the day. We're all exhausted, we're all talked out, and they say, uh, mr nance, can you turn off the cameras? And it's because I had a little digital camera and some audio equipment, because it's history, I want to get all this down. You know it's important in my mind. I'm thinking it's important, right, so I'm getting it all.
Speaker 1:And they said can you turn off all the equipment? I said sure, so I turn it off. And they said we would like for you to not put this in your book. And I said what? Yeah, I was like wait what? And then they explained to me their good reasonings and all that. And the family was all gathered there and they kind of all were looking at me saying, yeah, we don't want it in your book, you know. And I thought, damn, I didn't. I never thought this would happen, I didn't expect. That taught me a lot about the way I approach families. You know, it's not my story, it's their story. They decide what they want to do with it.
Speaker 2:So I respect that. It's tricky and there's there's a lot of power in the space between words right.
Speaker 2:Anybody that writes um, writes well, figures that out at some point. Yeah, and you know those, those gaps are incredibly important, but uh, yeah, it's, it's. It's a precarious thing when you're dealing with the human element of that. I've had it happen on this podcast. A lot right, and I think that the most interesting things that have ever been said on this show and the thousands of hours of recording have been things that people later said can you, can you edit that out? It's like, oh, yes, I can. Of course I can. Yeah, um, but I wish that you would reconsider because this is this is powerful stuff.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:But um power moves in in every direction.
Speaker 1:It does, man, it really does. Uh, and I? I think that's what I learned, that's the lesson right there. That's well articulated. The way you said that Power moves in every direction, I think I went into it thinking power was going to move in this one direction, right, and it taught me no, it moves this way too much.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's a four-dimensional world.
Speaker 1:It absolutely is. It absolutely is. And so, yeah, I approach the whole thing now differently and out differently. Um, you know so and you know actually what you know. Here's the thing is I still try to weasel around it. What I told the families was I said, listen, I'll let me write it and I'll show it to you. If you don't like it, then then I won't publish it, but let me just write it first and you read what I'm going to write first. I did, and they looked at it and they said, wow, we feel very honored. It's wonderful, don't publish it. Yeah, that's why I went out. All right, I get it. That's fair enough.
Speaker 2:And that's exactly what it is. It's fair enough. Yeah, fair enough.
Speaker 1:What are you?
Speaker 2:working on now man.
Speaker 1:What brings you to Wallowa County, the subject of love at Fishtrap, that's what brings me Fishtrap?
Speaker 2:We're talking to a global audience. Okay, good, good, Of course, I know what it is. Yeah, well.
Speaker 1:Fishtrap is basically. It's a writer's I don't know retreat, for lack of a better word. It's a gathering of writers and folks who want to learn about writing. So Fishtrap organization gets writers from all across the country, from different backgrounds, different experiences, different genres, brings them here maybe about eight of us and then we teach folks who want to become writers and that's it. And we do it here in this beautiful setting, here in the walauas, and it's just, it's a natural setting, gorgeous, and we spend just an entire week, man, just pushing out the whole writing thing, workshops and all that kind of stuff. And you know what I love about it too, is it's it's for people of all range of experience, people who just never written a thing in their lives but want to be writers, and others who have degrees in writing and are still trying to work on another book. So we have all sort of range of experience, which is why I love coming back here. Every year. They have a theme, um, and this year's theme is love, which is a big, all encompassing theme.
Speaker 2:You can go anywhere with that, obviously but that's about as easy to define as poetry.
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly yeah, exactly Right. So, uh, no. So I came back to teach. This is my third year. They invited me in 2018 and 22. And then and then, this year this is my third year here. So, yeah, I love coming back here and teaching and being part of it, and also it gives me an excuse to get out of hot El Paso. You know, although I got to say man, this year has been the warmest year up here.
Speaker 2:Dude, you ain't kidding. I was down in the canyons this week and it was 102 in the shade what? And we were spearfishing and it was 67 degrees in the water. A couple guys had brought wetsuits and, man, the wetsuits got abandoned quick. We were just getting in the river to survive it was brutal.
Speaker 1:Yeah, man, it's the hottest it's ever been here that I've experienced. In times I've come, yeah, but that it's the hottest it's ever been here that I've experienced. In times I've come, you know. Yeah, but that's what Fishtrap is. That's what brings me out here.
Speaker 2:So are your students wanting to write for publication, or they wanted to learn how to write for catharsis or for communication.
Speaker 1:A little bit of both catharsis and publication. I think most of them have their eyes on publishing. Eventually, some are at a place where they don't believe that's possible for themselves. Yeah, and others are like, yeah, I've done it before, but I just hit a slump and I can't get moving. Uh, yeah, so there's just a different ranges of of what, what they're coming for, their purpose for being there, um, but I think honestly and this is just my experience across the board a lot of people are just looking for permission, you know like, to write their story to say I have something to say and they're like looking at saying you know, is this worth saying?
Speaker 1:is it publishable, is it? And I'm like, yeah, you know what? And publishable or not? Like, say it because you got to say it, write it because you got to write, uh, and we'll figure that other part out later. You know, let's just stick with, like, what we got to say first, and so I think a lot of that, a lot of encouragement, that kind of thing, yeah I've always felt like it's a bit juvenile to write about yourself, and and I don't mean juvenile in a negative way sure I mean young yeah in your writing experience.
Speaker 2:Would you agree with that?
Speaker 1:uh, not necessarily, um, no, not necessarily. I can see. I can see, though, the inclination towards that. Uh, I think a lot of people, initially, will enter writing by writing about themselves. I think, though, that you know the saying every portrait is a self-portrait, you know, and I feel like, even if we're not writing about ourselves and we're not the subject, we're still writing about ourselves.
Speaker 2:It's our lens, it's our lens.
Speaker 1:We can't avoid that, you know, and that's something that I've been talking a lot about this week, because this week I'm teaching. I'm actually here this time to teach memoir writing, so it is about writing about yourself.
Speaker 2:It has the word me in there.
Speaker 1:It starts off with the word me Memoir, starts off with me, and so it's like you know. But one of the things that I'm talking about is, you know, their concerns are like well, you know, how can I write about somebody else but not put words in their mouth or not? Look at them from my perspective. I'm like that's unavoidable. You there, it's all from your perspective, because even the conversation you decide to write about is a choice that you're curating as you're writing. It's unavoidable. Everything we write is a reflection of ourselves. Everything we choose to focus our lens on is a reflection of us. You know, the best we can do is do it with ethics, uh, you know. Do it uh in that, you know, I think, pays honor to another person, you know as much as possible.
Speaker 2:Memoirs are interesting and it's interesting at what stage of your life you feel inclined to start it. When we were down here in this river canyon this week, uh, you know three three of us were about my age, right Like mid late thirties, and then, uh, another gentleman was in his 60s and we were talking about which way we were looking. Yeah, when we were in the canyon, were we looking down river? We looking up river? The three younger guys were all looking down river, the old guy was looking up river and I I thought that that was, uh, you know, interesting psychology and an interesting metaphor. Uh, he was looking at where the water had come from and we were looking at where it was going that's great.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, that's exactly right so when you say that there's poetry in all things, I think that there is, if you're looking for it yeah and I certainly found it there in that conversation, in that place yeah, no, that's absolutely right.
Speaker 1:I mean, I think that you know that's how a lot of magic works. You know it's, if we're looking for it, we see it, and if we're not, then you know our lives are, are something else. You know what I mean. Um, yeah, yeah, that's that's how spirituality works. That's how a lot of things work, our beliefs, you know. Sometimes, uh, yeah, it's depends on what we want to believe and what we choose to believe, and that's what works on us, or doesn't.
Speaker 2:So if a person's writing, they've gone through their own process, they've edited, they feel like they've got a relatively polished product. When do they think? Well, maybe it's time that I start to look at publication.
Speaker 1:You know, I think that at some point you just got to throw it and see if it sticks. You know you gotta go. You gotta just put it out there because the truth of the matter is it's never gonna feel ready where are you putting it out there?
Speaker 1:you trying to write a couple lines on on Twitter or Instagram or well no, I mean like to get it published as a book yeah yeah, yeah, sending it to a publisher, you know, finding the, and one of the ways that a lot of students will do it is they'll find books that resonate with them, or books by authors that kind of write along the lines of what they're writing. They look at who published that book and then they approach that publisher and you know, but a lot of times too, writers will get, you know, know, man, writers are the best procrastinators, you know, because we can find, like you know, cutting the lawn, uh, you know, is never as important until the moment you try to sit down and write a book.
Speaker 2:yeah, yeah, and honestly that procrastination gets celebrated in a lot of ways does it tell me?
Speaker 1:tell me, what do you mean?
Speaker 2:oh, okay, so if I say you know, I've, I've, uh, I've been writing this book. I've been working on it for 20 years. I write two lines in the morning, two lines in the evening, and then I edit one of those before I go to bed, something like that, people will be like, wow, that's amazing, right? If I said, yeah, I've been working on building this fence for the last 20 years, they'd be like why don't you just do it, why don't you just get that done?
Speaker 1:That's right. You're right. That's exactly true, man. That's right. Procrastination for writers is celebrated.
Speaker 2:In some ways it is yeah.
Speaker 1:I mean, no wonder anyone finishes a book ever. It's like how the hell? Yeah, no, that's true man, Absolutely true, 100% true. Yeah, I've been contemplating this one sentence for a month, you know. Wow, that must be a great sentence.
Speaker 2:Wow, you've really been slugging it out. Yeah, exactly, I hope it doesn't suck Totally, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1:It better be a damn good sentence, you know, man? No, that's true. You know Somebody was asking me something about't believe in writer's block. I said Stephen King has a great quote. He says listen, inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us get up and do the work and that's it. You just wake up every morning, pound it out, Whether it's crap, whether it's great, whatever, it doesn't matter. You're just pounding out words and eventually you have enough stuff.
Speaker 2:Yeah yeah, there's no real fear and and uh, and you might not be able to organize your thoughts or articulate it into your hand, but you can. You can physically write something.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And oftentimes, if you're willing to to face that fear long enough to know that that first thing that you write is going to be crap, yeah, it's like. Well, just keep writing crap until it's not.
Speaker 1:That's it, yeah, yeah. I mean, if we're not showing up, you know, if we're not putting our, our, our behind in the saddle every day and writing the stuff, you know, what are we? What are we waiting for? We're waiting for what a great line to appear in our head one day, and then I'm going to write it down Like no, you just got to put stuff, yeah, how do you balance writing what you want to write versus what you think your audience wants to read?
Speaker 1:I don't think about at all what my audience wants to read when I think about the subject I want to write. Something has to really speak to me in order for me to invest my time. You know it has to be something that either man, I'm like, I don't have an answer for it, it's just been there and I want to discover, or if it's like man, I have a big fear of this. You know like what is that about? And then I want to dig deeper. So then I say I find myself writing about something you know, or I want to come to a new understanding about something that I just don't understand. I could be like, why is this person over here acting this way? Or why have they been like that their whole lives, or whatever? I want to? I want to get to something that just speaks to me. So that's how I enter a subject to write.
Speaker 1:I'm not even thinking at that point, you know, of a audience or possible even a publisher. At that point I'm just like, let's see what this is about for a while. I'm going to spend some time with it, because for me, writing really is about my own education. I'm trying to teach myself about new things. You know, things I've never learned about. Like I mean, how do I know all this stuff about Douglas DC-3 airplanes? I wouldn't have cared about it once upon a time. I never thought, you know.
Speaker 1:Now I fly, I feel safer in an airplane today than I ever felt before in my life. You know, because I know a lot of stuff about airplanes now that I didn't prior to that. But I love learning and educating myself about things. So that's how I enter the book or the subject. If at some point, probably about halfway through, after working on it for a couple of years or something, then I start to realize you know, this could actually be a book. Or sometimes and I have a couple of books that never made it, never became anything I'm like, no, I learned a lot, but it's not. It's not going anywhere.
Speaker 2:So yeah, Do you write on paper? Do you write on a laptop?
Speaker 1:I type yeah, but you know, I mean I also journal Like typewriter type.
Speaker 1:No, I'm not that old school. But no, I use my computer. But actually you know what I journal every day. I write in a journal every day and sometimes and again it's just for the practice of writing. Sometimes it's just total crap. It's mundane, it's cold outside, that's it and that's my day. That's all I write for the day. But I'm writing something every day. But when I have enough stuff or an idea for something, I actually will usually start by typing up like, like, say, a book idea comes to me, I'll type it up in a Word document on my laptop and I'll just leave it there for weeks, months, whatever. If it keeps coming back to me and sort of calling me other ideas around it, if it just keeps pulling at me, then I start to listen to it. And so at any given time, like right now, I probably have about 13 different folders that have possible book ideas. One of them is speaking to me more than the others right now and that's the one that seems to be gaining some momentum.
Speaker 1:Yeah, what's the hardest line to write in a book? The last line. For me, it's the last line. Yeah, it's always the last line. First line's easy, you know. Uh, the last line is difficult. It's like.
Speaker 1:It's like leaving a meal you know, sometimes you walk away from a great steak and then someone says, do you want some dessert? And I'm like no, you know what, I I'm gonna let that steak linger for a little while because it's still. I still carry that essence of it with me and it was damn good, so I'm just gonna hang with that for a little bit. I don't want to change the flavor yet in my mouth and that's why I feel the last line does the last line in a book. It's like just having a great meal and you want that person to leave with that resonating in their being and who they are in their mind. I want them to carry that with them for a few days, if possible. You know, share that, that kind of thing, yeah.
Speaker 2:Which is the most powerful line in a book?
Speaker 1:The most powerful line in a book? The most powerful line in a book? I don't, I don't know. You know that's a. Those are great questions, james. Uh, I don't think that there is one most. No, I don't think that there is one most powerful line. I think there's a, there's a few, there's always a handful of most powerful lines and probably one of them comes towards the beginning, one, and then a couple of them somewhere in the middle of that and then obviously the end. You know, but I feel like along the way I'm always searching for the most powerful line and I find, I say to myself you know, this man, this line is gonna stick with me for a while, and it does, until I find another line that does it, I'm like whoa.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I can remember more first lines than last lines.
Speaker 1:Really, yeah, I think so Nice. Yeah, what about you? You know what? That's probably true. Also, I can probably remember more first lines, absolutely yeah. What is one of your favorite first lines?
Speaker 2:Gosh, you know if you've read the Meadow by james galvin? I haven't. No, it's, it's wonderful, he's, he's. He's a poet that decided to take a crack at fiction and did a really good job. Um yeah, moby dick, right, call me ishmael. Um yeah, like there's. That that's one of the only ones I can think of where there's books written about the first, the first line yeah you know, that's, that is, that's, that is.
Speaker 1:That's wild, that is. That's the iconic first line. Call me Ishmael man. We were talking about first lines in my class today too, and it was like you know what's funny is first lines, at least for the most part. I'll say just generalizing here. Writers don't come upon the first line in your first line, you know what I mean. You just don't. That's after you've written hundreds of pages and suddenly you go that is a first line material, right, and you pull that all the way to the front again and that becomes the first line. And you know a lot of folks who are at least starting out writing too. We don't realize that. They just kind of think that the first line'll figure out the line later. Yeah, for me it's Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath, the opening line of that.
Speaker 2:Which is which.
Speaker 1:I'm going to paraphrase because I don't remember it to a T, but it's like to the gray country, to part of the red country, the first rains came and it did not cut the scarred earth. You know, it was like a beautiful line. It talks ideas and all that in this country, and then it comes.
Speaker 2:it talks about this, how nature comes in and creates a sort of chasm in between the two and it's like, yeah, yeah, love that, yeah, yeah, the first line of the galvin is that galvin writes in the meadow um, as the real, real world goes like this yeah, oh, so good. And he, he, he circles back on that enough times that you, you really start to feel it and you think about, uh, you think about the story of this book, like like water and eddie, yeah, yeah, it's good yeah, man, I you know what you're right.
Speaker 1:I think that I absolutely do remember first lines more than I do last line. So why am I so hung up on last lines then?
Speaker 2:no, you know, there's some, for for a reader, there's some remorse at the end of a good book. Yeah, like, yeah, you know you can, you can finish it and and feel, feel sad that it's over. Yeah, um, there, there's times that I've been reading the book, that I've started to read less of it, even though my interest is growing.
Speaker 2:My connection to to the story is growing, because I don't want it to be over yeah um, yeah, and and I think that there's in writing there's a lot of fear and like how am I gonna, you know, put a? Put a bow on this? How do I conclude all this in songs. Songs are are a classic example of not knowing how to end a song, and that's why so many songs that you listen to just fade out Right. They don't end, they just turn the volume down until you can't hear it anymore.
Speaker 1:Dude, that's funny, that's true, you're right. I wish we could just turn the volume down on the book, right.
Speaker 2:Just fade out, Just make the ink a little bit more faint as you go and people are like what the hell? The book just ended and faded out. Yeah, That'd be so annoying, yeah man, oh man.
Speaker 1:You know, one of the most powerful endings for a book was not words at all but images. And it's in Jonathan Safran Foer's book, extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, where the character is. I don't know if you've read it, but the character is this little boy who's trying to find out the clues, his. So he believes that his father was probably the falling man in 9-11 and the twin towers that his father was the one falling. But because as a kid growing up his father always played these sort of games where he'd leave him little like clues and that kind of like little scavenger hunt kind of things you know and you leave them clues around. So the boy wants to believe that because his father is killed in the twin towers, but he wants to believe that the falling man is his dad. So the whole book he's trying to figure out the clues, the clues, or he's hoping the falling man isn't his dad, that's right. Because he's trying to think is that my dad's still alive? He's, I gotta find the clues, I gotta find the clues. He's going all over the city of new york trying to find these clues ashes in a box or keys, a bunch of keys just to find out. He thinks his dad's playing a game and he wants to find his dad alive. But this whole time he's got this eye on this haunting image of the falling man and he's praying. It's not his dad. He's like I hope it's not my dad.
Speaker 1:So the book comes all the way to the very end and the boy has this little monologue and he's talking about how he wishes he could just rewind time, how he wishes he could hear his dad's words. And he's talking about rewinding time. And then the final image is the, the image of the man falling out of the out of the building. And then you flip the page and you flip the page, you flip it and the man starts to float upward across the page back into the. It's beautiful ending. It's incredible. I thought, man, that is powerful. Yeah, we're just kind of doing a flip book at the end, but it's that monologue leading up to that moment that the man starts to float up. It's powerful, man.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I hate it when they put pictures in the middle of a book, right. Yeah, well, I understand, like the physical reason why it occurs, but a lot of times we haven't gotten to that part of the story yet.
Speaker 1:Oh man, I know, yeah, oh yeah, no, I know what you're saying. Yeah, exactly, family images and all that, and you're like, I'm not even there yet. Oh, so he lives All right. Yeah, they ruined the whole thing, man, I agree, I agree, I agree a hundred percent. You know, I use a lot of images in this next book that's coming out of mine, um, which is the continuation of the plane crash story. This is a little bit of a different approach to it, but I use images. But I also use images very intentionally, in the way that, like, I'm going to play with, I'm going to mess a little bit with the mystery. I'm going to show you a picture and make you want to know, like, more about it, and then I'm going to, and then I'm going to tell you about these pictures, but not show you the picture, like you know. So I've kind of played with that whole idea because, I agree.
Speaker 2:That's always happens. I'm like that's the place that you know. Whoever's printing this thing can slam all those pictures together and like I, I get it. Um, just wish they wouldn't do it yeah, no, I agree, man, I agree.
Speaker 1:And you know, I'm even kind of one of those people who I don't you know, because my publisher originally in this conversation was like, well, what if we just put all the pictures at the back? You know, I'm like I don't like that either, because it's too easy to flip to the back and look at the pictures Like I'm going to sprinkle them out, I'm going to weave them into the story, make them a part of it, make people work for that image by the time they get to it, and then it's like that's the idea.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, interesting, when you're dead and gone and there's a tombstone over your grave, what is something that you've?
Speaker 1:written that you would want somebody to come and set on that tombstone. I don't think I want anything that I've written on my tombstone.
Speaker 2:Would it be something that somebody else has written?
Speaker 1:I don't know, man. That's a good question. No, I don't think I want something anybody else wrote either on my tombstone. You know what I want my tombstone to say? Man, more than anything, I just wanted to say he was a good dad. Yeah, that's it. That'd be great. I win in life If that's what my tombstone says.
Speaker 2:That's a big accomplishment.
Speaker 1:I feel like a winner, man. That's it, yeah, yeah, anything my books, all that cool man, that's cool. You can say what you want about it, but my kids can just look at me and have some respect for what I've done as a dad, then I'm good.
Speaker 2:That's all I need. Yeah, where can people find the things that you've written?
Speaker 1:anywhere online, anywhere um bookstores. Bookstores will have it um, I haven't. My last book was published seven years ago, so a lot of the stuff is probably not on shelves right now. You can order it, though, anywhere through any online website.
Speaker 2:Do you have a website where they can order it from you directly, or anything?
Speaker 1:I do. Yeah, if you go to my website timzhernandezcom timzhernandezcom you'll find links to my books there, and if you just click on the book it'll take you right to where you can order the book.
Speaker 2:Nice order the book Nice Right Very easily. Yeah, thanks for mentioning that and we'll put a link for that in the podcast description to make it a little bit easier for folks.
Speaker 1:Awesome, awesome and uh, yeah, you know, uh appreciate you chatting with me at such short notice and and being out here it's great.
Speaker 2:Oh, my pleasure. Uh, last question yeah, what advice would you give to yourself in 2010, as you started on this specific journey that we've been talking about?
Speaker 1:like to my 2010 self. Yeah, um, I would say, relaxed him with the paranoia. Uh, this is, this is your story to tell. It's your story to tell, like, let go of all the worries and the other external noise. You know you were meant to tell this story. Tell it.
Speaker 2:Do you think you could have heard that advice?
Speaker 1:I would have heard it, I would have wanted to believe it. Don't think I would have believed it yeah right, that's the truth. Yeah, don't think I would have listened to it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I I would have believed.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, right, that's the truth. Yeah, don't think I would have listened to it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'm the kind of person who, for better or worse, I got to experience something on my own. Yeah, yeah, I mean story goes uh, when the student's ready, the teacher appears right and uh, a lot of times we're just not even even if all of that advice or information or counseling is available for not, we're not ready for it, it doesn't matter.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's exactly right. If we're not ready for it, that's exactly it. And I love that quote. Yeah, I heard that one a long time ago and felt, yep, man, that is so true. Yeah, the student is ready, the teacher appears and yeah, man, I wish I had.
Speaker 1:You know, when I was starting it all in 2010, it was a new beast altogether from what I had been writing prior to that. You know, everything I wrote prior to that came out of my own imagination. It wasn't about other people. The moment it became about other people, there was a lot of noise around it, people contacting me and it got me to this place of media contacting me, because it was like a famous song that nobody ever heard. This mystery. Now you're breaking it open, you know, and it was like I had so much noise I started to become distrustful, got in fights with friends that I felt close to.
Speaker 1:It was just a weird situation in my life and it came because of my own paranoias around the story. You know, it's almost like the way a friend of mine put it later on, years later. She said it's like the ghosts of the story were there to haunt you into shape, haunt you, to get you to a point where you realize, shit, am I going to do this or am I just going to back away from it? But it's not going to be easy and I chose to move forward with it. But it was. It was kind of a weird. It was a weird situation. Never felt anything like that before, never went through it, do you?
Speaker 2:do you perform well under pressure?
Speaker 1:yeah, I think I do. Yeah, better under pressure than yeah, I'm gonna put some pressure on you okay sure okay, speak the last line of the podcast here's what I've learned from everything A single story that we share with another person can be medicine, but I think that when we can share stories in community with others, then we have a potential for transformation.
Speaker 2:I just want to take a second and thank everyone who's written a review, who has sent mail, who's sent emails, who's sent messages. Your support is incredible and I also love running into you at trade shows and events and just out on the hillside when we're hunting. I think that that's fantastic. I hope you guys keep adventuring as hard and as often as you can. Art for the Sixth Ranch podcast was created by John Chatelain and was digitized by Celia Harlander. Original music was written and performed by Justin Hay, and the Six Ranch Podcast is now produced by Six Ranch Media. Produced by Six Ranch Media. Thank you all so much for your continued support of the show and I look forward to next week when we can bring you a brand new episode.