The Way I Heard It

by Mike Rowe

  Two weeks after this conversation, the Big Valley went down. But there was no film crew on board. No one was there to watch as it sank. And, injuries and fatalities didn’t increase after filming began. In fact, after our first season aired, a new law was passed that eliminated the derby approach that many believed made crab fishing more dangerous than it had to be. I could argue that our show actually helped make things safer. But I won’t, because people still die up there, no matter how careful they try to be.

  You can’t script the Bering Sea.

  As for duck farts, those are easy: Kahlúa, Bailey’s, and whiskey. Layered in equal parts just in that order. They were Phil’s favorite, but, as I told him so many times, there’s no accounting for taste.

  A LITTLE TOWN UP NORTH

  During her farewell tour in 2005, Cher demanded that multiple boxes of aloe vera tissues in rose-scented, cube-shaped boxes be placed in her dressing room at every stop.

  Happily, Cher wasn’t David’s problem.

  When Mariah Carey was interviewed on British TV in 2009, she demanded to be lowered onto the sofa by two stagehands—so that she wouldn’t crease her dress.

  Happily, Mariah wasn’t David’s problem.

  When Madonna checked into a 5,000-square-foot hotel suite in 2012, she demanded hundreds of pink roses, individually placed into hundreds of crystal vases, carefully situated on every flat surface.

  Happily, Madonna wasn’t David’s problem, either.

  But when Eddie demanded seven full weeks to prepare, well… that was David’s problem. Because if David was going to pull off an event of this magnitude—the most ambitious outdoor gathering in recent memory—he’d need the right entertainment. And there was really no one else like Eddie. But seven weeks of rehearsal? That was a diva move unlike anything David had ever experienced. The event was less than a month away. Moving the date at this point would be a logistical nightmare. What to do?

  David rubbed his aching temples and took a moment to feel sorry for himself. Back in the sixties, prima donnas were no less common than they are today—and guys like David were still at their mercy. But the sixties were also the reason David was determined to make this happen. America was at war, young people were feeling rebellious, and David thought the country could benefit from a massive expression of love and unity. He also believed the farmland around his hometown would be the perfect venue.

  Of course, he was right.

  You know the town. You might even know the famous address. But unless you were there in person to hear the music and smell the air and lose yourself in the moment, it’s easy to forget that the whole event turned on a single performance—which is why David ultimately agreed to Eddie’s demand. He rebooked the vendors, rebooked the performers, redrew the permits, and announced a new date. Then he prayed that Eddie would come through. Which, of course, Eddie did.

  Again, you had to be there. But if you weren’t, it’s fair to say that Eddie was a force of nature. Like Hendrix and Joplin, he could go for hours on end. Like the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane, he could riff in ways that left audiences astounded and begging for more. But unlike those famous headliners, Eddie didn’t have a band to back him up. When Eddie took the stage, it was just him. That’s why no one wanted to follow Eddie—not ever. That’s also why, in spite of the last-minute scheduling change, the announcement of his involvement triggered a migration of people. Thousands walked, thousands hitchhiked, and thousands more did whatever was necessary to get themselves to that little town up north, where they hoped to be a part of something bigger than themselves and maybe hear something transcendent. Something they’d always remember. And boy, did they ever.

  After a few very solid opening acts, Eddie took the stage—and the crowd went wild. For two hours, the most electrifying performer in America held thousands of people in the palm of his hand. They cheered and they wept, and when Eddie had finished, they applauded for a full fifteen minutes, deeply moved and profoundly grateful to know that one day they would tell their grandchildren, “I was there the day that Eddie made history.”

  Of course, they did. To this day, their descendants are passing the same story on to their children. Because, remember, this was the sixties. A time when America was at war, and young people were feeling rebellious. A time when a farmer named David had the good sense to see that the farmland around his hometown would be a perfect venue for his carefully planned expression of love and unity. Of course, he was right. A few months earlier, another kind of gathering had unfolded in that very same place: a gathering that brought 175,000 young people together for three days of unforgettable slaughter. An epic bloodbath that left 50,000 Americans dead or wounded. Many of them were still scattered, in terrible pieces, right there on David’s front lawn.

  That’s why, after three months of unspeakable cleanup, David was determined to dedicate the farmland around his home to those now buried beneath it. And so he did. But unless you were actually there to hear the bands play their dirges, to hear the choirs sing their hymns—unless you were there to smell the air, still rank with rotting flesh, and listen to Eddie deliver his 13,000-word eulogy from memory, it’s hard to imagine what happened in that little town up north, during that unforgettable summer of death.

  You know the town. And you probably know the address. No—not the two-hour rhetorical masterpiece no one thought they’d ever forget—but the two-minute rumination that followed: a shockingly brief, 272-word homily that left most people scratching their heads, wondering if they had missed something.

  Funny how things work out. Edward Everett was once known as America’s Greatest Orator. But today very few people remember him at all. Fewer still can recall a single phrase from the epic address he delivered so masterfully on that sacred afternoon, in 1863. No one at all still recalls David Wills, the man who organized the event that transformed the farmland around his home into the sprawling National Cemetery it is today. But we all remember the man who stole the show seven score and sixteen years ago. A haggard man, suffering from fever and grieving the death of his son. A humble man, about as far from a diva as a politician could be. An honest man, who was content to write his speech on the morning of the event in the spare bedroom of David Wills’s home.

  A man named Lincoln, who delivered the address we do remember: a famous address that took its name from a little town up north. A little town called… Gettysburg.

  * * *

  TLDR

  Those were the letters that appeared in the comments under my very first Facebook post, back in whatever year that was. I didn’t know what they meant, but they kept showing up after all of my subsequent posts: TLDR.

  TL/DR

  tl:dr

  TL>;
  I encountered a millennial one day, out on the mean streets of San Francisco, and asked him what these letters meant.

  “Too long, didn’t read.”

  “You’re kidding,” I said. “Why would someone with no time take time to tell me that they had no time?”

  The millennial shrugged and said, “People are busy?”

  “I understand that,” I said. “But if you have time to spell out the fact that you’re too busy to read what I wrote, how busy can you really be?”

  But the millennial was no longer listening. He had leaned down to pet Freddy, who snarled viciously and tried to bite his finger off. That got the millennial’s attention.

  “Hey, man! You should tell people your dog is mean!”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t have time.”

  I wonder sometimes if Freddy is smarter than he lets on. Like Lincoln at Gettysburg, he made his point in no time. With a snarl and a snap, he gave his audience something to remember. My dog seems to understand the power of brevity. But do I? Have I held your attention thus far? Or have I droned on like Edward Everett, belaboring things unnecessarily?

  Don’t get me wrong: what Everett did at Gettysburg was remarkable. He wrote 13,000 words, memorized them, and then delivered the
m flawlessly to a full house. His performance was hailed as a triumph in both the Union and the Confederacy. This was a man who could have talked about a pencil for eight minutes, or eighty, and for that he has my deepest admiration. But I wonder how Everett would do in our TL/DR culture. I wonder, how would he do at a TED conference?

  You might be familiar with TED: a series of gatherings in Silicon Valley where self-styled “creatives” pay thousands of dollars to hear luminaries hold forth on topics near and dear to their hearts. Many famous people have given TED Talks, though the most popular ones tend to come from people you’ve probably never heard of. They have titles like “How to Measure Your Life”; “My Stroke of Insight”; “The Skill of Self-Confidence.” Makes you wonder how creative those creatives are.

  I gave a TED Talk, too, in 2008. Like Lincoln, who was invited to Gettysburg to make some “remarks,” I didn’t know I’d been invited to give an actual speech. I thought I was there to say a few words on behalf of the Discovery Channel, which was sponsoring the event. In reality, Discovery had volunteered me to give a presentation about the dignity of dirty jobs. An eighteen-minute presentation—no more, no less.

  I called my speech “The Changing Face of the Modern-Day Proletariat” and used my eighteen minutes onstage to reflect on castration—specifically, the oral castration of baby lambs. It was a popular talk. You can watch it on YouTube right now. As a matter of fact, you should. Go ahead, I’ll wait.

  Are you back? Great. As you just saw, the process of biting the testicles off a baby lamb is not as barbaric as you might have thought. Sure, it’s disgusting, but it’s a lot more pleasant than the method recommended by experts at the Humane Society, who assured me that putting a tight rubber band around the scrotum is the way to go. That process takes days and causes prolonged agony for the lamb but looks a lot more civilized than the toothier method. It’s “approved.” But it’s not more effective. Nor is it better, in any way, for the lamb.

  Anyway, I told my story with way more detail than my audience might have expected. Naturally, I cast myself as the protagonist. Then I discussed Aristotle’s ideas about “anagnorisis,” wherein the hero discovers something about himself—an inescapable truth that he didn’t know—and “peripeteia,” whereby that discovery reverses the course of the narrative.

  When Oedipus, for instance, learns that he enjoys having sex with older women, that’s anagnorisis: a discovery about himself. When he discovers that the woman sharing his bed is his mother, that’s peripeteia. Likewise, when Bruce Willis, in The Sixth Sense, realizes that little Cole really can see dead people, that’s anagnorisis. When Bruce realizes Cole can see him—because he’s been dead all along—that’s peripeteia.

  I liked the idea of using Aristotle’s high-minded terms to describe the surprising truth about biting the balls off baby lambs. Specifically: I liked using those terms to illustrate my realization that, sometimes, the experts don’t know their ass from a hot rock. But let me tell you: I would have liked it a lot more if I had been given two hours instead of eighteen minutes to explain myself.

  Here’s something you might not know about TED Talks: many of them exceed the allotted time. Take it from a guy who sat through three days of these things: otherwise brilliant people struggle mightily to keep their stories under eighteen minutes. Those are the TED Talks that never get posted to YouTube. The ones that make me feel better about how much trouble I had with mine. In fact, you may have noticed: despite my best efforts, I also went over the allotted length—by two whole minutes. No big deal, right? Except that two minutes was all Lincoln needed to unite a divided country—to make the occasion eternal with words we now consider immortal.

  Words that, if posted on Facebook today, would undoubtedly elicit a “TL/DR” from those with just seconds to spare.

  Or maybe a “Woof!” from Freddy.

  SOMETHING UNFORGETTABLE AND REAL

  A high-performance convertible flies down a two-lane highway at speeds well in excess of the posted limits. In hot pursuit, a professional stuntman drives a Ford station wagon that’s pulling an empty trailer. The scene couldn’t be simpler: No special effects, no CGI, just a good, old-fashioned Hollywood car chase.

  On his deathbed, thirty-one years later, Bill Hickman recalls the scene in vivid detail. In his mind’s eye, he can still see the convertible rounding the corner and disappearing from view. He can still feel the frustration at not being able to catch up. If he had been driving his famous Dodge Charger that day—the muscle car he drove in Bullitt—things might have ended differently.

  Bill smiles at the memory. The Charger had been one hell of a car and Bullitt one hell of a movie. As the film’s stunt coordinator, Bill had been asked to create the most realistic car chase ever filmed. By most accounts he’d done just that. With Steve McQueen in hot pursuit, driving a Ford Mustang 390, the two men turned the hills of San Francisco into their personal racetrack, complete with hairpin turns and asphalt launching pads. Their muscle cars literally flew through the air. Hubcaps exploded from their wheels and rolled crazily down the streets, and the fiery explosion at the end—when Bill’s car crashes into the gas pumps at the filling station—set a new standard on the big screen for vehicular verisimilitude.

  It was the mistakes, though—along with the actual stunts—that brought a new sense of realism to every Bill Hickman sequence. In one shot, Bill sideswipes a parked car with a camera affixed to it, knocking it sideways. Normally, footage like that would wind up on the cutting room floor, but Bill argued that the mistake made the chase feel more real, and the director agreed. The shot stayed in, and Bullitt won an Oscar.

  After that, every director in Hollywood wanted a car chase with the “Hickman touch.” In The Seven-Ups, Bill drove his Pontiac Grand Ville so aggressively that the actor in the passenger seat screamed in terror. That was not in the script. But the director kept it in—because it was real.

  During The French Connection, the door of a parked car opens seconds before Bill speeds by at sixty miles per hour, ripping the door off its hinges. This, too, looks shockingly real—because it is real. So, too, was a severed door that went spiraling through the air like a giant ninja star, nearly decapitating the camera crew and sending passersby diving for cover.

  In that same sequence, Hickman—doubling Gene Hackman—chases down a bad guy who’s commandeered an El train in Brooklyn. The stunt takes place fifty feet below the speeding train, as Hickman’s 1971 Pontiac LeMans tries to keep pace on a busy New York street. It was a difficult scene to shoot, and the director hated the first take. He told Hickman that he wanted a car chase that would scare the hell out of audiences: something unforgettable and real.

  Bill smiles, ruefully, at the memory, recalling his exact conversation with the famous director.

  “You want real?” he said. “Meet me tomorrow morning at the corner of Eighty-sixth and Stillwell. Bring your camera, if you have the balls for it. I’ll show you something real.” The next morning, William Friedkin strapped himself and his camera into the back seat of Hickman’s LeMans and captured some of the most harrowing footage ever to make it onto the big screen. Why? Because Hickman exceeded speeds of 90 mph—in actual New York City traffic. No special effects. No CGI. And no permit. The result? Six Oscars for The French Connection and a sequence Friedkin—the man who directed The Exorcist—would call “the scariest thing I’ve ever seen.”

  Now, as he lies dying, Bill comes to realize an inescapable truth about his own identity: his whole life has been one long car chase. In his final moments, he thinks about how far Hollywood has come from the days in which actors sat behind fake windshields and fake steering wheels and pretended to drive as fake footage rolled by. He also thinks about how lucky he’s been over the years. It’s a miracle that no one has ever been hurt during any of his scenes—unless, of course, you count that very first scene, thirty-one years ago, back when Bill was a young stuntman driving a station wagon, hauling an empty trailer, trying to keep up with that speedin
g convertible.

  Bill can still see the convertible rounding the corner and disappearing from view. He can still feel his frustration at not being able to catch up. And he can still see the sight that awaits him when he finally does round that corner: slumped behind the wheel of the mangled sports car, he sees the young driver who should have been sitting beside him. A driver whose Porsche should have been secured on the empty trailer behind his station wagon as they drove to the Salinas Speedway. Alas, the kid had insisted upon driving himself to warm up the car’s engine for the race he was scheduled to run that afternoon.

  It was a scene, all right—but this was no movie, and with no director on hand to say “cut,” the action had unfolded in slow motion, as real life sometimes does. Bill had run to the wreck and pulled his young protégé from the smoldering pile of twisted steel. There were no last words. No final close-ups. Just the sound of one ultimate exhalation, seconds before the driver died in Bill’s arms and everything faded to black.

  That was the start of a legendary career—the career of a stuntman remembered for his obsession with making action movies feel unforgettable and real—along with the start of a legend. The legend of a twenty-four-year-old race car driver whose fleeting work on the big screen is still remembered as something real and unforgettable. A rebel without a cause named… James Dean.

  * * *

  How crazy is this: just a few weeks before the accident, James Dean recorded a public service announcement advising young drivers to slow down. He stared into the camera and said, “The life you save just might be mine.” Then, just two hours before the crash that killed him, a cop pulled him over and gave him a speeding ticket. Do you think the universe was trying to tell him something?