True West
Silver City author Bob Swisher brings his real-life experiences down from the mountain to craft an honest tale, far from the Old West myth.
"No, that really happened. I was guiding a trip, and this woman got struck by lightning, right on her horse," Bob Swisher says. In describing where he gets his characters—whether they're real, live people, pure works of fiction or a composite of the two—the western author tells the tale of one who is, well, shockingly literal.
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Bob Swisher with a selection of his novels, in his Last Day in Paradise
bookstore-gallery. (Photo by Donna Clayton Lawder) |
"It was a clear sky above us. I was on my horse, the guy was on the ground behind me, and the woman was on a horse behind him," Swisher recalls. "Suddenly, the lightning was popping everywhere. Out of nowhere, man."
His eyes travel to a far corner of the room in his Silver City store and gallery, Last Day in Paradise, where he sells copies of his own books and contemporary Southwest art. Even today, all these years later, the memory of that storm takes him away, takes him to that ridge somewhere in the wilderness where fate in the form of a deadly lightning bolt struck.
"It knocked me out. I woke up and I just knew that woman was dead," he continues. "I went to where she was lying, and her clothes were just atomized, nothing left." He gestures with his hands, as much to say "into thin air" with his outstretched empty palms. "The Nikon camera she had around her neck, this decent-sized camera? It was the size of a quarter."
Swisher wrapped the woman in a tarp and slung her over his own horse, tied her companion into the saddle so he wouldn't fall out, then led the horse down the mountain, walking 22 miles, probably in shock himself.
He says the event was the trigger for writing the newly published How Far the Mountain, Swisher's eighth book with Sunstone Press ($22.95). Swisher's novels, which are categorized as "contemporary westerns," eschew the romanticized Old West of myth for more realistic yet no less dramatic tales.
You don't get much more dramatic than being literally struck by lightning.
Swisher picks up the true story that inspired his latest book: "On my way down, I passed this couple. The woman turned to the man and made some kind of comment like, 'Look, he killed some poor animal.' She thought I had a dead deer or something on the back of my horse." The dead woman's blood was running down the back of his horse, he recalls. Certainly he must have looked like a victorious game hunter.
"I didn't say nothin'," he remembers. "I couldn't even look at them."
Instead, Swisher took the body to a doctor in Chama, NM, the nearest town. Then he started back to the ridge where he'd had to leave a couple of his horses behind. On the way, Swisher was arrested for murder, a charge that was dropped when the doctor in Chama told the authorities what had happened.
In the book, the two main characters—a man and a woman—are on individual quests. The man has lost someone dear to him and is driven "to touch the bones," a mysterious term and quest that becomes clear only well into the book. The woman, too, has lost someone dear, and heads to the mountains as part of a birthday present to herself and to face her aloneness.
"That's what the story is about. Why these people go to the mountain," Swisher says. "People still do it today. They're looking for something. Freedom. Perspective. And the mountains are a great place to go, don't get me wrong." He adds with a laugh, almost menacing, definitely a knowing kind of laugh, deep in the throat, "But they're not friendly."
In a way, the mountain itself becomes a third character, an omniscient observer of sorts. The chapters alternate from "The Man" to "The Woman" to "The Mountain," each like a story in itself from the perspective of that character or entity. The mountain's stories tell of larger cycles, of events that perhaps reveal Swisher's viewpoint and bear on his final message.
He says that finding a way for the two main characters to meet without the book winding up corny was a considerable problem for him. He mentions the bestseller The Bridges of Madison County, which was made into a movie.
"Oh, that sort of thing really cheapens the story," he says, speaking disapprovingly of the Hollywood-ized romance between Clint Eastwood and Meryl Streep. "Hell, you want the cowboy to be a cowboy!"
Swisher's long tenure as a ranch foreman and wilderness guide gave him plenty of experience to draw on for his novels. "I've written 30. I've placed 13," he says, ticking off on his fingers. "I'm trying to sell six out of the remaining ones. I threw the rest away, which is a damn shame now that I think about it because maybe those were the ones I could sell!" He laughs and shakes his head.
After returning from Vietnam in 1966, courtesy of having had one thumb mostly blown off in the war, he started writing poetry, getting more than 1,000 poems placed in literary magazines. "You get a copy (of the magazine) and a buck—the buck if you're lucky," he says with a laugh. He went on to short stories, getting a hundred or so of those published. This, also, was not a lucrative venture. "Hell, it's good for your ego, I guess, but you don't even make enough to buy stamps to send out more stories!"
He got the idea to start writing books. He wrote six novels. The topics varied a bit, but the satisfaction he got from writing them carried him onward.
"Then I wrote The Land," Swisher says. "I wrote it in a six-by-six cabin on Cook's Ranch on an old Hermes typewriter. Do you know Hermes typewriters? They're the best, wonderful machines." He smiles sweetly at the memory.
He tried to get the book published, but wasn't getting much for his efforts except rejection slips—hundreds of them. He's got the text from one of those "Dear Author" letters painted on the front of his store, with the postscript that The Land is now in its fourth printing. His book was the first fiction title the Santa Fe-based Sunstone Press ever carried.
Swisher says he writes "because I have to. It's who I am. The only time I'm comfortable is when I'm working on a book."
The first time he re-reads one of his newly completed manuscripts, he says he asks himself, "Where the hell did this come from?"
He also sometimes questions his decision to write contemporary stories about the West. "It's not an exceedingly popular genre, after all," he says with a chuckle. "But, you know, everyone has in their minds this myth. There's this myth about the West, and that's what they're looking for." He pauses, shakes his head slightly. "I don't believe in that myth, and my books aren't about that.
"I believe in this land," he says. "Even with all the change in the world, this land, this place—it's still the best there is."
—Donna Clayton Lawder
Bob Swisher sells his books at his store and gallery, Last Day in Paradise, named after one of his books, 211-B N. Texas St., 313-5610.
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