by Laura Waterman
State University of New York Press, 2024
Laura Waterman’s latest book reflects on an extraordinary life as a wilderness steward, homesteader, mountaineer, and writer. It also offers heart-wrenching insight into the death of her husband by suicide. Part memoir, part anthology, Calling Wild Places Home is a collection of poignant and vulnerable essays illustrating salient points and offering a profound exploration of Waterman’s life journey.
It isn’t her first memoir. Waterman authored Losing the Garden: The Story of a Marriage in 2005 after her husband, Guy Waterman, a noted author and mountain climber, ascended to the summit of Mount Lafayette in New Hampshire to deliberately freeze to death in 2000. While Losing the Garden was a book of survival and continuance, Calling Wild Places Home probes more deeply into the author’s grief and rebirth through writings that illustrate the couple’s wilderness ethics and survival.
Waterman begins each essay by setting it in place and purpose. She writes, “Adventure stories can turn into published articles or books. They can also quietly sit in diaries, until the moment comes and you find yourself rummaging back through the years to find that diary entry that will refresh your memory as you commit that long-ago time in the mountains to the page.”
Her complex story is raw and beautiful, starting on the campus of a boys’ school (where her father was a teacher) and ending in the mountains of New York, Vermont, and New Hampshire. Throughout are essays and writings from the 1970s to the early 2000s that appeared first in books for Countryman Press and publications such as International Journal of Wilderness and the popular magazines Outside and Backpacker. She opens the book with an essay first published in Northern Woodlands’ Autumn 2013 issue, describing the woodland camp of her childhood, which was “surrounded by greenery and smelled of spruce, balsam fir, and loamy soil.” It was here that she and her brother first “encountered Nature head-on.”
In Calling Wild Places Home, we see the young Watermans exploring the Shawangunk Mountains, commonly known to climbers as the Gunks, in upstate New York after long days at work, then as a couple leaving their jobs to homestead in the mountains of Vermont. Laura Waterman eventually climbed all 48 of the 4,000-foot New Hampshire peaks seven times and with Guy tackled the Adirondack High Peaks the winter of 1971–1972.
In 1980, Laura and Guy became adopters of the Franconia Ridge Trail, helping to maintain the popular hiking route. She writes of their multiday hikes into the mountains and the evening talks they gave to hikers “about the alpine vegetation and the importance of its protection.”
While the two were writing, climbing, and advocating for mountain protection, Guy struggled with mental health challenges, which culminated with his suicide. Several of the essays in Calling Wild Places Home reveal how Waterman faced her husband’s death – and how she moved forward with her life, eventually moving out of the mountains and into a nearby village.
“That’s my happy place where I am now. This hiking, this exploring, is new, and brought about by change,” she writes.
In the book’s last paragraph, Waterman adds that she has “just spent the last few weeks with Guy, without being consciously aware of it…. Now, this is written, and I’m losing him all over again.”
Calling Wild Places Home is a book for those who value conservation and seek nourishment in some notion of the wild. Waterman’s writing is a testament to the human spirit and to a life dedicated to the stewardship of our natural places.