The Life and Times of T.H. Chalm, by Roland Wiederaenders

The Life and Times of T.H. Chalm, by Roland Wiederaenders

Many people ask me about T. H. Chalm, namely, who this person was and how I came to know him? His life intersected with mine geographically at a very well-known and frequently-visited spring-fed pool located here in Austin, of course, where I have resided practically all of my 47 years.

There are many different types of people that you meet at Barton Springs, but one type certainly are those wounded souls who have been naturally-drawn to the healing powers of its magical waters. Chalm, as I, was one of those. In 2012 during my divorce, I tortured myself with 2-mile swims in the icy waters of the springs, literally swimming through all of the pain generated by that separation. Chalm was a salamander biologist pursuing his obscure and highly dubious theory that, millions of years ago, the Barton Springs blind salamander lived (geographically amidst Gondwanaland/Pangea) in a symbiotic relationship with the endangered deaf fire salamanders now found only in remote subterranean caves of Languedoc-Roussillon, France: the blind warned the deaf of predators that only could be heard, and the deaf warned the blind of those that only could be seen.

I never understood the pain that Chalm possessed, but the enormity of it drove his poetry to exquisite heights. Those precipices are now the goal of QuetzalHiloco Publishing, and over the next years, we commit to bring you more and more of the previously-unpublished poetry that Chalm left to me (at his death in 2015) in trust for posthumous publication.

How I felt about him, and the deeply-significant role that this man played in my life can only be truly and fully expressed in poetry.