It’s important, I think, that every writer (and every athlete for that matter) finds a mentor at some point during her career – a teacher and guide whose life lessons will stay with her longer than the mentor likely will.
A true mentor can’t be found and will usually enter your life entirely by accident. The key is to recognize them, learn from them, and hold on to them for as long as you can because chances are they will drift out of your life the same way they drifted into it, without any warning or pretense.
I was lucky because my mentor came into my life during my 20s, when I was as malleable and impressionable as a soft piece of clay. He guided me as a writer, but also as a snowboarder and outdoor adventurer (mostly because my job entailed a little bit of each). He also happened to be young, energetic and appealing (my idea of an old sage), with a full head of shaggy light brown hair that always looked three months overdue for a cut, icy blue eyes and a mouth that curled up on each end, the way a child draws a smile with pen and paper.
Eric Blehm offered me a job as an assistant editor at Transworld Snowboarding magazine in Oceanside, Calif., two weeks after I graduated from journalism school in Boulder, a position I hadn’t even applied for. I think his offer went something like, “We need an assistant editor. Can you be here in two weeks?”
A San Diego native, he had the breezy cool of a lifelong surfer, but was keenly intelligent, maybe even a little nerdy. He had the slightest lisp and frequently used expressions like “Hi-de-lee Hey-de-lee” that earned him the nickname “Flanders” after Homer’s goofy, straight-laced neighbor on “The Simpsons.”
During my four-year tenure at the magazine, he gently nudged me up that proverbial mountain, grooming me for responsibilities and experiences beyond my wildest dreams. From the beginning, he sent me out into big mountains with big, famous snowboarder dudes in faraway places, then let me write big stories with the kind of placement and hefty page count most writers wait for their entire career. (I realize it was just a snowboarding magazine and not National Geographic, but the experiences were invaluable nonetheless.) Then one day, he came into our disheveled office and announced he had decided to spend a year traveling the world with his future wife, and he quit – slipped away, just like that.
A couple of months ago, an oversized envelope from Harper Collins appeared in my mailbox. Inside, was a copy of “The Last Season,” Blehm’s newest book about Randy Morgenson, a lifelong backcountry ranger from the southern Sierras who mysteriously disappeared.
I cradled the book in my arms and walked gingerly inside as if it I might break it, like it was a tray of crystal champagne glasses or a multi-tiered wedding cake. I knew Eric had spent the past eight years entrenched in this guy’s life, retracing his every step. I knew this story compelled Eric on every level, as a writer, a journalist, but also as an outdoorsman with a rare appreciation for the wilderness and a compulsion to understand Morgenson, who once said, “The least I owe these mountains is a body.”
I drove home, sat in my favorite chair and did not get up again until I finished every last word.
The reviewers raved. “As Jon Krakauer did with ‘Into The Wild,’ Blehm turns a missing-man riddle into an insightful meditation on wilderness and the personal demons and angels that propel us into it alone,” says Outside magazine. Men’s Journal notes, “Blehm recounts the search for Morgenson with a thriller’s pacing, pausing only to dig back into the ranger’s idyllic wilderness childhood … a potent testament to the enduring power and allure of wild spaces.”
I couldn’t help but notice the mentors in Morgenson’s life were powerful but fleeting. The few people who did manage to get close to him were barely able to scratch the surface of his existence, like small ripples from a pebble thrown into a huge lake. I know Morgenson’s life inspired Eric, but who, if anyone, inspired Morgenson?
Aside from the allure of the remote wilderness where he lived and died, Morgenson never really had a mentor. I guess I’m just lucky I did.
You can meet author Eric Blehm for a talk and book signing at 7:30 p.m. Thursday at the Tattered Cover in Lower Downtown (303-436-1070 or www.tatteredcover.com).
Freelance columnist Alison Berkley can be reached at alison@berkleymedia.com.
