Tennessee Friends

It’s now been four days since I heard about John’s death. The confusion and numbness has begun to wear off a bit and as it wears, what is starting to be revealed to me is the metal underneath—just how strong and honest his life really was. We always think of the parts of a life, and not the whole, but death helps us brush aside the superficial and see what someone really did with their time on this earth. In John’s case, what a masterpiece! Jacqui: his friends here in Tennessee are giving him a standing ovation.

John was always alive. He was a doctor, and a very good one. He was a businessman and an entrepreneur, a husband who obviously loved Jacqui very much, a skier, a hunter, a conservationist, a rancher, a pilot, a wine lover, a loyal friend. He always seemed to me to be doing something.

We worked together in Tennessee in the 1980s, but I really got to know him better in the years after that, when he had moved back to California. He and Jacqui would sometimes join our family trips to the slopes, and I always loved skiing with him. He was smooth and controlled, and unlike Stryker and me, he just looked good working his way through the bumps, flexing his knees and moving up and down just like you were supposed to. The only conflicts came when it came time to select a movie to watch after supper; most of us, and especially the teenagers, wanted something with lasers or swords or car chases. John and Jacqui definitely preferred something foreign, obscure or better yet impenetrable, ideally with subtitles. We only let them choose once.

John was a great conservationist and also an avid hunter; he loved our land and all the relationships you could have with it. Four of us, John, Stryker Warren, Pete Sain, and I made trips to New Mexico, to Texas, to Colorado and Wyoming to hunt deer, antelope and elk over the last decade and a half. He was a perfect companion; a fine hunter but one for whom a day in the desert was a wonderful thing independent of whether he was successful in bagging game. He loved to eat wild game, and was monomaniacal about wrapping and preserving it appropriately so that he could get it safely home It occurred to me at one point that he wasn’t interested in trophies, he was interested in food! When he came to Pete’s place in Texas to deer hunt each fall, John would make a pre-trip to a Bay-area fish market, and bring fresh salmon, Dungeness crabs, and whatever else he thought would be a great luxury at a camp in the South Texas desert.

As always, it was the social times together on those trips that were the best part. None of us are big drinkers, but somehow the tradition got started that we started off each trip with a martini in camp. It was not a hard liquor crowd, but we all loved wine, and had some fine glasses to go with the conversation in a lot of camps throughout the west. Because of our mutual interest in health care, John and I would talk a lot about what was going on, and I have to say we solved many of America’s health care problems, not to mention the war in the Middle East, around campfires in Texas and New Mexico.

I valued John’s friendship very much, and will remember those trips together as something really good in my own life. John lived an active, creative, involved life, and left everything better for his having touched it. I don’t know that I could give a higher accolade. His life was already long, but not nearly long enough, and he should have had a couple more decades of time with Jacqui, with his ranch, with his horses, with his friends, and yes, with his flying.

I did not know Susan Jordan, who perished with him. I feel sure as a friend of John and Jacqui’s she was a person of great character and rich history, and I ask us all to keep her and her family also in our thoughts and prayers as we mourn John.

I don’t remember ever having discussed the author Jack London with John Austin, but I feel confident that John was an admirer of his life and work. I’ll let Jack have the last word:


I would rather be a meteor, every atom of
me in magnificent glow
than a sleepy and permanent planet.
The proper function of a man is
to live, not to exist.

I shall not waste my days
in trying to prolong them.
I shall use my time.

John did use his time, rest in peace.