When Tom Gaman was 11 years old, he was speared to death by an unhinged pack of tweens, faces covered with mud as they ran around a pyre in loincloths chanting, “Kill the beast!”
Tom, now a 74-year-old Inverness resident, was playing Simon, the pensive towheaded boy written into existence by English author William Golding for his debut and magnum opus, “Lord of the Flies.” When director Peter Brook asked him to star in the film, the novel was less than 10 years old and wasn’t yet on high school reading lists. Mr. Brook told him it was “sort of like ‘Swiss Family Robinson.’” Tom was sold.
Though Tom’s acting career never blossomed, he carried with him Simon’s introspective and naturalist leanings throughout his life. These days, he is mostly retired from a career in forestry that straddled California and New York, but he occasionally works on local reports, including one he wrote on Tomales Bay State Park. He spends his days maintaining Inverness’s trails and bridges and monitoring its watershed.
Tom moved to Inverness from Wingdale, N.Y. in the Hudson Valley in the summer of 1986. He had inherited a parcel of land and decided to build a home with his wife, Barbara, and their daughter, Emily. The family slept in a tent for a month before Emily began kindergarten at West Marin School and the family found a rental for the winter.
Tom and his two siblings grew up on a hobby farm in Princeton, N.J. Their English immigrant parents had left Britain after World War II. The austerity of war-torn England had turned his mother into a “real back-to-the-land type of character,” he said. They had rabbits, horses, a variety of dogs and cats, a bunch of sheep, a whole lot of chickens and a few ducks. There was also Alvin, the one-horned goat, and Joby the horse, whom Tom called Fred “for whatever reason.”
Tom’s father worked for a New Zealand marine insurance company in New York during the ’50s, a time when the maritime trade industry was pervaded by mafia groups. When he was transferred to San Francisco, the family moved to Mill Valley, where Tom got his first taste of western forests. On weekends, the Gamans drove out to Point Reyes.
“Back then, we’d pay the ranchers 50 cents, and they’d open the gates and we could go down and camp for the night at Drakes Beach,” Tom said.
Soon the family returned east, and Tom saw an ad in his local newspaper looking for British boys for a new movie. He decided to apply. As it turned out, Mr. Brook was a friend of Ernest Gordon, the dean of the Princeton University chapel, which the Gaman family attended. Mr. Gordon introduced Mr. Brook to Tom’s parents and, before he knew it, Tom was sitting at the top floor of a skyscraper in New York City. Mr. Brook looked at Tom and said, “Would you like to be in a movie?”
“It was simple as that,” Tom said laughing. “That was on Thursday and by Monday evening we were off. I mean they were desperate.”
The production crew set up camp at an abandoned pineapple cannery on Vieques, the first island east of Puerto Rico. The venue was fitted with 35 cots, 35 mosquito nets and 35 copies of the book. Tom and his cohort had never heard of “Lord of the Flies,” and even as they read it, he said they weren’t cognizant of the novel’s deeper meaning.
Journalist Robert Wallace visited the boys for a story in Life Magazine and observed one of the boys feeding a lizard into a metal fan. “One could almost hear William Golding, 4,000 miles away in England, chuckling into his beard,” Wallace later wrote.
Tom was originally chosen to play a lineless role, but his bright blond hair had stood out to the eccentric director. It would glisten on black and white film, creating a symbolic contrast to the book’s more sinister Jack and order-driven Ralph.
When they weren’t acting, Tom and his cohort spent the summer larking around the tropical island, swimming, playing chess and exploring the sugarcane plantations. It was like summer camp, Tom said, except they got paid $100 a week and were intermittently acting in what would become a timeless film. At the end of the summer, the crew filmed Simon’s martyrdom—one of the most surreal scenes.
“They gave very strict warnings to everybody that night: If anyone so much as touched me with a spear, they’d be sent home right away. Everybody was pretty well aligned,” Tom said.
Tom quickly disengaged from acting, save a high school performance of “Antony and Cleopatra.” But the appeal of nature never left him. While attending the University of Washington in St. Louis, he spent summers at a farming commune in the Ozarks, siloed off from civilization. The man who ran the arboretum was a forester, and Tom was enthralled by his ability to make a living studying the outdoors. When he applied to transfer to the University of California, Berkeley, in the spring of 1970, he filled in forestry as a major.
That summer, Tom attended the university’s 10-week forestry camp in the Plumas National Forest. He described it as a “highly convincing indoctrination program,” with each day a new ecological crash course. Students traveled by stake-bodied trucks, measuring tree stands and studying their characteristics, learning Latin names, working at lumber mills, surveying fisheries and learning about the latest environmental policies. Cal was on the cutting edge of environmental education with a staff that led the charge in silviculture, prescribed fire, G.I.S. and forestry legislation.
“Forestry isn’t really about individual trees, but the whole ecosystem,” he said. “All the land uses, people associated with the landscape and what changes are reversible and irreversible.”
After graduating, Tom thirsted for adventure. He answered an ad in the San Francisco Chronicle that read: “SEEKING 6-MAN CREW FOR 39 FT. SAILBOAT—THE BLUE ORPHEUS.”
Using celestial navigation, Tom and the crew made it to New Zealand, stopping in uninhabited places like Palmyra Atoll, an abandoned World War II military settlement. Tom recalls climbing the boat’s mast to shout down guidance to the crew as they made their way through the sharp reef. From engine failures to fires and the occasional mirage, the odyssey of the Blue Orpheus was chronicled on the front page of the travel section of the Los Angeles Times.
Eventually, Tom took the forestry licensing exam so he could work on federal and state projects. “It turned out the questions were all written by the same professors I had at Cal five years earlier, so I passed pretty easily,” he said.
In 1978, he bid on a project in the Klamath National Forest. Living in a truck with his coworker, he spent nearly a month on the project while it poured rain every day.
After several projects in California, Tom decided it was time to move back to the East Coast. While earning his master’s at Yale’s forestry program, he was immersed in East Coast forestry. After several years working on reports in Blawenburg, N.Y., he moved to Inverness, where he bid on federal reports for California national parks. Tom and his tiny team camped through the state’s coveted and diverse parks. “We felt like we knew every dirt road in the state,” he said.
But budgets for the projects were slim, and after completing around 25 of them, Tom vowed to end that chapter of his life in 1994. As it turned out, the United States Forest Service needed Tom and recruited him to work as a consultant for the bidding process for all federal projects in California. He did this for two decades until he retired in 2015.
A couple years later, the state parks department asked Tom to survey Tomales Bay State Park and its ailing bishop pines. At the age of 67, he put in 50 survey plots, bushwhacking through, hoisting himself over and crawling under the forest’s dense brush and aging stands.
When he takes an inventory, Tom stakes out a sample unit, such as a quarter-acre patch of decent-sized trees, and studies their health. This allows him to make an assessment of the forest as a whole.
Earlier this year, Tom worked with the Bolinas Eucalyptus Project to survey every single tree in a problematic eucalyptus stand—a total of 413. “Usually you don’t do it that way,” Tom chuckled. “They wanted to take out all of those trees, so it’s important to know what they’ve got.”
Tom has served on the Inverness Foundation and Association for the last six years, working as the trail and bridges manager, a role that he stepped down from in July. William Barrett, president of the association, said he doesn’t know a single person in Inverness who knows the trails better than Tom.
In “Lord of the Flies,” Simon represented the tension between a morally spiraling group of boys and the truths of the natural world. He stood with nature and reason rather than myth and impulse. As our climate changes, our forests burn and our natural world inches closer to cataclysmic disaster, Simon’s famous line rings true: “‘Maybe there is a beast… Maybe it’s only us.’”