Honoring a debt
Outdoor activist Jack Loeffler gives back to the planet that helped make him
For 21-year-old Jack Loeffler, July 1957 held an epiphany that would revolutionize the rest of his life. He was a witness to an atomic bomb blast seven miles from ground zero.
Dressed in his summer uniform of Bermuda shorts, a short-sleeved shirt and a pith helmet, Loeffler was a trumpeter in the 433rd U.S. Army Band. The band was bused to a military base at the Nevada Proving Grounds.
Midway through the playing of “Stars and Stripes Forever,” he writes in his new book, “the (pre-dawn) sky burst into light brighter than the sun, and an enormous mushroom cloud rocketed skyward, unfurling an array of colors, some of which do not otherwise appear in Nature in my experience.”
Loeffler said in his stirring, proudly nonlinear memoir “Headed Into the Wind” that the blast was a defining moment for him. It confirmed that he should pursue an independent path involving “resistance to any form of governing body that condoned the detonation of atomic bombs that blatantly destroyed spans of earthly habitat. … ostensibly in defense of the American Dream.”
Loeffler, a longtime Santa Fe resident, believes his activism and idealism have penetrated his thinking, his endeavors, his adventures and his friendships.
He has counted among his like-minded compañeros Alvin Josephy, the late historian of Native America, and the “radical” environmentalists Edward Abbey (“The Monkey Wrench Gang”) and the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Gary Snyder.
An embracing storyteller, Loeffler tells of living in and repairing a forked-stick hogan at Navajo Mountain in Utah and working three summers as a fire lookout (sans tower) in the Carson National Forest.
Among Loeffler’s activist endeavors was cofounding the Black Mesa Defense Fund in 1970. Set up at the request of Hopi elders, the defense fund was an attempt to halt coal-fired electric generating plants in the Southwest and a coal company’s lease to strip-mine Black Mesa, a Four Corners land form sacred to Navajos and Hopis.
Loeffler’s idealism has infused his work as a curator and creator of sound collages for museum exhibits, a radio producer, an author, an ethnomusicologist and an aural historian. He had all these enriching experiences after dropping out of college.
He tells of spending years recording the music and lore of Indian tribes throughout the American West and northern Mexico. He has recorded the folk music and folklore of Hispanic New Mexico and organized concerts. Loeffler has also recorded the sounds of nature (animals, birds, wind, thunder) in the Southwest.
Early in his life, he realized that he ought to thank Nature, which has given him a homeland, “years of wonder and extraordinary beauty.”
The point of his book, the 83-year-old Loeffler said in an interview, is that humans must shift their “collective cultural attitude” before we can address climate change. “We believe that we still are dominated by an economic paradigm. It’s taking us down the tubes,” he said.