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By Andrew Gottlieb, January 21, 2012 9:31 pm

Oak: One Tree, Three Years, Fifty Paintings

By Stephen Taylor

Princeton Architectural Press, 2012

Reviewed by Andrew C. Gottlieb

There’s something comforting about the ability of an artist to focus solely on one object, and then to work to render that object over time in as many ways as necessary, perhaps until the need to render that object dissolves, whether that brings to the artist relief or depression. In Stephen Taylor’s new book, Oak: One Tree, Three Years, Fifty Paintings, an art book of 112 pages, plates and text, we have the privilege of peering into the world of a British artist who’s done just that.

Oak is a look at Stephen Taylor’s life over the course of about three years as he painted—in varying weathers, distances, lights, times of day—one oak tree. Thus, this book isn’t about trees, per se, nor paintings of trees, nor is it about oaks, in general. It is about Stephen Taylor’s methods—and the ways in which he studies color and uses technology are informative and interesting—it is about his painting, and it is also about his life history: all of this is the story of Stephen Taylor and his work. And it’s about one tree. But even more fascinating is that the book is really about Taylor’s ability to paint that one tree, over and over. And again.

Perhaps the most attractive quality of this book is simply that: insight into the meditative nature of Taylor’s work as an artist. Meditation, in the many traditions of Buddhism for which it plays a part, often recommends—to quiet the mind—closing one’s eyes and focusing on one imagined object. That object might be a candle flame, a spot of color, anything, really, that the practitioner chooses. Once past the freedom to choose an object, one quickly learns it’s remarkably difficult to prevent the mind from straying.

Outside a practice of meditation, one need not be reminded how difficult it is in today’s society to focus on anything, let alone the artistic recreation of one physical object. Writers and artists throw up their hands trying to find time to make art amid the needs of a job, a family, a life. Technology distracts; prescriptions—Ritalin—abound.

Focus like this is a rarity. Even for poets like Denise Levertov, who had an object like Mount Rainier as a talisman, the poems aren’t all about Rainier. How did Stephen Taylor get to a place where he could hike out into the same field for three years to look at and paint one oak tree? There are philosophies of art and objects that aren’t concerned with the backstory. Objects for object’s sake, authorial irrelevance. It’s possible to view, judge, and value these paintings of an oak tree by themselves, in a vacuum. If we do this, we lose the richness of Taylor’s life and work, the lesson of this artist. His story makes him human, and in the 20-page introduction, Taylor provides, succinctly though descriptively, a short history of his life up to The Tree. The critical point: in his late thirties, both his mother and a women he loved died of a brain tumor, the same disease. Shortly after, his father had a stroke and died.

There is grief here, but not sentimentality. Taylor tells us, “I found myself sitting in my childhood home, not quite knowing where I was.” This is about as emotional as Taylor gets. He keeps us linked to the art. “I grew up surrounded by oak trees,” he begins. He takes us through his university studies, early portraits, still lives. Then, following the tragic deaths he’d experienced, an invitation from friends to come and live on a farm in North Essex. Taylor spends the next seven years on this farm.

The plates are gorgeous and the text informative. Some of the work is impressionistic and some realistic, almost like a photograph. I read Oak in one sitting of several hours and spent some of the time showing various plates to my wife—who thought some photographs. The plates alone are vivid, often visibly textured, and enjoyable. The variation in lights and weathers provides a spectacular range of work about this one tree. I found myself flipping pages to compare. One of Taylor’s first realizations was that differences forced him to consider similarities: “I had not expected to see that, when placed next to each other, each oak study would look so distinct that they appeared to be different trees. They made me think about the ways in which there were the same tree.” (Italics his.)

There is science here. Taylor explains crop rotations in the field, soil nutrients, how oak trees replace limbs and prioritize leaf growth. He talks about the technology of his work, how he uses software to deconstruct elements of a photo to understand color variation, how he sees yellows across a plane, greens in a night sky, reds in a dusky blue sky. And he talks about his goals and aims, the more ineffable but crucial parts of any the artist’s drive. “I wanted to make an oak tree that felt both observed and imagined: an emblem embedded in vision.”

The book concludes with a 10-page instructional section. Putting this at the end of the book is a great choice, preventing the book from feeling didactic, and yet offering details on the process to educate the reader, making this more than a pretty coffee table book. Taylor, who teaches, explains about the use of a pochade box and how he approached learning how to paint swallows.

There is one thing I want to improve about this book and that’s its size. I want it larger. Almost a perfect square, about 11 inches to a side, Oak has content to justify a book twice its size. A glossy wrap, large plates. It feels too small now for its content. I want this to be a giant, a book that guests can slowly flip through, admiring the work, taking in the text.

The overarching fascination of the book and work is Taylor’s ability to paint one tree for three years. It’s similar to the focus of the late Roman Opalka’s mission to paint all the numbers, one by one, white on white, from 1 to infinity. One can only call this kind of focus admirable, refreshing, relieving, and for an artist, desirable, when considering the speed and chaos of the world’s information.

Taylor’s in-flight crows and swallows appear alive. One learns to see the red in Taylor’s blue skies. One becomes familiar with one North Essex oak tree, and one asks oneself, Could I focus this much, on one thing? Taylor shows us that in art, as in life, mantra as material can be exceptionally rewarding.

~~~

Andrew C. Gottlieb is the Reviews Editor for Terrain.org. His work can be found online, in many print journals, and in his poetry chapbook, Halflives, (New Michigan Press.) Find him at www.andrewcgottlieb.com.

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By Andrew Gottlieb, January 1, 2012 11:21 am

The Way of the Woods: Journeys Through American Forests

By Linda Underhill

Oregon State University Press, 2009

Reviewed by Derek Sheffield

In The Way of the Woods, Linda Underhill is an engaging, widely informed guide who leads us through various American forests from Tennessee’s Great Smoky Mountains to Washington State’s Olympic Peninsula. As we follow her through old-growth hemlock and sequoia, she enlarges our journey by drawing on poetry (Dickinson, Keats, Neruda, Basho, cummings), philosophy and religion (Buddha, Odin, Chief Seattle, Thich Nhat Hanh, Plato, Christianity, Lao Tzu, Druid), history (Native Americans, colonists, explorers), and science and natural history (Thoreau, Leopold, Carson, Muir).

All this lore becomes part of Underhill’s invitation to get your legs out from under the desk and into the woods. In a style that is accessible and, at times, lyrical, the spiritual walks hand in hand with the pragmatic. In “Ode to Autumn,” for example, she waxes poetic about the colors and scents of leaves, but also takes a realistic look at the problem of deer over-browsing our forests where hunting is part of the solution. Just as we learn that trees were sacred to Odin, we become acquainted with some wonderful ecological terms such as subnivian space and scuzz.

As we follow Underhill from forest to forest, meeting some lively, modern-day druids along the way, we hear the stories of some of our nation’s iconic trees. They are stories of sweetness, and they are stories of struggle. In one essay, we are persuaded that, like wine grapes, the sugar maples and their delicious sap possess their own terroir, and then, in the next, we learn of the decimation of old-growth eastern hemlock due to its susceptibility to the invasive woolly adelgid (Adelges tsugae). Other stories include the western red cedar, Sitka spruce, and sequoia.

One question that Underhill poses is, Do we need a new story? After all, the Quinault and Sumerians had stories and beliefs that underscored the sacred importance of their respective cedar trees. If we had such a mythology, would we act to preserve rather than destroy? Maybe science will give us this story.

One question I have is, Where is Big Pharma on the eco-front? Underhill tells us that these companies have recently “gone to the forests of Madagascar to study the rosy periwinkle, a tropical shrub that produces two substances found to be effective in treating Hodgkin’s disease and childhood leukemia.” Shouldn’t Pfizer and other pharmaceutical corporations be the superfund for preservation efforts? Wouldn’t that make their industry sustainable? Their profit, like people and just about everything else, depends on the diversity of flora in our forests.

Maybe what I appreciate most in this marvelous collection is Underhill’s ability to write about the spiritual without sounding sappy (sorry, couldn’t help it) or too detached. This collection is an ode to being in the woods. When she’s in the woods, she says she’s “connected to the joy of being alive” and she feels as if she’s “inside the mind of the universe.” I know exactly what she means. It’s “like being in love.” Truly trees are our first and last cathedrals. Underhill has been inside some of the anthropogenic ones—Notre Dame, St. Peter’s Basilica, and St. Paul’s—but she says that “none of them compares with the beauty and majesty of a forest, where the trees are alive and reaching for the sky, where the light is always changing, where wind, rain, fire, and ice are all celebrants in the daily liturgy of life on planet Earth.”

Amen to that.

~~~

Derek Sheffield’s A Revised Account of the West (2008) won the Hazel Lipa Environmental Chapbook Award. His poems have appeared in Orion, Wilderness, Poetry, Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review, and The Georgia Review. He lives on the east slope of the Cascade Mountains in Washington and teaches writing and literature at Wenatchee Valley College, including Northwest Nature Writing, a team-taught learning community that blends biology and writing.

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By Andrew Gottlieb, December 18, 2011 11:30 pm

The Way of Natural History

Edited by Thomas Lowe Fleischner

Trinity University Press, 2011

Reviewed by Andrew C. Gottlieb

Thomas Lowe Fleischner has delivered a gem of a little book in this collection of 21 essays and one poem. It’s a slim, well-designed book, even a pleasure to look at, and the cover photo — a pond, a pathway of large, worn stones, leading from the bottom of the photo to the top, the stones partially submerged in the algae-covered water and leading to land — much in the way of a peaceful Zen garden, suggests the focus of much of the content: mindful walking, contemplation of the wild and its inhabitants, the long generous path that nature and natural history offers when one’s eyes and mind are open.

I once asked a poet friend, a woman who’s a naturalist by day-job, how she got to be that way. In the sense of, I’d like to be a naturalist, too, and she simply said, with only the slightest wry humor, I think you just go outside and look at stuff.

So how did Natural History come to seem so complicated? Or dry and boring, the idea of dusty log books, text books, scientists sitting in the woods or in boring laboratories staring at plant cells through microscopes? Maybe it’s the word History. We don’t call it Natural Science but Natural History. In the engineering wing, we say Computer Science, but in the field, staring at a grasshopper or a hummingbird or a weasel, we call it Natural History.

Strange. The title Naturalist seems much more alive, and that’s what this book is filled with: essays by authors with varying backgrounds—ecologists, professors, poets, activists, biologists, conservationists, even a musician—all of whom are naturalists in the true sense of the word. And that’s what their writing addresses: what is natural history? What does it mean to be a Naturalist? And why is this more crucial now than ever before?

What makes this book a pleasure to read is that it’s not simply a collection of pieces telling stories about experiences in the woods. The coyote I saw. The forest I visited. These writers take it a step further, linking the natural world to important elements of humanity, to what we gain or lose — patience, peacefulness, connection, relatedness — via the process. I looked forward to reading Jane Hirshfield’s essay: but her’s is the poem that opens the collection. “The Supple Deer” sets the stage. Jane watches a deer leap between the pales of a tall fence. Her jealously is the focal point of the poem—not of the deer, but of the fence. “To be that porous, to have such largeness pass through me.”

This is the experience of the world the naturalist is lucky to get. To be surrounded by the natural world, to feel submersed in a pool of awe, to feel joy, to gain understanding of something larger than us. Fleischner’s own introductory essay links Natural History to Buddhism and meditation, setting the stage for the revelation that meditation and the practice of a naturalist are kin. “Natural history is a practice of intentional, focused attentiveness and receptivity to the more-than-human world, guided by honesty and accuracy,” he tells us. “Our attention is precious, and what we choose to focus it on has enormous consequences.” What Fleischner’s getting at is that natural history is not just valuable but crucial. The more our society becomes urban-dense, over-populated, economically-strained and technology-focused, the less we can see the wild around us. Fleischner’s book is about the third or fourth book I’ve read in the last six months or so discussing students and their disassociation with nature. Fleischner cites Richard Louv’s term “nature deficit disorder” and recalls Thich Nhat Hanh’s point that we “become the bad television programs that we watch.” We are what we watch.

These writers watch the wild. John Tallmedge’s piece of memoir takes a historical look at how he became a naturalist, someone his daughter claims is “crazy about nature.” He cites Darwin, Muir, Thoreau, Robinson Jeffers. It’s a good essay early in the collection putting natural history in context of its development, its forefathers. Robert McFarlane takes a fascinating overnight hike into the frigid winter cold in England’s Cumbrian mountains. At the end of the cold, solitary trip, we see that the “…sun was now full in the eastern sky, and in the west was the ghost of the moon, so that they lay opposed to each other above the white mountains: the sun burning orange, the moon its cold copy.” McFarlane too reminds us that “we have begun a turning away from a felt relationship with the natural world.”

Yet natural history doesn’t have to happen in the woods but can be found in one’s backyard. Charles Goodrich takes us to his garden to see aphids, mantises, ladybugs. Goodrich echoes other writers in showing that natural history can teach us the relatedness of all beings, understanding our link to the ecology of our world. Laura Sewall deepens this, in her essay showing how and what we watch determines our understanding of the world and the way we live. “Unless we commonly perceive the interdependent reality within which we are all embedded, we will never get ourselves out of the ecological mess we are in,” she says. Our attention leads to pattern recognition in the world, the realization of interdependence.

What these writers are pointing to are the patterns and relatedness underlying all things; for example, a predator-prey relationship: if we remove all the wolves, the deer over-populate and eat and make extinct certain kinds of flora. Kathleen Dean Moore makes us aware of bears in Alaska, her ability to live safely but warily among them. Cristina Eisenberg takes us close to wolves and her study of their effect on their territory in Glacier National Park.

Three of these essays derive from the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest, and the Long Term Ecological Research project happening there co-led by the previously-mentioned writers, Charles Goodrich and Kathleen Dean Moore. A project bringing writers to the woods to log their observations, the scope is 200 years, and observation is the key element. Alison Hawthorne Deming and Scott Russell Sanders show us northern spotted owls, rotting logs, shelf fungi, Douglas firs, all while they contemplate the place and consequences of humans in the world.

As with any collection, there are stronger and weaker pieces. Paul Dayton’s essay feels more unfocused, and is lazy with the words ‘as’ and ‘eventually,’ overused here as attempted indicators of time or simultaneity. This is a weakness of grammatical structure and variety, though, not one of his understanding of the worlds of ecology or natural history. Richard Thompson’s piece feels randomly added-in, the simplest in terms of message or contribution.  

There is both a real intelligence and peacefulness to this collection. It brings together concrete visions and stories from the natural world by a variety of ecological leaders, while examining the reasoning behind the critical nature of the process of what we call Natural History. It will make a reader want to get up and go for a hike or simply sit and look at some aspect of the natural world. For those who continue reading, delaying their hike, the essays will explain and deepen an understanding of why the process of natural history not only feels so good, but is important to our lives as humans in the world. As R. Edward Grumbine writes, “Natural history is a supreme antidote to abstraction; what we choose to pay attention to makes all the difference in the world.”

~~~

Andrew C. Gottlieb is the Reviews Editor for Terrain.org. His work can be found online, in many print journals, and in his poetry chapbook, Halflives, (New Michigan Press.) Find him at www.andrewcgottlieb.com.

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By Andrew Gottlieb, December 8, 2011 10:09 pm

Learning the Valley: Excursions into the Shenandoah Valley
By John Leland

University of South Carolina Press, 2010

Reviewed by Rachel Furey

In the preface to John Leland’s collection of essays Learning the Valley, the author states the book is “intended primarily” for his thirteen-year-old son, Edward, a dedication to the adventures the two have shared together exploring the natural wonders in Rockbridge County, Virginia, and a means through which, in coming years, his son can discover Leland’s own memories and insights to their escapades. Leland also hopes that other readers benefit from the collection, particularly that they “learn the land they live in” and come to recognize the nature that exists in their very own yards.

Given the preface, readers may expect several father and son moments to appear throughout these twenty-five short essays. However, Edward makes only rare appearances in the text and often for not more than a few lines at a time. But while those readers expecting a memoir recounting family moments may be disappointed, nearly every reader is likely to find at least one essay of interest. Leland’s book covers a wide range of topics, including natural wonders such as rock castles, man-made reminders of earlier times like rock walls, and frustrating outdoor pests, including mosquitoes. In “Flying Frass”—frass means insect poop—he urges readers to connect with the natural world in a unique manner. He suggests they try “aphid poop,” writing, “Pop it in your mouth and lick—you’re eating star spit, the sweat of gods.” Readers wouldn’t be the only ones to eat these secretions; ants feast on it as well.

None of the essays are longer than six pages, making the book a manageable read. Each essay is a tightly packed section of prose offering readers the lyrics of a memoir combined with the facts and insights of a nature or travel guide, as well as a hint of history that weighs more heavily in some essays than others. In “Poison Ivy,” readers learn how scientists have tested the plant on lab animals, that Thomas Jefferson grew poison ivy in his garden, and why some patients consumed poison ivy, making for a story that will shed new light on a plant familiar to the majority of readers.

Leland proves a patient writer, taking the same care with each sentence as he does with his son when cutting a Christmas tree: the end result has to be just right. Combining a careful eye for detail and an ear for sound, he’s able to construct vivid lines such as the one he uses to describe cedar apple rust fungus in “Cedars”: the fungus “looks like a purplish brown misshapen golf ball glued to a branch for the two years it takes to mature.”  Leland also shows adeptness for incorporating metaphor. In “Forest Communities,” he writes, “ten thousand generations of foraging squirrels, burying and forgetting their harvest, can move, if not mountains, then trees up mountains, and it is they who are thought to have wrought this slow miracle of reclothing the Appalachian Mountains.”

Although beautiful and lyrical sentences frequent the book, Leland doesn’t entirely shy away from humor. In “Sassafras,” he writes about sassafras tea and states, “What I teach my son might just poison him in ways undreamt of by the FDA.” Moments of humor include Leland’s son, such as in “Vegetable Armature”: “When he was younger, Edward and I picked the thorns off the younger locusts and licked and applied them to our foreheads, becoming rhinoceri.” And in “Flying Frass,” he writes, “while most caterpillars are content to let their loads drop where they will, one heaves its frass into the air…They call it scatapulting.” Leland captures the beauty of the valley. He also doesn’t hesitate to capture the less-than-beautiful attributes of some of the creatures that inhabit that valley.

As evidenced by his lengthy notes section, Leland’s research is thorough, serving as a sort of ballast around which to weave his sentences. Essays such as “The Natural Bridge,” in which quotes frequently appear, including the last line of the essay, may rely too heavily on research at the sacrifice of Leland’s lyrical voice; and sometimes, as a result of the amount of material packed into an essay, the ending feels strained as he tries to tie too much together at once. What often keeps the book from turning into a science lesson laced with history are Leland’s brief, and yet strategically placed, references to his son, as well as his willingness to humbly incorporate some very human moments of his own. In “Massanutten,” he mentions that he plays war games with his son, then adds, “I keep them from my cadets and colleagues, who think such daydreams inappropriate for English teachers.” In “Caves,” Leland shows a similar self-awareness combined with enthusiasm when he writes, “Every now and then I have to crawl through passages narrow enough to fool me into thinking I’m trapped, but which release me with a scrape and a twist.” His enthusiasm for the material shines particularly bright in moments such as these, moments in which the author admits to scraping through mud in order to investigate a cave, moments many readers may like to see more of.  

Ultimately, Leland’s title does begin with Learning, a clue to the layering of history and facts that he works into each of his essays, and while his own experiences with the valley are sometimes overshadowed by the rich history incorporated into the essays, he does allow readers to experience vivid moments with him, such as when he finds himself among migrating Monarchs, writing, “Looking left and right, I count one, two…and on and on and on, until I tire of being cerebral and run with the wind and the waves of butterflies and flap my arms and would fly south with them.” While readers may not so eagerly fly with each of Leland’s essays, given the wide range of topics and slight shifts in tone, most readers are bound to find at least a few essays in the collection that make them feel something like being surrounded by migrating monarchs and wanting to take flight, riding the lyrics of the prose to essay’s end.

~~~

Rachel Furey is currently a Ph.D. student at Texas Tech. She is a winner of Sycamore Review’s Wabash Prize for Fiction and Crab Orchard Review’s Charles Johnson Student Fiction Award. Her work has also appeared in Women’s Basketball Magazine, Fifth Wednesday Journal, Waccamaw Journal, Hunger Mountain, The Prose Poem Project, Sweet, and elsewhere.

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By Andrew Gottlieb, November 8, 2011 8:57 pm

Memory Wall
by Anthony Doerr

Scribner, 2010

Reviewed by Joshua Foster

I first heard Anthony Doerr, then Idaho’s Writer-In-Residence, lecturing to a group of undergraduates on the art of writing. Doerr explained that a personal goal in his own craft was to, “Make the stone stony.” Though he attributed the concept to another writer, Doerr has embraced the philosophy as his own and exemplifies it in his most recent short story collection Memory Wall.

Even the vocabulary of the idea—make a stone stony—exudes an antiquated simplicity that stands against a literary landscape where wittiness, disillusionment, and abstraction seem to reign supreme. I’ve always appreciated what painters Mark Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb embraced in their own artistic manifesto: “We favor the simple expression of complex thought. We are for the large shape because it has the impact of the unequivocal. We wish to reassert the picture plane. We are for flat forms because they destroy illusion and reveal truth.”

The word flat carries negative connation in writer-speak. A flat character, a flat scene, a flat landscape. But to appreciate Doerr’s stony stories—just as to marvel at Rothko’s flat squares—allows a deeper understanding for the varied terrain of our complicated world.

In the 267 pages and 7 stories in Memory Wall, Doerr transports the reader to a future South Africa where memories are catalogued on cartridges; to barren Laramie, Wyoming where a couple struggles to conceive; to cold Idaho as a man tries to navigate his divorce, his elderly father, and his son’s dishonorable discharge from the Vietnamese Demilitarized Zone; to China’s Village 113, scheduled for submergence; to Lithuania, where a fifteen year old girl from Kansas is placed with her grandfather and together they fish the River Nemunas for an allusive lunker; to a dreamy account of an elderly woman at the end of her life, memories drifting to her German orphanage at the onset of World War II to her current mortality in Ohio; to the story of a boy and girl in a marsh in Detroit.

Doerr’s simplistic, striking style makes these diverse landscapes grow stony and tangible. Doerr is a master of the short story—his accolades and awards include the O. Henry Prize, a National Magazine Award, a Pushcart Prize, and inclusion in the Best American Short Story series—and one of his unique abilities is to aggrandize the form to novelistic proportions. Three of the stories (“Memory Wall,” “Village 113,” and “Afterworld”) could easily stretch into two hundred pages. And his shorter, condensed stories carry just as much heft and scope.

In the spirit of Terrain.org’s currently themed issue “Image,” allow me to excerpt a few of my favorites.

An image through dialogue from “Memory Wall” (here Alma, homeowner and employer, slowly losing her memories, speaks to Pheko, her housekeeper and employee):

“There were times when I was happy and times when I was not,” continues Alma. “Like anyone. To say a person is a happy person or an unhappy person is ridiculous. We are a thousand different kinds of people every hour.”

Concrete, clear images viewed by Imogene in “Procreate, Generate”:

Imogene beings to notice pregnant women everywhere. They clamber out of minivans at the Loaf ’N Jug; they hunker in Walmart aisles holding infant-sized pajamas to the light. A pregnant repairwoman services the office copier; a pregnant client spills orange juice in the conference room.

A startling, imagistic scene from “The Deep” (here, fourteen-year-old Tom—given four years max to live because of his heart condition—is led by Ruby, his classmate, on an unknown quest to a marsh):

Ruby pitches the far end of the hose into the water. With waxen cord she binds the other end to the pump. Then she fills her pockets with rocks. She wades out, looks back, says, You pump, and puts the hose into her mouth. The swim mask goes over her eyes; her face goes into the water.

 The marsh closes over Ruby’s back, and the hose trends away from the marsh. Tom begins to pump. The sky slides along overhead. Loops of garden hose float under the light out there, shifting now and then. Occasional bubbles rise, moving gradually farther out.     

One minute, two minutes. Tom pumps. His heart does its fragile work. He should not be here. He should not be here while this skinny, spellbinding girl drowns herself in the marsh. If that’s what she’s doing. One of Mr. Weem’s similes comes to him: You’re trembling like a needle to the pole.

To cite Thomas Carlyle: “Simplicity has been held a mark of truth; it is also a mark of genius.” Doerr’s prose envelops truth, genius, and simplicity. His straightforward storytelling and deeply complex characters offer the reader striking images and heartfelt insights into our own simple and complex world.

~~~

Joshua Foster is the nonfiction editor for Terrain.org. His work—both short stories and personal essays—often deals with rural culture and habitat and has been nominated for The Pushcart Prize, Best of the Web Anthology, and published in other journals, anthologies, and magazines. He earned MFA degrees in Fiction and Nonfiction Writing from the University of Arizona and is currently a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Fiction Writing at Stanford University.

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By Andrew Gottlieb, November 3, 2011 8:26 pm

Cabin Fever: a Suburban Father’s Search for the Wild

By Tom Montgomery Fate

Beacon Press, 2011

Reviewed by Andrew C. Gottlieb

I grew up a few miles from Walden Pond, the site of Thoreau’s famous cabin, his experiment in deliberate living. It’s a favorite location. I swam in the pond growing up, I got poison ivy from its woods, I skipped school with friends to lounge on its beaches, and later, older, I hiked around it often, alone, visiting the cabin site, pondering Thoreau’s time there, wishing myself to a solitary place with my own cabin in the woods.

Tom Montgomery Fate has written a memoir about his own life and his attempts to populate just that sort of cabin, and this memoir is a direct descendent of Thoreau’s own Walden, a book that Thoreau himself would appreciate, I’m sure. I grew fond fast of this book, and it’s hard not to. Fate is a man who brings coyotes and cougars to the page in a thoughtful, beautiful prose that’s readable, lyrical, and begs the reader to slow down and take their time. The book is a wide, deep river, best observed with a cup of coffee as the sun’s coming up over the ridge and the night’s crickets have given way to the scratching and calls of the morning’s towhees.

“I have a large bowl of lake glass on my desk. When my writing goes poorly, I pick up a piece—touch a story of loss, of transformation—and imagine the cold, deep re-remembering of the lake, the constant journey of glass back to sand.” This, from an essay about time’s passage, the transformation from child to parent, and the randomness of lake glass.

Sawyer, Michigan is home to 50 acres of land that Fate shares with friends, a community of owners. It’s on this land that he spent two years building a small cabin. But Fate lives two hours away in Chicago with his wife and three children, and his life is busy with all the usual demands. Teaching, grading, family-living, bill-paying, writing: how does one balance this with a deliberate life in the woods, let alone any sense of solitude?

However, this memoir is more than a man alone in a cabin dreaming of blackberries. This is a series of essays that explore life and death, family and solitude, growing, learning, and living. And doing so while recognizing our need to survive at the collisions of environments as Fate calls them. For we misconstrue the world when we try to imagine ourselves pursuing Thoreau’s experiment: going to one place and existing in solitude. Fate’s premise: “…we always live in between—forever teetering on the rusted fulcrum of our wondrous but uncertain lives.”

We see Fate walking the woods around the cabin, ducking brush, hiking to the river, watching herons nest, ants carrying a fly back to their underground home. We see him write by candlelight, lose cell phone reception, drift off to sleep in a sleeping bag, watch the rain fall outside the cabin.

But we also see Fate stuck at home. Chapter three begins in Chicago after a weekend trip to the cabin has been canceled. Fate’s wife is working and his son Bennett has a fever. There’s a broken faucet, and Fate turns this all into an essay about his revelation of himself as a father now appreciating his time with his son. “Maybe it’s because I’m now almost exactly between my son and my father—forty years older than Bennett and forty years younger than my dad—that these small moments seem sacred.”

Fate is an activist, a man who looks at the land around him and is dismayed by what he sees. And he’s aware of the facts behind the problems. “The reason for corn feeding is economic: corn-fed cattle reach slaughter weight in a little over a year, while grass-fed cattle require four to five years.” But these essays don’t focus on the factual minutiae. Fate wants us to know the rivers are polluted, and that antibiotic use in corn-fed cattle is a problem, but his way of relating his concerns turns always inward, and facts becomes links in meditations and revelations for the author, for the specifics of his world. These are not pedantic, but expansive, pieces, essays that bloom. How do his children read the world? How does his wife survive her illness? How does the author cope with a friend’s death? How do we exist and find contentment in moments of adult life that span joy and sorrow?

There’s humor here, too. “Trimming Trees,” an essay about an almost-disastrous do-it-yourself episode that involves an underpowered chainsaw, large trees, a power-line, and an eager amateur handyman, is funny—laugh-out-loud funny in places—and anyone who’s taken on an outdoor project too great for their skill-set will appreciate the honesty and humor of the author, even as he comes close to electrocuting himself. Fate is a handyman. He’s built a cabin for goodness sake, but he’s a handyman who reveals to us his own learning in the lumberyard. It’s not Fate telling us that he’s a beginner or an expert, but both at once, in different ways. One can build a cabin and misjudge a job. The appeal of these essays: Fate is honest about his humanity, his successes, his failures.

Thoreau’s writing arcs these essays, both in epigraphs and as quoted insertions, and it feels an appropriate anchor. Fate as a modernized Thoreau. The same issues, but different times, different technologies, different facts. The scenery has changed, but the concerns of a human in the world have stayed very much the same. Discovering the deliberate, careful and hopefully contented life amid chaos, confusion, hypocrisy, and sadness.

Fate teaches us this, that “…sauntering is all there really is, and the best sentences we will ever read or write or live only lead us deeper into the woods, into a place where keys and credit cards don’t matter, a place where we once belonged, and still long to be.”

~~~

Andrew C. Gottlieb is the Reviews Editor for Terrain.org. His work can be found online, in many print journals, and in his poetry chapbook Halflives (New Michigan Press.) Find him at www.andrewcgottlieb.com

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By Andrew Gottlieb, October 29, 2011 5:54 pm

The Big Year: based on a book by Mark Obmascik

Directed by David Frankel. Fox 2000 Pictures.

Reviewed by Tom Leskiw

Ever since it was revealed that a movie was being made of Obmascik’s 2004 book, “The Big Year: A Tale of Man, Nature, and Fowl Obsession,” the birding community has eagerly—tempered by some trepidation—awaited the results. Full disclosure: as an avid birder since 1987, I count myself a member of this community. I don’t invoke the term “trepidation” lightly, for within this diverse group, there remain two constants: first, a shared mania for getting the science right, such as the distinction between a species’ songs and calls; second, and most importantly, the wish to avoid a replay of past movies and TV shows that have given inaccurate, cartoonish portrayals of individuals for whom “buffoonish” is one of the kinder descriptors.

For instance, in the 1962 movie “Mr. Hobbs Takes a Vacation,” Jimmy Stewart meets a “half-bubble-off-center” birdwatcher whose long days in the field yield several out-of-habitat birds plus a potpourri of inaccurate soundtrack calls and songs for birds that have no business being in a marsh. And don’t get me started on the annoying Miss Hathaway from “The Beverly Hillbillies” TV show, a caricature that likely remains encoded on viewers’ memory banks to this day.  

Thus, I am pleased to report that I found “The Big Year” an entertaining, enjoyable ride—one with sympathetic, 3-dimensional characters who sweep you up in their quest to see the most bird species within North America (excluding Mexico) during a calendar year.

Nearly every movie takes some literary license with its source material, and “The Big Year” is no exception. But here’s the kicker: many of the changes resulted in a more-compelling narrative, better focusing the challenges, risks, and adverse impacts to one’s family life experienced by obsessed individuals who embark on a marathon, year-long avian treasure hunt. Director Frankel had the foresight to employ Obmascik—a birder himself—as one the screenwriters, key to keeping the script true to the spirit of the book.

The movie centers around the exploits of three men engaged in a Big Year. As 1998 dawns, Sandy Komito holds the record for most number of bird species seen: 721 during 1987. Perhaps the most-notable departure from the book is that Komito, who is again doing a Big Year in 1998, has morphed into a completely different—and much younger—character named Kenny Bostick, played by Owen Wilson. Kenny is a 30-something whose current wife has been taking hormone injections in an effort to get pregnant. His character re-write ratchets up the competitive craziness that permeates a Big Year: would a real birder choose chasing his nemesis bird, a Snowy Owl, over inseminating his wife during her monthly fertile period? The answer is yes.

Bostick’s rivals are Stu Preissler (Steve Martin) and Brad Harris (Jack Black). These two characters are closer to their real-life counterparts, Al Levantin and Greg Miller. Although the movie somewhat glosses over this detail, Harris is the only one of the triad trying to juggle a full-time job during his North American globe-trotting. In the book, Black’s character’s father is also an avid birder, who shares his son’s ability to identify birds by hearing them. Whereas, in the movie, Black’s father, played by Brian Dennehy, can’t understand the buzz that Jack gets from birding. In one of the movie’s most- touching scenes, Black shares photos of the birds he’s seen with his father, who’s in the hospital recovering from a heart attack. As Black relays a bit of the biology of each species and the rigors of migration—such as the American Golden-Plover’s flight from its Arctic breeding grounds to South America—Dennehy’s face lights up and you see his transformation. We can now count him among the initiated—he understands his son’s obsession.

Again, a re-write has strengthened the narrative arc. Namely, if you are among the minority whose parents had a fascination for birds, congratulations. However, most of us, at one time or another, have struggled to communicate to a spouse or significant other, family or friends, why this communion with the winged ones is so important to us.

The script does an excellent job of translating the lure of birds and birding into a language that the uninitiated can understand. The urge to push beyond fatigue, to discover what lies beyond, and to greet life’s mysteries head-on are embodied in Wilson’s response to his wife about why he wants to do another Big Year: “Hey, Lance Armstrong, what’s the big deal? Or, hey, Columbus, what’s the big deal with that whole New World thing?”

Ultimately, the part of birds’ lives that we find most compelling is their stories: how they raise their young, how they find food during the long winter months. Black’s voice-over about the life history of Sooty Shearwaters is a masterful bit of movie-making. It illuminates for non-birders why seeing a bird is so much more than that. In the case of the shearwater—which breeds on offshore islands in the south Pacific and Atlantic Oceans and spends more than half the year flying over open ocean—to see one is to be enveloped in the passage of the seasons and the spectacle of long-distance, multi-hemisphere migration.  

The trailer for the movie didn’t bode well for the finished product. A migratory Swainson’s Hawk that spends the winter in Argentina…at a snowy Colorado ski resort? And, given the cumulative comedic talents of the three main characters, scenes from the trailer suggested that the hilarity volume would be “cranked up to 11” for the film’s 89 minutes. In reality, Martin, Wilson, and Black, along with a fine supporting cast, give nuanced, thoughtful performances. Which is not to say that comedic scenes are scarce. Martin’s “two wild and crazy guys” swagger from Saturday Night Live makes a brief appearance (although the homage is unlikely to be grasped by anyone under 50).

However, the trailer found its mark by stressing the buddy picture aspect, in order to market a film about competitive birding to a broader audience. Martin and Black team up to try to defeat the current champ, stressing the cooperative aspect of an assault on a Big Year record. A quibble: the holder of the Big Year record often was referred to as “the World’s Best Birder.” As the movie and book make clear, accruing a sizeable bird list is at least partly a function of having a large bank account and an open schedule. Although a Big Year quest is both grueling and entertaining, in reality, many of the world’s best birders work as scientists or as bird guides intent on finding avian riches for their clients.

The film also explores what life is like for spouses left behind. Martin’s wife, played by JoBeth Williams, is a font of support, encouraging him not to defer his dream for another year, instead exhorting him to “Carpe annum” (seize the year). Black’s character, recently divorced, is drawn to fellow birder Ellie, played by Rashida Jones, in a fine performance. Things grow complicated when he learns about her boyfriend, but, in matters of romance, just as in a Big Year quest, hope springs eternal.

The bittersweet nature of a year-long rollercoaster ride is well-portrayed, such as when Wilson’s character, now separated from his wife, eats Christmas dinner at a Chinese restaurant. Urging the employees to come keep him company in the otherwise-deserted eatery, he mentions that perhaps he’ll next head for China. “What do you know about Chinese birds?” he asks. Uncomprehending his focus, one of them stammers, “Peking Duck?”  

When the screenplay deviates from Obmascik’s excellent book, I sometimes was prompted to repeat the mantra “This is not a documentary…” In what appears to be Joshua Tree National Park, Black hears and then photographs a Western Tanager. Although I’m not sure what bird call it was, it certainly wasn’t a Western Tanager. One puzzling re-write is how one of the first records for North America of a Great Spotted Woodpecker on Attu, the western-most island in the Aleutian chain, morphed into a bird seen thousands of miles away on the Oregon coast. The bird is compensation for a dazed Wilson after he falls asleep at the wheel and crashes into a tree with his rental car. If a car wreck was all it took to find a near-first record for the continent of a particular species, no vehicle in the vast rental car fleet would be safe!   

Speaking of Attu, the movie’s portrayal of a birder husband and his non-birding wife honeymooning there amid the lack of privacy, leaky Quonset hut, and rats was hysterical. Perhaps there were honeymooners on the island during the time that the real characters were there in 1998, but it was not mentioned in the book. If not, writer/birder Pete Dunne may deserve “an assist” for his fine essay, “Made in Heaven” that covered the same situation.  

Concerns about the considerable carbon footprint of a full-on Big Year effort have spawned a series of similar projects. In summer 2007, Wendy and Malkolm Boothroyd and their teenage son Ken Madsen attempted a Big Year without the use of fossil fuels. They bicycled 13,000 miles, tallying 548 species and raised more than $25,000 for bird conservation. This year, I’ve assisted three friends in their efforts to surpass the Big Year record in our home county. The winner is projected to finish with nearly 340 species, a testament to the avian diversity of Humboldt County, California.   

Within the birding community, much anticipation of the film centered around seeing our comrades portrayed on the big screen, such as character Annie Auklet, who we know as Debi Shearwater.  But even if the players, places, and Big Year strategy are unknown to you, those making the film have succeeded in creating a lively, entertaining chronicle of a year in the life of three intrepid individuals.     

~~~

Tom Leskiw retired in 2009 following a 31-year career as a hydrologic/biologic technician for Six Rivers National Forest. His essays and book reviews have appeared in a variety of journals and are forthcoming in Riverwind, Silent Spring at 50, and Snowy Egret. His monthly column appears at www.RRAS.org and his website resides at www.TomLeskiw.com.

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By Andrew Gottlieb, August 27, 2011 10:54 pm

Three Hours to Burn a Body: Poems on Travel

By Suzanne Roberts
Cherry Grove Collections
Reviewed by Andrew C. Gottlieb

Suzanne Roberts’s third book of poems is a guidebook of sorts, a catalog of poems derived from the author’s past travel, but this is no simple litany of sights seen, no handbook to comfortable resort travel. These poems draw the reader in to situations of discomfort, or confrontation, situations that ask basic questions like, What does a traveler’s eye prioritize? What does travel mean? What do we see? What’s the difference between a tourist and a traveler? And what do we miss whether intentionally or inadvertantly when traveling?

This is a collection of narrative free verse and prose poems that juggle the social sphere with the solitude of a writer but on a global stage. A moment in Cusco, Peru, before a night of strolling alone in the dark: “No one knowing where I am— / the certain freedom that comes only / with loneliness.” The pleasure of being anonymous is familiar, but many of these poems would not exist without a social aspect that many travelers never see.

For there are other people here as well. Whether Roberts is drinking rum at a haircutting ceremony or meeting a grandmother in England, her eye directs us to the sharp social details of what many travelers avoid seeing. In Ecuador, an injured woman begs while NFL highlights play for tourists eating waffles. A girl missing a eye looks toward an oil field and the stack belching flames, black rain descending to the river. In India, a man pulls a rickshaw filled with a family of six, while another family gathers around a small fire in front of their tent.

Roberts’s details make the collection what it is. She uses a journalist’s care in paring her verse down to specific and vivid pictures that build a landscape. We see, in Varanasi, India, “Two cows climb the stairs, / lazy as the afternoon. The train arrives.” The juxtaposition of the mechanical and animal in this setting is what makes this work, and the crispness of the unadorned details keeps the lens clean. This poem, “In the Train Station,” contrasts the poverty of a region with the entitlement of a tourist, a clash that’s familiar but here specific with careful details.

Other locations include Nicaragua, the Kuna Yala Islands, Colombia, Mexico, Italy, California, China, Mongolia, and England. Regardless of the locations, we’re implicated in these poems. Roberts doesn’t cajole or threaten. Nor does she offer the pretentiousness that so much travel writing tries to sell, whether in verse or prose. It’s simply that Roberts won’t let you admire the crown molding in your Four Seasons suite. Not while people are suffering feet away. Instead, Roberts walks us among the errands and rituals and lives of others. In that way, the reader has to be involved, has to embrace the suffering of the world, has to ask some important questions.

There is death here, too, as we might expect from any serious verse. In India, we witness the Untouchables caring for the dead, eldest sons tending fires, treating the bodies of their fathers. The sons are washed, robed, shaved—the rituals required of those who can touch the bodies. “Another son throwing river water over / his shoulder, saying, Father, go on your way, / I’ll go mine.”

There might be redemption here, though it’s not apparent, and more often one feels an open-endedness that’s simply honest. There’s no happy ending for many of the people we meet. Even when Roberts crosses boundaries and interacts, it’s a temporary action that in reality can’t heal or change. Again in India, at the Ganges, small girls sell shells—filled with a candle and marigolds—to float on the river. The poem explores an aspect of the Untouchables: one of the girls can’t have her photo taken due to her status. There is photo negotiation, and admiration for a digital camera, but when Roberts floats her shell, it flips and the candle flame goes out.

Roberts learns that the “world holds together / by the superstition of safety”, presents a “boundlessness of human song” and, in the end, asks us all, “What is your country?”

~~~

Andrew C. Gottlieb is the Reviews Editor for Terrain.org. His work can be found online, in many print journals, and in his poetry chapbook Halflives (New Michigan Press.) Find him at www.andrewcgottlieb.com

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By Andrew Gottlieb, June 29, 2011 8:25 am

Permanent Vacation: Twenty Writers on Work and Life in Our National Parks. Volume 1: The West

Edited by Kim Wyatt and Erin Bechtol
Bona Fide Books, 2011
Reviewed by Andrew C. Gottlieb

If you’re like me, you’ve visited a number of National Parks, you’ve been enthralled by the beauty and variety presented by that great national resource, but your personal list of parks-to-see is long. What to do to ease the craving in between trips to our national parks? One answer: read about them.

Bona Fide Books, a young press out of South Lake Tahoe, has put together for a first anthology a rich collection of essays by writers who’ve not only visited our parks but have spent time working and living in them, in some cases for whole careers. Thirty-plus years. That’s the beauty of Permanent Vacation: Twenty Writers on Work and Life in Our National Parks. Volume 1: The West . These essays present the lives, insights, and secrets of people who’ve not only visited the parks but have experienced them from the inside. A handsomely produced volume, it’s readable, fun, and small enough to shove in a backpack.

I’ll admit: I’m biased. I had the luck to once be the writer-in-residence on Isle Royale National Park, and those three weeks gave me my own taste as a National Park Service insider. But as this anthology illustrates, one park, or one experience, is not like the other. There are stories here you won’t find in any parks guide book. The beauty and appreciation you’ll expect; the dark side of working in the parks may be a surprise.

Joseph Flannery writes about encounters with grizzly bears, secret back roads and buffalo carcasses, the differences between grizzlies and black bears, and the way Yellowstone employees pride themselves in experience: “To have a close encounter with a grizzly is to wear a sort of badge of honor around the park.” Troy Davis, a ranger and biologist at Yellowstone for nine years, tells of the management of the famous Elk Number Six, and losing sleep one night while the animal circled his cabin, bugling. “I spent more time, eyeball to eyeball, with Elk Number Six than did any other human being.” Ruth Rhodes, now a professor of English, spent three seasons working at Denali National Park, and writes of the Dash, the end of summer ritual in which park employees strip down and run three miles, naked, in the frigid midnight air of Alaska, from one bar, the Golden Spike, to another, the Chalet.

There is the beauty and the wildlife: sunsets and sunrises, lush forest, snowy wilderness, elk, bear, wolves, big horn sheep, and brook trout. The geology: mountains, petrified forest, volcanoes, canyons. The process: tents, cabins, employee housing, hiking, climbing, summiting, and river-rafting.

But there’s also the rote work, the let-down, the exhaustion of underpaid drudgery, and the drugs and alcohol, the car accidents and deaths, the dark side of the Park Service, the symptoms of young people together in isolation, working in a dream wilderness but with few other outlets. Melanie Dylan Fox talks about escape during five seasons of work in Sequoia National Park: “It’s easier to rely on the feelings alcohol and drugs evoke than it is to recapture that sense of wonder we all felt at the beginning. We keep searching for the intoxication that the forest itself once brought.” Nicole Sheets, for this essay perhaps appropriately named, writes of changing bed linens, pleating sheets and tucking edges, of being a “lowly drone.” For Sheets, the adage “leave no trace” takes an unexpected angle. “My work succeeds . . . if . . . each guest can maintain the illusion that they are the first people to ever stay in their room.”

Like all anthologies, some essays are stronger than others. The best here tell more than one story, using lyrical prose to reveal something personal. Cassandra Kircher tells of a difficult relationship with her aging father, attempting to understand his quiet, his isolation. During one of his visits while she works in Rocky Mountain National Park, “my father arranges pieces of bark with his foot like he’s playing a game, creating a whole world that is more real to him than the one he is in.” By the end of the essay, caught trout slowly dying in a bucket become a larger metaphor for the reader, for the essay’s narrator. Mary Emerick writes of escaping relationships with men, traveling from park to park, a vagrant seasonal worker with a fear of commitment to anything but her “ancient road atlas.” Janet Smith writes about working in the parks to escape feelings of inadequacy, ugliness: “living—literally—in the shadow of Half Dome equated to a better life.” This type of writing is at once painful, revealing, and gratifying.

Other national parks represented include Mount Rainier, Wrangell-St.Elias, Grand Teton, Petrified Forest, Black Canyon of the Gunnison, and Yosemite. A highly recommended collection that will make you want to ditch your job and pack your gear for a nearest or favorite national park, but with a new appreciation for many of the seasonal and full-time rangers, naturalists, and workers helping maintain the incredible National Parks System that most of us will only briefly get to visit.

~~~

Andrew C. Gottlieb is the Reviews Editor for Terrain.org. His work can be found online, in many print journals, and in his poetry chapbook Halflives (New Michigan Press.) Find him at www.andrewcgottlieb.com