Robert Root

 

As I lay in bed this morning in Florida, trying to sleep again, my wife already up and busy, I began picturing where we are. Sometimes, when we visit here, I sleepily lose track of our location, confuse it with our Wisconsin home, vaguely envision our surroundings both here and there as if I could simultaneously relocate myself in time and space. And so, blankets over shoulders and eyes closed, I visualized rooms around me, mixing them with similar rooms we reside in elsewhere, conjuring images from two locations: this familiar one-floor condo rental separated from a golf course by a narrow stream north of Sarasota, and our two-floor condo home in a complex along the Fox River in Waukesha.

 

Imagining the rooms presently around me—my bedroom, bathroom and closets, her bedroom, bathroom and closets, the living room and dining area stretched alongside them, the west side kitchen and hallway both ending at front doors leading to a parking lot, the east side screened-in patio where the sun rises directly above trees scattered across a golf course visited early and late by various busy birds—made me aware of where we were now, the country club apartment we've annually rented for five late summer/early autumn weeks over the past six years. Sometimes, because I wake three to five times each night and struggle each time to fall asleep again, I'm drowsily uncertain where I am and woozily attempt to clarify how our present surroundings differ from the ones that we routinely inhabit for forty-seven weeks each year, entirely through winter and spring and some neighboring weeks.

 

This morning, body snugly wrapped, my waning thoughts conjured northern pictures, not like old memories but like recent sightings. I envisioned images of our home—my bedroom, blinds on east-facing windows on the same side of my bed as in Sarasota, the dresser also across from the foot of the bed and the bathroom closer but in the same direction, her smaller bedroom down the hall a similar distance away, the guest bathroom across from the narrow study that separates bedrooms, the laundry closet on the wall above the staircase circling down to pass a heating and water closet facing a supply closet on a short hallway to a third bathroom, all opposite the garage entrance and leading to a joined kitchen and dining/living room area. Our condo faces east, the sun shining daily through our entrance door and patio windows, our back wall adjoining another, west-facing condo. We've lived here seventeen years. With eyes shut in my southern bed this morning, I conjured images of our northern home, unable to sort out the differences between our Palm Aire and Fox River residences—too groggy to separate them distinctly or keep them from blending.

 

Eventually, persisting and growing fully awake, I confused them no longer and, unexpectedly, began to recall vaguely related images of the old neighborhood central Michigan house we lived in for almost thirty years while teaching at a local college and neighboring university and then, pushed further back in time, of the similar house in western New York in which I grew up, random resemblances among them both flashing from memory. But memory didn't linger long on those settings; it quickly returned to those simultaneously immediate ones. Again I wandered slowly through images of both of their now separated interiors, carefully distinguishing their similarities and their differences, until I became too aware of deliberately envisioning them. I rolled onto my back, opened my eyes, and acknowledged daylight entering through window blinds. All those household images evaporated.

 

But, somehow, I couldn't let it all go. I wanted to understand why that confused home-blending occurred. It wouldn't have happened in Wisconsin—it was probably provoked by our temporary relocation here, making a lifestyle comparison more noticeable—and I didn't recall it happening in earlier years—mere repetition couldn't have prompted it inadvertently. We've been visiting our daughter in Florida for roughly a quarter of a century, since she graduated from a northern college and moved south, before her marriage and the birth and growth of three children, before we abandoned cross-country car trips south to visit them and settled on air travel to an annually recurring rental—this year, our oldest grandchild graduated from college and began working towards graduate school, her brother enrolled as a sophomore at a relatively nearby university, their younger sister still living at home with two more years of high school ahead, their parents fully employed, we grandparents no longer occasionally necessary babysitters. Predictable alterations in lifestyle for all of us have become—at least for a grandfather who acknowledges them so slowly—more constantly, more persistently obvious.

 

Something outside the usual circumstances must have triggered the confused blending that haunts me, perhaps an innate awareness that imminent changes are already in process, sufficiently unavoidable and insistent on being noticed. Memory is making me assess changes I've been unable to overlook entirely but can no longer avoid examining more meticulously. In the past, while I was employed at universities, I couldn't avoid preoccupation with—or entirely take a break from—intense course preparations and imminent deadlines for publications and preparations for presentations requiring immediate attention. By now those kinds of responsibilities no longer make persistent demands on me, though I realize, at last, that I still behave as if they are potentially lurking, as if they need the same spaces in time to accomplish what would be necessary to complete them. I still have a familiar—if undirected—energy; I should more thoughtfully determine where to release it now.

 

 

 

I recently read "The Cruelty—and Possibilities—of 21st-Century Book Promotion", a long piece by Michael Castleman in The Authors Guild Bulletin. His book-publishing history and mine both cross the same span of time. He's published 19 books since Sexual Solutions in 1980, the year before my first book, Thomas Southerne, was published; his most recent, The Untold Story of Books: A Writer's History of Book Publishing, was published in 2024, the same year as my most recent books, The Arc of the Escarpment and Time's Passage, were published. His article offers an overview of changes the publishing industry has undergone in the last twenty-five years, particularly in the present decade, and suggests ideas that might help me engage in publishing again.

 

Offering "Marketing Strategies for the 99.99 Percent of Authors Who Aren't Bestsellers," Castleman finds it depressing "that authors are uninformed about the daunting challenges they face in marketing books today." Retracing his publishing history, beginning in 1980 when publishers released 45,000 titles, he claims that "since 2000, releases from Big Five Publishers, indie publishers, pay-to-publish ("hybrid") houses, and self-publishers have averaged more that 2 million annually," nearly 45 times as many titles. (His italics.) He reports that publishing The Untold Story of Books "cost $16,000 over six months" in free copies and shipping to contacts, hiring a publicist and a marketing assistant, and "miscellaneous".

 

In the entire 20th century, he maintains, "American publishers released 2.5 million titles. Today, that many appear every year." He asserts that "each new non-bestselling release [. . . ]  [is] unlikely to garner much attention"; a bestseller like The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store can sell a million copies but there are "only around 200" bestsellers annually, "one title in 10,000." It is estimated that "79 percent of new releases—four out of five—sell fewer than 100 copies. Only 6 percent sell 1,000. Most self-published books sell in two figures—many Big Five titles sell only a few hundred copies." Although he reports that publishing The Untold Story of Books "cost $16,000 over six months" in free copies and shipping to contacts, hiring a publicist and a marketing assistant, and "miscellaneous," he advises authors releasing a book to keep their expectations low: "Only 20 percent of new titles sell 100 titles."

 

Castleman reports that, before 2000, new books needed to find audiences in order to get additional printings; that required continued promotion. (Note: Several of my earliest books are no longer listed in their publishers' catalogs and were only printed once. Some still sell through used book dealers.) "But ever since 2000, when publishing went digital, authors have gained one small but significant advantage. Books no longer go out of print. They've become digital files that can be maintained almost for free and printed when ordered."

 

"Authors now enjoy longer promotional runways," Castleman argues, because publishers aren't backlogging abundant physical copies but mostly printing them when orders come in. (That's likely happening with The Arc of the Escarpment—a limited number exist at the UW Stevens Point Cornerstone Press campus, but additional copies are ordered through a printing firm.) Publishers needn't remove older slightly selling or unselling books to make room for newer potential-selling volumes. The "best way to sell books has always been face-to-face and word-of-mouth endorsements," Castleman asserts, claiming that writers need to "cultivate a wide social circle" by sending a few group emails a year. Amazon uses pre-order buttons, which Castleman used to inform 1,000 names on his list ("family, friends, and associates"), all on his own time, achieving a 15% response rate to his pre-order—"85 percent didn't buy." He also repeats his posters, promoted twice for Christmas gift sales (20 copies a week for seven weeks), and will send them out next Memorial Day and Christmas.

 

"Eight months before pub day," he turned his final manuscript into a PDF and pitched every author he knew. "I distributed 75 PDFs, and within a few months, harvested 38 lovely blurbs. . . . A few of those blurbs grace the back cover, but they all appear as editorial reviews on the book's Amazon and Bookshop pages, and as hype in several pages before the title page." He's not sure how much influence they'll have but "Maybe." He also worked up a cheap website for the book.

 

Though they're harder to get now, Castleman has used print reviews and approved Publishers Weekly and Library Journal. He invested $6,500 "in a publicist with a strategy," whose effectiveness he's unsure of. He's also uncertain about how profitable other enterprises like podcasts and interviews are (he got 25), and thinks its okay to post on Facebook, Instagram, and BookTok and to solicit reviews on Goodreads. He recommends book festivals, Amazon advertising, and repeat marketing to an author's personal list rather than bookstores. "Today it's easier than ever to publish books but harder than ever to promote and sell them." That's an observation that sticks with me.

 

I think The Arc of the Escarpment is a pretty good book but, for mostly time-crunch reasons, I haven't sought sales as hard as I once did, and Castleman's convinced me of the limitations of author promotion in terms of profit and popularity. After reading him, I still feel encouraged to keep writing and keep letting the work go public. Composing the kind of books and essays I've been doing over the past forty-five years has given me a fairly solid sense of how reading and writing taught me to value what I've centered on. I'm feeling assured that I need to continue doing that as long as I can.

 

Notes:

Castleman, Michael. "The Cruelty—and Possibilities—of 21st-Century Book Promotion", The Authors Guild Bulletin (Spring-Summer 2025: pp. 18-24).

 

Lately, I tend to scroll rapidly through items on Facebook and YouTube, looking for something to pay attention to, haphazardly passing random contents or only punching open a comic Jon Stewart or Desi Lydic Daily Show segment or a Stephen Colbert Late Show monologue. I seldom read anything posted at length or review any articles I notice, although I'm supposing—or pretending—that something published online will prompt me to write a thoughtful commentary or reactionary essay of my own, the kind of thing that, for several years, I composed and posted on my lapsed blog, www.rootwriting.com.

 

Last week, after reading "Paper Trail," Melissa Kirsch's online piece about writing a note to herself about herself and what she's doing, a kind of a chatty report that she might put aside, as other writers do, to only read again five years in the future, I wondered if I should follow her example. I haven't recently been writing journal entries, personal essays, or blog posts like the ones I composed regularly a couple years ago. Back then, I maintained a special website that let those short pieces go public. Nowadays, once a week, I only compose private notes—well, usually a single page of four fairly random paragraphs labeled "Notes," "Writing," "Working," and "Reading." The Notes paragraph starts the page with casual mention of personal social or business matters; the Reading paragraph ends it with a very short record of what my wife and I read aloud to one another before supper and what I later read alone in bed. The distinction I make between the two paragraphs in the middle of the page dates a long way back: "Writing" is about composing in process, "Working" is centered on what I'm getting—or at least hoping to get—done.

 

These days, these weeks, actually these months really, it's more of a struggle to find anything to record: sometimes the "Writing" paragraph is often virtually blank; under "Working" I tend to report more fully on accomplishing nothing. When I started this blog series. I usually filled two and a half or even three and a half pages; nowadays I barely ever fill one, although I can claim that this very paragraph is actually a revision of the "Writing" paragraph I originally composed.

 

After copying Melissa Kirsch's "Paper Trail" note to my laptop, I reread it several times. She distinguishes between writing a journal entry, which she sees as "an exercise in immediacy, a way of getting down what happened today, what's on my mind in this instant," and writing a letter, claiming that "[i]n a letter that attempted to capture my experience of being alive right now, I'd pull back, take a wide view and present the situation as more of an offering than a regurgitation. I'd try to convey something essential about who I am, what I believe and hold dear." She fears that, if she reads the letter five years from now, she might not "think my priorities and preoccupations worthwhile"; she hopes she will consider herself "wiser and more evolved" in 2030. "It makes me almost embarrassed to be me today."

 

Kirsch mentions a friend who "writes a letter to herself every year on her birthday, but she doesn't open them." I'm suddenly reminded of a period in my younger years of notetaking when, on my birthday and possibly also at New Year's, I too wrote what I thought updated myself and my situation. I just now went into my computer and found a December 31 Notes entry that listed both what I had accomplished in 2013 and what I hoped to do in 2014—I then taught online for a graduate program at Ashland University and simultaneously was composing The Arc of the Escarpment. Apparently, I also kept a handwritten journal where, I claimed, I would "save my whining for the New Year's Day journal entry." It might still be stashed in a box somewhere in our garage.

 

I'll possibly—probably—celebrate my 83rd birthday in a little over three months. It may not be prudent to expect to delay re-reading whatever I write now for five years. Instead, I'll keep wondering what I might have written in a 2020 New Year's blog entry and hope to track it down. More practically, I ought to write that kind of entry on New Year's Eve this year and make sure I can post it online.

 

 

Notes:

Kirsch, Melissa. "Paper trail." The New York Times The Morning (nytdirect@nytimes.com Sat 8/2/2025 4:05 AM)

 

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As the old year ended, we celebrated part of the holiday season with close-by daughter and grandchildren and intermittently spent time online with more far-flung offspring. The new year began quietly, our Wisconsin and Florida daughters and their families settled into post-holiday employment and pre- and post-graduate schooling. Our son in California left home for a short Asian holiday, enjoyed wrestling events in Japan and wandered briefly in Taiwan. I didn't hear from them often but, as usual, I calmly checked up occasionally on whatever localities they were experiencing. It didn't take long to raise my continental anxiety level.

 

Big storms were predicted for coastal Florida—we'd experienced some in our most recent autumn visits there—and I scanned the news daily, mostly to relief. But then, barely a week into January, alarming news about fierce fires in familiar California locales sent me online several times a day to locate where they were emerging and how they were expanding. The fires were widespread, though when I found our son's neighborhood on whatever telecast maps I located, I was at least briefly reassured. I couldn't know how much he learned in Asia about the Los Angeles fires, which were still raging when he soon returned home, but he then reported that his neighborhood was safe. Until the fires were finally subdued, and rainstorms eventually reassured us of their unlikely resurgence, I still checked in daily, mostly calming whenever he told us what conditions were like nearer to him. His neighborhood avoided the most ferocious blazes of the multiple fires surrounding it, but even after he was confirmed safe, I couldn't stop thinking about them.

 

By chance, among end-of-year birthday/Christmas giftbooks, I'd received John Vaillant's recent Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World. Reviewer Robert Macfarlane describes it as "a landmark in nonfiction reportage on the Anthropocene, or what Vaillant here calls 'the Petrocene'—that epoch defined primarily by humanly enhanced combustion." In a recent book of my own, I'd tried to replace the familiar term 'Holocene' with the more appropriate 'Anthropocene' but Fire Weather soon convinced me that 'Petrocene' should be the more accurate term. I quickly became deeply immersed in the book.

 

For me, Fire Weather was a long read: 359 pages of text in small print in three parts, with nearly fifty additional pages of Notes and Bibliography. The narrative's primary setting is Fort McMurray, a once thriving oil industry community in Alberta Province, due north of Montana between British Columbia and Saskatchewan, In May 2015 a tremendous fire devastated the area, sweeping over a vast portion of Alberta and some of Saskatchewan for several days. Vaillant sets up the background of the oil industry there in Part One, provides a deeply detailed account of the fires throughout Part Two, and in Part Three gives us an expansive overview of the future the oil industry and Canada's climate will have to face. I confess I was alarmed throughout the book's first two sections, continually in suspense over the fire's expanding growth and consequences, and then, in the third section, constantly distressed over implications regarding the future we all face because of the approach to climate that we've been engineering throughout the Anthropocene Epoch we're living in.

 

In the past, I suspect, most of us who decided to read about some calamity or another tended to approach the event as something occurring distantly, something one-of-a-kind, notable for its power and its scale but essentially remote from the rest of the world—from the daily living most of us experience. Vaillant acknowledges that, until recently, such stories were seen "as glimpses of a frightening and aberrant event outside normal time, in a place safely far away." He now suggests that they were—and are—"in fact . . . messages from the near future and from very close to home" and asserts that "extraordinary changes have taken place across the entire climate file": atmosphere, energy, forestry, and especially "fire itself". He reports that "a host of states and countries"—he specifically names 32 places from South Africa to North America, from Europe to Australia—where people would find themselves living in a landscape susceptible to fire. "Since 2016, even places we never considered capable of burning"—he mentions the Arctic, the Amazon, the moors of Britain, Notre-Dame Cathedral, Boulder, Colorado—have caught fire and burned.

 

Reporting on the history of the "kind of disruption" occurring "in the context of drought and rainfall," Vaillant informs us that it is "now referred to as a 'phase shift': a dramatic, effectively irreversible change in a region's climate regime. There is abundant evidence that phase shifts are now under way across much of the planet." The example of fire behavior he offers comes from California: "in the 1950s, the state's fire season lasted about four months; today, it is effectively year-round, and the acreage burned during the most severe seasons (1950 versus 2020) has increased eightfold (to say nothing of lives and property lost)." "In New Mexico," he adds, "fire weather days have increased by 120 percent since 1973." His book was published before the January 2025 fires in California.

 

The most discouraging aspect of fire's increasing presence and possibility is that, from a historical perspective, there was a time when fire at such a scale did not take place and only the intervention of human industry and the exploitation of natural resources have brought us to a time in history when reversing the climate change that we persist in keeping in motion may be impossible. Even if we stopped the relentless development of industry, we've likely gone too far to change its potential impact. The Anthropocene, the period of Earth history overwhelmed by human exploitation of natural resources, has probably actually become the Petrocene; the chemical impact on the climate everywhere has overwhelmed the period when people had charge and could have made better choices. In America, as confirmation, the current president has vowed to concentrate on industry and has thoroughly dismissed climatology.

 

Despite how troubled I am by what it portends, Fire Weather is a book everyone should read. As my grandchildren set out into the world of grownups—one will graduate from university this year, one will become a college sophomore, one become a freshman in the fall—I try not to cast my imagination too often into the future of the world they—and their children and their grandchildren—will be living in. For a while still, that's where, attentively, I'll be also be living.

 

Notes:

O'Connor, M. R., "Line of Fire," The New Yorker February 3, 2025: 12-16. An Annals of Disaster essay.

 

Vaillant, John. Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2024: 252, 354-355.

 

 

 

Recent family events have made me relentlessly aware of time's passage. In Illinois one Sunday we gathered with family and friends to recall our son-in-law's late father, hear brief comments from his children, and share unconcealed sorrow. Over the past two decades he and I had spent some time together at family events. Back in Wisconsin we heard reports about the declining health of my stepdaughter's grandmother in Michigan, who had been a widow for a decade or more, and within days, she too died. Granddaughter and her husband both wrestled with their own and with each another's grief.

 

That Sunday Sue and I left for Michigan's Leelanau Peninsula, crossing Lake Michigan by car ferry from Milwaukee to Muskegon. Over the past several years we had vacationed in Leland with Sue's siblings and their families and our Florida grandchildren and their parents. My wife and her siblings had grown up on the southern portion of that shoreline, the connection that had led to the annual northern outings in Leland. Sue's twin brother had spilled his wife's ashes into Lake Michigan there a few years earlier, as they had released their younger sister's ashes into the lake long before, and now his siblings, his children, and his grandchildren had gathered one last time to free his ashes there. This was likely a final physical visit to that past.

 

My brother-in-law had been in his late 70s. In recent years he had tended to his daughters and their daughters—all five between mid-teens and pre-school—and to his son and daughter-in-law. They all were close to him, their grief sincere and deep. I'd known him for forty-two years, but the youngest granddaughter had known him much more intimately. The dispersal of his ashes was a highly charged event.

 

Two days later we drove and sailed back home, each constantly reminded of family losses over our lifetimes. Memories resurfaced of past funerals and past burials and lost presences in our lives. I kept comparing the grief of the youngest granddaughters I'd witnessed on the lake with what I could remember of my own reactions to family losses.

 

My family has long been depleted. I have no memory of my father's mother, who died just after I turned five, but I do recall his father, who lived into my teens, and his siblings, whose families we visited annually—his older brother predeceased my father by many years, his younger sister outlived him by a decade and a half. My mother's family had mostly lived in the county we did, her father dying first, then my mother dying long before her mother, before my father, and before her three brothers. I knew my grandmother's siblings too and believe I spent some time with her parents and others in both generations, though my great-grandparents made little impression on me.

 

Some images arise as I write this—a farmhouse in the countryside with a woodstove in its center; a small church on a back-country road and my memory of attending a funeral there in a summer sportcoat and tie (undoubtedly tied by my clothing-salesman father); my mother's funeral, my grandmother's, my father's, my aunt's. I remember cousins, all younger than me, and know that in each family I'm related to by blood at least one cousin has died, sometimes two. There are later generations, of course, and thanks to Facebook I am often aware of those generations, can recognize them from their on-screen images, and vaguely know how my widowed aunts and step-grandmother are faring. We are now all widely scattered, and I physically see only my own children and grandchildren occasionally.

 

So, what am I doing here? The one constant in my existence—in everyone's—is the persistence of change across the passage of time. No matter who you are, no matter how interactive, how social, how engaged you might be with others, the heart of your circumstance is always solitary. The people who brought you into the world, the people who helped you adjust to living in it, the people you yourself brought into the world and the people they later brought into the world, the persons you may have partnered with throughout the passage of time—at base each and everyone of them is a single entity, a solitary being adjusting to who they are and to the constantly changing presence and/or absence of each entity they once interacted with.

 

Appreciating what you've gained across your time here is rewarding; accepting what you've lost is always challenging; recognizing the inevitability of losing everything you've gained, including yourself, is—eventually—unavoidable. Helping those who followed you to appreciate what they've gained and could still gain might help them better accept what they've lost when you and the generations before you are gone.

 

 

I was born and grew up in Lockport, New York, in the northwest corner of the state, a short distance from Lake Ontario and Lake Erie and Niagara Falls. The town is named for the locks built along the Erie Canal to aid shipping and boat travel across the state to the Hudson River. When my father sometimes on Sunday took my sister, my brother, and me to a newsstand and cigar store on Main Street, he would let us cross to the Big Bridge to look down on the locks in hopes someone would be using them to raise or lower a vessel from one level of the canal to another. On the far side there was a pathway that would let people descend to the locks for a closer view.

 

There are caves underneath Lockport. In childhood my friends found an opening in the wall across the towpath from the Locks, but none of us were brave enough to go deeply into it. We suspected it was man-made, not natural, and someone claimed rattlesnakes lived in it. Rattlesnakes were more believable than alligators under the Big Bridge, and we only peeked into it. Other caves were said to exist under streets elsewhere in town and someone tried to open one up for tourists. From what I now know about the formation of caves and sinkholes in the cuesta, I imagine the escarpment here has many hidden caves. One prominent and accessible cave near the canal is the site of the Lockport Caves Tour, its office above the canal, its entrance off the Erie Canal Heritage Trail. Some years ago, I took that tour.

 

At noon, Ken, our guide, led me and a dozen others to the top of the trail. We descended with intermittent pauses as he filled us in about the history of Lockport, the locks, and the canal. He was polished, knowledgeable, and entertaining, explaining that scenes in the movie Sharknado 2 were filmed in the Lockport Cave. Past the Locks and remnant stone wall ruins Ken unlocked the entrance door to a large lighted metal tube and then ushered us into a well-constructed, dimly lighted room that would lead us into the tunnel proper and the stone interior of the escarpment.

 

The New York State Legislature first authorized the construction of a tunnel on the north side of the canal in 1839, to provide waterpower for a mill. Eventually Birdsall Holly, an entrepreneur and hydraulic engineer, expanded the excavation into a 1600-foot-long downward sloping tunnel for hydromechanical power. He constructed a seven-story factory and devised a water distribution system giving firefighters a more powerful and effective way of fighting fires—ironically, one night a worker in the fire hydrants building knocked over a lantern and the factory burned down.

 

We passed through a stone arch doorway into a lower, narrower passage. The walls were rough and uneven and the lighting minimal. We carefully walked single file on a narrow gravel path alongside a continuous pool of water, pausing sometimes to consider the limestone walls. As in any limestone cave water seeps through the rock and forms small stalactites and traces of flowstone. Irish laborers worked eight years to complete the tunnel in tight, dark, enclosed underground space.

 

At the far end of the cave the tunnel floor was completely flooded. We boarded a long flat boat lined with benches to float deeper into the escarpment, almost up to the top end of the cave but not as far as the water channel went. In the dank semi-darkness, we sensed the weight of the dolostone strata above us and in the uneven walls understood the challenge of chipping away all that subterranean stone by hand. When we returned to the dock, everyone seemed relieved to be shown a nearby exit—we wouldn't have to retrace our footsteps back to where we started. Outside, in daylight, we started a steep climb up to the escarpment's edge. It felt good to be in the open.

 

These memories of the canal arose when I encountered recent online news items about that flat-bottomed tour boat capsizing in the tunnel, spilling out 29 passengers and drowning an older man by trapping him under the overturned boat for an hour. Rescue workers soon broke through a wall of the cave. Eleven passengers were taken to a hospital, several suffering from hypothermia, the worst injury a broken arm. Most could wade out. They were all event planners visiting the cave to consider possible tours. None had been required to wear life vests. It was the first such accident since the tourist attraction opened in the 1970s.

 

If I ever visit Lockport again, I'll likely stand above the locks inviting memory, though my sense of being deep in the cave may have altered.

Although I had enjoyed several of Ann Patchett's novels, I ignored her nonfiction, assuming This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage would simply be a cheerful memoir. But when, online, I happened upon "The Getaway Car," her essay about writing, tried to find a physical copy in my local library, and discovered it was available only in that essay collection I'd deliberately overlooked. I immediately checked out the book and have since renewed it four times. It's a good collection and "The Getaway Car" is a good, long article about writing, centered on her fiction ("consolidating the bulk of what I know about the work I do in one place") but applicable to creative nonfiction as well.

 

 "Every writer approaches writing in a different way," Patchett declares, contrasting approaches between "people who write in order to find out where the story goes" ("if they know the ending of the book there would be no point in writing it)" and people, including herself, "who map out everything in advance," (like John Irving, who "can't start writing his books until he thinks up the last sentence"). I haven't written fiction for decades, but I identify more with her first group than with the group she identifies with. I usually have the urge to write about something but need to write about it to discover why I want to write about it.

 

Asserting that "to get to the art you must master the craft," she advises, "If you want to write, practice writing." She believes, "I get better at closing the gap between my hand and my head by clocking in the hours, stacking up the pages." She emphasizes self-forgiveness as key: "I can't write the book I want to write, but I can and will write the book I am capable of writing. Again and again throughout the course of my life I will forgive myself." When people ask her if writing can be taught, she claims, "I can teach you how to write a better sentence, how to write dialogue, maybe even how to construct a plot. But I can't teach you how to have something to say." Her observation reminds me of the challenge in teaching writing to students. Textbooks often center on grammatical correctness or, in subject matter courses, on approved interpretations of subject matter, both easier to evaluate than comprehension and individual understanding. Sounding like you know what you're talking about is different from actually having something to say.

 

Patchett also suggests that the influence of reading other writers is often unpredictable, because a particular work can somehow impact you "in moments when you are especially open." She was influenced by Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain and Saul Bellow's Humboldt's Gift, reminding me of how idiosyncratic responses to writing usually are. I remember college professors who completely dismissed writers I found inspiring, like Kurt Vonnegut, Wallace Stegner, and Ivan Doig. Feeling her two years at the University of Iowa (where I spent six years) was "an imperfect experience," she claims, "An essential element of being a writer is learning whom to listen to and whom to ignore where your work is concerned." (Once, in William deBuys' writing course, I listened to a discussion of one of my drafts and remember feeling only one classmate had actually read it. I followed her advice and ignored other remarks.)

 

Patchett's advice about writing fiction usually draws on experience. One example: "If you decide to work completely from your imagination, you will find yourself shocked by all the autobiographical elements that make their way into the text. If, on the other hand, you go the path of the roman à clef, you'll wind up changing the details of your life that are dull." Another example: "ranking everything in my life that needs doing," writing fiction always number one, then zooming through "a whole host of unpleasant tasks to avoid item number one." (I've operated that way myself.) She also recommends "picking an amount of time to sit your desk every day. . . without distraction: no phone, no Internet, no books. . .. Sooner or later, you will write because you will no longer be able to stand not writing, or" you'll give up altogether.

 

 "If I'm writing a book," Patchett claims, "I'm racing to be finished; if I'm finished, I feel aimless and wish that I were writing a book." One January, daily for thirty-one days, she spent at least one hour composing and usually wrote for more than an hour. When it produced "some of the best writing I'd done in a long time," she continued through the year. She concludes, "Writing is a miserable, awful business. Stay with it. It is better than anything in the world." She's right. I really ought to follow Ann Patchett's example.

 

 

Finding a recent essay by Terry Tempest Williams online in The New York Times' opinion section, I not only copied it—in case I can't find it again on the Internet or in my public library—but also browsed the collection of her books in my study. I'd begun reading her among other western nature writers—memoirists and essayists modeling how to engage terrain unfamiliar to a Great Lakes boy like me—when I served two weeks as an artist-in-residence at Rocky Mountain National Park and later attended writing workshops in Montana and Idaho. Like Gretel Ehrlich, Kim Barnes, and Reg Saner, Terry Tempest Williams became one of the most reliable western writers I continually sought.

 

The first book of hers I read was Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place, a multi-faceted book, thoroughly informative about the history and climate of Great Salt Lake. Williams grew up near Salt Lake City, her Mormon family residing there for generations. When she wrote Refuge, she was partly concerned about the effect of nuclear testing on people in Utah. Her closing chapter, "The Clan of One-Breasted Women," deals with health issues—including cancer and death—due to radiation. A parallel narrative running throughout, ostensibly centered on birds, focuses on her mother's death. It's both a significant family memoir and a powerful narrative of place.

 

In the thirty years since Refuge appeared, Williams has published a number of books I considered essential reading. For example, The Hour of Land: A Personal Topography of America's National Parks takes her to twelve different parks. To each she brings her own individual perspective. I've visited eight of them, a couple for the first time after reading her book. Erosion: Essays of Undoing, grounded in landscape, is one of her more forthright argumentative collections, examining issues of place that call for remedying.

 

In Spring 2017, while teaching graduate writing at Ashland University, I assigned students to read Williams' Leap and respond online to each other's reviews of it. It generated a lively discussion among my students about her reflections on Hieronymous Bosch's triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights (El Jardín de las Delicias). Williams had visited the painting at the Prado in Spain several times, her reaction to it initiated by having reproductions of the two end panels depicting Paradise and Hell posted above her childhood bed while the central panel displaying a garden of earthly delights was deliberately kept hidden. Leap follows Williams into that central panel at considerable imaginative length, reflecting on its Christian commentary and her Mormon education. I found it to be a powerful book on every level and my students' readings of it were rich and insightful.

 

Williams' New York Times opinion piece, "I Am Haunted by What I Have Seen at Great Salt Lake," is an intense essay. Describing her visit to Great Salt Lake with the photographer Fazal Sheikh to examine drought conditions that had lowered the lake, she mentions how construction had divided the lake into north and south arms and cut off the flow between them, which "could be a terminal decision for a terminal lake." Images supported information about the shrinkage of six major salt lakes around the world, illustrating how Great Salt Lake, once 100% full in 1872, has declined to 29% in 2023, having "lost almost two-thirds of its total volume since 1985" due to industrialization and agricultural consumption. "Two-thirds of the natural flow going into the lake is currently being diverted: 80 percent of that diversion by agriculture, 10 percent by industries and 10 percent by municipalities." Politicians claim melting snowpack will replenish the lake, but Williams points out that "very little if any of that runoff will find its way" there and that "one high water year does not solve decades of overconsumption."

 

The Utah Division of Wildlife Resources reports that "[b]ecause the Great Salt Lake is terminal (i.e., with no water outlet), large amounts of minerals have built up in the lakebed, including heavy metals such as lead, mercury and arsenic." Lakebed exposure allows dust particles to enter the air and "pose a significant concern to public health." Williams identifies several: "cardiovascular events from strokes to heart attacks to respiratory diseases such as asthma, pneumonia and lung cancer." She emphasizes: "The laws of nature do not negotiate with generations of abusive behavior. Our needs are overtaking the needs of Great Salt Lake at our own peril."

 

Reading Terry Tempest Williams' reliably observant books, you come away feeling as enriched as if you yourself have been to the place she's recreated on the page. Especially with her Great Salt Lake books, you become aware of the effects of the passage of time not only on her thoughtful perspective but also, memorably, on your own sense of place. It haunts you.

 

 

Notes:

 

Hieronymus Bosch, "The Garden of Earthly Delights"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Garden_of_Earthly_Delights

 

Terry Tempest Williams, "Opinion: I Am Haunted by What I Have Seen at Great Salt Lake". Photographs by Fazal Sheikh. The New York Times, March 25, 2023: 25.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/25/opinion/great-salt-lake-drought-utah-climate-change.html

 

Nathan Rott, "More than half of the world's largest lakes are shrinking. Here's why that matters." NPR, May 20, 2023: 5:30 AM.
https://www.npr.org/2023/05/20/1177221645/more-than-half-of-the-worlds-largest-lakes-are-shrinking-heres-why-that-matters

 

Utah Division of Wildlife Resources. "Great Salt Lake water levels," April 13, 2023. https://wildlife.utah.gov/gslep/about/water-levels.html

 

 

Somehow Bill Bryson's early book The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America, published over thirty years ago, showed up on my Kindle, apparently unread. I'd read some of his other travel memoirs, like A Walk in the Woods, but I couldn't remember uploading this one and started reading it. Bryson, then long resident in Great Britain, recounts touring parts of the United States that he'd visited in his youth, traveling south from Iowa through states east of the Mississippi and then north through states on the Atlantic coast. His recollections of family trips with parents and siblings sparked vague memories in me, and eventually mention of specific sites made me recall my own travels in them as a teenager. Those memories ended up being more vivid than what I was reading,

 

I grew up near Niagara Falls. In the summer of 1955, my traveling salesman father and I drove through central New York and Pennsylvania bound for Washington, DC, the southern limit of his route for Lockport Mills. I wrote about those travels in a section of my family memoir, Happenstance, where episodes about my parents' divorce and its aftermath alternate with episodes about being a 13-year-old alone on the road with my father for a week. Our journey together was perhaps generated by someone thinking I needed either to get closer to him or get more distant from my home life. My memoir was published ten years ago; reading Bryson's account of his travels sent me back into my book and the memories recorded there.

 

My father wanted me to see monuments and historic sites in Washington and Philadelphia. I kept a travel journal of sorts, and later pasted many photographs, some postcards, and scribbles of identification in a cheap binder. We toured the White House and some of the Capitol. When we climbed the Washington Monument, I raced ahead up the staircase, occasionally waiting for Dad to catch up. We circled the tower, squeezed among tourists lining the railings, and in the distance saw the White House across the Ellipse, the Capitol past the Smithsonian, and the Lincoln Memorial off near the Potomac River. I thought the view inspiring. In the Smithsonian, gawking at Lindbergh's Spirit of St. Louis, the Wright Brothers' first plane, and objects from various presidents, I began to appreciate the preservation of historical objects. At both the Jefferson Memorial and the Lincoln Memorial, we stared at presidential statues and read some of the inscriptions on the walls.

 

We crossed the Potomac to visit Arlington National Cemetery and watched the changing of the guard at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. At the Memorial Amphitheatre Dad took the only photo of me on the trip, sitting in a stone chair in a very Lincolnesque pose. Remembering John Wayne's film, Sands of Iwo Jima, I snapped a picture of the U. S. Marine Memorial statue of soldiers raising the American flag on Mt. Suribachi. My father wandered around the statue—he and his brother had both fought there during World War II. He didn't mention whether the memorial affected him, although he'd visited it before. Books and movies influenced my sense of history a lot back then. When we toured Gettsyburg on our way back north—I'd read The Red Badge of Courage and seen the movie with Audie Murphy—I thought again about Iwo Jima.

 

In Philadelphia, after visiting Independence Hall, site of the Declaration of Independence and the original Constitution, Dad took me to the restored home of American flag seamstress Betsy Ross, to whom he believed we were distantly related—his mother, born Delia Lathrop Ross, was always called Betsy. Then we wound our way into an affluent suburban neighborhood, where his cousin—son of an older brother of my grandfather—and his family lived, all of them lively and gracious. We spent the night, extending my awareness of my father's side of the family, which I rarely encountered, and I couldn't help comparing their lifestyle to my family's circumstances.

 

In the morning Dad drove through rows of brownstone row houses, pointing out the architecture, but soon moved into downtown Philly, through narrow, cramped, littered city streets in heavy traffic, unnervingly crowded with jaywalkers and a ghetto population. On one busy street corner, an old black man staggered to the curb and pissed into the gutter, people constantly bustling around him. I thought later that driving down that street might have been my father's way of broadening my awareness of the world, making me compare his cousin's prosperous community with the abundant urban squalor here. I doubt that he pointed out the differences, but the contrast stayed with me. Cultural history, family history, personal history. The past I enjoyed touring. The present I needed to recognize as where I really lived.

 

 

Notes: Bryson, Bill. The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America. New York: Harper & Row, 1989.

 

Root, Robert. Happenstance. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2013.

 

 

Expecting to read aloud from Walking Home Ground soon, I re-familiarize myself with it and notice connections to what I've posted online since it was published. The work came together slowly, first as personal journal entries before expanding into a book manuscript. I read the Wisconsin writing of John Muir, Aldo Leopold, and August Derleth, walked where they'd walked and journaled about it, and reread Thoreau, as all those writers had done. Eventually, the manuscript followed the trajectory of those influences, from Thoreau to me, quoting them abundantly.

 

Those writers celebrated their time in nature. Thoreau expressed alarm at thinking of work while he walked in the woods: "In my walks I would fain return to my senses. What business have I in the woods, if I am thinking of something out of the woods?" Muir exuberantly described arriving at his new home as "This sudden plash into pure wildness—baptism in Nature's warm heart" and recorded seeing passenger pigeons "flowing over from horizon to horizon in an almost continuous stream all day long, like a mighty river in the sky." Leopold wondered, while "watching the green fire die in a wolf's eyes," about "Thoreau's dictum: In wildness is the preservation of the world." Derleth told how "long walks into the countryside around Sac Prairie disclosed it as nothing else could have done," listing sightings of whippoorwills, woodcocks, "blue racers in the ecstasy of mating," and more. Readers experience natural surroundings deeply in these works.

 

I completed and published Walking Home Ground roughly six years ago. Since then, I've read more recent, truly terrific nature books, like Robin Wall Kimmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass, Suzanne Simard's Finding the Mother Tree, Elizabeth Kolbert's The Sixth Extinction, Barbara Hurd's The Epilogues, Leila Philip's Beaverland, and Ed Yong's An Immense World, all solidly literary and ecologically learned. They tell me things that enrich my understanding of the way the elements of the world we live in work. I gain a deeper understanding of unique qualities of whatever life form or locale they focused on, all far more complicated in their existence than we once knew. They also reveal troubling knowledge about their futures on our planet—as well the future of our species. The nature books of the 21st Century provide urgent warnings and dire speculations about the direction the creatures and creations on the planet are heading.

 

Reviewing my observations about writers walking their home grounds, I feel unsettled by not having stressed implications for the future in what they examined. In The Story of My Boyhood and Youth, Muir was disturbed by the changes wrought in the landscape, prairie and savanna turned into farmland, the health of the environment endangered. Unable to convince new owners to preserve Fountain Lake, his awareness of what could be lost in the natural world sent him exploring and recording as much as he could.

 

Muir saw things as they were and tried to preserve them; Leopold saw things as they had become and tried to restore them. In A Sand County Almanac, he wrote of his own efforts at the Shack: "On this sand farm in Wisconsin, first worn out and then abandoned by our bigger and better society, we try to rebuild, by shovel and ax, what we are losing elsewhere." Time and change are a constant awareness in Leopold's writing; the elegiac is always an undercurrent in what he writes, as well as a sharp observant presence. The monument to the extinct passenger pigeon "commemorates the funeral of a species," he reflected, "Men still live who, in their youth, remember pigeons. Trees still live who, in their youth, were shaken by a living wind. But a decade hence only the oldest oaks will remember, and at long last only the hills will know. To love what was is a new thing under the sun, unknown to most people and to all pigeons."

 

In Return to Walden West, Derleth recognized the changes occurring in his familiar landscape, and sought solace there. "I never found that nature failed me," he wrote. "While the condition of man on his planet slowly worsens, the pattern of the seasons changes not at all, however much nature's aspects reflect the damage wrought by man in his avarice and his devotion to false, unnatural values." He laments the "unceasing change" of the social world, the way most people

"never see themselves as integral to nature." He ends his Sac Prairie nonfiction series with a mixture of resignation and acceptance, letting him come to terms with his experience walking his home ground.

 

Retreat and withdrawal seem acceptable, even justified in those earlier nature writers; broader knowledge and deeper understanding are vitally convincing and necessary in the current ones. They are also disturbing if we're actually learning vital truths too late.