With Seattle’s ACME Inflatable Art Gallery(TM) set to host a retrospective of botanical drawings by Wile E Coyote, Mel Stanford examines the troubled life behind the infamous public persona.
From 1949 to the mid-1990s, Wile E Coyote was the sole protagonist in an unpopular and apparently doomed campaign to rid the New Mexican Highway – a critical trade link between North and South America – of reckless and smug birdlife.
Though originally backed with grants from the federal government, Coyote’s high-profile lack of success led to a withdrawal of funding in 1955. From this point, the considerable expense of acquiring anvils, TNT, high speed tonic, invisible paint, various jet-propelled vehicles (pogo sticks, roller-skates and unicycles), wigs, artificial rocks, birdseed and dehydrated boulders was met entirely from his own pocket (and support from his life-long benefactor, the ACME corporation).
Having struggled for 40 years with chronic manic depression, Coyote’s few close friends insist his obsessive devotion to work was the only way he felt able to keep his personal demons in check. In a 2002 interview with Rolling Stone, long-time confidant Marvin ‘the Martian’ Rubens, confirmed: “At times, it was like he was running on thin air, only held up by his belief in the chase. If he slowed down, or took his eye off the ball – even for a second – he’d be in freefall.”
The turning point came in 1995, when Coyote’s long-suffering wife finally admitted a 20-year affair with celebrated outdoorsman Elmer Fudd (which, despite both being in the public eye, they had managed to keep vewy, vewy quiet) and left him with what little remained of their shared wealth.
Cut loose from the one stable influence in a life of cruel near-misses and frustrated ambition, Coyote fell into a spiral of drug abuse and increasingly bizarre pest-control techniques, which culminated in his tragic death aboard an invisible atomic steel carrot.
Initially a source of great amusement among those who had always scorned his quixotic struggle, Coyote’s death has, in time, led to a more sober reappraisal of his life and work. As well as the botanical drawings, his scholarly work on the structural safety of rocky overhangs has found new relevance in the battle against coastal erosion.
Perhaps most ironically, Coyote’s passing may also have secured the victory he so desperately sought in life. Having grown accustomed to the enormous piles of grain he habitually used as bait – in addition to tit-bits discarded by tourists attracted by his escapades – the roadrunner population lost the ability to gather its own food and is now listed as an endangered species.
Stop and Smell The Flowers opens at the ACME Inflatable Art Gallery(TM), Seattle, on Monday 16 June
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