Wood Lit - Summer 2005
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Wild Moments
“Looking at and seeing the natural world is a skill that takes years to acquire,” Ted Williams writes in his new book, Wild Moments; and that skill is one he has developed to a high level. Whether he is writing as a naturalist or as an investigative environmental reporter in his “Incite” columns in Audubon magazine, Williams is constantly alert to the most minute detail, yet he never fails, at the same time, to take in the big picture as well. His interest, curiosity, and focus move easily from the tree to the forest and back again.
In Wild Moments, Williams the naturalist has gathered together the short essays he has been contributing since 1997 to Audubon magazine – about half a dozen per issue – under the heading “Earth Almanac.” Remaining true to its almanac origin, Wild Moments leads us through the cycle of the year – winter, spring, summer, and fall – and reveals to us, in short entries of anywhere from 100 to 300 words, wonders of the natural world that we may have looked at but not seen or, more likely, that we have overlooked altogether. Williams’s subjects range from the microscopic to the cosmic, from bugs to birds to bears to Perseid meteor showers. You can learn here how bumblebees pollinate lady’s slippers and how ants disperse trillium seeds. You can learn that moose and wolves have in their feet a highly unsaturated fat that insulates them from ice and snow and that the only winter the brown band on a woolly bear caterpillar can tell you about is the previous one, not the coming one. “The more brown hairs, the older the caterpillar. A long winter delays hatching, resulting in a younger caterpillar and a thinner band.”
But to describe Wild Moments simply as a compendium of intriguing natural lore is to sell it way too short. Williams treats us not only to his own keen observations but also to the fruits of his wide reading and research, both scientific and literary. He does not fail to tell us, for instance, that the bite of Gila monsters is poisonous but adds that they are so sluggish and reluctant to bite that they “almost require human help in the human-biting process.” Or as a Dr. Ward wrote in the Arizona Gazette of September 23, 1899: “I have never been called to attend a case of Gila monster bite, and I don’t want to be. I think a man who is fool enough to get bitten by a Gila monster ought to die.”
Then there is the writing itself. Whatever Ted Williams shows us, we see not through a glass darkly but through a glass so clear and flawless that the glass disappears entirely, and we see what Williams is seeing in all its vividness. Old squaw ducks “fly like hurricane-borne shingles”; puffins in flight “resemble badly thrown footballs.”
In short essays that introduce each of the four seasons, Williams highlights some of the things we might see in that season and adds thoughts helpful to acquiring the skill of “looking at and seeing the natural world.” In his “Spring” essay, he writes, “Never take children on ‘nature walks.’ It smacks of the teaching from which they have just been sprung. Take them on ‘expeditions’ instead, and do so with a stated purpose….Gather pussy willows, for example; build a house out of sticks and leaves; collect chrysalides; catch pollywogs. The most indelible natural-history lessons are taught by actions not words.”
True, but the next best thing to going out on an expedition with Ted Williams has to be reading his words. They alert us to what we probably missed today and will send us outdoors tomorrow better prepared to open our eyes and see.
And, as if all this were not enough, Wild Moments is a handsome book with that indispensable feature – an index – and with drawings by John Burgoyne that are as sharp and clear as Ted Williams’s prose.
Bob Kimber
© 2005 by the author; this article may not be copied or reproduced without the author's consent.
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Hunting the Whole Way Home
Hunting the Whole Way Home is a memoir of a lifetime of upland bird hunting. It’s also a paean to embattled wild places in northern New England (author Sydney Lea lives in the Connecticut River valley in Vermont) and a closely examined and deeply felt account of the author’s own growth and maturing, both as a practitioner of field sports and as a human being.
Lea is a poet, novelist, teacher, and founder and editor of New England Review. He brings a poet’s sensibilities – and a deep respect for the craft of writing – to this book, which, in addition to the prose passages, includes seven of the author’s poems. The book is grounded in keen observations into hunting, fishing, and “the primary, tactile experience” of life and the land. Here’s a description of the scents in a bird cover: “frost-slackened apple, cinnamon whiff of dead fern, pungency of the slain grouse itself, pointer’s breath in my face as I congratulated her on the find.” The book deals unflinchingly with human nature. The author is willing and able to judge himself: “I’m pigheaded and spoiled, my purism ruinous, manic.”
Part of that purism centers on hunting behind hard-charging pointers. He writes, “I can’t bear a timid worker,” and “All I ask is that the dog check in every so often. Respectful friendship between us is the key, and such a relationship requires plenty of time to establish.” Time is at the heart of many of Lea’s writings: time that is running out for old dogs, old hunting partners, and certain parts of the region where Lea has put down roots. He scorns those who would despoil the land for profit: “In my corner of the globe, it is not only the ladyslipper, the woodcock, the indigenous trout, the black duck, the painted trillium and countless other wild marvels that give way to the ski condo, the mall, the office park; it is also a certain honorable way of viewing the world.”
Lea writes, “I speak only to and for the passionate hunter, the one who regards this business as more than mere sport.” I believe I’d disagree: Lea speaks to all thoughtful people who have a passion toward nature and the outdoors. His writing is rich and complex, only occasionally linear in time or process of thought. Lea has given us a book to savor, to read chapter by chapter, at quiet times when the mind is alert enough to appreciate the author’s telling insights and complex but clear and precise prose.
When Hunting the Whole Way Home was first published in 1994 by the University Press of New England, it received little notice. This new edition from the Lyons Press resurrects an important work about the outdoors. It includes a new introduction by the author, dealing with such matters as conserving woods and waters as well as a sustainable, working landscape. Lea concludes: “Let no one ever begin his or her tale by saying, ‘There was once a wild New England.’”
Charles Fergus
© 2005 by the author; this article may not be copied or reproduced without the author's consent.
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Losing the Garden: The Story of a Marriage
In February 2000, noted climber and writer Guy Waterman ascended to the summit of Mount Lafayette to freeze to death, deliberately.
Laura Waterman’s new book, Losing the Garden, places the stark incident of her husband’s death in the larger, more intricate setting of his life and their more than 30 years together. Even given the intrinsic drama of Guy Waterman’s end, this is a book of survival and continuance, as Laura Waterman demonstrates the resourcefulness, probing honesty, and literary gracefulness that have given her a renewed understanding of life’s possibilities beyond the devastation of a loved one’s suicide.
In addition to the enormous difficulties confronting any writer who seeks to chronicle the complications of her own personal and family life, especially in the wake of a disaster, Laura Waterman had a sprawling bundle of subjects, all potentially important. Devising a form for this story must have been very challenging.
She and Guy Waterman left New York City in the early 1970s, part of a wave of seekers for authenticity and a new connection with nature and traditional ways. In marrying Guy, she had also joined his existing family, including three sons from a previous marriage, two of whom later died tragically. Also, she was the daughter of one of America’s most influential literary scholars, Thomas H. Johnson, a man who suffered the ravages of alcoholism.
As she has described in interviews, Laura Waterman had to find a form and sequence for her story. And she had to cease thinking of herself continually as a “we” – one portion of the organism “Guy and Laura” – in order to discover her own existence as an “I.” She chose to begin the book with a tender evocation of Guy’s final breakfast at home before he set off for his long-pondered appointment with death. Rather than saving this incident for the book’s climax, which would have been a much more melodramatic option, with characteristic forthrightness Laura Waterman attends to one of the book’s most difficult episodes straight away.
Without presuming to be able to answer, Laura Waterman poses there at the outset these riddles for herself and her readers: how could a man who excelled in so many ways – as climber, author, gardener, jazz pianist – suffer so long from depression in secrecy? And how could she fail to resist, and in some ways even aid in, her husband’s plan to commit suicide?
While readers may come to this book from a number of directions, drawn by its vivid and entertaining accounts of rock-climbing and homesteading or by its searching candor about the experience of living with relatives who are plagued by depression or alcoholism, ultimately what all of us will find here is a revelation of love’s stamina and resilience, described with the vividness and beguiling inventiveness of a lifelong reader who has truly found her own voice.
Likely to be particularly fascinating to readers of this magazine are the book’s often delightful accounts of the Watermans’ life in the woods, the seasonal round of building projects, sugaring, gardening, and co-authoring wonderful books about hiking and wilderness ethics. Here were two citified professionals whose experiences with “roughing it” were their weekend jaunts for upcountry camping and rock-climbing. They succeeded in figuring out how to keep themselves warm and well fed for three decades, without a driveway or electricity but with a splendid library, irrepressible sense of whimsy, and well-seasoned reverence for the natural world.
When one finishes reading this complex and lovely story, the title Losing the Garden seems misplaced in its emphasis, offering the wrong impression of Laura Waterman’s remarkable achievement. Like the treasured books the Watermans read aloud every evening for solace, instruction, and delight, through times of enchantment and times of great pain, here is book that proves again that whatever life’s catastrophes, the garden surrounds us.
Jim Schley
© 2005 by the author; this article may not be copied or reproduced without the author's consent.
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