The Western Nature Essay Since 1970

1970, the year of the first Earth Day and of several important pieces of environmental legislation, makes a logical starting date for a summary of recent trends in the western nature essay. In truth, though, the "Environmental Decade" saw no startlingly new developments in western nature writing; what happened was that the theme and concerns of the genre, as they had evolved for almost a century, now became public themes and national concerns. Indeed, as Paul Brooks has argued in Speaking for Nature (1980), the work of such writers as John Muir, Mary Austin, Enos Mills, and Joseph Wood Krutch may have been a major impetus to the environmental awakening.

In a sense, then, there is nothing new in the contemporary western nature essay. Writers are still describing the solitary immersion in wilderness that has for millennia given rise to insight, and they are still portraying fellow animals with the feeling of shared life. The basic matter of the nature essay remains, as it must, the same. And western writers continue, as they have since the time of Muir, to criticize the simultaneous triviality and power-for-ill of our brand of civilization. If there is distinctiveness to the contemporary nature essay, it is perhaps only its aura of increased seriousness and urgency as the human population and the technosphere relentlessly expand, wilderness dwindles, and species diversity declines.

Edward Abbey, who grouses at the label "nature writer,"¹ remains, perhaps, the West's most important writer-about-nature. More than others, he explores the psychological, social, and even political meanings in the encounter with wild nature. His most recent collections, Abbey's Road (1979) and Down the River (1982), do not have the sustained unity or philosophical intensity of the classic Desert Solitaire (1968), perhaps because these later books are made up of essays written for periodicals; however, their wide range and surprising, shock-of-recognition insights (often delivered humorously) reveal a writer with truly various powers.

For Abbey, wilderness experience is a standard by which the aberrations of technological, money-distracted society may be measured incisively. In the canyons of the Southwest ("Abbey Country," as the author once termed it), there is yet a remnant of peace, quiet, and time in which one might make a start toward an examined life. Abbey portrays this wild opportunity cherishingly, in the image-detail that respect for its importance inspires. The distance between the authenticity of wilderness life on the one hand and the abstracted desperation of the mass of men on the other then leads him (as one familiar with the modern nature essay might expect) to a Jeremiah-like vision. This is common enough, perhaps; Abbey, though, surpasses other nature writers by expressing his dismay in sardonic, self-and species-reducing humor, the like of which has not been seen in the West since Mark Twain. The effect of the humor is to democratize and personalize the complaint; Abbey's rapport with the reader is unequalled in the genre. He is probably the only western nature writer to make good literary use of the automobile, that universal phenomenon; his use of it is to destroy it, slowly and with unmistakable relish. His narratives describing trips in new, unfit vehicles over rocky desert tracks develop a giddy, accumulating humor as the cars are piecemeal destroyed. Through it all, Abbey remains blithe, perfectly regardless, cooking dinner at evening by the disabled vehicle, listening to the sounds of the desert, preparing to hike onward the next day. The enemy, for once, has been vanquished.

There are western nature writers with more documentary knowledge of flora and fauna than Abbey, perhaps–his approach to natural history is almost always narrative and experiential–but his mingling of prophetic depth with outrageous exaggeration and satire gives him a unique literary voice, a standing in a wholly separate category from other nature essayists. He may be enlarging the field significantly.

John Graves's Goodbye to a River (1960) shares with Abbey's Desert Solitaire the status of a modern classic. Both books work the theme of the lone individual in nature, reflecting slowly and deeply on self and man and the scheme of things–Thoreau's territory. Graves went on, in Hard Scrabble (1974) to ruminate on Texas country life; by nature, perhaps, his subjects were not so vividly individual as the story of his earlier, solitary trip on the Brazos River. His latest collection of essays, From a Limestone Ledge (1980), moves even further from Goodbye to a River to cover a wide variety of subjects (fences; meat; trash, and so forth), each one de novo in a separate chapter. The book is held together by Graves's tentative, unrighteous voice ("Notes of an Uncertain Bluecollar Man," the title of the first chapter, sets the tone), but there is simply not the opportunity for extended or especially searching reflection. From a Limestone Ledge consists of essays gathered from Texas Monthly; with their good sense, modesty, and savor for the practical, they are likely the state of the art in the country column.

Ann H. Zwinger of Colorado, whose most important western works are Land Above the Trees: A Guide to American Alpine Tundra (co-authored with Beatrice E. Willard, 1972), Run, River, Run (1975), and Wind in the Rock (1978), writes with considerably more passion and involvement. She is centered in the wild, and unafraid to declare it as her world of source. She describes a night spent camping alongside the upper Green River in Wyoming, in Run, River, Run:

I lie awake most of the night, sensitized to the river, Peace, contentment: these are programmed cultural words; what I feel is the infinity outside of culture, and although I sleep little, I awake rested. ²

Her method, in general, is to present factual natural history–both by straight exposition of scientific data and by her own rather technical drawings, which profusely illustrate her books–and to vivify the detail with relevant personal response. The quality of open space and light in the high country, to take one instance, is a result of very specific environmental factors that Zwinger details in documentary fashion: thin air, thin soil, and relentless weather have shaped this world. Above timberline, life is exposed. She describes the multitude of adaptations that plant and animal life must make to survive the hard conditions. Then she rounds and enlivens the scene with human consciousness: "And psychologically, the great wash of light illuminating the alpine tundra gives one a sense of encompassing comprehension, verging on euphoria." ³ Later she writes, "lt is the landscape of ultimate freedom." ⁴ The sense is of a whole world, seen and known in its particulars and also as a totality–essentially the world of poetry, one might say, and of the best nature essayists.

The alpine tundra, the wild river, the remote canyons of southwestern Utah with their Anasazi ruins, all these subjects of Ann Zwinger's books are threatened. Each, as her treatment shows, is a stunningly intricate realm whose natural state is one of patterned, structural health; but each can easily be injured by careless humans. They are fragile worlds–balance is by nature a fragile thing. "Man and the Tundra," the concluding section of Land Above the Trees, is short and understated, centering on the snowballing tendency of a disturbance as it reverberates through the myriad mutualisms in a natural community. Zwinger does not belabor the point, because the book as a whole has already made it. The harsh, hard world of the high country is, ironically, extremely vulnerable. "Fifty to one hundred years of plant growth can be snuffed out by a beer can." ⁵ The Green River, too, the length of which she walked or floated for Run, River, Run, Zwinger shows to be threatened. It is a living thread of wildness, but it can easily be dammed. The engineering problems are not insuperable. In the canyon country of Wind in the Rock, the quality of life preserved for seven hundred years of quiet, unknown repose can be lost in a casual afternoon of vandalism, as pothunters work over an Anasazi ruin.

In Wind in the Rock, Zwinger portrays her personal commitment and her reward, giving a fine explanation of the lure of backpacking. She walks out from under the temperature-controlled dome, as it were. Outside, one can be hurt, thirsty, too hot or too cold; but there are other possibilities, also:

In spite of this, after walking there for days, coming home bug-bitten, shins bruised, nose peeling, feet and hands swollen, I feel ablaze with life. I suspect that the canyons give me an intensified sense of living partly because I not only face the basics of living and survival, but carry them on my back. And in my head. And this intense personal responsibility gives me an overwhelming sense of freedom I know nowhere else. ⁶

With wilderness diminished to something less than five percent of the area of the United States, the frontier-adventure style of nature writing has had to undergo certain modifications. It is not possible, any longer, to see country that "no white man has seen," or to give names to mountains–as was possible so late as the 1930s for Robert Marshall in Alaska. Under the circumstances, frontiersmanship has gone in two main directions: high onto enormous cliffs deemed unclimbable just a few decades ago, and (crucially, for literature) inside, to moral and psychological frontiers. When these two trends converge, as they do in some of the best climbing literature, the possibilities are rich indeed. When the climber, or in a few cases the wilderness trekker, deliberately chooses less equipment and thus a more direct (and dangerous) contact with the environment, the modern or post-frontier era of self-consciousness appears. The literary potential of this territory is just beginning to be explored. For the literature of climbing, Galen Rowell of California is perhaps the best guide among western American writers. His subtle, post-frontier focus is well illustrated in the fine climbing-essay collection he edited in 1973, The Vertical World of Yosemite. Then in High and Wild: A Mountaineer's World (1979), Rowell developed further, richer ironies and complexities by relating that contemporary, lower-technology climbing methods are, surprisingly, often "faster and less strenuous than the old-fashioned methods." ⁷ Thus "frontier" becomes an almost infinitely progressive term. The degree of one's exposure to the unknown is to some extent, and ironically, a matter of choice and planning.

Nevertheless, the quest for self-knowledge and more powerful levels of experience is not taking place in a purely mental vacuum. The contemporary nature essay continues to hold that the wild world is the purest, most potent scene for the quest. One of the most stimulating recent explorations into the possible meanings in wilderness trekking is David J. Cooper's Brooks Range Passage (1982). In 1976, Cooper made a long, solitary journey in the Brooks Range in Alaska, finishing with a descent of the Alatna River on a raft he made from spruce logs. For shelter he chose to carry only a poncho, and much of his food was found on the journey itself–"Eskimo potatoes," for example, and blueberries. The terrain was difficult, and the weather hardly ever agreeable. As the weeks passed, Cooper made adjustments, found some strengths and weaknesses, enjoyed luck and developed patience; he reports his gradual assimilation to the requirements of the wild in a fittingly unpretentious, unwriterly style. He claims no great breakthrough, but simply in his learning to live with the rain there is a passage indeed. Very frequently in the land he crossed, clouds lowered and another storm hit; the willows dripped with water; the streams rose and rushed and were hard to ford; at night the rain slammed in waves on the poncho, pitched a few inches overhead on a tripod of willow sticks. Finally, on the Alatna, Cooper learned how to guide his heavy, half-awash raft of spruce logs in the safest of the channels, where the flow was fullest. He had never floated a river before, anywhere, but now, rather quickly, and as if regaining an ancient and normal human capacity, he learned a great deal. The intimacy with nature portrayed in this book, symbolized by the water that is everywhere in one form or another, is remarkable.

Another well-established tradition in the nature essay is the journal written from the cabin in the woods. This, too, like the adventure narrative, is somewhat constrained by modern conditions, but its essence of quiet reflection based on a simplified existence remains intact. It is still possible to lead, at least for a time, a Walden-like life. Theodore J. Walker's Red Salmon, Brown Bear (1971) and Dwight Smith's Above Timberline (1981) are of interest, because both books resulted from a venture called the "New Explorers," in which the American Museum of Natural History and other sources funded a kind of cabin-sabbatical for professional biologists, and because the journals themselves often reveal quite profound changes and developments in outlook, sometimes coming as a surprise even to the writers. Walker's stay in Alaska, for example, led him to personal and philosophical insights–he rethought his relationship with his draft-avoiding son, saw how important (and rare in "normal" life) delight is, and learned that his earlier intuition in favor of direct field study had been absolutely correct. He expresses his thoughts in a conversational style (both his and Smith's books are transcriptions of daily taping sessions) that occasionally rings with something like poetic force:

We add and we subtract and chance plays its ugly games. We come, we go. We all move, we all cry. We all are lonely.

I've come further than most. I look ahead, I look back, I look out the window. (There are the trees, swaying in the wind. Beautiful, beautiful trees.) ⁸

John Haines, better-known for his poetry, also has published a prose account of his life as a back-country Alaska trapper. Of Traps and Snares (1981) has the virtues of direct-contact existence, a simple and strenuous life. There is a strong sense that Haines felt intimate with the wilderness, at least after he had served his apprenticeship. But the account also has a certain odd ambiguity. He is "living a dream," he says, ⁹ apparently meaning the old frontier dream of self-sufficiency in the wilderness, and implying that it is indeed a dream and not in this modern time an ecologically responsible course. He makes his living partly by trapping, and admits "the end in view: selling the fur so that others may be rich and clothed beyond their natural right." ¹⁰ However, rather surprisingly, the insight does not translate into restraint; as far as this book shows, he goes on trapping. Perhaps Of Traps and Snares may be most valuable for its honest record.

One Man's Wilderness (1973), drawn by Sam Keith from the Alaska Journals of Richard L. Proenneke, is extraordinarily clear and unified. Proenneke built a cabin by himself, with a few hand tools only, and has lived in it for many years while photographing wildlife. His attitude is rockbottom practical–readers may wonder if there has ever been a more ingenious or self-reliant cabin man–and this practicality is also (and logically, as Proenneke tells it) the surest guide to ecological rightness. He takes no more than he needs, and examines his needs rigorously. There are several passages in his journal that are almost perfect paraphrases of Thoreau; but their originality is never in question, for Proenneke's thoughts are seen to come straight from his experience. If he is similar to Thoreau it is probably because both men touched the same source.

I learned something from the big game animals. Their food is pretty much the same from day to day. I don't vary my fare too much either, and I've never felt better in my life. I don't confuse my digestive system, I just season simple food with hunger. ¹¹

Proenneke's existence is only superficially like that of the nineteenthcentury western frontiersman; his writing reveals an earned sophistication about the interweavings of natural patterns and the right fit of man into those patterns. It is calm and grounded, with the simplicity of a naturalized, moral decisiveness.

Studies of wildlife afford perhaps the most direct, obvious and logical opportunity for cultural criticism in the modern nature essay, because so many wild animals are under attack or are unconsciously endangered by the burgeoning of a powerful, technology-aided human species that for the most part has not outgrown earlier attitudes. Among the most important western studies are those of Hope Ryden and Barry Lopez, who have done scientifically respectable and spirited works on often-anathematized species. Ryden's books on mustangs, America's Last Wild Horses (1970), and Mustangs: A Return to the Wild (1978), her study of coyotes, God's Dog: A Celebration of the North American Coyote (1979), and Bobcat Year (1981) are factual, sensitive and compassionate, and unsentimental. She has done her field work; her study of coyote dens in Wyoming, for example, approaches Adolph Murie's of Alaskan wolves in its patience. She has small use for telemetry, preferring to see the animals in person and follow them in person, and this Murie-like approach tends to substantiate her conclusions on the social and historical dimensions of her subjects. There is strong fellowfeeling in Ryden's books, and a clear sense of moment. This emotional depth, not present in so many of the myriad, purely technical studies conducted nowadays on animal behavior, ¹² gives resonance to her work.

With one outstanding book, Of Wolves and Men (1978), and several essays in national magazines, Barry Holstun Lopez has taken a place as an important western writer. In Of Wolves and Men, he has constructed a significant synthesis, combining science reporting, lore collection, and an unsettling, unsparing historical critique. As with Ryden's coyote and bobcat, and to an even greater extent, the wolf as men know him is largely a creature of projection and legend. Astonishingly, and regretfully now as the species' range shrinks and subspecies are extirpated, we know little about the wolf that is field-verifiably true. Adolph Murie's The Wolves of Mount McKinley and David Mech's The Wolves of Isle Royale (1966) and The Wolf (1970) are important breakthroughs. But Lopez has attempted something more comprehensive. What emerges from his book is not only a plausible behavioral description, but an insight into what is being lost as the wolf declines–what kind of different, lesser world is evolving, and what qualities of heart and mind are helping to propel that world. In common with most modern nature essayists, Lopez does not shy away from the dark side of the human performance. After describing the almost paroxysmic savagery with which the wolf population of the United States was decimated in the decades after the Civil War, he concludes,

It seems to me that somewhere in our history we should have attempted to answer to ourselves for all this. . . . I think it is simply that we do not understand our place in the universe and have not the courage to admit it. ¹³

THOMAS J. LYON, Utah State University

Notes

1. Edward Abbey, Abbey's Road (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1979), p. xviii.

2. Ann H. Zwinger, Run, River, Run (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), p. 29.

3. Ann H. Zwinger, Land Above the Trees: A Guide to American Alpine Tundra (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), p. 4.

4. Zwinger, Land Above the Trees, p. 56.

5. Zwinger, Land Above the Trees, p. 381.

6. Ann H. Zwinger, Wind in the Rock (New York: Harper & Row, 1978), p. 5.

7. Galen Rowell, High and Wild: A Mountaineer's World (San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1979), p. 58.

8. Theodore J. Walker, Red Salmon, Brown Bear: The Story of an Alaskan Lake (New York: World Publishing, 1971), p. 221.

9. John Haines, Of Traps and Snares (Delta Junction, Alaska: Dragon Press, 1981), p. 42.

10. Haines, p. 4.

11. Sam Keith, ed., One Man's Wilderness (Anchorage: Alaska Northwest Publishing Company, 1973), p. 71.

12. It is probably safe to say, for example, that nothing of literary quality will come out of the study, recently reported, in which redwing blackbirds were operated upon so that they could not give their territorial call. Such an investigation would appear to lack the ethical and aesthetic consciousness that makes literature possible–to say nothing of its casual cruelty.

13. Barry Holstun Lopez, Of Wolves and Men (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1978), p. 196.

14. Lopez, p. 199.

Selected Bibliography

Abbey, Edward. Abbey's Road. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1979.

. Down the River. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1982.

Bakker, Elna S. An Island Called California. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971.

Brooks, Paul. Speaking for Nature. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1980.

Cooper, David J. Brooks Range Passage. Seattle: The Mountaineers, 1982.

Cowles, Raymond B. Desert Journal: A Naturalist Reflects on Arid California. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977.

Craighead, Frank. Track of the Grizzly. San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1979.

Geist, Valerius. Mountain Sheep and Man in the Northern Wilds. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975.

Graves, John. From a Limestone Ledge. New York: A. A. Knopf, 1980.

Haines, John. Of Traps and Snares. Delta Junction, Alaska: Dragon Press, 1981.

Keith, Sam, ed. One Man's Wilderness. Anchorage: Alaska Northwest Publishing Company, 1973.

Lanner, Ronald. The Piñon Pine: A Natural and Cultural History. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1981.

. Trees of the Great Basin. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1984.

Lopez, Barry Holstun. Of Wolves and Men. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1978.

Rowell, Galen. High and Wild: A Mountaineer's World. San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1979.

. ed. The Vertical World of Yosemite. Berkeley: Wilderness Press, 1973.

Ryden, Hope. America's Last Wild Horses. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1970.

. Bobcat Year. New York: Viking Press, 1981.

. God's Dog: A Celebration of the North American Coyote. New York: Viking Press, 1979.

. Mustangs: A Return to the Wild. New York: Penguin Books, 1978. Smith, Dwight. Above Timberline: A Wildlife Biologist's Rocky Mountain Journal. New York: A. A. Knopf, 1981.

Walker, Theodore J. Red Salmon, Brown Bear: The Story of an Alaskan Lake. New York: World Publishing Company, 1971.

Zwinger, Ann H. Land Above the Trees: A Guide to American Alpine Tundra. New York: Harper & Row, 1972.

. Run, River, Run. New York: Harper & Row, 1975.

. Wind in the Rock. New York: Harper & Row, 1978.

[Contents]    [Index]

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