About 20 years ago I was researching
my book, "La Frontera, the United States Border
with Mexico."
And I just spent three frankly God awful weeks
in El Paso and Juarez, and I finally got out of there
and I headed west.
I headed to a place where the borderlands get kind of blurry.
There are intricate canyons and the water flows sometimes
in Arizona, sometimes in New Mexico,
sometimes in old Mexico.
I was headed in search of a reclusive legend.
This guy came out of a well-known St. Louis
family who didn't enter the well-known St. Louis family's
well-known family business because during high school
he had spent his summers cowboying in Wyoming,
and when it was time for him to go, he also headed west.
He came here to this University.
In fact to this very Poetry Center,
and he became enthralled with what he read,
and what he began to write, and within a few years
he was published.
You can find in the library here a copy
of his earliest book, "The Webbing" and I do recommend it.
Because of that work he was embraced
by some of the great poets of our times, Charles Olson, Gary
Snyder, Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Robert Creeley.
He communed with them, he traveled with them,
but then a curious itch took over
and instead of west he turned south.
He crawled through the border fence,
came back two years later, el vaquero, the cowboy,
and then he became a rancher.
The first night that I was at Drum's ranch
he and I and photographer Jay Dusard whose
work has graced the walls of this Center
and a bottle of tequila, we took a walk
that crossed all of those borders
that I mentioned at one time or another.
We were following a creek that ran through a gorgeous canyon
that Drum Hadley had nursed so beautifully back to health
that it eventually won him an Aldo Leopold award.
Even as he was still running cows through it.
In coming years, he would be known for conservation work,
founding of the Animas Foundation,
and a co-founder of the Malpai Group.
Drum and his neighbor ranchers dedicated
to preserving a way of life, open spaces, and wildlife
habitats all at once.
Drum became known for that work.
But what had happened to the poet?
Well, there had been a couple of early books,
but then in the years to follow even though many of his poet
friends would come down to his ranch, all of us
writers who would go down there, we
knew that there were still poems flowing.
But they had not yet pooled into a book.
Well, years went by, and I once asked
Drum who had talked a lot about why he liked being
away from cities, why was he--
why had he chosen the border?
Why not the Dakotas or someplace?
Here's his answer.
He says, because Mexico provides the continuum of traditions
created in the image of the Earth,
in the image of weather and land patterns.
Also because Mexicans have a knowledge of waiting.
Well, as far as this book goes, the waiting for us is over.
It's here and it's a masterpiece.
I'm doubly pleased to be able to present Drum to you tonight.
One, so you can hear him read, and two, because right
about the time that he delivered the manuscript,
we nearly lost him.
Drum was driving the Geronimo Trail,
a road so remote in Southern Arizona
that you would never think that you're going
to meet someone coming on it.
And surely the driver of the pickup truck who
was on his side of the road cresting the hill
didn't think he was going to meet anybody,
but they met head on.
Both of Drum's hands gripping the wheels
were broken, concussion.
An air bag saved him, luckily, and miraculously he
has been pulling it back together ever since.
His vision is still a little bit blurred,
sort of like those borders that he's been crossing and writing
about all these years.
So when he recites his poems tonight
because it's still hard for him to read,
he's going to be assisted with some prompting
by his companion Rebecca West.
Thanks Rebecca.
Thanks Drum.
Go to it.