Philip L. Fradkin

Philip Fradkin currently is working on two books.

He has completed work on the draft manuscript for a book about the California coast to be published by the University of California Press. The photographs for the book are being taken by his son Alex, who as a six-year-old accompanied Philip when he was researching his first book in the early 1970s. California, the Golden Coast was published by Viking in 1974. Alex was six-years-old at the time, now he is in his 40s and is an accomplished photographer whose work on the coast and other projects can be seen at www.alexfradkin.com.

The text and photographs are clustered around the seven predominant land uses and the overarching force impacting the coast. They are--in the order from the Oregon to the Mexican borders they will appear in the book--the wilderness, agricultural, residential, tourist, recreation, industrial, and military coasts. A concluding chapter titled "The Political Coast" describes how politics has shaped the shoreline. For each coast, an emblematic place is chosen: for example, the Lost Coast in Humboldt County for the wilderness coast and the Bolsa Chica wetlands in Orange County for the political coast.

The second book is a biography of Everett Ruess, also to be published by the University of California Press. Ruess was a talented adolescent who left his Los Angeles home in 1930 and then traveled throughout California and the Southwest with mules or horses for five years before disappearing in the canyonlands of Southern Utah in 1934. Some bones thought to be those of Ruess were discovered in 2008. Currently, there is a controversy whether those bones belonged to Ruess or someone else.

The abbreviated life of Everett, Fradkin believes, has much more to teach us than whatever death may have befallen him in the desert, although there is no doubt that his disappearance has elevated him to the pantheon of naturalists in this country. Fradkin has written the following explanation about his connection to this book project, his thirteenth:

There needs to be a personal reason, meaning a private line of inquiry, for me to spend two or three years researching and writing a book. The subject also needs to be tangible, like a river, a weapon of mass destruction, a state, an earthquake, or an individual. In turn, that subject needs to cast a shadow, meaning be representative of something else besides its own vertical presence. I also need to think of the words that unroll as story telling: the narrative accounts of the Colorado River, nuclear fallout, the State of California, the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, the life of Wallace Stegner, and, in this case, the life and times of Everett Ruess.

Stegner led me to Ruess. I read Stegner’s book Mormon Country in the late 1970s in preparation to write the chapter on the Mormons and the Indians in A River No More. In Stegner’s book there was mention of the brief life of Ruess, its promise, and his disappearance. Beginning in 1998 I sought a publisher for a biography of the young man. Because he had no national renown and seemingly was only a regional presence associated in the West mainly with Southern Utah, no publisher outside of that state was interested. I made a renewed effort to find a publisher after I completed the Stegner biography. In that book I had written a story about a man who lived a full life. How fitting, I thought, to write about a boy-man who lived a short life but demonstrated incredible promise for the future.

I have never felt the need to explain in such an explicit manner my personal attachment to a story. I do in this case so that the reader can understand my insights, prejudices, and commitment to this story. Like Everett, I was raised in the Unitarian Church with its emphasis on the intellect, had progressive parents of a liberal persuasion who believed in letting a child find his own way, and embarked on a quest, hitchhiking for six months through Europe with a backpack. Everett was searching for beauty; I was looking for sex, and therein lies one of many differences between us, except both searches demonstrate the seriousness of purposes during those tender years.

I believe this tale is the story of all of us when we were adolescents with our lives spreading out before us and numerous diverging trails through the wilderness to chose from. A large part of the appeal of this subject is that as I near my eightieth year I want to relive that time of turmoil through another, and through storytelling complete a cycle. I hope readers can also relate to this unusual adolescent through themselves, a child of their own, or a more distant youngster. For Everett’s story is ultimately about us and our children and youths partially known or unknown to us, only writ larger. Therein lies the shadow.