ABOUT DON GAYTON
Don Gayton, born in 1946, has been a prolific contributor to a wide variety of publications including Equinox and Canadian Geographic, writing chiefly about ecology, history and geography. He came to live in Canada in 1974 and has produced seven wide-ranging books since his arrival in British Columbia in 1989. Below is information about just his three most recent titles.
Merging fiction and non-fiction, "Man Facing West" has been described as "a story of commitment to the causes of peace, rural development, and ecology." Gayton recalls his American childhood infused with guns, Republican politics and dissent. "A stint in the Peace Corps spawns an enduring interest in small-scale agriculture, but then Gayton comes home to the moral quagmire of Vietnam, and the Draft. Becoming a passionate Canadian, he rediscovers his attachment to the rugged landscapes of the Canadian and American West."
As a range ecologist with the BC Ministry of Forestry for ten years, Don Gayton placed the garden within both historical and artistic perspectives, examining the garden-related works of painters and writers, as well as the work of park designer Frederick Law Olmstead and architect Christopher Alexander, for "Interwoven Wild: An Ecologist Loose in the Garden". He traces the apple back to Kazakhstan, explains how the tulip arrived in Holland from Turkey, and relates how a smuggled Asian cherry tree ruined B.C.'s cherry orchards.
In "Okanagan Odyssey: Journeys through Terrain, Terroir and Culture", Don Gayton examines British Columbia's Okanagan Valley, from Osoyoos to Armstrong, describing and enjoying local fruits and regional wines. Gayton matches up books and landscapes with local vintages, and, as an ecologist, he "negotiates the tension between the beautifully delicate Okanagan and the Okanagan that is the mecca for developers and urban refugees." Not a travel guide, Okanagan Odyssey is nature writing for both pleasure and education.
Don Gayton describes his racial background as "Shanty Irish" and Norwegian. He has been the 2009/2010 Haig-Brown Centenary Writer in Residence at the University of Victoria and served as a judge for the Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize in 1999, but mostly he has lived outside the mainstream of B.C. literature, primarily residing in Nelson and now Summerland, as a science writer whose work has gradually led him to fiction.
In 2011, he wrote, "I've reached a stage in life where writing is a distinct pleasure, and I use it to indulge a series of personal fascinations. The evolution of landscape painting. The aerodynamic mysteries of the airplane wing. Rural development, the ecology of natural grasslands, the geology of the Great Spokane Flood. And more of that ilk. I call myself a scientist, because I flunked Algebra."
For Gayton, science is the undiscovered country of the literary imagination. As a reader, fiction has always been his first love, followed closely by scientific journals. "So as a writer," he says, "I like to threaten the fortified boundaries of non-fiction, shouting and waving my arms. More and more I gravitate to story as our primal form of communication."
Gayton spent his 1950's childhood mostly in southern California, "in a new invention called the suburb." His father's powerful attraction to fishing prompted a move to a tiny coastal community on the Olympic Peninsula of Washington State where young Gayton spent a couple of glorious years roaming beaches and fields and forests. The family moved to Seattle, where he attended a multi-racial high school, played football, read Dostoevsky and channeled the beatniks. After graduation, Gayton hitchhiked around Europe then "answered Kennedy's call," spending several years in Colombia as a Peace Corps volunteer.
"My father was deeply offended by the hippie movement of the 1960s," he recalls, "particularly by its rejection of technological progress and established values, not to mention the hair. I, in turn, as part of that movement, was deeply offended by technology and established values, not to mention Vietnam, which loomed larger and larger."
Gayton returned to the US in the fall of 1968, to race riots and body counts. "The notion that my government would ask me to help peasant farmers in the Peace Corps, and then ask me to kill them in Vietnam, did not sit well. Tumultuous years followed, ending in our move to Canada. We have six children (thank god for socialized medicine!). All of us are proud Canadians, but America still tastes of home waters to me, in spite of the politics."
The places Don Gayton has lived or worked include San Pedro, Pasadena and Fullerton, California; Dungeness, Seattle, Twisp, Tonasket and Omak, Washington; Las Cruces, New Mexico; San Felipe de Ocoyotepec, Mexico; Riosucio (Choco) and Zuluaga (Huila), Colombia; Zagreb, in the former Yugoslavia; Munich, Germany; Saskatoon, Regina and Fort Qu'Appelle, Saskatchewan; Nelson, Vancouver and Summerland, British Columbia.
For many years Don Gayton mainly worked as an ecologist, specializing in grasslands, grazing management and fire ecology, and he wrote in his spare time. He liked to say, "In the last century, the physicists interpreted science for the public; in this next beleaguered century, we ecologists will get our turn." Now his evolution as a writer has led him to a fascination with Ranald Macdonald, resulting in his manuscript-in-progress, Columbia Son.
CONTRIBUTOR TO:
(2002) Ghost River: The Columbia Journal of Ecosystems and Management, Vol. 1 no. 2, p. 1-4. (2002) Little Bluestem and the Geography of Fascination (nature essay) in Eye in the Thicket, Sean Virgo, ed. Thistledown Press, Saskatoon, SK. (2001) Landscape Mathematics (nature essay) in Northern Wild: Best Contemporary Canadian Nature Writing, David Boyd, ed. Greystone Books, Vancouver. P. 223-233. (2001) Ground Work: Basic Concepts of Ecological Restoration in BC. FORREX, Kamloops. 25 pages. (2001) All Flesh is Grass (feature article on elk and native grasslands) Bugle Magazine, 18:1, p. 69-75. (2000) A Schooner In Memory in Going Some Place: Creative Non-Fiction Across Canada, L. Van Luven, ed, Coteau Books, Regina, Sask. p. 231-250. (1999) Sonora North (article on yucca and horned lizard) Equinox Magazine, Vol 105, p. 58-70. (1999) The Cartography of Catastrophe: Harlen Bretz and the Great Spokane Flood. Mercator's World, May-June 1999 Vol 4 (3) p. 54-61. (1998) Healing Fire (article on fire ecology) Canadian Geographic, July/August, 1998, pp. 32-42. (1997) Cry of the Wild (article on endangered species) Canadian Geographic May/June, pp. 30-42. (1996) Turf Wars (article on crested wheatgrass) Canadian Geographic May/June 1996, pp. 70-78. (1993) Big Bluestem and the Tallgrass Dream (ecological restoration). Equinox, Jan/Feb., pp. 30-39. 1991: Grazing Pressure on Saskatchewan Rangelands (technical article) Rangelands, 13 (3):107-108.
***
The Sky and the Patio: An Ecology of Home by Don Gayton
(New Star $18)
Ecologist Don Gayton of Summerland meanders (in a seemingly effortless way) from animals and scenery to etymology, poetry, wine, recipes, history, memoir, geography, and back to animals in one story. Yet it all holds together as evidenced in his latest collection of essays, The Sky and the Patio: An Ecology of Home. Here is an excerpt from the essay that gives the book its title, which tells of a spring dinner hosted on the family balcony and feeling close to nature.—Ed.
Evening clouds move like an immense, quiet army, all dressed in purple and gold. They march steadily northward over the top of nearby Conkle Mountain. It is April, and I am consummating my first outdoor patio supper of the year, under this referential sky. It is a full auditory evening: hungry coyote pups yip from somewhere on Conkle, as they anxiously await mother’s return from her hunt. Neighbourhood dogs respond in kind. Then cheers go up for a home run at our small town’s softball field. Pacific tree frogs in a slough nearby add their separate chorus. Earlier in the day I heard the season’s first sandhill cranes: harbingers of oncoming spring. These great birds are heard long before they are seen, on their migratory journey from Texas to Alaska. Yard work comes to a halt while you (literally) crane your neck to look for them. Sandhills are always far higher in the sky than first assumed. Sometimes you don’t see them at all because they are flying above the clouds. But they do return, every April, and I am humbled by that.
I am confident the natural forces that govern the lives of sandhill cranes, coyotes and tree frogs also compelled me onto our patio this first spring night....
…The word patio is nominally from the Spanish language, but the word’s linguistic roots go far back into Old Provençal and Latin, signifying variously ‘a communal pasture,’ ‘a covenant,’ or ‘to lie open.’ The Arabic equivalent is the enclosed courtyard or fana’, and the patio concept appears in many other building styles and cultures. Our patio functions as a human communal pasture when we gather there with friends to enjoy food, wine and conversation. The long Covid shutdown reminded us just how life-sustaining that companionship is.
A patio is a refuge, but one that is exposed and slightly daring. Perhaps it is a tacit acknowledgment that we humans have spent more evolutionary time outside than inside. To my mind, the Argentine poet Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) captured the patio’s fundamental essence when he wrote:
“El patio es el declive por el cual se derrama el cielo en la casa.
“The patio is the channel down which the sky flows into the house.”
9781554201945 (BCBW 2022)
***
AWARDS:
Canadian Science Writers Award, 1999
Saskatchewan Writers Guild Award for Non-fiction
US National Outdoor Book Award (for Landscapes of the Interior)
Peace Corps Travel Book Award, 2011
BOOKS:
(2022) The Sky and the Patio: An Ecology of Home by Don Gayton (New Star) $18 9781554201945
(2010) Man Facing West. Thistledown.
(2010) Okanagan Odyssey: Journeys through Terrain, Terroir and Culture. Heritage House.
(2007) Interwoven Wild: An Ecologist Loose in the Garden. Thistledown Press.
(2003) British Columbia Grasslands: Monitoring Vegetation Change. Forest Research Extension Partnership (FORREX), Kamloops. 49p., illus.
(2002) Kokanee (book on the kokanee salmon) New Star Publishers, Vancouver 96 pages, illus.
(1996) Landscapes of the Interior: A Re-exploration of Nature and the Human Spirit. New Society Publishers, Gabriola Island, B.C. 176 pages.
(1990) The Wheatgrass Mechanism: Science and Imagination in the Western Canadian Landscape (book of essays) 156p. Fifth House, Saskatoon. (Second edition published fall, 1992)
[BCBW 2022]
Don Gayton, born in 1946, has been a prolific contributor to a wide variety of publications including Equinox and Canadian Geographic, writing chiefly about ecology, history and geography. He came to live in Canada in 1974 and has produced seven wide-ranging books since his arrival in British Columbia in 1989. Below is information about just his three most recent titles.
Merging fiction and non-fiction, "Man Facing West" has been described as "a story of commitment to the causes of peace, rural development, and ecology." Gayton recalls his American childhood infused with guns, Republican politics and dissent. "A stint in the Peace Corps spawns an enduring interest in small-scale agriculture, but then Gayton comes home to the moral quagmire of Vietnam, and the Draft. Becoming a passionate Canadian, he rediscovers his attachment to the rugged landscapes of the Canadian and American West."
As a range ecologist with the BC Ministry of Forestry for ten years, Don Gayton placed the garden within both historical and artistic perspectives, examining the garden-related works of painters and writers, as well as the work of park designer Frederick Law Olmstead and architect Christopher Alexander, for "Interwoven Wild: An Ecologist Loose in the Garden". He traces the apple back to Kazakhstan, explains how the tulip arrived in Holland from Turkey, and relates how a smuggled Asian cherry tree ruined B.C.'s cherry orchards.
In "Okanagan Odyssey: Journeys through Terrain, Terroir and Culture", Don Gayton examines British Columbia's Okanagan Valley, from Osoyoos to Armstrong, describing and enjoying local fruits and regional wines. Gayton matches up books and landscapes with local vintages, and, as an ecologist, he "negotiates the tension between the beautifully delicate Okanagan and the Okanagan that is the mecca for developers and urban refugees." Not a travel guide, Okanagan Odyssey is nature writing for both pleasure and education.
Don Gayton describes his racial background as "Shanty Irish" and Norwegian. He has been the 2009/2010 Haig-Brown Centenary Writer in Residence at the University of Victoria and served as a judge for the Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize in 1999, but mostly he has lived outside the mainstream of B.C. literature, primarily residing in Nelson and now Summerland, as a science writer whose work has gradually led him to fiction.
In 2011, he wrote, "I've reached a stage in life where writing is a distinct pleasure, and I use it to indulge a series of personal fascinations. The evolution of landscape painting. The aerodynamic mysteries of the airplane wing. Rural development, the ecology of natural grasslands, the geology of the Great Spokane Flood. And more of that ilk. I call myself a scientist, because I flunked Algebra."
For Gayton, science is the undiscovered country of the literary imagination. As a reader, fiction has always been his first love, followed closely by scientific journals. "So as a writer," he says, "I like to threaten the fortified boundaries of non-fiction, shouting and waving my arms. More and more I gravitate to story as our primal form of communication."
Gayton spent his 1950's childhood mostly in southern California, "in a new invention called the suburb." His father's powerful attraction to fishing prompted a move to a tiny coastal community on the Olympic Peninsula of Washington State where young Gayton spent a couple of glorious years roaming beaches and fields and forests. The family moved to Seattle, where he attended a multi-racial high school, played football, read Dostoevsky and channeled the beatniks. After graduation, Gayton hitchhiked around Europe then "answered Kennedy's call," spending several years in Colombia as a Peace Corps volunteer.
"My father was deeply offended by the hippie movement of the 1960s," he recalls, "particularly by its rejection of technological progress and established values, not to mention the hair. I, in turn, as part of that movement, was deeply offended by technology and established values, not to mention Vietnam, which loomed larger and larger."
Gayton returned to the US in the fall of 1968, to race riots and body counts. "The notion that my government would ask me to help peasant farmers in the Peace Corps, and then ask me to kill them in Vietnam, did not sit well. Tumultuous years followed, ending in our move to Canada. We have six children (thank god for socialized medicine!). All of us are proud Canadians, but America still tastes of home waters to me, in spite of the politics."
The places Don Gayton has lived or worked include San Pedro, Pasadena and Fullerton, California; Dungeness, Seattle, Twisp, Tonasket and Omak, Washington; Las Cruces, New Mexico; San Felipe de Ocoyotepec, Mexico; Riosucio (Choco) and Zuluaga (Huila), Colombia; Zagreb, in the former Yugoslavia; Munich, Germany; Saskatoon, Regina and Fort Qu'Appelle, Saskatchewan; Nelson, Vancouver and Summerland, British Columbia.
For many years Don Gayton mainly worked as an ecologist, specializing in grasslands, grazing management and fire ecology, and he wrote in his spare time. He liked to say, "In the last century, the physicists interpreted science for the public; in this next beleaguered century, we ecologists will get our turn." Now his evolution as a writer has led him to a fascination with Ranald Macdonald, resulting in his manuscript-in-progress, Columbia Son.
CONTRIBUTOR TO:
(2002) Ghost River: The Columbia Journal of Ecosystems and Management, Vol. 1 no. 2, p. 1-4. (2002) Little Bluestem and the Geography of Fascination (nature essay) in Eye in the Thicket, Sean Virgo, ed. Thistledown Press, Saskatoon, SK. (2001) Landscape Mathematics (nature essay) in Northern Wild: Best Contemporary Canadian Nature Writing, David Boyd, ed. Greystone Books, Vancouver. P. 223-233. (2001) Ground Work: Basic Concepts of Ecological Restoration in BC. FORREX, Kamloops. 25 pages. (2001) All Flesh is Grass (feature article on elk and native grasslands) Bugle Magazine, 18:1, p. 69-75. (2000) A Schooner In Memory in Going Some Place: Creative Non-Fiction Across Canada, L. Van Luven, ed, Coteau Books, Regina, Sask. p. 231-250. (1999) Sonora North (article on yucca and horned lizard) Equinox Magazine, Vol 105, p. 58-70. (1999) The Cartography of Catastrophe: Harlen Bretz and the Great Spokane Flood. Mercator's World, May-June 1999 Vol 4 (3) p. 54-61. (1998) Healing Fire (article on fire ecology) Canadian Geographic, July/August, 1998, pp. 32-42. (1997) Cry of the Wild (article on endangered species) Canadian Geographic May/June, pp. 30-42. (1996) Turf Wars (article on crested wheatgrass) Canadian Geographic May/June 1996, pp. 70-78. (1993) Big Bluestem and the Tallgrass Dream (ecological restoration). Equinox, Jan/Feb., pp. 30-39. 1991: Grazing Pressure on Saskatchewan Rangelands (technical article) Rangelands, 13 (3):107-108.
***
The Sky and the Patio: An Ecology of Home by Don Gayton
(New Star $18)
Ecologist Don Gayton of Summerland meanders (in a seemingly effortless way) from animals and scenery to etymology, poetry, wine, recipes, history, memoir, geography, and back to animals in one story. Yet it all holds together as evidenced in his latest collection of essays, The Sky and the Patio: An Ecology of Home. Here is an excerpt from the essay that gives the book its title, which tells of a spring dinner hosted on the family balcony and feeling close to nature.—Ed.
Evening clouds move like an immense, quiet army, all dressed in purple and gold. They march steadily northward over the top of nearby Conkle Mountain. It is April, and I am consummating my first outdoor patio supper of the year, under this referential sky. It is a full auditory evening: hungry coyote pups yip from somewhere on Conkle, as they anxiously await mother’s return from her hunt. Neighbourhood dogs respond in kind. Then cheers go up for a home run at our small town’s softball field. Pacific tree frogs in a slough nearby add their separate chorus. Earlier in the day I heard the season’s first sandhill cranes: harbingers of oncoming spring. These great birds are heard long before they are seen, on their migratory journey from Texas to Alaska. Yard work comes to a halt while you (literally) crane your neck to look for them. Sandhills are always far higher in the sky than first assumed. Sometimes you don’t see them at all because they are flying above the clouds. But they do return, every April, and I am humbled by that.
I am confident the natural forces that govern the lives of sandhill cranes, coyotes and tree frogs also compelled me onto our patio this first spring night....
…The word patio is nominally from the Spanish language, but the word’s linguistic roots go far back into Old Provençal and Latin, signifying variously ‘a communal pasture,’ ‘a covenant,’ or ‘to lie open.’ The Arabic equivalent is the enclosed courtyard or fana’, and the patio concept appears in many other building styles and cultures. Our patio functions as a human communal pasture when we gather there with friends to enjoy food, wine and conversation. The long Covid shutdown reminded us just how life-sustaining that companionship is.
A patio is a refuge, but one that is exposed and slightly daring. Perhaps it is a tacit acknowledgment that we humans have spent more evolutionary time outside than inside. To my mind, the Argentine poet Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) captured the patio’s fundamental essence when he wrote:
“El patio es el declive por el cual se derrama el cielo en la casa.
“The patio is the channel down which the sky flows into the house.”
9781554201945 (BCBW 2022)
***
AWARDS:
Canadian Science Writers Award, 1999
Saskatchewan Writers Guild Award for Non-fiction
US National Outdoor Book Award (for Landscapes of the Interior)
Peace Corps Travel Book Award, 2011
BOOKS:
(2022) The Sky and the Patio: An Ecology of Home by Don Gayton (New Star) $18 9781554201945
(2010) Man Facing West. Thistledown.
(2010) Okanagan Odyssey: Journeys through Terrain, Terroir and Culture. Heritage House.
(2007) Interwoven Wild: An Ecologist Loose in the Garden. Thistledown Press.
(2003) British Columbia Grasslands: Monitoring Vegetation Change. Forest Research Extension Partnership (FORREX), Kamloops. 49p., illus.
(2002) Kokanee (book on the kokanee salmon) New Star Publishers, Vancouver 96 pages, illus.
(1996) Landscapes of the Interior: A Re-exploration of Nature and the Human Spirit. New Society Publishers, Gabriola Island, B.C. 176 pages.
(1990) The Wheatgrass Mechanism: Science and Imagination in the Western Canadian Landscape (book of essays) 156p. Fifth House, Saskatoon. (Second edition published fall, 1992)
[BCBW 2022]
Articles: 3 Articles for this author
Kokanee: The Redfish & the Kootenay Bioregion (New Star $16)
Review
The Kokanee River runs between Castlegar and Nelson where Don Gayton lives. He is a big bearded ecologist with a nice smile who won the U.S. National Outdoor Book Award. Don't know if there's an Indoor Book Award, but maybe he can win that, get two trophies, use 'em as bookends. Anyway, Don has written this little book, Kokanee: The Redfish & the Kootenay Bioregion (New Star $16).
First thing I noticed about this new 'Transmontanous' title is that kinda scientific sounding name. Transmontanous on the spine reminds me of my grade nine Latin teacher Mr. Brown who threw chalk. Agricolae meant farmers. Don Gayton is more like a guide instead of a teacher. He takes you all the way from the Ice Age to Ice Beer. In just 92 pages. If Don had only written 92 pages about beer, he'd have something for the Indoor Book Award.
Anyway, this one is about the fish. The Kokanee is a landlocked sibling of the sockeye salmon. Don really likes his fish. He says it slips into the Pacific Ocean, an elusive flash of molten silver, a lustful reproductive torrent of fire-engine red, an icon of regional culture, a pawn of industry and a marvel of interior adaptation.
Wow. That's pretty good for a fish. Other times Don's book is more serious than poetic. That's okay because there are lots of pictures. It's not all bioregions. Other times he gets personal, too. He talks about going fishing with his son. He talks about fishing with his father, too. When that happens, you're not sure if Kokanee is really about the fish or not. That's the best part.
"My father was deeply offended by the hippie movement of the 1960s, particularly by its rejection of technological progress and established values, not to mention the hair. I, in turn, as part of that movement, was deeply offended by technology and established values, not to mention Vietnam.
"When our mutual affronts had weathered down to the point that my father and I could talk again, the condition of rivers, oceans, lakes, and fishing was generally a safe area for conversation. On our rare meetings I would probe on those issues to gauge the reactions of this hard-edged man.
"For a time he lived in northern California, near a rusting Louisiana-Pacific pulp mill, which regularly polluted the saltwater bay it sat in with a toxic, foul-smelling effluent. Testing him, I mentioned how destructive LP's dumping practice must be to the fish habitat. He responded by saying, 'You're damn right, it's a terrible thing, and whenever anyone makes any noise about it, LP just threatens to close down
the mill and put people out of work.'
"I absorbed that statement in stunned silence. From this oracle of conservative, establishment, and technocratic values came a shocking bit of eco-political analysis. I look back on that comment as a belated endorsement and a kind of cross-generational mandate.
"If the condition of rivers, lakes, oceans, and salmonids made my earth-moving, engineer father say that, then they were indeed in bad shape and I had better act on that endorsement. In the confused tangle of our lives together, my father had found a free end and offered it to me.";
It gets spiritual. Gayton talks about fiery red spawners and how the fish is part of him, a clean and dignified and rooted part. I find all that nature business a bit spooky myself. Gayton doesn't. "[My father], like many men, fished from a curious combination of motivations: a passionate attachment to nature, an enduring mystification about his role in society, and a kind of primitive male satisfaction in showing he could still bring occasional food home from the wild.";
Up here in Campbell River, I recently spread my Dad's ashes near a beach, like he asked. Maybe some ashes blew out with the tide. Fish come and go there. That would be a bioregion thing, eh? Friend of mine told he heard somewhere recently that David Suzuki, the Nature of Things guy, has this new deal where you go to his website to register your name if you're doing just three of ten possible things that we could all be doing to stop global warming. Sounds like progress to me. 0-921586-85-X (2003) By Charlie Chum.
[Spring 2003 BCBW] "Environment" "Fishing"
Peace Corps Prize
Press Release (2011)
Rocky Mountain Books is pleased to announce that Okanagan Odyssey: Journeys Through Terrain, Terroir and Culture by Don Gayton has won the 2011 Peace Corps Travel Book Award. Before moving to Canada from the United States in the late 1960s, Gayton volunteered with the Peace Corps in Colombia.
Okanagan Odyssey is a quirky and lyrical examination of British Columbia's Okanagan Valley. Sticking to the backroads and byways, Gayton gently pokes and prods local ecosystems, histories, vineyards and people. In his unique version of wine pairing, Gayton matches up local books and landscapes with local vintages, giving terroir a whole new meaning. An ecologist by profession, Gayton deftly negotiates the tension between the Okanagan that is home to many endangered species and ecosystems, and the same Okanagan that is a mecca for developers and urban refugees.
Don Gayton is the 2009/2010 Haig-Brown Centenary Writer in Residence at the University of Victoria and an author of popular non-fiction. Don also writes for Canadian Geographic as well as technical articles on grasslands, climate change and fire ecology. His awards include the Saskatchewan Writers Guild non-fiction award, the US National Outdoor Book Award, the Canadian Science Writers Award and two shortlistings for the BC Book Awards. Gayton lives and works in Summerland, BC.
Don Gayton
Personal Statement (2011)
I've reached a stage in life where writing is a distinct pleasure, and I use it to indulge a series of personal fascinations. The evolution of landscape painting. The aerodynamic mysteries of the airplane wing. Rural development, the ecology of natural grasslands, the geology of the Great Spokane Flood. And more of that ilk. I call myself a scientist, but really I'm a "gentleman scientist"; because I flunked Algebra.
For me, science is the undiscovered country of the literary imagination. As a reader, fiction has always been my first love, followed closely by scientific journals. So as a writer, I like to threaten the fortified boundaries of non-fiction, shouting and waving my arms. More and more I gravitate to story as our primal form of communication.
My childhood was spent in 1950's southern California, in a new invention called the suburb. My father's powerful attraction to fishing prompted a move to a tiny coastal community on the Olympic Peninsula of Washington State, where I spent a couple of glorious years roaming beaches and fields and forests. We then moved to Seattle, where I attended a multi-racial highschool, played football, read Dostoevskii and channeled the beatniks. Hitchhiked around Europe after graduation, and then answered Kennedy's call, spending a couple of fascinating years in Colombia as a Peace Corps volunteer.
Meanwhile Vietnam loomed larger and larger. I returned to the US in the fall of 1968, to race riots and body counts. The notion that my government would ask me to help peasant farmers in the Peace Corps, and then ask me to kill them in Vietnam, did not sit well. Tumultuous years followed, ending in our move to Canada. We have six children (thank god for socialized medicine!). All of us are proud Canadians, but America still tastes of home waters to me, in spite of the politics.
I work as an ecologist, specializing in grasslands, grazing management and fire ecology, and I write in my spare time. In the last century, the physicists interpreted science for the public; in this next beleaguered century, we ecologists will get our turn.
Places I've lived or worked:
San Pedro, Pasadena and Fullerton, California
Dungeness, Seattle, Twisp, Tonasket and Omak, Washington
Las Cruces, New Mexico
San Felipe de Ocoyotepec, Mexico
Riosucio (Choco) and Zuluaga (Huila), Colombia
Zagreb, in the former Yugoslavia
Munich, Germany
Saskatoon, Regina and Fort Qu'Appelle, Saskatchewan
Nelson, Vancouver and Summerland (our current home), British Columbia
Gayton website