Loss and Redemption

”. . . a man who wants to act virtuously in every way necessarily comes to grief among so many who are not virtuous. . . .”

Machiavelli, quoted in “The Journey Is the Destination”

Time scrambles across the pages of Dan Eldon’s journals. Past and present blur in violent abutments of colors and words, visions of love and danger, much as they did for Kathy Eldon in the fall when she visited Mogadishu, the place in Africa where a mob murdered her son four years ago.

” . . . and from the roof [of the Al Sahafi Hotel] we listened to the story of how the journalists would watch the gunfire and the artillery, while listening to Edith Piaf and chewing khat,” she recalls. “We were surrounded by [our escorts], loaded down with ammunition clips, watching for snipers. We were not in grave danger, but there is the potential that anything can happen. . . .”

Sitting in her West Hollywood apartment, the city below an image of hazy, benign congestion, Kathy can still feel herself hurtling through Mogadishu on a long overdue rendezvous with her son’s ghost. She wanted to stand where he had been stoned, see the street, the earth and sky that he had last seen. Four years have done little to change that spot. The battered city, with its potholed streets and bullet-pocked villas, is still in pathetic ruin.

Few books capture loss and redemption as stunningly as “The Journey Is the Destination: The Journals of Dan Eldon,” the legacy of an extraordinary young man who died at 22, his life curiously realized, and the mission of a family who loved him dearly. Leaf through its pages--each a ragged collage of drawing, scraps, scrawling and photographs that Dan feverishly assembled from age 14 until his death--and you see him, along with his sister, Amy, and their friends, as they followed the bright, dazzling trajectory of their youth. These are teenagers and young adults playing at life in a world that has forgotten how to play, and the more you look, the more you will remember something you might have forgotten, something akin to a riff in an old song, liner notes to the album, something punkish, something irreverent and relevant at the same time.

But for Kathy Eldon, the hypnotic message is not so much a memorial to her son but a catalyst for the creative expression it might unleash in others. For four years, Kathy has lived with these surrogates (there are 17 journals; “The Journey Is the Destination” is a compilation), crossing the country with them, turning their pages with publishers, film execs and museum curators. Finding a home for them was not easy, but a momentum developed. First, they were exhibited in her hometown, Cedar Rapids, Iowa, then they were published in DoubleTake magazine and recently exhibited in a New York City art gallery; today there’s the hardcover (published by Chronicle Books), a documentary and a film being planned and a conversation with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which might add the journals to its permanent collection.

“Dan was just a kid, asking all the important questions,” says Jan Sardi, who was nominated for an Oscar for writing “Shine,” and who recently completed a screenplay based on Dan Eldon’s life. “Dan had an ability to lock himself onto the immediacy of life, and yet at the same time was aware of a struggle with the darkness, a struggle in which he tried to find his way through.”

*

“Dan Eldon was a freelance photographer who had been working in Somalia for Reuters since June 1992. He was born in London in 1970 and grew up in Kenya. He said he ‘attended Mogadishu University, studying how not to get your head shot off.’ ”

From the second edition of “Somalia,” a photo essay published by Dan Eldon

He had the looks of a young Sean Penn but without the tough-guy pretense. A smile, a shock of hair, an impish look in his eyes gave him an innocence, both beguiling and playful.

“I see him on the boardwalk at Venice Beach.” Sardi is describing a possible scene from the movie, which he hopes will begin filming this year. “He’s trying to raise money to help refugees from Mozambique, and a policeman pulls him aside for selling without a license. The cop is African American, and Dan instantly charms him, talking about his own Masai friends and asking about the cop’s background: ‘a twist of that, a dollop of that.’ And before you know it, he’s getting out of the ticket.”

Eldon came upon the purpose of his life at an early age. The point, the journals seem to say, is to never be serious about being serious. The Eldons moved to Nairobi from suburban London when Dan was 7. Dad had just accepted a new job as an executive for a computer company; Mom was a freelance journalist, and this new ancient world lying alongside the Rift Valley mesmerized their children, who took easily to the neighborhood games, playing Frisbee among giraffes, swinging from vines, dodging buffalo and getting to know the Masai children. When Dan was 14, he started a scrapbook, an innocent record of a school field trip. Along with a growing interest in photography, the scrapbook soon became his obsession, and as the pages slowly filled, his life suddenly compressed.

In his journals, Dan was “digging into Africa and himself,” suggests Sardi. “It was a place that opened him up.” The prevalence of death there “gave him a sense of his own mortality. In the wide open of Africa, you abandon yourself, and the transience of life let Dan go at it 100 miles per hour.”

When Dan was 17, Kathy and Mike Eldon separated. Dan left for the United States and worked as an intern at Mademoiselle magazine in New York. He moved to California, enrolled at Pasadena City College (and later at UCLA), returned to Kenya, bought a 17-year-old Land Rover and safaried with friends. Subsidized by various schemes--selling T-shirts and jewelry, and tapping into an idle education fund established by his grandparents--his travels took him throughout East Africa and, later, to Cape Town, Berlin, Spain, Marrakech and West Africa. “Africa,” his father notes, “is not always a friendly place, but Dan was able to tickle his way through life.”

Not that every moment was a joke. When he was 14, he had organized an effort to raise $5,000 for a Kenyan girl who needed heart surgery. When he was 15, he helped support a Masai family by selling the beaded jewelry they made. When he was 19, he organized a motley group of strangers and friends, raised $17,000 (again by selling T-shirts, jewelry, putting the pinch on wealthy friends, talking to potential sponsors) and drove from Nairobi to a refugee camp in Malawi, where the money was used to dig wells and provision the children’s hospital. That safari is one of the centerpieces of “The Journey Is the Destination.”

“But Dan was no saint.” Kathy is relaying the story of these young philanthropists. “He was a totally normal guy, manipulative, chauvinistic, lazy and terribly messy. But the way he lived his life can help others.”

In 1992, Dan had heard of a possible famine in southern Somalia, and he and a reporter from the Philadelphia Inquirer drove there. A few days later, they returned with images and a story that would jar the conscience of the world, and suddenly he had found a powerful outlet for his talent. Through the arrival of the U.N. forces on Sept. 15, the landing of the Marines almost three months later and the bitter mission-creep that quickly followed, Dan gave an astonishingly human face to a world sometimes too horrible to consider in human terms.

“He was drawn to Somalia by the anarchy,” Kathy says. “It was a heady, fascinating and horrific experience. He was repulsed and attracted to a country with no rules.”

Dan was in his element, making friends of Somalis (who dubbed him the mayor of Mogadishu) and soldiers, taking his pictures, selling still more T-shirts and postcards to aid workers, and publishing a book. “One Sunday morning,” he wrote, “they brought in a pretty girl wrapped in a colorful cloth. I saw that both her hands and feet had been severed by shrapnel. Someone had tossed a grenade in the market. She looked serene, like she was dead . . . but the nurse said she would survive.

“It made me think of the whole country. Somalia will survive, but what kind of life is it for a people that have been so wounded? I don’t know how these experiences have changed me, but I feel different.”

*

“There’s no beginning, no ending, only the infinite passion for life.”

Federico Fellini, quoted by Kathy Eldon

The journals are stacked in a closet, kept in storage boxes, wrapped in bubble wrap and tie-dyed pillow cases. Kathy places one of them on the dining room table. Bob Marley’s “Confrontation,” one of Dan’s favorite cassettes, plays in the background.

Out of its wrapper, the book springs to life. When it was new, it might have folded flat, a mere half-inch thick. Today, packed with a year’s worth of Dan’s fevered, scattered impressions, the journal is like a swollen suitcase, impossible to close. It is the sheer thickness of each page that the compilation can’t capture. Black-and-white beads, Kodak 3-by-5s, snakeskins, condoms, coins, burned matches, glass shards, bank receipts, Bible pages, road maps, headlines, magazine articles, advertisements have been cut, torn, scissored, pasted, glued, taped, folded into these pages. Scrawled in between the images is Dan’s running commentary: part truth, part fantasy, part simple exaggeration. He was constantly directing himself in the movie of this book, creating his own script.

Images overlay images: A photograph of a road sign marking the equator in Kenya is covered by a picture of a fire, which is covered by a picture of a pretty young black girl, her long legs strangely suggestive of the continent’s southern coastline. Stare in the eyes of the nine men in a jeep with an 8-inch gun pointed at you, pistols and AK-47s in each of their hands, and then at the image of the young East African, innocent and astonishingly friendly, the Color of her skin and the shape of her eyes showing a marriage of ethnicities from Arabia, India and Africa.

By capturing the beauty and the horror and evil, Dan gives us much more than news from Africa, a continent famously ravaged by AIDS, Ebola, corrupt dictators, civil wars, rivers filled with corpses, brutal prisons, population bombs and suspicion. It is, instead, a Continent of people no different from ourselves but by mere circumstance. Look up from the journals, and you see what Kathy has been living with for four years: an awareness of the power of these books, the meaning of her son’s life and the sleepless need to get the message out.

*

“I have immense plans--clarity I have energy--need of vision.”

Dan Eldon from “The Journey Is the Destination”

“Losing Dan was the worst,” Kathy says. “It’s every parent’s nightmare. You think you can’t survive, but you have to survive. If I hadn’t had Amy, I wonder whether I would have bothered.”

Mike Eldon was at home in Nairobi recovering from a car crash when he received his phone call. Dan had visited him just the month before.

“It was late in the morning when Graham Stewart from Reuters called,” Mike remembers. “ ‘It was very likely that Dan had been killed,’ Graham said. ‘We don’t know for sure, but I didn’t want you to find out secondhand.’ ”

U.N. military forces had blasted the command center of fugitive Somali warlord Mohammed Farah Aidid. Angry Aidid supporters claimed that as many as 73 Somalis had been killed and up to 200 wounded.

Five journalists, who had been watching the hourlong attack, left the Al Sahafi Hotel with Aidid supporters who promised them safe passage. About a thousand Somalis had gathered in front of a destroyed home, and they started throwing stones at the journalists. The vehicles that had brought the journalists there were gone. Dan tore off his flak jacket to run more quickly, but a rock hit him. He fell, and the mob descended. Only one of the journalists survived.

Amy Eldon was in Mexico City working as an intern for a Japanese contracting company when the phone rang. She collapsed from shock and grief. Friends gathered her up and got her on the next plane to LAX.

“We fought like brothers and sisters,” she recalls. “You know how it is: Who’s going to get the front seat of the car? He teased me, but he also protected me, introducing me to his friends as his 12-year-old sister, even when I was 19. And when he died, I was suddenly an only child.”

Death at so young an age leaves a complicated legacy. Mike Eldon directs

his anger at the U.N. and American mission, especially the work of retired U.S. Adm. Jonathan Howe, who commanded the U.N. forces there, a man “ill-suited to his task,” Mike Eldon says.

“Here you had this isolated American enclave in the least American society you could have. Add to that the unfortunate American way of demonizing its opponents, and you have a crazy situation,” says Mike, particularly pained to have been told by a reporter from the Washington Post that while his son was being killed, a U.S. Cobra helicopter circled overhead, reportedly having been instructed not to land unless military personnel were in danger.

Kathy’s anger toward the military is sadly cut by the guilt of a mother who left a marriage and moved away from her children. “Had I lived a different life,” she wonders, “not left my husband, not encouraged Dan to become a journalist, would he maybe still be alive?”

Her grief led her to a no-man’s land, a period during which relationships fell apart. She crashed her car, she wandered the beach in Santa Monica. By the end of ‘93, she admits, her life, caught between wanting to memorialize her son and the pain of that effort, wasn’t working.

“When you lose someone young, you see the brevity of life,” she says. “If you’re here only a little while, what are you going to do? If you die tomorrow, are you living the life of your choice? I knew I had to live life that I was postponing, but finding the purpose was difficult.”

*

“Only the dead have seen the end of war.”

Plato, quoted in “The Journey Is the Destination”

Amy Eldon has not had a day off in six weeks. No sooner had she gotten off the plane from a tour of Africa than she went to work in Century City, editing almost 100 hours of film for the two-hour documentary that Turner Broadcasting will air this year. “Dying to Tell the Story” is a mix of interviews, featuring, among others, Eddie Adams (best known for his photograph of a Vietnamese police chief executing a Viet Cong at point-blank range in 1968), CNN correspondent Christiane Amanpour and noted combat photographer Don McCullen.

After Dan’s death, Amy started to wonder who he was and who he might have become. Her curiosity led her to write a treatment for this documentary, a profile of photojournalists who risk their lives in the line of work.

“It’s the story of how war photographers never lose faith,” she explains. “How they persevere in spite of the horrors they record, and whether they will always have a job or if someday we can make them jobless.”

She looks at one of the journals on the dining room table. A magnetic presence throughout the journals, she is only a year older than Dan was when he died, but in her poise and thoughtfulness, you get a sense of who Dan might have been. Her hair is cut shorter than in the journals, but her smile is clearly recognizable. The journals have become a bridge for her, presenting questions that she and Dan asked together but that he never got to answer.

“How do you get the message across to people who are desensitized to violence? Maybe the journals can do this. Maybe our film.” She abruptly changes the subject. “I’m sick of people characterizing young people as Gen-Xers. We’re not all Beavis and Butt-heads. We have an opportunity to be anything. We are interested in discovering a new paradigm for being, and you don’t have to go to Somalia to do it.”

Twenty miles from West Hollywood, down on 48th Street in South-Central, teenagers are capTioning pictures on the Macintosh. On the wall behind them are a couple of Dan’s photographs. The kids are sitting in the Dan Eldon room of the Blazers Safe Haven, a center in the neighborhood to visit after school and learn more about life than from the street. Bennie Davenport, the founder, learned about Dan Eldon the hard way: when Dan and the other journalists died.

“It was quite devastating to hear that such positive kids could have their lives cut short, through no fault of their own,” remembers Davenport, who read about Dan’s death in the paper and who met Kathy Eldon later at a benefit for a homeless artist. At the time he didn’t know who she was; it was only after he showed her the Blazers facility that she mentioned her son. “I always thought Dan would be a perfect role model,” says Davenport, “and he and his life would point the way to other kids, letting them know what would be possible for them to do with their lives. We needed a hero, a standard-bearer. I thought we could dedicate a room to Dan.”

Back in Nairobi, about 15 miles out of town, on the campus of a woman’s college that once was a coffee farm, the Depot, the Dan Eldon Place of Tomorrow, is thriving. Like Blazers, the Depot is a youth development center. One of its directors is Mike Eldon.

“We develop life skills for young people, such as team building, communication, leadership, problem solving,” Mike says, “the usual things which aren’t very usual here.”

At the Depot, Mike has re-created the room where his son used to work on his journals when he was in Nairobi. On its walls are the Islamic prayer boards Dan brought back from Somalia, some Of his photographs and a big horn, the Harpo Marx kind of horn with a huge rubber bulb, that Dan had on his Land Rover.

“I’m not focused on Somali mobs or American helicopter pilots anymore,” Mike says from his home in Nairobi, a home that overlooks the Ngong Hills, a sight that provides a connection to his son, who so often played there. “I’m focused on the way I enjoyed Dan as a son and a friend. We enjoyed so much together: humor, photography, our trips. That lives; that’s fun.Now it’s a smile rather than a tear.”

Half a world away, Kathy is no less connected to Dan’s spirit. At a recent publication party held in the Beverly Hills home of Lisa Henson, producer with Janet Yang and Kathy of the film on Dan’s life, Kathy took a moment to talk to the guests and addressed what she believes is really important.

“As representatives of the most powerful industry in the world, I implore you to inspire, to stir, to move people to greatness. We have power in this community. Even Somalia is affected by Hollywood. In Mogadishu, we saw pictures of Gunmen standing next to ‘Rambo’ posters. So what are we going to do with this power? How are we going to raise the consciousness of the people on this planet so we don’t kill each? How are we going to use the power of media in a positive way?”

Kathy’s words flowed smoothly; her eloquence poured through a crucible of sadness and grief. She is both tough and tender, ingenuous and savvy, and determined that her son and the meaning of his life not be forgotten. Last year, speaking to the Freedom Forum, she quoted St. Francis of Assisi: “. . . where there is violence, let each of us make a move toward gentleness; where there is anger, let us begin to forgive; where there is chaos, let us find harmony; and where there is hatred, let us learn to love.”