Graduating from Stanford in 1965, looking for a life path, Alice Coogan felt lost. Career tracks for women trailed off after nursing and teaching. In 1971, she was working for an interior design company in San Francisco, suggesting furniture, carpets and wall colors for commercial buildings. "Every day I go to a job I have no talent for," she wrote. "I haven't any talent or imagination. Nothing interesting is going to happen to me."
That statement is belied by the diaries Coogan, 1944-2004, left behind. Filled with watercolor sketches and vivid description, they provide a portrait of a writer and globetrotter who was ironic, expansive, funny and keenly observant. They provide a window into the mind of a vibrant mid-20th-century woman who struggled with introversion and self-doubt. And they document how one person helped open up the world to thousands—the travelers who fell in love with Coogan after she became assistant director of Stanford Travel/Study.
"Being among extraverts squashes me," she wrote—an assessment that would have surprised many of those who knew her. She could be bitterly self-critical: "I have awful posture and am very weak. I'm an awful person, mean, petty, ugly and unkind." She confided to her journal, "I hate the gap between what I am thinking and how I sound."
Her mother's death prompted Coogan to take stock—and reassess. "Don't dwell on petty things like physical shortcomings," she told herself. "Don't miss anything. Do everything you have a chance to do."
GLOBAL OBSERVER: Coogan, '65, kept diaries that increasingly included sketches and watercolors, including all that illustrate this article. (Photo: Joel Simon, '74, MS, '84)In 1975, she signed up for a Stanford Travel/Study trip exploring Hopi and Navajo culture in the American Southwest. Travel/Study had grown out of an alumni association program that brought alumni to campus each summer to listen to stellar professors. In 1968, history professor Rixford Snyder had taken a group on a cruise down the Rhine. Trips to Greece and down the Danube followed. In 1974, Peter Voll, '65, who had worked as an advance man for political campaigns, succeeded Snyder as the head of the growing travel program. Voll (who died in December; see obituary in Class Notes) planned and led the Southwest trip—and he asked to see Coogan's journal.
It was filled with things that kindled her imagination: the costumes of Kachina dancers, archaeological details of ancient ball courts, birds flying overhead. At Wupatki National Monument in Arizona, she wrote, "Fantastic landscape—behind us, rolling hills with cinder cover, then gullies and ravines with red outcroppings and soft green brush. Faraway mesas, pale pink, yellow and green, deep blue shadows from the rain clouds coming up behind us. Not a single color wrong."
Voll, interviewed in 2011, recognized in Coogan "a Renaissance thinker" and "a great storyteller with a wonderful sense of humor." He soon hired her to bring writing and planning skills to Travel/Study. During the next decades, her observant eye and narrative flair complemented his ambitions for the program, which grew and grew.
Coogan wrote travel brochures and planned trips—and accompanied several each year as the alumni association's representative. That role meant coordinating local guides, checking passengers into hotels and onto planes, herding luggage, tipping guides and drivers, and generally setting a comfortable tone. (There was a certain amount of public speaking, too: She grimaced through that.) She made lifelong friends who tell Most Unforgettable Character anecdotes about her. Coworkers are especially fond of the time she completed a trenchant performance self-evaluation by answering its questions with slips from fortune cookies.
And she wrote in her journals. On the Colorado River: The boatman "slipped too far to the right as we entered the rapid, and then took us for a ride that answered all questions in the 'What's so great about the Colorado's rapids?' vein. SENSATIONAL!! . . . Down through the holes, water pouring over the bow, rushing up my neck . . . looking around, seeing even bigger holes and great giant muddy waves that seemed sure to engulf us instead of just filling the footwell up over the seat. Water everywhere: waves before us, deep pits yawning under us, muddy foam splashing to the sides, spray carried into our faces. . . . and we emerged virtually unscathed, enormously exhilarated."
China: "A yellow cockroach stands poised on my vitamin pill. In the distance a throat is cleared, and phlegm hits the floor, or perhaps a spittoon. A far-off bell tolls, and even at midnight the sounds of China go on. This is a magnificent country. It alternately delights, horrifies, fascinates and baffles me. How enormously fortunate I am to be here."
Tunisia: "There are broad bands of color across the horizon: yellow flowered fields and distant blue hills. Olive groves everywhere. (Tunisia is the world's fourth largest producer of olive oil.) . . . Red soil, green meadows, fields of wheat (well, about as much wheat as wildflowers), . . . birds carrying great streamers of grass to their nest sites, women in white cocoons and shawls—some holding their head-shawls closed with their teeth when their hands were full. Baby blue sky, fertile land all around."
India: "Off we went in Radiant's Tattered Tata bus whose shock absorbers must have been part of a previous incarnation, out past the tiny businesses that make up life in the third world. Grain, coal, spices, food, bicycles, firewood, sewing, barbers. . . . scrawny babies lying stiffly in front of their mothers, children with flies in their eyes, black water running stickily in streams next to the houses. . . . It's very hard not to get overwhelmed in India."
Antarctica: "Ice to make Henry Moore gnash his teeth for sheer beauty of form, ice everywhere. . . . The gray sky, very creamy above the horizon. The black mountains . . . mantled with blue ice. In the foreground, ice floes with penguins, the occasional Wilson's storm petrel; in the distance a convention of huge ice, big blocks, wide cakes, ice of all descriptions. . . . A dream, it was like a dream in four very subdued colors."
She wrote about Venice, Tokyo, Bali, Dalmatia, Machu Picchu, Kilimanjaro, Kathmandu, Easter Island, Samarkand, the Galapagos, Istanbul, Zanzibar, Borneo. Her accounts touched down in at least 75 countries. She heard classics professor Marsh McCall read Homer where once stood Troy.
"I've gotten to see such wondrous things!"
There was architecture. The Grand Palace in Bangkok seemed "to stretch on forever" with glazed tile roofs, gilded eaves, gold towers, colored mirrors and muraled corridors—"enough simultaneous narrative to make you dizzy." She lingered in great museums. "Every Renoir face looks like every other Renoir face." Of a Rousseau masterpiece, she noted, "No one has ever painted rain as well as the Douanier, and the tiger's teeth are fabulous." And, "There's no way to look at Michelangelo's David and search his eyes and not feel both inner calm and total focus."
She recorded nearly every meal. Tortellini, "slightly fragrant with nutmeg" in Venice; bobó de camarão in Brazil; "a great braised ostrich" in South Africa. A dinner at Paul Bocuse's famous restaurant in France went on for five pages. In Brunei, "I felt very silly asking a headhunter if he could see if there was more pasta."
Above all, she loved creatures—and avidly listed and described them. She sketched pandas and orangutans, marveled at scarlet macaws in Venezuela and snow pigeons in Bhutan. Wyoming pronghorns were "tan above, clear white below, on their tiptoes as taut as champagne corks." On the Great Barrier Reef, a lionfish, "in full regalia which means a series of fins and ruffles that look for all the world like the work of a Japanese paper sculptor, like a floating feather headdress, its calm so complete, its expression so arch . . . we could have watched it all night but it floated off into the dark."
On the Caribbean she saw "dolphins, everywhere . . . At one point the wave in front of me was empty, completely quiet, and then they all leapt out at once, hundreds, in that beautiful pointy arc that dolphins make, flicking their tails. . . . Any day with dolphins is a great day." It was after watching dolphins in the surf at a South African beach that she wrote, "Sometimes at home I think to myself I've forgotten to be happy. Out here, I feel like I've remembered."
On a trip to the Orinoco River in 1991, she met Lyall Watson, a South African naturalist. The author of Supernature and Whales of the World, Watson had been appointed minister without portfolio by the government of the Seychelles. (In his diplomat role, he had persuaded the Iranian oil minister to threaten to stop exporting oil to Japan if it didn't accede to international whaling policies.) "It's hopeless," Coogan wrote in her journal. "I'm smitten by Lyall."
Watson returned the sentiment, but he, a noncitizen, could only stay in the United States a few months at a time.
Coogan left her Travel/Study berth in 1994 so she could spend time with Watson, although she intended to stay single. She bought a house in Charleston, S.C., spending part of the year there and part of it in South Africa or sailing the Caribbean on Watson's boat. She continued to lead trips and write brochures for Stanford.
In 2002, she was diagnosed with colon cancer. Surgery and a long, difficult recuperation followed. Watson changed her dressings and stroked her back and legs to comfort her. "It is such a loving thing to do, it makes me cry," she wrote. "I never realized how awesome love is."
She could not metabolize the chemotherapy that was prescribed and she stopped it. "I really don't know how long my life is written now," she wrote. "Every day has to count." She called overseas and said, "Dearest Watson, will you marry me?" He said yes. At lunch the next day when a friend asked what changed her mind, she replied, "I feel lovable for the first time."
In May 2003, she and Watson were in the doctor's office looking at PET scans. "We could see yellow lights like suburban street lights in an aerial photo—the small tumors all up and down my lymph system, the beacon of a tumor on the dome of my liver. They're not curable."
They took out a wedding license and were presented with "a sealed plastic bag labeled 'The Newlywed Kit,' which on closer observation was found to contain not condoms (my first guess) but a coupon for teeth whitener, some laundry products, bath gel, Pepto Bismol! and a travel-sized deodorant."
They took a final Stanford trip—to Alaska, because, she said, she had never seen a puffin. On their wedding day in 2003, Lyall Watson left her a note saying, "I'm a very lucky man." Alice Watson's journals ended four months later.
After reading the Class Book for her 35th reunion, she had written, "How come all these people have careers, are doctors with specialties, teach computer science, run a business, and I continue to float through life like a bit of dandelion fluff?"
The self-criticism seems wildly unjustified. She and Peter Voll had grown Travel/Study from a staff of two running seven trips a year into a staff of 16 running more than 60 trips. The program had become an industry leader that changed the way people traveled. The woman who feared "nothing interesting" would happen to her had had a very fine career indeed.
Peter Steinhart, '65, who lives in Palo Alto, is the author of The Undressed Art: Why We Draw and The Company of Wolves. After Lyall Watson's death in 2008, Steinhart received the journals of his friend Alice Coogan from her brother and arranged to donate more than 80 of them to Stanford Special Collections.
