Robert Root

I just completed a rare combination, at least for me, of reading and viewing. I read Where Bigfoot Walks: Crossing the Dark Divide by Robert Michael Pyle, an updated 2017 edition of his original 1995 book. Then I viewed The Dark Divide, a film based on Pyle's book starring David Cross as Pyle and Debra Messing as Pyle's wife Thea. A short promotional video included scenes from the trailer, interviews with Pyle, Cross, and director Thomas Putnam and occasional mention of Bigfoot. The book is a series of chapters about Pyle's travels in Bigfoot terrain, his research, and his conversations with people who wrote, both pro and con, about Bigfoot's existence. Pyle isn't totally convinced but, especially in additional material for the new edition, tends to lean that way. A respected lepidopterist, he also writes authoritatively about butterflies, moths, wildlife, and terrain. His scientific observations often deflect his attention from narrative. The book is less a nature memoir than a blend of informative reflection interspersed with trail observations.

Pyle as a writer was not unknown to me. Years ago, living near Denver, I discovered The Thunder Tree: Lessons from an Urban Wildland, his 1993 nature memoir about the High Line Canal in Colorado, near where he grew up. Because I'd grown up near the Erie Canal in western New York, I was curious about parallels we perhaps shared in our youth and also eager to learn about unfamiliar western terrain. Recently, a joint online presentation of Pyle with Scott Russell Sanders led me first to his Nature Matrix: New and Selected Essays and then, somehow, to both the Bigfoot book and the movie.

Curiosity about the film made me read the book first. It's not often that a nature book gets dramatized into a story film. The Dark Divide is not a documentary; it doesn't play like an episode of Nova or Nature or other PBS programs. A trailer I'd seen convinced me it was filmed in the Pacific Northwest and offered a thorough sense of the terrain Pyle traveled through to research his book. The movie's title was taken from the subtitle of the book; viewers shouldn't expect close encounters of the Sasquatch kind. Spoiler alert: A single muddy footprint is the only sign of Bigfoot in the film. Pyle is sometimes alarmed by vague sounds, but no hairy giants emerge from the forest.

Though ostensibly set in 1995, the film was created decades later. In that 27-year-long-gap between them, the personal changes in the lives of the main characters altered the interpretation of Pyle's experiences in the Gifford Pinchot National Forest. In the book Thea Pyle has a minor but useful role as a backup figure in her husband's travel plans, but she died in 2013, twenty years after it was published; in the film, she is introduced as suffering from cancer and Pyle is presented as hesitant to leave her to head into the wilderness to hunt for lepidoptera. Only after her death does he set out, haunted by her earlier urging. The film presents Pyle as someone psychologically unprepared for wilderness wandering; Cross plays him as often confused or clumsy or uncertain, while the Pyle who narrates the book is assured and reliable and confident as both scientist and outdoorsman.

The film is dedicated to Thea and the credits mention drawing material from Pyle's other books. These alterations in the life facts surrounding the book affect our understanding of the film as an adaption of it. The film is largely the story of one man's expedition into unfamiliar terrain in the wake of tremendous loss, responding belatedly to the encouragement his dying wife gave him while they were still together. His experiences are alternately comical, arduous, harrowing, and healing. He comes through them as a man altered in his sense of himself. The Dark Divide is an actual portion of the landscape in the Cascade Mountains of Washington State, but metaphorically it suggests the descent into grief and ascent into recovery. The visual elements of the film reinforce that distinction sequentially—at one point, Pyle clambers through a long underground passage, finds pictographs on cave walls, and weeps in the darkness before emerging. He is a stronger individual by the end of his trek.

I'm quite fond of both Where Bigfoot Walks and The Dark Divide, but I'm not inclined to recommend reading and viewing them sequentially or even close together. They don't reinforce one another as perhaps a production of a Shakespearean play might validate a previous reading of it. Instead, together they make us aware of the demands each genre makes on the way it presents its material. That's not a criticism; it's an explanation.

An invitation to visit Diane Freedman's advanced undergraduate course titled "Cabin in the Woods," online at the University of New Hampshire, sent me searching for my writings about place. I'm to share some writing and some personal reflections centered on "the reality/idea of a cabin" and discuss what influence it might have had on my writing and thinking. Students will read Walden and investigate other works that offer variations on Thoreau's example or openly acknowledge his influence. The course description mentions such writers as Annie Dillard, May Sarton, Bernd Heinrich, Henry Beston, John Haines, Sue Hubbell, Anne LaBastille, Tom Montgomery Fate, and E. B. White, most of whom mention Thoreau's presence in their writing. I've made pilgrimages (of a sort) to some of the places explored in their books—the sea has swept away the site of Beston's The Outermost House, Thoreau's demolished cabin exists only in reproduction, and White's shack on the Maine coast can barely be seen from a distance—and walking the land where they and such Thoreauvian writers as John Muir, Aldo Leopold, and August Derleth have walked has invigorated and inspired me. I've even been inside Leopold's shack.

Once, on sabbatical, I spent a week at Great Pond in Maine where E. B. White so often vacationed throughout his life, the inspiration for his great essay "Once More to the Lake." The following week, carrying a copy of White's essay about Walden, I stayed in Concord, strolling around Walden Pond, walking through the cemetery where Thoreau and Emerson are buried, steeping myself in the atmosphere of place. The essay my pilgrimage inspired, "The Everlastingly Great Look of the Sky," retraces White's visit and records my own, both deeply aware of Thoreau's sojourn there. I reread it recently, realizing how much more writing in place I did in the wake of that research trip.

I'd already written about my time in a cabin in the woods a decade earlier. In the summer of 1993, I lived for two weeks on Scoville Point, the end of a narrow peninsula on the northeast side of Isle Royale National Park, where I hoped to get to know the island in the way the diarist Ruth Douglass experienced it in 1848-1849. It was my first time as an artist-in-residence at a national park. I hiked and canoed on my own for one week and then my wife and I hiked and canoed together the second week. I remember how silent we were driving away from Lake Superior at the end of the residency, not eager to return to the frantic world where we usually lived.

That first park residency prompted me to apply for others. During one summer in Colorado, in the midst of researching and writing about Isabella Bird's time there in 1873, I lived for two weeks in a very comfortable cabin in Rocky Mountain National Park, once owned in the early 20th century by the Kansas newspaper editor William Allen White. It gave me ready access to forest trails and mountain tops, with coyotes and mule deer and elks and cottontails and golden-mantled squirrels, magpies and hummingbirds and green-tailed towhees for occasional neighbors. In time I would climb 14,259-foot-high Longs Peak. It was exhilarating to think of myself as an inhabitant of that park, to wake each morning and see the mountains waiting for me across the flatlands below the cabin.

Two years later, no doubt inspired by reading both White and Thoreau, my final residency took me to Acadia National Park, on the coast of Maine, encompassing Mount Desert Island, Schoodic Point on the mainland, and Isle au Haut, the furthest island offshore. Over days of wandering coastal shorelines, climbing up rocky bluffs, summiting open-topped mountains, sometimes sitting on a cobblestone beach until rising tides reminded me to find higher ground, my immersion was continually rewarding. The park rangers let me stay for one night in a cabin on Isle au Haut and I envied them their opportunities to occupy it longer.

In my short virtual visit to that course, I may be asked to answer that question about what a cabin in the woods might represent for my writing life and mind. I'll need to revisit my earlier writing, find those envelopes filled with AiR photos, skim the daybooks and journals I kept, try to relive my nights in those cabins and my days wandering beyond them. I may also have to read Walden once more. Even though I've already dog-earred very many of his pages, I'm certain Thoreau will remind me again how much I still need to write about place.

Notes: "The Pattern of Life Indelible," "The Everlastingly Great Look of the Sky," "Terra Cognita," and "Time and Tide" are in Postscripts: Retrospections on Time and Place. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2012: 27-44, 45-67, 149-177. They can also be found online:

"The Everlastingly Great Look of the Sky: Thoreau and E. B. White at Walden Pond," The Concord Saunterer New Series. 12/13 (2004/2005): 370-387.

"The Pattern of Life Indelible," Ecotone: Reimagining Place 1:2 (Winter/Spring 2006): 152-167.

"Terra Cognita" and "Time and Tide." Acadia National Park Artist-in-Residence Online Catalog.

"Time and Tide," Ascent, 2010, http://www.readthebestwriting.com/time-and-tide-robert-root/

(Broadcast on WCMU-FM Morning Edition Fall 1984)

Everybody wants to be Thoreau. That is, the best of our modern essayists and nature writers have imbibed the spirit of the author of Walden along with their taste for outdoor air, and he continually haunts their perceptions of the world and their judgments about their own and others' work.

Pre-eminent among them is E. B. White, who, describing his retreat from hectic New York City life to an idyllic Maine saltwater farm, wrote his own Walden in One Man's Meat. Throughout his career White continually felt Thoreau's presence at his shoulder, declaring, "I should hate to be called a Thoreauvian, yet I wince every time I walk into the barn I'm pushing before me, seventy-five feet by forty, and the author of Walden has served as the conscience of my trivial days." Time and again White used Thoreau as the measure of conscience and of observation, writing that, "I'd like to stroll about the countryside in Thoreau's company for a day, observing the modern scene . . . and offering belated apologies for my sins." He wryly observed that "Thoreau is unique among writers in that those who admire him find him uncomfortable to live with—a regular hairshirt of a man."

Other writers find him equally omnipresent. In The Survival of the Bark Canoe John McPhee discovers that everyone canoeing the Allagash River with him has virtually memorized Thoreau's The Maine Woods, discussing around the campfire Henry's accuracy and the Allagash's changes. Thoreau is the ghostly passenger in each canoe, somehow an essential element of the forest and the river.

But he doesn't only haunt the locales of his life—Concord and Cape Cod and Maine; his spirit travels wherever literate people wander the wilderness. Edward Abbey, whose Desert Solitaire is a Walden of the American southwest, writes of reading Thoreau while rafting the Colorado. Trying to discover support for his own perceptions, Abbey most often turns to Thoreau. In Beyond the Wall he writes that "sentiment without action is the ruin of the soul," and then adds, "Or as an old friend of mine once said, 'If I regret anything it is my good behavior. What demon possessed me that I behaved so well?'"

Such writers not only see themselves in Henry's terms but judge each other by measuring their integrity and insight against Thoreau's. Larry McMurty calls Edward Abbey "the Thoreau of the American West," and Edward Hoagland writes of Abbey that "like Thoreau, he is at times ornery and subversive in thrust, undeterred by the tastemakers of his own day, a man still 'with the bark on.'" The Washington Post identifies Hoagland as "the Thoreau of our time," and the American Academy of Arts and Letters claims that Hoagland's voice sounds "like Thoreau's, the sharp note of man's independence." Scott Elledge says of E. B. White that, "early on, he knew, like Thoreau, that contemplation was a form of creativity."

All this sense of Thoreau's ghostly presence in modern creative life, all this measuring of modern accomplishments against Thoreau's model, should make us suspect that something in his life and work still speaks with vitality and force to fundamental, universal issues. E. B. White called Walden "a document of increasing pertinence" and Edward Abbey wrote, "Thoreau becomes more significant with each passing decade. The deeper and faster our United States hurl themselves into industrialism, urbanism, militarism and authoritarianism—with the rest of the world doing its best to emulate America—the more poignant, strong and appealing becomes Thoreau's demand for the right of every man, every woman, every child, every dog, every tree, every snail darter, every lousewort, every living thing, to live its life in its own way at its own pace in its own square mile."

As we turn with delight and pleasure to the writing of our modern day Thoreaus, we might do well to occasionally return to the source, just as they do.

Note: Thoreau's influence continues—

Fate, Tom Montgomery. Cabin Fever: A Suburban Father's Search for the Wild (2012)

Gessner, David. Quiet Desperation, Savage Delight: Sheltering with Thoreau in the Age of Crisis (2021)

Gessner, David. A Wild, Rank Place: One Year on Cape Cod (1997)

LaBastille, Annie. Woodswoman: Living Alone in the Adirondack Wilderness (1976)

Mitchell, John Hanson. Living at the End of Time: Two Years in a Tiny House (1990)

Mitchell, John Hanson. Walking Toward Walden: A Pilgrimage in Search of Place (1995)

Sanders, Scott Russell. "The Infinite Extent of Our Relations" in The Way of Imagination: Essays (Berkeley: Counterpoint Press, 2020: 71-86). Originally published as "Hooks Baited with Darkness" in Daedalus, 143:1 (Winter 2014): 115-122.

I'm curious about the effects writing can have on readers, certain that what we react to in literature arises from our own personalities, the experiences we've had, our memories of people we've known and events we've lived through. Talking to people about books you and they have read or films or plays you and they have seen you often sense that they read something other than what you read or witnessed a different performance even though they sat right next to you when you witnessed it. I remember, years ago, seeing An Unmarried Woman with faculty friends and hearing reactions that varied widely among the happily married couple, the divorcees in a second marriage, the troubled married couple, and the never-married bachelor.

Over the years I've gravitated toward writers who eventually revealed their admiration for the same earlier writers. One such writer is Scott Russell Sanders, who examines his relationship with Henry David Thoreau in "The Infinite Extent of Our Relations," an essay collected in The Way of Imagination. It's a significant study of the effect an individual book may have on a younger writer's development of over the course of his career.

Sanders tells us that he first read Walden at seventeen, "at the urging of a high school teacher who sensed that my adolescent mind, brimming with questions, would benefit from grappling with a truly radical thinker." He admits, "Much of the book baffled me." Because Sanders' country upbringing was among "thrifty, resourceful people," he appreciated "Thoreau's effort to provide some of the necessities of life with his own hands"—the physical labor constructing his cabin, chopping firewood, fetching pond water, and hoeing beans—but he didn't understand Thoreau's taking "pains to distinguish between the necessities of life and the luxuries, between enough and too much." He was excited by "Thoreau's desire to lead a meaningful life" and thrilled by his effort to explain what he lived for. His high school teacher was certainly right about Sanders' "adolescent mind, brimming with questions." He too imagined life having "a purpose beyond mere survival and the passing on of genes, beyond piling up possessions, beyond auditioning for paradise"—(what a great phrase)—but he didn't know what its purpose might be.

He quotes Thoreau's best-known passage: "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary." That first reading of Walden encouraged Sanders to emulate "Thoreau's determination to observe and enjoy the marvels of Earth, to be fully awake and alive, right here, right now."

In the interval since that first reading, "fifty years and many rereadings later," Sanders acknowledges that Walden has become both "less bewildering, since I have made my share of difficult choices and suffered my share of losses, and also more challenging, since I have come to recognize more clearly my own limitations as well as those of the book." He recognizes that both he and Thoreau moved beyond Walden in their lives and their writing but acknowledges that the first reading was a formative experience for him and that "the example of Thoreau's life and the challenge of his thought remain potent influences for me, as they have been potent influences for generations of readers." Considering the age in which we live, the kinds of lifestyles that multitudes of us have acquiesced to almost automatically, he asserts that "we need more than ever to ask the questions posed in Walden": What is life for? What are the necessities of a good life? What is our place in nature? How should we spend our days? These are vital questions.

The broader assertion Sanders makes in the essay is this: "Great books read us as surely as we read them, revealing by the aspects of our character and personal history they illuminate, who we are." He confesses telling his students that, even if Walden doesn't speak to their condition, other books will—they will, in essence, read them, reveal who they are. Who we are is not always something we know well and he hopes that, whatever the book may be, it will be "giving voice to what you have felt but have not been able to say, asking your deeper questions, stirring you to more intense life." It's what reading Thoreau did for him and what it's done for a good many other readers, myself among them.

Note: "The Infinite Extent of Our Relations" in The Way of Imagination: Essays (Berkeley: Counterpoint Press, 2020: 71-86), was originally published as "Hooks Baited with Darkness" in Daedalus, 143:1 (Winter 2014): 115-122. Downloadable at https://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DAED_a_00260