In Memoriam: Utah Phillips

I saw Utah Phillips perform one night in Santa Cruz, before he became too ill to travel at all. He spoke of non-violence, and he said something I have thought of often since. To be truly non-violent, he said, we have to lay down all our weapons. It's a fairly simple matter to lay down our physical weapons, but the weapons that we find most difficult to put down are the weapons in our minds. To do no violence means to have a non-violent mind; to relinquish the mind that attacks and defends. It is to forgive not only others, but also ourselves.

Utah had a fantastic physical presence. My sense of him was of someone who had grown into precisely what he was meant to be. Here was a man who had seen many storms and seasons come and go. He had the grace of the unspeakable. He taught by his very being: that was what made the words he spoke so powerful. And he was damn funny, with the humor the long view of things will give you, if you let it.

The people I met who shared Utah's life, especially his wife Joanna, are also extraordinary. To be long loved by good people: what better life is there than this?

He wrote a letter for the local radio station not long ago, well worth reading in its entirety. But I'm closing with his story about the chickens, because it made me laugh: Last winter a bear broke into the chicken yard and tore the door off the henhouse. The hens and Ralph managed to escape by hiding behind an old chest of drawers. The first hen to reappear showed up in our dog Bo’s mouth; she was uninjured, but that condition would not have lasted much longer. The others came out of hiding one at a time. Before our friend Che Greenwood could come over to fix the door, we feared the bear would return, plus a great storm was kicking up. So we set up a round of chicken wire in the greenhouse, which, as I say, is part of the living room, and installed the chickens there. Eventually, the smell was overpowering. How can chickens live with themselves? It was Friday evening and I’d turned on my small portable radio, as at this time the power was out, to listen to a station in Sacramento that broadcasts opera from 8:00 p.m. till midnight. That Friday one of the opera excerpts featured was an aria from Puccini’s Tosca sung by Maria Callas. That’s when Ralph decided he liked opera. As she sang, he began to crow along, so I got Tosca as a duet between Callas and Ralph. That’s when I said, these chickens have got to go back up the hill. I mean, it was Puccini, for God’s sake.

Travel well, Storyteller.