PaulShepardbio

In October 1994, Paul Shepard was informed by his doctor that he had
metastatic cancer and had only a short time to live. Until that time, being a man
filled with great energy, motivation, and interest in life, he had never really
considered dying. For several months he hovered, stunned, on the doorstep of
death. Then, after a partial recovery, he began compiling notes and references for
his last books. He then went back to his desk where he worked steadily until a
few weeks before his death.

I was Paul's partner for the last decade of his seven on this earth.

Long before I first met him, I had read his books and used them in my
environmental studies seminars at the University of Utah. Some of these books I
had ordered directly from him, but I had never met him in person until Valentine's
Day, 1985. On his way to Jackson, Wyoming for a speaking engagement (and,
from there, on to India on a Fulbright lectureship), he asked me to meet him for
lunch on his stopover at the Salt Lake City airport. I suggested, instead, that he
arrive a day earlier to speak to my graduate seminar where we were reading his
Nature and Madness.

So I found myself standing at the arrival gate watching people stream out
of a plane just in from California. Assured that I would recognize him from a
composite version I had framed in my mind from dust jacket pictures, I was
unprepared when a tall, slender man with graying beard and hair, wearing a
weathered leather jacket and clutching a brief case and small brown suitcase,
strode past me at break-neck speed. I hurried to catch up and asked tentatively,
"Paul???" He turned, looked at me (I might add, 'with eyes bluer than robins' eggs')
and answered, "Flo, there you are!"

I rushed him off to the university where students were waiting
and where for three hours he held us in awe. He began his
lecture without wasting time on disclaimers or niceties.
Expecting that we had come to hear what he had to say, he
delivered a lecture that was brilliantly crafted, eloquent and
executed referring only occasionally to a short list of topics he
had written on a small yellow pad. At the end of the lecture,
he received each question with complete attention, never
answering the querie directly, but extending and bringing
added depth to the topic. With a firm idea of who he was and
what he believed, he met criticism with humility, without
defense, but with firm commitment to his ideas. I listened
transfixed as I would many times in the next years during one
of his lectures.

One of my graduate students took him to the airport early the
next morning, and I didn't hear from him again for four months.
In June, on a short vacation from academia at a cabin in
Bondurant, Wyoming, with a grandson who loves to fish, I was
surprised one morning to see Paul drive up in a cloud of dust
and his little blue Honda. In the next months our friendship
and commitment grew firmly into a partnership. We eventually
built our own cabin in Bondurant where he could fish the
streams after a good day's work at the desk.

My first portrayal is of Paul as a teacher, for that is how he
saw himself and is, I believe, how he would want to be
remembered. Paul refused to be placed in zoology or biology
cubbyholes and disliked teaching traditional science courses.
Fortunately his position at Pitzer College in environmental
studies as an endowed chair of Natural Philosophy and Human
Ecology allowed him to teach interdisciplinary courses and to
address topics of his own choosing.

He valued good questions and interest in his work, and
welcomed friends and colleagues to our home. Visits became
seminars and he gave each his complete devotion and
concentration. After guests left, however, Paul, completely
spent, would often collapse for a day or two of recuperation
before he could get back to his own work. It was obvious that
he had given his all.

On visits, his children always came with natural history questions, mostly to
do with the identification or behavior of animals that they had observed.
These queries were an opening to conversations with their father and
reminiscences that followed about a past intertwined with kept animals,
travels, and misadventures that had been part of their childhoods.

Referring to the marvelous vacations he planned with his children each
summer, his daughter, Jane wrote, 'We had adventures together...You
showed me the world, and took me to places all through my childhood, into
adulthood, that gave me scope and a realization of the earth and different
cultures that nothing but adventure can bring.'

Paul loved to fish. His son, Kent, built a small 'John boat' to Paul's precise specifications
and together they fished the Green and New Fork Rivers in Wyoming. We spent some
golden autumn days floating the rivers with geese and sandhill cranes sounding overhead
and huge moose staring at us from shore.

Paul hunted throughout his life, later more with binoculars than with guns. As a youth
he hunted and fished with his father and followed Ben, a friend slightly older than himself
and a skilled hunter and trapper.

Hunting and the attention to detail it requires, led Paul to a deep love of all nature, but
his greatest passion was for animals that since childhood had guided him through a
series of passages. After his service in the army during World War II, he enrolled at the
University of Missouri in wildlife biology and English literature, and attended Cornell
University summer courses in ornithology to improve his proficiency in bird identification.
Partly due to this good grounding, Paul became an excellent naturalist and an impressive
'birder.'

When we drove through the countryside, he would roll down the car window a crack so
that he could hear the birdsong, and he would intersperse our conversation with the
names of the birds whose calls filtered through the window. As a young professor at
Knox College, he kept and studied a colony of crows. But of all animals, the bear held
the most fascination and meaning for him. For twenty years, he admitted, he had been
involved in an "intermittent meditation on the bear."

Paul was a voracious and selective reader, hunting down references and
following the meandering trails of research. Sorting and resorting his notes was
a means of framing his direction for current research. Next he made a list of
the topics he intended covering in the new book or essay. When he began The
Others he taped to the study door a list of over 100 topics he intended
exploring in the book. In the years since his death, editing his manuscripts and
papers, I have become more starkly aware of the vast body and deep insight of
his literary legacy.

It was a great pleasure and privilege to share Paul's life for a decade
and I hope to enrich what remains of my life and work with the wisdom
of his words. He set a splendid model for hard, continuous dedication
to his many projects sprinkled each day with a good mix of love and
play-and fishing, when possible. When he left us with that long, final
sigh, it was as if he had turned the concluding page of his last book
and said, 'Well, that's all there is this time around.'"