An East End Mystery… Tour

I’m having strange thoughts, more so than usual…

(Long pause, some pacing) Look. A friend of mine has disappeared and it seems very much like he will never be seen again, not by me, nor by his other friends, nor by his family, maybe not by any other human… I’m talking desaparecido.

But who cares? Some 600,000 people go missing each year in the United States, tens of thousands never heard from again. What makes this one different? Why should you care? 

Look into it if you must, but permanently missing people is a true phenom and continuing mystery, with maybe the strangest — and most relevant to this case — the inordinately high number that disappear from National Parks ; the degree of high strangeness in these wilderness cases has warranted at least one deeply researched book. Where do they all… go? 

Interesting and all that, but how to make you care about this one person, missing here and now? 

(Nodding) His name is Peter H. Beard and you likely have no idea, no picture or image of who he is, except maybe as a vaguely familiar name, maybe attached to some fucking ‘celebrity’ or elite scumbag. (If you well know who he is or have ever met him, I suspect you are… unique… in some way.)

In my reading about Peter’s disappearance, how, 12 days ago as I write, he ‘wandered off’ (‘they,’ the Mainstream Media, say) from his home on the wooded cliffs at Montauk, New York, my old home town, at about 4:40 PM on March 31, a cold but not freezing day… in reading the stilted, journal-prose the phrase that hits me like a physical blow is the ‘detail’ that Peter ‘suffers from dementia’… 

But god I hate that word…

I hadn’t seen Peter in some 12 or so years and since my on-the-road bolt from Montauk in 2014 none of my local friends saw fit to inform me of his condition. Just as well, actually, as his ‘disappearance’ somehow softened the D-word blow: I’d rather know all at once that he is no longer the Peter, the man, I knew, and that he no longer walks the planet, i.e., (odds are) he’s dead.

Right. I’d rather picture him dead than… that word. (Why the lack of hope? Look into the stats on people missing for two weeks.)

(Head shaking after more pacing) ‘The Sun Disappeared Today, Just Blinked Out!’ as a headline, along with a warning ‘from experts’ that it’s soon apt to get cold, would not shake me up and put me down like pairing Peter Beard’s name with that dreaded word.

Why do I feel this way about a person I hadn’t seen in so long, and, truth be told, did not ‘hang out with’ all that much. He was so often absent from his isolated compound out east of town, while I was likewise living and scamming in other climes, from North Africa, South and Central America and the Caribbean, Peter off in (East) Africa mostly, creating art with his camera and his diaries, but mostly with his life…

(A moan) I can’t write a biography (obituary?), short or otherwise, of Peter Beard, to maybe get you to understand why I’d rather know him as ‘disappeared’ than… that other word… You can go here for his ‘official’ cv, but I would bet that Peter (not many who really knew him used the familiar ‘Pete’) had zero to do with it; he had to sell his art to live in ‘the style to which he was accustomed’, support his family, all that, so the bio is for buyers. I’d bet he’s never even read it; it certainly is lacking the laconic, self-effacing Beard ring, along with the endless, audacious anecdotes that defined him as much as his physical artwork.

Anyway, best you hit the link to his art (or scan this page) if you want to understand a liiiittle, tiny bit about him. Maybe that a Beard diary/collage recently sold for well over half a million will pique your fucking curiosity, asshole…  Sorry… I am having strange thoughts…

See… and no I haven’t seen him for a decade or more, but in a sense I think of him every night, just before sleep. Hold on, and I’ll go do a photograph (Beard would appreciate this sort of interruption.)

(Ten minutes futzing with lenses, exposures and composition)

…Beard gave me ‘The Elephant’… (the photo is ‘A Beard’ so I’ll switch to that in references) on Christmas Eve, 1986, during a casual visit to his and his wife Nejma’s (prnounced ‘Nah-shma’) rustic but mostly chaotic ‘cottage’ (plus guest houses, now worth some $20 million, I hear) on the cliff’s, and I can… you bet I can…I can picture him stretched out on his cramped, disheveled living room floor…

(Finger drumming) …this is from a different visit, but it will do: Beard stretched out on that floor (the floor itself is down there somewhere, under all the… stuff) as I gingerly tip-toe through the kaleidoscopic clutter, zigging past open bottles and cans of paint and ink and bleach and turps, zagging through flotsam treasures, some stained garish, some dusty and forgotten, plus his precious wrack line juju stones, and here and there actual garbage (I think), and then I hop over Beard’s lean, supine form, outstretched finger smearing a black & white of Jaggar or a wildebeest with red, either paint or blood (his own, usually), me in search of the chair that used to be over there, then Beard, noticing my care to step only on carpet, ordering, ‘No, no, don’t be careful, just plow on through!’ or the like, hoping that a muddy footprint or some spilled color on a wrinkled canvas would sharpen the chaos of his art.

The above is pretty much how it went that Christmas Eve night so long ago, when Beard presented me with his gift, The Elephant. 

(Next day after a few hours of fitful sleep) Upon awakening, I recalled the following…

It was the early ’70s and I can’t be more time-specific, except that it was summer, and way after sundown. (Some of my most unforgettable and absolutely strangest Montauk experiences came in the dead of winter, when ‘no one’ was around, other than the weirdos.) I’m up at Beard’s with a mixed crew of locals and ‘Up-IsIanders’ (anyone from west of the Napeague stretch of Montauk Highway), and we were out on the grassy Atlantic overlook Beard had cleared from the thick Montauk bramble on his high promontory, the dozen or so of us surrounding the mysterious, snake-filled ‘pit’ (‘snake-filled’ literally, like in Gunga Din); there was no fence or barrier, nothing to prevent a disoriented or otherwise blitzed guest from stepping or staggering right the fuck off the cliff onto thin air (or into that lunatic pit), followed by a surely fatal fall to the rock beach below. And the moonless East End night, apart from glowing joint-ends, was visually impenetrable, a dense black.

I had latched onto a visiting Manhattanite (a way Up-Islander), one of the many stunning females Beard attracted like feminine iron filings to a very male bar magnet, and was doing my best to set up the night, if you get my seductive drift. She was in fact a ‘super-model’, a household name of that time (also as an actor), and in the midst of my own braggadocio (likely regarding my recent Moroccan hash smuggling exploits)  she all of a sudden undid her belt, wiggled her lithe form with wry feminine grace, then to my stoned surprise in a blink she disappeared from view; where she had stood a moment ago was only the void of the moonless night.

It was like Poof! and she was gone (speaking of desaparecidos!). Jesus, I must have been thinking, how fucked up am I?

Then, hearing an odd sound, sort of a continual splat, I glanced down to see her dazzling upturned cover girl face as she squatted there in the dark, having herself a mighty whiz. She hadn’t bothered to move or shuffle a step. Just dropped trou, squatted and let ‘er rip. (The wiggling had been to lower her jeans.)

Returning to upright, buckling and grinning, she said (and yes, after all these years I recall the words exactly), ‘You guys have it fucking easier in some areas,’ referring to the mechanics of urination.

Addendum: To anyone thinking ‘how gross!’ or the like, for me, Ms Super-Whiz’s move was merely her mammalian way of signaling sexual interest. (Which did prove to be the case, by the way.)

Need I even say Those Were The Days?

There must be a thousand… no, uncountable… likewise strange and wonderful and unforgettable anecdotes in the lives of those who knew and cavorted with Peter Beard.  

I have to tell you something, and maybe it will help you get it: That framed photo of The Elephant is my only possession that has gone everywhere with me since ’86, in all my travels, including my Captain Zero journey, my farm/surf life in Costa Rica, back to Montauk, then off to Mexico in an even smaller truck than for Zero, for that trip the The Elephant screwed into the overhead since there was no wall that would take it…

But you get the idea… nothing, no watch, no old leather wallet or coat or piece of jewelry, no manuscript, nada, has been with me this long. And, as you can see, it was overlooking me as I slept last night, as every night. Partly art, partly inspiration, it’s all I have that’s… priceless.

The inscription, in Beard’s meticulous, elegant but still masculine, almost calligraphic hand, reads…

(Horizontally), ‘To Allan’

‘With Salaams’ … and regards… as ever… Peter

Driftwood Cove… Xmas, ’86’

Then the meat of it, at the bottom of the (long dead now) tusker’s image…

‘of the lion, the leopard, and his other flesh-eating neighbors, he went in no fear, for the flesh of his mighty carcass was above their daring, and so his peaceful career might have continued, had it not occurred to some cunning mortal to invent that magic dust called gunpowder.’

(A harrumph) Could you come up with that prose, half drunk late night on Christmas Eve, off-the-cuff for a casual friend? Or, better, would you?

Ironic, or even hypocritical, the under-educated jackleg might rejoin at Beard’s sentimental reflection, given that he himself vehemently lobbied for legal pachy slewing with that ‘magic dust’ and long guns, said critique being based on ignorance of the Why of it. Look it up, asshole… shit, sorry! (strange thoughts!)… The culling of the over-populated herds (as the bush became the mall) when Beard ‘wore the white hunter’ hat, almost certainly staved off the species’ doom.

Doom staved off for now but not for long! as Beard often warned, referring to us as much as the magnificent animals he so famously shot, usually with cameras but when warranted, with a firearm, although I don’t agree with his view of mankind as a disease, a blight on the planet, with overpopulation our coming downfall — ‘too many seals on the rock’ being one way he has put it. Beard gives us too much credit here, methinks… (sigh) but no matter now… 

(A high desert dog-walk, now a frown.) Thirteen days now and counting since an old friend… ‘wandered off’…

Beard’s possible current whereabouts is how I want to wind up this half-assed, half obit — half memoir, but beforehand I have to say this: I am not easily… maybe at all, ever… impressed by other humans, their doings, their lives… the 95% who are dishonest to the marrow don’t make the first cut… and the rest, the remaining 5%…

(A grunt, furrowed brow) …those who have read my books might correctly suspect I know a creative life when I see it, if only to compare with my own, and I can tell you that there is not a man or woman on this planet that is on the same list as Peter Hill Beard, in making art out of living life. Not… even… close… is number two on that list and I include those I’ve only heard or read about, be they a Hemingway or a Picasso or a Joshua Slocum, or even a goddamn Indiana Jones (Beard lived a life you couldn’t make up)… and yeah, they gotta make their living a… a certain way to be a candidate (no rules, you know it when you see it kind of thing).  

Although Beard flowed from the kind of stock I deeply distrust — born a New York aristocrat, heir to a railroad fortune on his mother’s side and a tobacco inheritance on his father’s, plus his status as a Yale alum (that fucking spook grade school) — I would bet a valued possession that when ‘they’ came to recruit him — that he was spook-recruited is an absolute guarantee, given his pedigree, social circle, and world-wide haunts — he was polite but adamant in his rebuff. Yet… yet, who knows? Maybe old P.B. (as some call him) was silently ushered in to Skull & Bones or facsimile thereof and has fooled us all with his black ops doings for the past half century. 

If so, I missed the ‘tell’ completely. 

So wherefore art thou, Petey B? Aye, that is the question. What clues have we, here and now?… now in this age of Coronavirus? (No, I’ll not go there, not as a link to his disappearance)… There is a big lead though, in the D-word, and it needs analysis, so let me hock it back and spit it out, given the surety that I’ll have to deal with it in some depth: Dementia. There, I’ve said it.

Addendum: What’s nasty about the word is its borderline onomatopoeic resonance. (You know, sounds like what it is, as in boom, crash, guffaw, plus plop plop fizz fizz, and so on, although snarl is my favorite.) Dementia. Say it, see what you think, how you feel.  

My fear of the D-word is that I won’t grasp its arrival before it itself steals my good sense to move on, shuffle off the coil, by whatever means necessary. Pills, my 9mm, deadly gas in the enclosed space of my little casita viajera… or how about a flying leap? That last one has a familiar ring to it, as in the 50 foot drop from the grassy area where my super-model had her whiz… did P.B. take that flying leap?

Two problems with this line of inquiry. One, Although the Peter I knew would not abide dementia as a state of his mind, and likely would do as I would… but but this is the problem, isn’t it? The perceived need to take that leap would be erased by the problem that leads to the decision in the first place. (Can you parse my drivel?)  This is the D-word’s nasty catch-22, like being too ignorant to know you’re ignorant. 

And two, the drop off point on the promontory, being pointed straight down, entails a shoreline splatter, not a water splash (plus a tidal sweep to sea), which would result in bodily remains on the beach, of which there was none; Naj, then search parties, would have first of all peered down off that grassy area, I’m sure. No, flying leaps won’t do as our solution. 

In fact, rule out suicide, for the catch-22 reason, plus the missing corpus. See, the dead cannot hide, themselves or what they’ve done.

But let’s get to the heart of it. Take my word (and examine the Google Earths I’ve embedded) and you’ll understand the heart of the mystery, and it truly is one, worthy of an A. Conan Doyle in the solving… let’s mystery-mull, see where some critical thinking leads us…

It’s the very end of March (yes, just before the day of fools and pranks, but let’s not go there), the very eastern jut of New York’s land, but we’re south of Montauk Highway…  this is key for, as the sat-view shows, there are only a handful of domiciles on that side, mostly off-season-empty in March; then, east of the Beard compound and ‘Driftwood Cove’ below it, the gone but not forgotten Camp Hero Airbase, spooky fenced ruins now, not a soul around…  

Addendum: The Airbase is notable, no question, but not for us, not now, on the subject at hand… I mean… I don’t think.. it’s… relevant… No! Don’t get started, Allan, on the Airbase...

… I know the eastern tip of the East End pretty much as well as anyone: Having camped it in the 1950s with my dad, I’ve since surfed and surf-casted its many rock points, reconnoitered the bramble for deer stands, endlessly dog-walked its winding trails… the territory is as wild and untrammeled (by humans) as any of the National Parks where so many have similarly gone poof, into thin air. 

Listen, this is important: Depending on his level of… dementia… Beard could not have gotten far in the thick tangly bramble surrounding his home, even with the bare branches of late winter. (The level of his dementia is a vital factor in our hunt for some truth. I’ve emailed those Montauk friends I have left — precious few — in the hopes they might know. So far, nada.)

It was cold that day, March 31, low 40s at 4:30 PM, cold enough that one night’s exposure would have likely done Beard-the-codger in, unless he wore very thick clothing (another important, and unknown, detail), which, if it’s true that he ‘just wandered off,’ would be unlikely; planning ahead, for the coming cold of night, say, is not the forte of… one afflicted with dementia. (Using the D-word as an adjective, as in ‘demented,’ surely gives an awful, and erroneous, drift. The shades of meaning are part of why it’s so nasty and misleading.)

I’m thinking that whatever his fate, it came upon him swiftly. Do you see my logic? No? Look at the damn Google Earths! Since we know he didn’t go to someone’s house, all he had as route to oblivion were narrow trails through thick, basically impenetrable bramble. 

Obvious as it is, always keep in mind the implications of this: No corpse has been found. 

Addendum from weeks later: Skip down to the P.S. from here. Now that we know Peter’s body was found, my ramblings from here on are irrelevant and tedious. But do check out that P.S. I’m quite sure Peter was murdered…

Given this, plus the apparent want of other clues, if we put a gun to a sleuth’s head and demand of him What’s your best guess on Beard’s fate? he’d probably have to say something to the effect of ‘The wife killed him’… Look it up, ass–… just look it up. Cui bonos aside, when a spouse bites it, the percentages point at the other one as culprit.

Me? No, I don’t see it. If only for their daughter’s sake, Naj would not concoct an endlessly agonizing mystery like the one playing out on the East End, leaving no closure for beloved Zara. (See Zara’s Tales; Perilous Escapades in Equatorial Africa, the book the two ‘collaborated on,’ a loving father to cherished adolescent daughter memoir, from 2004.)  No, Naj would not do that. (I’ll not try the reader’s patience with my assurance that ‘knowing Naj’…. and so forth, although I’m tempted.)

Plus there are too many other, less schemey ways to simulate a dementia-afflicted 82 year-old’s natural passing. Naj did not like the publicity Beard brought with his lifestyle and is probably in as much anguish over the goddamn ‘Beard Missing!’ headlines and hoopla as her husband’s (assumed) demise.

Felt I had to get that out of our way.

Kidnapped? Or murdered and buried or carried off to be disposed of? Although I don’t doubt that Beard made some enemies (given his shenanigans, think ‘cuckolded’ as one motive), you don’t wait until your victim is 82 and blank of mind to exact revenge. Besides, he outlived most of the hubbies he wronged.

‘When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.’

My favorite Sherlockism (from ‘The Sign of the Four’), by far, and easy enough said. The problem with it, though, is the failure to define ‘the impossible.’ In this case, indeed, what we have are degrees of improbability. 

Is it impossible that a UFO swooped down and snatched our man? See what I mean? (If you said Yes, it’s impossible, then you’re a fool and can get lost anyway.)

Here’s what is all but impossible: Beard wandered off and died of ‘natural causes’ (not by homicide). Why? Because every square meter from town to the point (some five miles) was searched, and, again, no body was found. Dogs were quickly brought in — meaning the next day, April 1 — and could find no scent leading from the cottage grounds. Mmmmm. Yes, I’ve mulled that detail a bit…

It’s still winter! Montauk is so desolate, so devoid of humans, so… spooky… that my first winter there inspired a screenplay titled The Island in Winter, a tale of how remote, elite summer places are completely different, and not in a good way, in the… dead of winter. (The screenplay sold to Showtime back in the early 90s and was on the verge of principal photography when a shake up in top management killed it.)  Point being, and sorry for the redundant rambling, but no one was around.   

I’ll tell you what I want to think, and this assumes that no remains turn up: 

(Squirming) Brace yourself as first I try to soften the blow… readers of this blog know that I do night sky time lapses here in the southwestern desert, and have been doing so for a couple months. Every night I set up two cameras, one facing east, the other west, with super-wide (fisheye) lenses, each taking in half the sky (or close to it). My exposure times are from 10 to 30 seconds, depending on the phase of the moon.

Addenum: I’ve been a professional photographer, usually combined with writing, as in my stories (and a cover and back page photo) for Men’s Journal, my 13 page spread for Smithsonian magazine, many others. (Perhaps my respect and affection for Beard, plus my attachment to The Elephant, is partly related to my love of the art/craft.) 

On average, every night (excepting the rare rainy or overcast ones) I record something… up there… that I cannot explain. The infrequent barren nights are offset by the ‘busy’ ones, wherein the heavens light up with enigmatic… I don’t have an accurate, precise noun for the enigmas, given my perception that… whatever it is… is much more complex than nuts and bolts ‘spacecrafts,’ let alone big-headed little gray men. (And ‘UFO’ presupposes a flying object, when I’m not certain that either word fits the reality of what I’m recording.)

For our purposes here, you’ll have to trust me for now that I’ve absolutely ruled out heavenly bodies, meteors, satellites, and conventional aircraft. Given this, I have to ask, What’s left? You tell me. (I’ve grabbed some wild-ass  ‘fireballs,’ i.e., long lasting meteor burns, and well know their look.)

I’ve made a couple or so videos from my sky imagery, which you can view here and here and here, but they were before I went back into my archives and gave them a close scrutiny. See, I’ve been doing time lapse photography for the last two or three years, and I recently realized that many of them compositionally included the sky, often from dusk until late night, when the battery would run out. (I’ve since added AC adapters so battery death is a  non-factor.)

Time lapse photogs rarely slow down their clips to examine every frame — it’s tiresome and the finished product is almost always a short visual trip through many hours of real time, so why bother?

And holy shit, with many hours of careful slow-mo examination I unearthed some gems. I’m working on a new video but for our purposes here, I’ll point out that the most common image — and again, I’m talking every fucking night (!) —  is of a bright moving light (brighter than most stars or aircraft) that shows up as a streak in the 10 – 30 seconds of exposure time, then… disappears. The sort of visual that someone looking up would likely not notice… unless they watched it go poof, and then thought about it. This is where the time lapse is invaluable. It’s stunning to be going through a night’s work, aircraft buzzing by (they all have blinking strobes) then you hit a frame that’s a steady white, and which lasts for one or two following frames before… whatever happens to it.

Appear, disappear, appear, disappear, every night. See where I’m going? No? Okay, work with me, hear me out on why this is relevant. Over the past decade and a half, since my dumb-ass abandonment of my farm in Costa Rica (think how much more I regret that now), I’ve made a study of how the world really works (HRWRW) — as opposed to what we’ve been told. No subject (or theory) is off-limits, but the sciences along with recent history are of special interest, starting with the ‘queen’ of the sciences, cosmology.

I mention this as background; for our purposes, the point I’m getting at is that this lifelong atheist/reductionist now knows that there is a Higher Power,’ not in the God of the Bible or what-have-you sense, hell no, not that crapola, but rather in a… presence that exists in some undefinable, other-dimensional sense, and is a meddler in the affairs of men, and of the physical planet, mama earth.

This isn’t the time or place for a lesson in cosmology — let alone how the whole expanding space/black hole/big bang paradigm is lunacy, and an exercise in false science/blind faith — but you can go to this post and scroll down to ‘Another Line of Evidence’ for the proof of the Higher Power — that is, unless the reader has no interest in either critical thinking or probability theory or the chance vs necessity vs intelligent design de facto revelation (in which case, again, get lost).

So either click the link and read, or accept my Higher Power assumption, for now at least. (I’ll give lazy assholes a hint: The stupendous coincidence that allows for total solar eclipses goes way deeper than mainstream science wants to admit.) There is a Higher Power and… it …not only meddles but is curious about what we think. I deduce this from the ‘moon numbers’ I write about (in the above link), through asking myself why would… it… include in the mechanics of the solar system such obvious proofs of its own existence, if not to see who has the intellectual chops to figure it out? (That ‘scientists’ can’t see the obvious here is the ultimate proof that their paradigm is in fact a… a religion.)

Combine the above with the logic behind ‘simulation theory’ and by god your head can spin. (I’ve debunked the Nick Bostrom version with this post, but the basic elements that survive have… implications.)

Yeah yeah yeah I’m getting to my point: Combine the appear disappear appear appear skyward enigmas (which in my view are not of nuts and bolts) with the implied surety that reality is not what we think it is… combine that with the Big Guy running ‘the program’s’ curiosity about who among us stands out, and I’m thinking, hoping, that old P.B.’s disappearance was a sort of cosmic value judgment pertaining to his fucking dementia. 

I’m postulating that a designer (small ‘d’ plus recall my contempt for religion) of such stupendous/unimaginable intellect would have more interest in the more interesting among us, and… you get it… who but Beard fits that description?

First on my list, remember? With number two being… not… even… close…

So take the Beard-poof-he’s-gone trick not as a physical mystery but as an aesthetic phenomenon. A putting of the world just a smidgen more… right.  (If you’re wondering why he/she/it doesn’t just ‘fix him,’ then you’re missing my point: ‘Curiosity’ infers non-omniscience, which in turn infers non-omnipotence… a limit to the power to meddle…)

Addendum: Regarding Beard’s return from death following an angry Dumbo’s squashing… was this (plus near death experiences, NDEs, in general) a nudge from my theorized intelligent designer? (In P.B.’s case because he’s too entertaining to watch to let him prematurely slip away?)  

Enough! By now you either get it or you don’t, in the matter of my old friend’s disappearance.

(A mighty sigh) Bye!

Allan

(Yawning) Sleep is amazing. I had some awful flashback dreams last night, maybe related to a dissatisfaction with this essay, maybe not, but I awoke and instead of posting this I kept repeating to myself another East End Peter’s name, Matthiessen, Peter Mattiessen, a likewise gone but not forgotten local figure, a colleague of Beard’s if not a close friend (I’ve heard they had issues), and a man of letters who shared many of Beard’s interests and proclivities.

(Wide awake now) Peter Matthiessen had a major effect on my life, my career as a writer, and in many ways reminds me of P.B. His 1978 The Snow Leopard won him the National Book Award (among other laurels) and is his version of Beard’s magnum opus, The End of the Game (or, many  would say, it’s the other way around) in its poignant celebration of a beautiful and endangered wild thing. You could probably get away with calling P.M. sort of a Beard minus all the babes. 

The effect Matthiessen had on me was via a different and much less touted book, Mens’s Lives, his homage to the bay fishermen of Long Island’s East End. Having been deeply moved by the book, I finagled a meeting with Matthiessen at his home just ‘upIsland’ in Water Mill, which led directly to my writing a screenplay on the subject. It was the best writing I’ve ever done. (And yes, it sold [with Jon Voight attached] and made me a ton of money; I’d still love to see it get made.)

Regarding P.M., I’ll quote from a book review of The Snow Leopard:

What makes the book stand apart form all others like it is Matthiessen who is a much more nuanced character than your average adventurer and the resulting narrative is a many layered and often exalted one.

Wait wait wait, you may be thinking. What does any of this have to do with… anything? Well okay, here comes the reveal, or part of it, and I’ll use good old Wikipedia so you know it’s the truth (ha ha!):

Peter Matthiessen (May 22, 1927 – April 5, 2014) was an American novelist, naturalist, wilderness writer, zen teacher and CIA officer. 

Addendum: A detail, plus an implication thereof: Did you notice the missing comma in the quote, the one following ‘zen teacher’? See the subtextual impression its omission leaves? Yeah, right, mates the two ‘jobs,’ doesn’t it, as if they were part of the same… something. Zen teacher and CIA officer! And the… touch behind the word ‘officer’; not ‘agent’ or ‘deep cover operative’ or (my fave) ‘spook.’   

Officer! Like a cop on the street or someone who might arrest you. I can only imagine Matthiessen’s anguish at his own Wiki page… they were fucking with him, truly.

They love irony – and those liiittle details – those mind-fuck fucks at Wikipedia! (If you don’t understand it’s an Intelligence op then… right, get lost.)

Yeah, point being is that my inspiration, my adored environmentalist hero, the man of letters who’d casted nets with my friends the Lesters (13th generation baymen), was a life-long mind controlling, culture-creating motherfucker. When I was enlightened on this, and it was just after P.M.’s passing… Disappointment doesn’t come close. 

(Imitating an effete, whiny voice) But his magazine, The Paris Review, was, like… communist propaganda, wasn’t it?! Remember this one: ‘The best way to control the opposition is to lead it ourselves.’ Think that was V. Lenin? More like A. Dulles. How naive are you?

Here’s how it went this morning, and how my mind works: I’m scanning this thing for edits (didn’t do enough of that, did I, asshole?), ready to hit Send, something about Matthiessen still buzzing in my head, when I zero in on this dumb-ass blurt, written yesterday:

If so, I missed the ‘tell’ completely. 

Remember what I was talking about? When ‘they’ came to recruit him, Beard would ‘politely, but adamantly decline,’ blah blah blah. Did my naivety bring you up short? No? Okay, not your job.

Remember how I bragged about how long I’ve been looking into how the world really works? 

Remember how I was so sure the spooks wanted him, something about his… ‘his pedigree, social circle, and world-wide haunts…’ Here’s one I sort of forgot: ‘If the CIA wants you, they will have you.’

Plus, think, Allan, think about when they would have approached him: the early ’60s, around the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, humanity on the verge of oblivion, and on the verge of the culture-created 1960s, Peter thinking, then saying, ‘Me, a ‘secret agent’? Sure, sounds like fun.’

And had he abjured ‘governmental service’, how easily ‘they’ could have blackmailed him into a mind change! Whaddam I, nuts? With P.B.’s outlaw mindset, his penchant for that other magic dust (Peruvian), and so on, it’d take ten minutes to bring him in!

It would only be later when he realized what spookdom really meant, what it did to you. Too too late, mate.

Talk about disappointments… another East End… not exactly a friend, but acquaintance and of whom I am a fan… Jimmy Buffett… reading in Cathy O’brien’s TRANCE Formation of America: True life story of a mind control slave… a book so stunningly audacious in detail that I had to give it a nod… wherein Cathy (I did meet her once) fingered Buffett as a long-time operative. (Who better, with his sea plane to move ‘stuff’ internationally and his devoted Parrot Head following as a culture-creation op?)

By the time in my life of that reveal, though, I was hardened beyond disappointment.

Who else do I know? How about… Sean Penn, who along with Radar Pictures bought my rambling memoir, In Search of Captain Zero — we didn’t get along, Sean and I — and whom in this post I out as the spook he certainly is. (If you go to that link, do a word search for ‘Penn’ or ‘El Chapo’, hint hint.)

Point here being that HTWRW, how it really works, on a societal level, is all about culture creation, mostly media/celebrity-fashioned, from those mentioned here to the now-outed Tim Leary to the whole of the rock & roll crew, Laural Canyon to The Grateful Dead…

And on and on. Look it up! Educate yourself! My hyperlinks are merely a suggested starting point!

But hold on, here, even assuming Beard’s life-long spookery, how does it relate to his vanishment? Good question? Mmmm… not really, not given his… dementia. (I knew it would come back as a clue.)

Recall ex-CIA chief William Colby’s ‘disappearance’ from his home on the Potomac, leaving his laptop running and the backdoor open, another very odd occurrence; then, eight days later, his body washes up, the media telling us that it was a ‘canoeing accident’ or ‘suicide’ or… whatever bullshit ‘they’ want us to believe… for the fact is that Colby’s autopsied body had only been dead and in the water for two days at most, leaving six days unaccounted for…

Think about how that could happen without… help… and is Colby’s poof-disappearance starting to sound familiar? 

Motive? According to those close to him, Colby, long retired from the Agency, had begun to reflect on his life, his career, the amount of death and misery he was directly responsible for (the horrendous Phoenix Program in Vietnam, Colby’s baby, accounted for tens of thousands tortured and slaughtered) and with his dirt nap looming (the natural one) had been spewing Agency dirt, out of guilt.

See, they killed him, of course, but wanted to ‘talk to him’ first, suss out how many others knew what he knew, and so forth, hence the time lag between disappearance and corpse floatation. 

And so we circle back to dementia. One of the very first symptoms of its oncoming is the spilling of whatever is on one’s mind, the blurtation of memories, as it were… be they trivia or state secrets. (What’s a ‘state secret’ anyway, when you have the perspective of a blanking mind?)

Did P.B. make a blabbermouth boo-boo, with his handler or fellow Agency traveler?  

If you’ve stuck it out this far, you have the picture.

And so I’ll wrap this up, this over-the-shoulder blurtation of my memories, and my thoughts on the vanishment of Peter Hill Beard.

The explanation is here somewhere in these ramblings, considering the high improbabilities of any other explanation… I’d bet a valued possession on it.

And so I’m wavering, between… naivety and cynicism… between… to put it slyly, between a higher power and a Higher Power… one earthly yet demoniac, the other… well, not so much… as the in-effect solution to this East End mystery… 

                                                                       A.C.W., hunkered in the desert, April 17, 2020, 2:30 PM

This video is a decent, very brief look at who P.B. is/was, where he lived out his days.

Addendum(s) (4/2120): Peter’s remains have been found, not coincidentally by a surf buddy of mine, ‘Fireman Dave’ (too many Daves on the East End!) who is an expert bow hunter/outdoorsman and knows the area around Beard’s better than anyone. (‘Not coincidentally’ b/c Dave predicted he’d find Peter after the ‘search parties’ gave up.)  Dave sent me the adjacent image with the two dots representing Peter’s house and where he was found, i.e., about 2/3 of a mile to the northwest. No trails in the area, ultra thick bramble. Details to come.

 My night-lapse image is a satellite. The flash is an ‘iridium flare,’ which is caused by the tumbling craft’s reflective antennae catching the sun just right. 

Now go to the next post. There’s more….