Famed nature writer, David Quammen babysits neighbor children’s toads

David Quammen had just returned from west Africa, where he’d spent two weeks wading through the swamps, and he was feeling lucky because he never got malaria.

By SCOTT McMILLION – Bozeman Daily Chronicle in the Helena IR

‘‘I only got a few footworms,” he recalled.

Then, a few days after he returned to Bozeman, he started feeling feverish. His doctor ordered a blood test, didn’t like the results and immediately put him in a hospital bed. Three hours later, he had a fever of 105.6 degrees.

Although the source of the fever couldn’t be diagnosed, the hospital staff learned he’d just returned from Africa, and Quammen learned something, too. At a time like that, he said, ‘‘you don’t want to make any jokes about ebola.”

The ailment was a ‘‘mystery fever,” and although it passed in a couple days, nobody wanted to come near him without a surgical mask, lest he bleed contagion from every pore.

Quammen shrugged the whole thing off as the cost of doing business, which, for him, involves explaining mysteries of a different sort. Quammen, now 55, is one of the most talented and celebrated nature writers in the world, yet he’s also a low-key resident of Bozeman, an intense and private man who has an incredible ability to grab an audience that always yawned in science class and make it pay attention.

‘‘I don’t like to preach to the choir. My number one requirement is to provide a good read,” he said of his work. ‘‘I always write for a general audience, but I look over my shoulder at the scientists, to make sure they’re nodding their heads and not shaking them.”

So far, in a 33-year career that includes 10 books and countless magazine articles and essays, those heads continue to bob up and down, and the smiles of approval just get bigger.

‘‘I am in awe of his ability to make arcane scientific concepts exciting and accessible to a lay public,” David Suzuki, a renowned Canadian scientist and author, wrote of Quammen’s most recent book, ‘‘Monster of God.”

The 515-page volume explores the long and complicated relationship between man and creatures that occasionally treat us as snacks. It examines science, but it also looks at culture and religion and psychology.

‘‘Among the earliest forms of human self-awareness was the awareness of being meat,” Quammen deadpans in the book’s introduction.

So who is this guy?

First, there is the writer and self-taught scientist. He’s a Yale graduate and Rhodes scholar who has won two national magazine awards, an Academy Award in literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, plus a big pile of other top honors in this country and in England.

His specialty is biology, how the earth shapes life and how life shapes the earth.

‘‘I think he knows as much as most of the Ph.D. ecologists that I know,” said Mike Gilpin, a retired professor of ecology and evolution at the University of California, San Diego. ‘‘But he’s a poet, too.”

Sitting in his book-lined study, an incredibly orderly workshop overseen by a portrait of William Faulkner, Quammen downplayed his accomplishments.

‘‘You work a journalistic beat and you learn,” is how he described it.

‘‘He makes it look easy,” said his longtime friend and fellow author Tim Cahill. ‘‘You might think he doesn’t work his ass off, but he’s pathologically modest. If he wins a big award, you won’t hear about it from him. You’ll have to read about it in the paper.”

Quammen works both hard and methodically, rising early every morning to take a head-clearing walk around his southside neighborhood. Then it’s a cup of strong coffee and a handful of dried fruit for breakfast. He turns off the phone, and the day’s labors at the computer begin.

That’s unless he’s on the road, tracking down brown bears in Romania, hunting crocodiles with Aborigines in Australia, or sloshing through those swamps in the Congo.

‘‘When I get out there, I get pretty dirty,” he said. ‘‘I like to go to fringe places.”

He spends about three months a year traveling. Any more than that, he said, and he can’t get his writing done. As for his education, he grew up in Cincinnati, where he spent 12 years under the tutelage of nuns and Jesuit priests, then went to Yale and Oxford, where he says he ‘‘majored in Faulkner” and avoided science classes.

‘‘I’m not a religious person anymore,” he said, ‘‘I envy people who believe, but I’m not one of them.”

He summed up his scientific education by saying he reads a lot.

Indeed. The books on his shelves tend toward scholarly tomes, covering everything from grizzly bears to the Indian caste system to Romanian vampires.

Quammen moved to Montana 30 years ago last month, living in Missoula, Butte and Ennis and supplementing his writing with jobs tending bar and guiding fishermen before settling in Bozeman in 1984, attracted there by the Montana State University library.

He began building his reputation, among both scientists and readers, as a columnist for Outside Magazine, a position he held from 1981 through 1995. That’s how he first came to Gilpin’s attention.

‘‘It sort of stuck in my mind,” Gilpin recalled. ‘‘That this guy at Outside Magazine was into chaos theory.”

When Quammen’s in town, he said, he writes six or seven hours a day, six or seven days a week. But that doesn’t mean he never cuts loose.

In recent years, he’s applied his typical methodical approach to teaching himself to cook gourmet chow, and he enjoys a martini an evening. When he was about 40, when most men start to relax, he traded his fishing boat for a kayak, and at the age of 49 he took up hockey and has become a passionate member of a Bozeman city league team.

Then there is the song and dance man, the guy who played guitar in a folk band in high school.

Cahill accused him of staging a ‘‘poor John Travolta imitation” on the dance floor at Quammen’s wedding this summer to writer/filmmaker Betsy Gaines.

Quammen also committed a certain amount of ‘‘belabored histrionics” at the karaoke microphone, according to Cahill.

It’s not the kind of thing you’d expect from a guy who can dissect — and write what is considered by scientists to be the definitive review of — Stephen Jay Gould’s 1,500-page book on evolutionary biology.

Then there is the good neighbor, the man who takes time to get to know neighborhood kids and gladly babysits their pet toad, in part because he likes to watch it munch crickets.

He actively supports the Bozeman library and last year organized a big promotion and show of community support for the Country Bookshelf, the town’s independent bookstore.

Community involvement is important, he said. He wishes he had time to do more.

And if that isn’t enough, he plays a key behind-the-scenes role in the global environmental movement. He serves as a board member of the Liz Claiborne/Arthur Ortenberg Foundation, a group that gives millions of dollars every year to environmental groups, many of them in Third World countries.

His role is to try to make sure the money is given away in effective ways, employing his broad scientific knowledge and his on-the-ground experience with what works and what doesn’t. Funding the wrong program or doing it at the wrong time ‘‘can do more harm than good,” he said.

He said his next book will be a thin biography of Charles Darwin, but for now he is enjoying the rush of rave reviews and publicity attracted by ‘‘Monster of God.”

But when it’s over, that won’t be a problem.

‘‘I hope it doesn’t change my life,” he said. ‘‘I like my life the way it is. I live in a nice place with a great woman.”

‘‘He’s the most unassuming person you’d ever meet,” said neighbor Todd Wilkinson, a journalist. ‘‘My kids know in a general way that there’s a famous, esteemed writer across the street. But what they really notice is he’s the neighbor who takes time to talk with them.”

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