Several decades after 'Jonathan Livingston Seagull,' author turns to ferrets for meaning

Soaring high above the trees in an azure sky: That's the place to talk with Richard Bach, author of "Jonathan Livingston Seagull."

"This is essentially my life," he says.

More than three decades after the little spiritual book about flight that made him famous, Bach may become known to a new generation for another type of animal: ferrets. The first two of his five-book "Ferret Chronicles" series are out now: "Rescue Ferrets at Sea" and "Air Ferrets Aloft" (Scribner, $15 hardcover). The adventure fables of the anthropomorphized little creatures seem suited for a younger audience, but the theme is similar: "Wonderful things happen if we live to our highest sense of right," he says.

His Lake LA-4-200 boat-plane is the kind with the engine and propeller sticking out of the top. Passing over Lake Stevens in it, Bach explains gently and calmly everything he does with the plane. Asked if he'd ever considered a career as a dentist, he chuckles heartily. "Flying is a metaphor for life," he says. "The most important thing is, you have to trust what you can't see." He swerves around a bald eagle almost subconsciously.

"I believe that an aircraft has a spirit just as much as a pilot does," Bach says.

In a new book called "The Hippie Dictionary," "Jonathan Livingston Seagull" is listed under "Books of and About the Era, and Some That Helped to Create It."

Except Bach is no hippie. Not the wimpy granola schoolteacher out of "Beavis and Butt-Head." He's a big, rugged-looking man who happens to radiate warmth: 6-foot-2, with a closely trimmed graying beard and brown hair that's getting sparse on top. This day, he's wearing a brown fleece jacket over a red T-shirt, with jeans.

He's "an eternal expression of life." That's what Bach is known to answer when asked his age, which is a very well-preserved 66. He lives with his 32-year-old wife, Sabryna, on 50 mountaintop acres of Orcas Island in the San Juans.

He once flew a plane equipped with The Bomb. He says the target would have been Dresden, Germany, a city already destroyed once during WWII. Lots of pilots loved to fly so much that they flew for the military without thinking much about the ramifications. To this day, he says he doesn't know what he would have done if he'd been ordered to drop The Bomb.

Landing the boat-plane on Lake Whatcom, Bach climbs outside and sits on top. Why ferrets? He thought they were cute and curious, and they stole his heart away. But also to show something: "There are lots of ways that we can have action and adventure without murder, without rape, without destruction and world wars. These little creatures are from another galaxy, and millennia ago they decided they were going to withdraw their consent from evil. There is no crime, there is no malice, there is no war. Each individual lives to her or his own highest sense of right. They love action and adventure. They love peril. But they don't kill each other to do it."

"The power of individual choice has been a central theme of my life," he says.

An old vinyl lunch box sums up the "Jonathan Livingston Seagull" phenomenon in some ways. Presented with one before the flight, Bach is tickled with the valuable collector's item; then he's slightly crestfallen when told it was found at a local flea market for the princely sum of three bucks. But not everyone gets his own lunch box.

For those who have forgotten or weren't born yet, this is how huge Bach's breakthrough 1970 book was: Although numerous publishers rejected it at first, word of mouth built until it became the top fiction best seller of 1973. Inevitably, it became a movie, with a Neil Diamond soundtrack, and Bach was promised final cut of the film — which is even now a rarity among filmmakers and nonexistent among authors. But that didn't work out. "If you see it, see it with earmuffs," Bach says now.

Bach's 1977 follow-up, "Illusions — the Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah," also became a best seller and achieved a following. But none of his subsequent books enjoyed a fraction of his early success.

"My job's not to match," he says. "I have no control over what other people do. They can like the books or hate 'em."

Some fans still regard him as a sort of spiritual guru. They're missing his point.

"That's very uncomfortable. My whole thing is, we all have enormous powers at our control, and it all comes with our questioning mind, curiosity, control of our thoughts — and to make one person special, that was the theme of "Jonathan Seagull": they called him special and divine. What about you?

This little known fact doesn't quite register at first, and then it makes perfect sense: "Star Trek" creator Gene Roddenberry once commissioned Bach to write a script for the series. It was never produced or published.

"Practice in Waking" was the title. The Enterprise crew goes back in time and saves a Scottish witch from being burned. Scotty the engineer falls madly in love with her. She believes the physical world is all appearances, and he believes it's reality. The witch gets killed in some ensuing adventure, and Scotty is devastated, ready to end it all. She comes back to explain to him what the world of appearances is all about, tells him we can express love no matter what world we're in at the moment, and that we bring events to us in order to learn from them.

Bach believes those things.

"Discarnate" is the word he uses for the dead. He says he has 10 ferrets, one of which is discarnate and researching a book about angel ferrets. He says he has six children, one of which became discarnate after an auto accident. Her name was Bethany, the name of the central character in the first ferret book. She was in the car with her brother, Jonathan.

He recognizes some apparent incongruities: "If I'm someone who doesn't believe in space and time, why am I wearing a wristwatch?" The answer: It's a convenience for making contracts with others who do believe in space and time.

Another: He got a divorce from actress Leslie Parrish after writing "The Bridge Across Forever" in 1986. "You write a book about soulmates and a few years later you're divorced? What's going on?" Without going into much detail, Bach says, "She has said, 'Never mention my name again,' and I respect that."

And: Despite his love-mongering writings, Bach claims he was a "terrible" father: "Absolutely lousy, no patience," he says. Cold and inaccessible, he says he was concerned with flying and writing. And although his relationships with his now-adult children have improved greatly, he says he has no idea how old they are. (See "eternal expression of life," above.)

Does he really believe all of these statements that skeptics might consider pseudo-philosophical mumbo-jumbo? Looking at it one way, it's like hedging your bet: You can believe we're born and die and that's it, or you can believe in a magical world of possibilities and you lose nothing, he says.

Or put another way: "I've always been unafraid of the mystical. And if it sounds crazy, it sounds crazy."

As for his writing, Bach still has plenty to say, and he's enamored of the ferret as a vehicle for saying it.

Winding down in a Monroe cafe with a cheese sandwich after the flight, he says, "The ferrets stretch to the horizon."

Mark Rahner: mrahner@seattletimes.com