High Profile: Melvin Virgil White Jr.

His curiosity for life’s sensory pleasures turned his attention toward music, birding and other worldly pursuits, such as a career as a freelance travel writer for National Geographic.

“I’m a freelance writer. You ask me do I want to do a story? I basically say, ‘Yeah.’”
“I’m a freelance writer. You ask me do I want to do a story? I basically say, ‘Yeah.’”

Mel White was about 15,000 feet up Kilimanjaro when the kind of serendipitous travel experience he relishes soared into view. It was a lammergeier, a giant bearded vulture the dedicated birder had long imagined seeing.

“It just went right over me, so close I could see every detail,” White says. “It was just a magical moment.”

SELF PORTRAIT

Mel White

PLACE AND DATE OF BIRTH: Aug. 22, 1950; Conway

WRITER I MOST ADMIRE IS Vladimir Nabokov.

IF I WASN’T A WRITER I WOULD BE bored.

FAVORITE ALBUM: Bach Brandenburg Concertos, The Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, Sir Neville Marriner

I WORK BEST WHEN it’s dead quiet.

BEST PACKING ADVICE: create a list and keep revising it

WEIRDEST THING I’VE EATEN: bat

I WON’T EAT oysters.

WORST AIRPORT I’VE BEEN THROUGH: The international terminal at LAX (although it has been upgraded since I was last there)

MY WIFE WOULD SAY I’M contentious, but I dispute this.

BEST PERSONALITY TRAIT: attention to detail

WORST PERSONALITY TRAIT: procrastination

I NEVER THOUGHT I’D see a Bornean bristlehead.

FAVORITE PLACE IN ARKANSAS TO VISIT: Ponca/ Lost Valley

GUESTS AT FANTASY DINNER PARTY: Mark Twain, Theodore Roosevelt, Dorothy Parker, Billy Wilder

ONE WORD TO DESCRIBE ME: introvert

There have been plenty of those in White’s life. And thanks to his skills as a travel and nature writer, he has taken readers of National Geographic magazine and other publications along for the ride — or, as in the case of Mount Kilimanjaro, for the really long hike.

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“Birders really liked him. He sort of really captured what it was like to be a birder, the joy of it, more so than anyone I can think of.” — Tim Gallagher, editor-in-chief of Living Bird, the magazine of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology

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Special to the Democrat-Gazette

While on assignment for National Geographic Traveler in 1997, Mel White climbed the 19,000-foot Mount Kilimanjaro, the tallest mountain in Africa. Before the last part of the climb, he spent the night at the base of a glacier, in a crater at more than 18,000 feet.

Over the past quarter-century, White has been paid to snorkel Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, traipse through Borneo’s rain forest and traverse the remotest mountains of New Guinea, to name just a few far-flung assignments. For National Geographic’s guide to U.S. national parks published this year, he visited 18 of the 59 U.S. National Parks. The books he has written or contributed to fill a shelf in his office.

“He’s always been exceptional, a brilliant writer and reporter, I think,” says Lynn Addison, a retired editor for National Geographic who has worked with him on numerous articles.

Addison says White is that rare double threat — a writer who’s accurate and also capable of spinning poetry into his prose.

Not that he waxes poetic about it.

“I’m a freelance writer,” White says. “You ask me do I want to do a story? I basically say, ‘Yeah.’”

As for his specialty — the outdoors — White traces that to being “a 6-year-old crazy about birds. That translated into being interested in nature and that translated into my whole career.”

From a 2012 National Geographic article by White on Socotra, Yemen:

“It’s nearly midnight on the broad hill called Firmihin, where a dragon’s blood forest g̶r̶o̶a̶n̶s̶ grows*. The moon, a night past full, floods the jagged landscape with cool silver. Inside the rock wall of a shepherd’s compound, flames light the faces of four people sitting barefoot around a fire, sharing a pot of hot tea mixed with fresh goat’s milk.”

Actually, White has been a few other things, too: musician, radio jingle writer, newspaper columnist, magazine editor and, briefly, political flack. He can look professorial one day, then like he has just come off a safari the next.

He grew up in Conway, where his father, Virgil, owned a Western Auto store. “I changed a million tires and put together a thousand bikes,” White says.

His mother, Virgie, was a backyard birder and shape-note piano player. Taking a ride through the country after church was a Sunday ritual.

“My mother and I would look at birds. That was back when Faulkner County was a hell of a lot more rural than it is now,” White says.

At age 9, he had a poem published in the Arkansas Gazette — “a proud moment for my mom.” Later he wrote parodies of The Man From U.N.C.L.E. and Shakespeare that he’s sure were “excruciatingly horrible.”

Music was his dominant passion. He played trumpet in school, took lessons on piano and violin and taught himself guitar like half the other boys in America after the Beatles landed. His social life revolved around school concerts and bus trips to football games with the marching band.

White enrolled in the University of Central Arkansas — then State College of Arkansas — before almost immediately changing his mind and transferring to Hendrix College.

“I’m a freelance writer. You ask me do I want to do a story? I basically say, ‘Yeah.’”

“SCA was the jock school, and Hendrix was the ivy-covered enclave of Volvo-driving professors and overly serious, not to say effete, students,” he wrote in a fond look back for the Hendrix alumni magazine this year. “The guys who hung out in the feed store on Front Street might have used different words to make the distinction.”

He took every music class he could, plus healthy doses of literature and philosophy. He also joined some SCA students in a band called the Loose Ends, modeled after groups like Chicago that featured horns as well as guitars. They played 73 gigs one year, 71 the next. White wrote the arrangements — and tried to make sure they were followed.

“I guess he was a bit of a taskmaster,” says Blake Browning, the band’s drummer and a longtime friend. “It wasn’t like he wanted to be in charge. He just wanted [us] to be as good as we can be.”

The band is still around, although these days its members get together more for practice than paying gigs. Browning, a Conway banker, says White “has mellowed a lot. He doesn’t get upset like he used to. He just says, ‘Let’s do it again.’”

After graduation, White moved to Little Rock. He drove a bookmobile for the public library, then worked as a gofer in U.S. Sen. J. William Fulbright’s failed 1974 re-election primary campaign against Dale Bumpers. Looking back, White says he “should have been for Bumpers. I wish he had been president.”

RELATIONSHIP WITH WORDS

A girlfriend worked for the Arkansas Democrat, a predecessor of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. White thought that sounded fun. He showed the managing editor a term paper he had written on Moby-Dick and got a job on the copy desk, making sure other people’s writing was correct.

“It taught me so much I had never thought about — about usage, grammar, getting things right.”

Another job at the Democrat, as a TV and entertainment writer, taught him something else.

“I had to crank out a column a day, whether I felt like it or not. It completely got me over the idea you have to be inspired to write. It’s just a job.”

White quit the newspaper at least two times — he isn’t sure of the exact number — to work for a recording studio started by a friend. They produced advertisements for Gaston’s White River Resort, the Central Arkansas Transit Authority and “every smalltown bank and car dealership in the state,” White said. The job allowed him to write music and, often, play nearly every instrument on a project, winning several state advertising awards in the process.

During the same period, he started freelancing for the Arkansas Times, then a monthly magazine, beginning with a look back at the 1974 election.

“I remember writing that I thought the [Orval] Faubus crew looked like a convention of funeral home directors,” he says. “I was heavily influenced by Hunter S. Thompson for a long time. I guess I still am.”

Eventually he became editor. “There was some hellof-a-good writing going on there,” he says, mentioning contributors such as Mike Trimble, Mara Leveritt and Bob Lancaster.

Nonetheless, by 1990 tension at the publication caused him to leave and launch a fulltime career as a freelance writer. He’d already whipped out part of a book, a guide to historic American places published by the Smithsonian Institution, on a tight deadline.

“Like a million other people, I decided I could be a travel writer,” he said.

White found a copy of National Geographic Traveler, a sister publication of National Geographic magazine, and sent its editors an unsolicited article — a practice that often lands manuscripts in the round file. But the work caught the eye of an editor, and White soon started getting Traveler assignments in and around Arkansas.

REALLY GOING PLACES

In a 2009 National Geographic article on New Zealand’s Tongariro National Park, White wrote, “The 12-mile-long trail called the Tongariro Alpine Crossing begins in tussock grassland, then climbs past lava cliffs and glacial moraines (heaps of debris piled up by former glaciers) to the base of Ngauruhoe, where hikers willing to endure a couple of hours trudging up scree can make a side trip to the top of the volcano. The main route ascends the slopes of Tongariro to the top of Red Crater. Steaming like the gate to hell, Red Crater is named for the rock around its mouth, given a chestnut hue by oxidized iron. Surrounding swaths of black lava testify to the crater’s long history of eruptions, continuing through the late 1800s.”

In July 1991, White got what he calls his “first really big, cool international story” — a piece on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef. It was a bit of a fluke: The magazine couldn’t find the globe-trotting writer originally intended for the story. “I’m secretly hoping this guy is being held by bandits in Afghanistan,” White recalls thinking.

White completed the assignment and scores more have followed, from the Traveler and National Geographic magazine: Spain, the Swiss Alps, Madagascar, the Amazon River, New Zealand, northern Italy’s Lake Country, the Seychelles.

He wrote a book about the Juan Fernandez Islands in the South Pacific, a trio of sparsely populated volcanic islands with a reputation befitting a former penal colony. Instead, White found “just the most delightful, wonderful, peaceful community of people who were fantastically nice. Incredible landscape, beaches. It was just like paradise for two weeks.”

He climbed Kilimanjaro in “the easiest way possible,” with a retinue of 15 guides, cooks and porters. Another time, way off the grid in the mountains of New Guinea, villagers threatened to hold his crew hostage, demanding $30,000. “I think they finally settled for a couple thousand and a portable generator — something like that.”

Still another time, he and a photographer were sent to south Australia for two weeks to report on “the most expensive wines we could drink. That was the story that made people want to kill me.”

A SOLITARY OCCUPATION

White has worked on more than 20 books for National Geographic’s book division. For more than two decades, he also wrote a regular column for Living Bird, the magazine of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, although White is quick to say he is not a trained ornithologist.

“Birders really liked him,” Tim Gallagher, the magazine’s editor-in-chief, says. “He sort of really captured what it was like to be a birder, the joy of it, more so than anyone I can think of.”

Another fan is White’s wife, Hope Coulter, a novelist and poet who directs the Hendrix-Murphy Foundation Programs at Hendrix. They met on a birding outing in 2003. As fun as the travel sounds, Coulter said, the writing that follows is hard work, even if White is good enough to make it seem effortless.

“He sits there from 8 to 5, has a turkey sandwich for lunch and his car hardly ever leaves the driveway,” she said. “It’s from one extreme to another.”

From a 2006 article in National Geographic by White about the fruitless search for the ivory-billed woodpecker in Arkansas:

“The ivorybill’s faithful, on the other hand, have another explanation. They say the bird, in its 21st-century incarnation, has been transformed into a creature as shy as Bambi, as silent as a Trappist monk, as anxious to avoid photographers as a Mafia stool pigeon in a witness-protection program — altogether as invisible to the human senses as a stealth fighter is to radar.”

This spring, White led a couple of visitors down a path north of the Big Dam Bridge that crosses the Arkansas River to connect Little Rock and North Little Rock. He identified the little squeak of a goldfinch, the whistle of a tufted titmouse and buzz of a northern parula, the first he’d heard this year.

He mimicked the call of a white-eyed vireo off in the woods — “It kind of goes chip diddle-diddle” — and pointed to a couple of turkey vultures gliding overheard. He stopped to watch a monarch butterfly — a “really beat-up monarch” that’d lost many scales, probably commuting from Mexico.

White would travel and study nature even if he wasn’t paid to do it. He and Coulter are headed to Australia this summer — his fifth trip there, her first. For work and pleasure, his approach has changed over the years. He still researches destinations thoroughly, but he no longer tries to pack every museum, cathedral or other tourist spot into his schedule. It goes back to the time he was hiking in Switzerland and the “the Alpenglow hit my eyes just right.”

“I suddenly realized this is why you travel, and this is what I should be writing about,” he says. “I decided I was going to wander around and let travel happen to me.”

“I’d much rather do that than stand in line for two hours to see the Eiffel Tower.”

High Profile on 06/19/2016

*CORRECTION: Mel White wrote the following in a 2012 National Geographic story on Socotra, Yemen: “It’s nearly midnight on the broad hill called Firmihin, where a dragon’s blood forest grows.” The quote from the nature magazine was incorrect in this story.

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