Yahoo Autos Tim Cahill is an Outside Legend. Thank Goodness He Didn’t Die.
This story update is part of the Outside Classics, a series highlighting the best writing we've ever published, along with author interviews and other exclusive bonus materials. Get access to all of the Outside Classics when you sign up for Outside+.
No one person--editor, writer, publisher, or athlete--has meant more to Outside than Tim Cahill. One of the founders of Outside, he put adventure journalism on--and off--the map. Whether he was riding a small pony across Mongolia, eating sago beetle lava in Irian Jaya, or suffering through a yoga retreat in Jamaica, his every-man style of travel has been mixed with literary reporting and a hefty dose of hilarious, and sometimes harrowing, misadventure.
My Drowning (And Other Inconveniences)
After a legendary career in adventure writing, Tim Cahill thought his story was over. Thrown from a raft in the Grand Canyon's Lava Falls, he was trapped underwater and out of air. When he finally reached land, his heart stopped for several minutes. Then he came back--and decided to risk Lava again.
Cahill and two other editors came up with the concept for Outside in 1977, working in an old warehouse in San Francisco. For more than two decades, he wrote the magazine's Out There column, work that was collected in eight books of essays, including Pass the Butterworms, Jaguars Ripped My Flesh, and Pecked to Death by Ducks. He also contributed ambitious investigative features to the magazine, like "The Shame of Escobilla," in which a trip to southern Mexico to see olive ridley sea turtles turned into an expose of the mass slaughter of an endangered species.
His life of adventure was almost cut short on a 2014 river trip down the Grand Canyon. Thrown from the raft, Cahill swam the notoriously dangerous Lava Falls. There on the beach after being rescued, he lost consciousness. For up to ten minutes, he had no pulse, no breath. His heart had stopped entirely. The resulting story, "My Drowning (and Other Inconveniences)," was one of his most poignant, not only for the gripping writing but also because we almost lost him.
Cahill talked with contributing editor Elizabeth Hightower Allen, who worked with him on several stories while she was on staff at Outside, from Livingston, Montana, where he has lived for many years.
OUTSIDE: Welcome back from the dead.
TIM CAHILL: Thank you.
Let's come back to that story later and start at the beginning, when you were a young writer at Rolling Stone. You've said that you got bored writing about rock and roll, because all those musicians did was trash hotel rooms. So, of course, my first question is, Who was the best at trashing hotel rooms?
Well, I can't indict any one band. But it was Rolling Stone, in the late sixties and early seventies, and there were various inebriants involved that led us to be somewhat less than careful. I did like traveling with the Allman Brothers, however.
I confess I didn't know about some of the Rolling Stone features you wrote back then. Your story on the aftermath of the Jonestown Massacre--the murder-suicide of some 900 members of the Peoples Temple at the behest of cult leader Jim Jones in 1978--is one of the best features I've ever read.
It's not something you want to see--nearly a thousand people lying dead in the blistering jungle with constant rain. I was down in Guyana for nearly three weeks. When the story came out, I was living in San Francisco, where the Peoples Temple had been headquartered, and there were still believers who did not commit suicide and were upset if you suggested that Jonestown was not a glorious gesture against repression. You were suddenly a target. It was a year of being very careful about where I went and who I saw and how I was armed.
Wait, you packed heat in San Francisco in the 1970s?
I did. Right after Jonestown, I legally purchased the gun and learned how to shoot it. Happily, I never had to use it nor brandish it in any way.
That was right around the time you helped create Outside. Could you tell us the origin story again? We never get tired of hearing it.
Jann Wenner, the publisher of Rolling Stone, wanted to do an outdoor magazine. One of our editors, Michael Rogers, was an avid outdoorsman, and I was the only other person in the office who liked to go outdoors. So, the two of us and a wonderful editor named Harriet Fear huddled up in a room in an old coffee factory with piles of canoeing magazines, trying to figure out how to put it together.
Really simply, the concept was to pay homage to the strain in American literature of literate writing about the out of doors--from John Fenimore Cooper through Mark Twain through Hemingway and Faulkner. What was available in the late 1970s were magazines with titles like Man's Adventure (which I like to call Man's Testicle), in which heroic guys ran through the jungle, usually dragging along a woman. The guy's shirt was ripped, hers was ripped even more, and they were being chased by rhinos or hippos. The sense you got reading these was, I don't think this is true. I honestly don't think there are any penguins at the North Pole, much less bloodthirsty ones.
I said, Well, I could do some of these things. But if I see a shark, say, I don't have to pull out a penknife and battle it to the death. I could just write about the wonder of seeing such a thing. Take somebody like me who's not entirely coordinated and easily frightened--then you might have an adventure story people could relate to. I was in the permission-giving business, I hope. People thought, If this clown can do it, so can I.
Let's touch on some of your greatest hits, which included eating a lot of disgusting stuff. Which of these was grossest?
Baked Turtle Lung, Northern Australia
Rooster's Head Soup, Peruvian Andes
Sago Beetle Grubs, Irian Jaya
Snake's Blood and Gallbladder Cocktail, Beijing
Lutefisk, Lutheran Church, Livingston, Montana
Some were actually good! With the snake's blood thing, they put the gallbladder in a glass and mull it around with a chopstick, and then you drink it with this very strong liquor. I said, Well, I'm just going to throw this down, and I did, and boom, there was another. You're encouraged to drink it again and again and again, and who was I to go against cultural norms? I remember banging against the walls trying to get back to my hotel room.
Okay now we have another quiz, this time about your literary sensibilities. I have three reviews here. Which describes you best?
