Dear Editor,
I know this letter is too long and too late, but it was cathartic for me to write and may give a little more insight into your former colleague and friend. It was only this week I learned that Gary Oliver died.
I first encountered Gary one dark night in early 1978. I had been riding on a crowded bus across the Guatemalan/El Salvadoran frontier, thinking I was the only Gringo aboard. The bus was stopped on a dark highway by government or rebel forces and we were all ordered to dismount. I was directed at gun point to stand on the other side of the ditch on the passenger side of the bus while the other passengers — men, women and children — were put against both sides of the bus and searched. The passengers were then ordered back onto the bus. I was ordered to stay still while the armed men also boarded the bus and it drove off, leaving me in total darkness.
Suddenly out of that darkness I heard a Texas accent demanding to know: “Did you sorry sons of bitches just drive off and leave me here.”
That’s how I met Gary and how we began our travels for the next number of weeks. He eventually went south toward Costa Rica while I went into the mountains to cross the newly opened border with Honduras.
Months later I saw him walking down a street in Panama City. I had previously told him I was determined to make my way to South America overland. When I met him in Panama he asked if I still intended to die in the Darién. I told him I did, so he offered to buy me my last meal. He then plied me with beer and when he believed I was vulnerable, asked if I would take him into the jungle.
The time was short. The boat we had to take into the jungle left on high tide and he didn’t have any gear or food. He was determined to go so we kitted him up and woke up the next morning on the muddy shore of a river in the Darién Gap. Crossing this stretch of jungle with a blind cartoonist from Texas was perhaps one of the most physically demanding things I have done in my life.
It was much harder for him. Unable to see well with the shifting shadows, and wearing inadequate footwear, Gary seemed to fall over every root or slippery rock along the makeshift trail I tried to cut with my machete. Gary’s recollection of this trip was much clearer than mine –– I contracted typhoid on the day we reached Turbo, Colombia, and it somewhat impaired my ability to process events –– but I recall a couple of events that gave evidence to the man.
We were wet, hot, starved, bedraggled, frightened and exhausted but we pushed on using a combination of sour humor and bitter silence. I would go on ahead, opening the trail and knocking down spiders Gary couldn’t see, then rest until he caught up. One time he never came.
Angrily, I extricated myself from my primitive backpack and stomped back down the trail to find him. He was sitting by a river, looking into the water. I demanded to know what the **** he was doing. “This is as far as I go,” he told me. “You have to go on alone.”
I knew I didn’t have the will to make it out alive if he quit. I swore at him and he swore at me. We had a shouting match that culminated in him yelling at me: “Shut up! Shut up! Shut up! Shut up — listen!” I finally shut up.
“Listen,” he repeated. I expected to hear him make an argument for why I should leave him. He looked at me and pointed down the river. We heard a rooster crow. Where there’s a rooster there are people. Without a word I walked down the trail until I found his pack, carried it back and helped him put it on and we kept going.
The other story that stands out was when we were camped on the side of a river on the Colombian side of the border. We had been surviving on pasta or rice flavored with packages of dehydrated soup — chicken and beef for me, eggshell for Gary, to accommodate his then vegetarianism. I absentmindedly read the ingredients on the packages and involuntarily gasped when I saw his was made with chicken. He demanded to know what I saw, but I refused to read it to him (it was too dark for him to see). He stopped eating the soup, sticking with just pasta and rice. “Would you eat yours if you read it had human hand in it?” he asked me. “Ya,” I said. “I’d eat it if it had MY human hand in it –– or yours.”
We made it out of The Darién with all four of our hands intact. I know Gary stuck with me in a dive hotel in Medellin while I fought through the feverish battle with typhoid, but soon after the Colombian government expelled him for failing to have the proper visa before he entered the country, and I lost touch with him until a few years ago when I was about to retire from my career writing for a newspaper.
I always wanted to visit him in Marfa, but after Trump was elected the first time, my wife balked at travelling in a country we no longer recognized. Then came covid. And then it was too late. There’s a painful lesson in this, of course, that while –– as Einstein said –– time is relative, it is also relentlessly indiscriminate.
I was pleased to read on these pages the many tributes to this impressive man. I’m glad he got to live out his potential among people who appreciated him.
Gerry Klein
Canada
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Dear Editor,
The last czar of Russia had Rasputin as an adviser — we all know how that went. Trump has Elon Musk as his advisor — ending to be determined.
Hitler convinced the German people of the need for more territory for space and natural resources — We know how that turned out. Trump claims we need Canada, Greenland and the Panama Canal — ending to be determined.
Trump promises massive tax cuts — his last tax return, 2014, showed a payment of $400. Hardly seems fair.
Looks like the next four years will be dangerous for our country.
Hugh Johnson
Alpine
Editor’s note: We could not find any information from Trump’s 2014 return, and overall, he has refused to release his tax returns. A New York Times investigation, however, obtained return information that his payments in 2016 and 2017 were $750 each year.
