“I Went Southwest”

In 1971, Lew Welch, a poet and “unsung member of the Beats,” walked into the wilderness of the San Juan Ridge carrying a .22 -caliber revolver, leaving behind a cryptic note. Police in Nevada County, California, searched for days to locate Welch; so did a a team of locals, campers and poets rallied by Gary Snyder, the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer and environmentalist. But Welch was never found, and his disappearance has evolved into a hazy legend. “He’s been useful grist for a certain type of adventuresome, hermeneutics-obsessed academic attracted to the themes of nature, retreat, and nonduality,” writes Brad Rassler, “with the handy conceit of his disappearance as a unifying metaphor for fill-in-the-blank.” Rassler, a mountaineer, explores the boundaries of Welch’s disappearance, sharpening the edges of a decades-old mystery while salvaging the complicated figure at its heart.

Through the years, Welch’s legend has been shaped and the burrs smoothed, the inconsistencies and unseemly bits taken into a particular form, in the same manner that a woodturner takes a roughing gouge to a block of wood to round it before hollowing it out. If Welch’s considerable foibles have been dropped from the legend, the timeline bungled, the alcoholism and probable mental illness minimized, the use of racial epithets and the overt misogyny ignored, his death fetishized into a form of transfiguration . . . he is cherished by those who know him for saying it plain: simply, elegantly, puckishly, and humanely.