Into the Infinite
How Bill Witherspoon ’65 immortalized his desert journeys.
From founding a fine art and digital technology company to dwelling on and off in Oregon’s high desert for more than 50 years, Bill Witherspoon ’65 has spent his life pursuing unlikely journeys that became unshakable callings.
“Now that I’m old enough to look back and want to see a pattern, it’s not been a conventional or expected path,” he says. “But that’s true for a lot of Reedies, so there’s nothing strange there.”
Bill’s path is immortalized in his memoir, Enter Space: Stories from the High Desert, a book that is as much a physical being as it is a narrative work: a clamshell hull containing five accordion-fold booklets, with 27 stories and 108 photographs.
“What we’re talking about is how one person used the desert—or was used by the desert,” Bill says. “I also built businesses and lived and had a family. And those, too, are tools.”
While Bill studied Russian at Reed and was a protégé of Professor Lloyd Reynolds [art 1929–69], many of his memories of his college years revolve around adventures beyond campus: rock climbing, mountain climbing, spelunking.
“My experience of being an artist is being someone who wants to see deeply, to know deeply, to understand deeply,” he says. “If you have this desire to see into nature, then [the desert] is a great place to do it, if you have a minimalist temperament. That was my nature.”
Chronicling Bill’s encounters with beautifully remote locales like Mickey Basin, the National Antelope Refuge, and Steens Mountain, Enter Space is overflowing with moments not easily literalized—like Bill’s near-death experience after his boat went over a waterfall.
“There’s no boat pictures or river pictures, but there are pictures looking east and west into the atmosphere at the subtle gradation of colors that occurs when the sun is below the horizon,” Bill says. The goal was to choose images that evoked what he felt in the moment, aided by book designers Franca Bator, David Navarrete, Andrew Murray, and Brian Smestad.
Today, Bill divides his time among Oregon, Iowa, and India. The desert remains an animating force in his life.
“I really try to get [across] what it is about the desert that attracts me—why I love it, why I think of it as a friend, as a mentor, as a teacher,” he says. “What is there on the horizon is an eyes-open, sensory experience that is as close to the beyond—as close to infinity—as you can get.”
Tags: Alumni, Books, Film, Music