Secret Vistas: Dedicated to the Memory of Spider Martin

by Glynn Wilson

The first time I rode the rocky, rolling white water of the Locust Fork River with Spider Martin, I knew it would be more than your average adventure. In stark contrast with today’s drought in the Southeast, near record levels of rainfall in 2002 swelled the narrow banks to the top of the black rocks smoothed over by the relentless forces of time.

Glynn Wilson

Spider Martin on the rocks in 2002

Then, anyone who has ever known Spider Martin knows life around him was, well, never dull.

The record rainfall would continue into 2003 and allow for other explorations of the river. But now that he is gone, they all merge in my mind into one.

When I launched this Website in early 2005, in part inspired by conversations with Spider, I also knew it would be a similar adventure even though he would not be around to share it.

To try to understand you have to picture in your head the most wide-open form of freedom possible in the imagination of a writer and a photographer in America then, sitting at the computer or careening down a fast river. In a world dominated by the professional, corporate press, and in this post 9/11, PR, police state, I know, this is hard to imagine.

But just picture Spider Martin in 2002 in the back of a green 17-foot Kevlar canoe in the lazy water by the Swann Joy Covered Bridge north of Birmingham in Blount County. I’m in the front. In the middle, there are two coolers. One is full of food. The other is stuffed with ice and beer, and not just any beer. Something golden brown.

In my wildest imagination, it would be cool to include here one great Hunter S. Thompson paragraph involving a waterproof suitcase full of psychedelic drugs, just to carry on the New Journalism tradition into blogland. Alas, this story is less romantic and does not involve mushrooms or mescaline, only Sipsey green grass.

Fashioning himself as an experienced canoeist, and never one to take the easy path in life, Spider guided us down the river “the hard way.” Instead of letting the water take us where it wanted us to go, in other words, his idea was to explore the one other possible route that could result in heart-thumping glory, or ultimate disaster. I imagined broken limbs, but said nothing except the occasional expletive, and paddled on, keeping us off the rocks as best I could.

He stood only 5-foot 1¾ inches tall, but he had no fear.

With one knee blown out from soccer and one collarbone sticking out like a chicken wing from an untreated injury from some adventure, maybe hang gliding, he was the product of the free-lance life with no health insurance. He had no teeth left at 63, but he did sport a fine set of dentures. He couldn’t see very well, and he was almost deaf.

He could hear me, however, due to the tenor of my voice, even in the crashing sound of rushing water, when I would point left and shout, “Fuck, Spider, take us left, left…”

Luckily, the Kevlar was fine with being bounced off the rocks. We careened down the rapids and back into smooth water maybe five or six times before taking a lunch break by a small waterfall. It was one fine summer day, when the native green ferns grew large along the banks overhung by the pink on white blooms of the invasive Asian mimosas.

Glynn Wilson

Spider Martin lunching on a Locust Fork beach

There on a small beach with sand the color of Alabama red clay, we ate a feast, usually vegetarian, although we would cheat now and then with a Top Hat Barbecue sandwich. We drank the good beer and talked about things like how hard it is sometimes for people to successfully communicate - even with all the information in the world at your fingertips on the “Internets.” Yes, Bush had already said that, and the war in Iraq was on. People sometimes misunderstand e-mail, but writing for the Web with imbedded links offered the opportunity to create a database of information and allow readers to catch up at their own pace.

We talked about art and science, war and peace and the future of democracy and man. And we wanted to know what form the future tools of communication would take. Was it possible to democratize the world using the Web?

At that time, after experiencing the newspaper business, free-lance journalism for magazines, owning a bookstore with a coffee bar on Birmingham’s Southside for three years, then nine years of teaching and doing research, I was living another dream.

Spider Martin

Glynn Wilson smoking in the river

All the way from hanging out on the banks of the Locust Fork to free-lancing for the national desk of the New York Times, and not just any New York Times. As the media columnists liked to call it in those days, it was the “Howell Raines New York Times,” after the executive editor from Alabama who, along with his “flood the zone” staff and hoards of free-lancers, covered the world like no newspaper before or since, winning 7 Pulitzer Prizes in the year of 9/11, more than any newspaper in history.

From the point of view of a 25-year Times reader, and knowing what came later, it appeared to be the last great American newspaper. The Jayson Blair scandal brought the 20th century to its real end and with it closed down the century of glory for the mass circulation daily newspaper.

As former Times correspondent and author Rick Bragg told me years later, when some of the sting had worn off, “at least they let us work there for a little while.”

I had already published one online magazine, perhaps the first, The Southerner, and still produced a headline page with links to the top daily news at Southerner.net. It really functioned and was created as my own home page for keeping up with news online. That’s important to making it as a free-lance writer. You have to keep up with what’s going on in the world and find fissures to mine for the gold that comes from selling words. When the right story comes along.

Spider thought I should create a different kind of Website, with editorial commentary and the ability for readers to make instant comments. But back then there was no such thing as blogging software. Blog was not yet a word, short for Weblog, and so it was no great threat to politicians or newspaper managers - yet.

Life was good. But with King George in power, there were many harbingers of disasters to come, including “the Big One” in New Orleans, which I wrote about for the Dallas Morning News.

But that was many miles away from our lunch by the Locust Fork. We explored a side stream, and continued on. Another five or six rapids with no major mishaps and smooth water time and again, time for breaks and more beer and lollygagging on the water, we never came really close to turning it over until the final drop before the landing. We almost lost it in front of a local crowd of country folk fishing and swimming. But in the end we saved the run and it was a glorious, satisfying success.

If only life could be like that always.

We went on and barbecued salmon steaks and talked into the evening for the book tapes. We were working on his story together, talking all about the Civil Rights days, his family and his friendships with the likes of former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman.

Many moons later, after many stories and other trips down the river, a taste of spring hit middle Alabamaland in March, 2003. But then a bad winter storm hit in early April, like it sometimes does in this part of the world. It lasted almost a week.

Still in New Orleans at the time, five years ago next month, I got one last e-mail message from Spider Martin from the mountain. He had hinted at suicide before, not unlike Hunter Thompson, but he would not warn me again. I had passed on other warnings before to his family.

Due to his fairly severe dyslexia, Spider always typed in ALL CAPS on the IMac I helped him pick out in Homewood.

I WATCHED LAWRENCE OF ARABIA LAST NITE, PROBABLY ONE OF THE GREATEST EPIC MOVIES EVER MADE. THE BATTLE FOR THE RICHES OF ARABIA BY THE BRITISH. THE SCENERY WAS LIKE WHAT YOU SEE ON TV FROM IRAQ TODAY. THE DUST STORMS AND THE TRIBES THAT CAN’T GET ALONG. THE PERCEPTION OF THE BEDOUINS ABOUT BLOOD AND GLORY.

IT SEEMS AS IF WE’RE DOING IT ALL OVER AGAIN. I THINK AS A JOURNALIST YOU SHOULD SEE IT. IF YOU HAVE SEEN IT, THEN SEE IT AGAIN. A VERY POWERFUL EPIC AND THE MUSIC IS CLASSICAL POWER STUFF. THE LAST SCENE SHOWS PRINCE FASIAL AND THE BRITS DIVIDING UP THE SPOILS OF WAR. FASIAL BECAME KING OF SAUDI ARABIA.

WAR, WHAT IS IT GOOD FOR? ANSWER, THE ECONOMY STUPID.

TA TA, AS THE BRITS WOULD SAY, SPIDER.

That was it.

Later in the early morning hours he would take his own life, not like Lawrence of Arabia who died in a motorcycle wreck. Spider was a daredevil who would have enjoyed that.

After attending his funeral in Birmingham as a pallbearer and making my way back sadly to New Orleans, I sent this message to Rick Bragg who was still with the Times. The Jayson Blair story had not yet been broken. That would come in May.

At 12:06 AM 4/14/03, I wrote:

Hey man,

I just got home late Sunday night. Just wanted to tell you that the only book on Spider’s bedside table in the bedroom where he shot himself, the room I set up as my bedroom in his house when I was in town working, was the copy of Ava’s Man I gave him.

The bookmark, a tag from one of his Civil Rights T-shirts, was slipped into the pages at Chapter 9: Movers. Not that it means anything. Just a fact.

After I wrote the following few graphs Saturday night, I had to stop myself, for reasons I’ll explain later. This will most likely not see the light of day. But I just wanted to show you my first lead on this. I can’t write it this way, so don’t show it to anyone else.

GW

Here’s what I wrote before stopping. I haven’t written about it much since, only in passing on the blog. This has never before been published. I do it here today, finally, because it is time.

Infamous Photographer Spider Martin Dies at 64

BLOUNT SPRINGS, Ala., April 9, 2003 - The eighth of April must have seemed like a good day to die for James “Spider” Martin, one of the most important photographers of the Civil Rights era in the American South, and one of Birmingham and Alabama’s most beloved, favorite sons.

It was the 30th Anniversary of Pablo Picasso’s death, his hero in art if not in life. Spider treated his women better.

Sometime after 8 p.m. on Tuesday, April 8, 2003, certainly into the morning after going through a half bottle of Jack Daniels and most of what was left of the grass, he took out the old WWI era flare gun his father or grandfather rigged to fire 16-gauge shotgun shells. He aimed it at his heart and pulled the trigger with both thumbs.

He surely died in an instant, Blount County Coroner Greg Long said afterwards.

Hours later, about 4 p.m. Wednesday, his partner of eight years, Lynn Coleman, “two times Miss Deaf Alabama” he liked to brag, came in the back door of his Civil War era house on the mountain in Blount Springs, near Hayden, about a 20-minute drive north of Birmingham. She found him lying in bed fully clothed with his hiking boots on, surrounded by his three dogs, howling.

-30-

Bragg wrote back:

Hey man,

This is beautiful but it breaks my heart. Why? Does anybody know yet? Or does it matter?

Rick

My response:

There are a thousand reasons why, none of them all that relevant, and it would break my heart to try to put them all down in an e-mail message.

Just talked to the coroner in Blount County. The investigator is out of town for a day or two, so it may be a couple more days before I can get the official word.

GW

It was later declared a suicide and the case closed. There were rumors about a burned cross and a family connection to the HealthSouth crisis, all of which came down about the same time as that late winter storm, which put a layer of ice on everything. Thinking it would be spring soon, and being nearly broke and finding it hard to get work, Spider did not order another refill on the propane tank for the heat in March. So it had to be freezing in that airy old house.

It never got really cold in New Orleans.

As the year went on, other parts of the world began to fall apart.

In May, the Jayson Blair story broke, you remember the kid who made stuff up, resulting in the departures of Raines and Bragg from the Times. The “flood the zone” payroll dried up for us free-lancers, as the Christian Science Monitor reeled from the kidnapping of a correspondent in Baghdad and People magazine laid off 33 stringers and the Dallas Morning News became ensconced in a major advertising and circulation scandal.

Then it looked like George W. Bush might win reelection in 2004. Horror of horrors! Surely they wouldn’t elect him again.

“Are they that fucking stupid?” Spider would ask, raising his voice, then laughing at his “French.”

With an opportunity to wade into the Bush AWOL investigation near the end of 2003 for a New York magazine, before it broke big in late January 2004, I abandoned New Orleans and moved briefly to Alabama and got the story out of Montgomery, and then moved to DC for awhile. But by the winter of 2005 I was back in Birmingham due to a family illness and got the call to help the New York Times cover the trial of Richard Scrushy.

Once the major free-lance research was done after about seven weeks of work and five weeks of the trial, the spigot dried up again.

By then, there were a few programmers putting up Websites called Weblogs, using software that made it fast to publish words and pictures - including everything from personal diaries to opinion columns to full-blown investigative reports - and allow readers to comment. If Hunter Thompson had lived, perhaps he would have figured out how to blog. Spider would have for sure. He loved e-mailing crazy messages and pictures. I still have more than 800 messages from him saved in the archives.

Seeing no real future for something called Southerner.Net, or at least not a future I wanted to fully pursue, I sat around for a few nights sipping Yuengling that spring, trying to think of another domain name to buy and start something new I wanted to try.

Remembering those trips on the river and what my creative friend had said, I decided to buy LocustFork.Net and begin to figure out a way to integrate a news interface with the more linear and limited layout of a blog. I mean newspapers are named after cities, but why can’t we create something that is way more than a newspaper online and name it after a river? It can range from the informal, conversational style of a diary to the more rigorous phrases of a legal or scientific journal, or the parsimonious prose of narrative journalism.

That has now morphed into what I call The Locust Fork World News(lest someone mistake this for a small town newspaper) and The Locust Fork Journal (which makes more sense and lends itself more to poetry than the word blog).

It is now one of the few profitable professional news sites and blogs in the region, yet I still free-lance from time to time as I did recently for The Nation magazine.

Otherwise, I live the life of a writer, albeit out of suburban Alabama and not yet out of a Sprinter Van with a high-speed satellite uplink hooked up to an HD TV.

The day that happens I will fulfill another dream I remember telling people about at parties back in 1984 when, in my early newspaper experience, the first laptop computers came along. One day I saw the day when it would be possible to travel the world and file stories from remote places over the coming Internet, still a very slow and limited way to transmit stories in those days. The PC revolution was just on the horizon in the years ahead.

The future is now, they say. I say democracy doesn’t work without a courageous, aggressive, watchdog press. And what better way to deliver it than on a Website? Build it and they will come - if you know what you are doing.

Thomas Jefferson was talking about newspapers and democracy when he said, to John Tyler in 1804:

“No experiment can be more interesting than that we are now trying, and which we trust will end in establishing the fact, that man may be governed by reason and truth. Our first object should therefore be, to leave open to him all the avenues to truth. The most effectual hitherto found, is the freedom of the press. It is, therefore, the first shut up by those who fear the investigation of their actions.”

But his words can still echo now for the future of the Web Press, if we have the ability to hear them still and act on them with the necessary information.

He also said, to A. Coray in 1823:

“It is also the best instrument for enlightening the mind of man and improving him as a rational, moral and social being.”

Since newspapers long ago stopped working for that mission and became instruments of profit alone, turning objectivity into a neutered mantra for making money by offending the fewest people possible, it is now up to bloggers to save democracy in this century like newspapers did in the 20th century with stories like the Pentagon Papers and Watergate.

The faster people get onboard the sooner the revolution can truly begin.

If newspapers want to be impediments to that future and try to hang onto the First Amendment’s special rights for their ink and paper, and glom onto the politicians perceived to hold the keys to the money lock box, they may soon go the way of the Dodo bird and the ivory-billed woodpecker.

If they want to get onboard the education and truth-telling revolution, what are they waiting for?

To some extent and in some places, public radio and television help educate people. But it too has become professionalized and to some extent compromised by the big money of the few remaining corporations left in the world. The monopoly power company. The monopoly phone company. The monopoly cable TV company. The one bank left and the four or five media companies left and, of course, there’s always Wal-mart.

Freedom lies in blogland, we believe, and our point is, the first thing that needs to happen is for King George to go - by impeachment preferably but at least back to the ranch after the 2008 election.

Newspapers could begin to repair their credibility in some people’s minds by apologizing for endorsing Bush twice. What a colossal mistake. But they won’t.

Then the people have to believe it is possible to bring back democracy from illegal spying and torture and political prisoners and Katrina and the other high crimes and misdemeanors against humanity.

Spider Martin would have believed in the fight. There are days when I wish he were still here fighting with us like he did on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma on Bloody Sunday. There are days when I think we could save American Democracy one more time - right here Alabamaland like Martin Luther King Jr. and the rest did in the 1960s.

Some days I think it is a lost cause, like the War Between the States, and I just want to move to Coney Island and play the blues and take the train to Manhattan and say to heck with the South.

Apparently, however, it is in my Cherokee genes to fight. And for better or worse, my ancestry is here. My weapon of choice is the word, which it is said can be mightier than the sword.

I know from experience this can be true. Among other experiences from my life and times, there is no damn dam on the Locust Fork River. People can make things happen if they believe in democracy - and stand up and fight for it.

But they can’t do it without a courageous, aggressive, watchdog press. And to have that, it takes real reporting, writing and resources. People naturally respond to stories, to narrative.

I do not have all the answers for how this economic transition will take place. But I am going to be right here pushing the envelope and giving it my best shot and living this life as long as I can. And the door is wide open to anyone who wants to jump on the hit boat with us and ride this river to its logical conclusion.

For more information and other people’s take on what is needed to fix the Web Press and save democracy, read this post at Jay Rosen’s Press Think blog at New York University.

Walter Pincus Rips into Newsroom Neutrality

And check out this story and poll from Atlantic Monthly.

The End of Democracy?

We will have more to say about this in the days ahead, in between the politics and the science. A detailed explanation of objectivity is in order. Soon…

For now spring has sprung, and it is time for a beach trip. St. Patty’s Day at the Flora-Bama. Camping in the Gulf Coast state parks. Floating the Choctawhatchee River in search of that elusive ivory-billed woodpecker.

And we just might even run into old Karl Rove, hanging out down at Rosemary Beach.

If you are the beneficiary of the Bush tax cuts or the tax rebate coming up soon, please consider making a contribution through our PayPal account. It helps pay for the gas.

As always, we welcome your comments.