Robert Root

 

I'd published two editions of a textbook titled Wordsmithery, so when I saw a photo of a typewriter in a catalogue touting innovation and read its label—The Wordsmith's Manual Typewriter—I had to learn how a typewriter might be specifically designed for a wordsmith. I read the description slowly once, then read it more slowly a second time.

 

The ad claimed that the manual typewriter (as opposed, perhaps, to the word processor, electric typewriter, ball point pen, or quill) "recalls the thoughtful, well-written correspondence" (as opposed, say, to essay, memoir, novel, novella, poem, play, or song lyric) "of yesteryear"—a flagrant bit of misdirection. Like ads showing such authors as Hemingway, Steinbeck, Orwell, and Plath with fingers poised above a typewriter keyboard, perhaps a cigarette dangling from their lips, their shirtsleeves rolled up and collar unbuttoned, as if unaware of the camera and the photographer, it was a tenuous link. ("This is a writer trying to look like a writer when he knows full well he is being photographed," E. B. White once wrote on a photograph of himself.)

 

The language felt tongue-in-cheek, wryly presenting liabilities as advantages, as when it referenced "the steady click-clacking cadence that encourages the patient, considered sentiment of a wordsmith who thinks before writing"—the way, say, writing in silence with a quill pen by candlelight never did. (If only Shakespeare, Dante, Cervantes, or Montaigne had typed!) A student of mine, eager to use a new typewriter and aware that "you can see tears in Plath's manuscript for Ariel because she punched the keys so hard," said she wanted to hear her own keys: "My apartment is quiet. It will be good to add those click click clicks." A week later, instead of "a click click click," she reported, "It makes a CLACK CLACK" and discouraged patient, considered sentiment.

 

I smiled at the claim that the machine "faithfully reproduces the eclectic [!?] printed impressions of its forebears" such as "variable kerning" (adjusting spaces between characters), "subtly ghosted letters" (creating shadows behind characters), "and nuanced baseline shifts" (uneven lines), thus "imparting unique, personal character to every letter or verse of poetry." Would readers really be charmed by the tendency of your letter "e" to stick and barely strike the paper or your "m" to smudge the spaces between the stems of the letter? Those features never charmed me.

 

The first typewriter I ever used was my mother's boxy black Royal. She must have shown me how to push the keys, spell out words in type, scroll in paper, advance the platen at the end of a line with the return lever. From the time, around the age of eight, that Bobby Hall and I spent an afternoon composing one-paragraph adventure stories on it, I was hooked on composing on the typewriter. I felt like a writer because my words were in typeface, just like the stories in books.

 

But it was slow work. I didn't give every key an equally "firm, purposeful stroke" and some letters were faint, others dark, almost smudged. If I misspelled words, I scrolled the paper up and erased the error, rubbing the page until it was sometimes transparent or worn through. The lines were often uneven after I scrolled the paper back to where I tried to replace a word. No matter how slowly I typed, forefinger by forefinger, clink, clunk, clack, it was frustrating never to have a single page error free, as in books. When I acquired them decades later, I never wished to be, once again, "devoid of technological crutches such as spell-check and deletion."

 

My parents found me substitutes for my mother's Royal: a Louis Marx toy typewriter on which to print a pretend newspaper, which I never did; a lightweight Smith-Corona portable, on which I wrote a 97-page novel in high school and all of my undergraduate college assignments. In graduate school, I bought a Smith-Corona Selectric, an electric typewriter with a rotating ball of type and a double ribbon with a second white ink strand to erase mistakes that let me throw out bottles of liquid White-Out. Leafing through my Selectric-produced dissertation, I felt that transcription technology and I had come as far as we would ever need to go.

 

I'm not tempted to purchase the Wordsmith's Manual Typewriter, but I remember my typewriters well. "Processing words" about them now on my laptop keyboard lets me almost reinhabit the boy who typed his adventure paragraphs on his mother's Royal, the teenager who clacked away at his novel on his portable, the grad student laboring at his dissertation on his Selectric. For better or for worse, each of them is still somewhere inside of me, prompted by the Wordsmith's Manual Typewriter to remind me that they haven't really gone away.

 

 

When you read certain kinds of books—essays and memoirs and ecological travel narratives, for example—a bonus might sometimes be extensions to the text that arise, perhaps personal memories of some sort, sometimes intimate, sometimes remote, but perhaps memories of other texts, setting off different reverberations.

 

That happened to me recently, reading New Yorker writer Elizabeth Kolbert's new book. I admired her earlier books, Field Notes for a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change (2006) and especially The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History (2014), a Pulitzer Prize winner that every intelligent person should read; it's a vital account of where we are and where we're heading. Some of the books I've read since were likely chosen in hopes of evoking what I felt in Kolbert's books.

 

At the moment I'm reading Under a White Sky: The Nature of The Future, once again impressed by the levels of information, intelligence, and expression she displays, but also startled to find myself stalling after the first section to pursue a path through other books that it called to mind. The section, titled "Down the River," focuses its first chapter on the Chicago end of the Mississippi and its second chapter—which triggered reverberations in my reading memory—on the Louisiana end.

 

For uncounted centuries the Mississippi River has found alternative routes to the Gulf of Mexico; for fewer centuries European-American immigrants to Louisiana have labored to thwart those alternatives. The Atchafalaya River to the west, running parallel to the Mississippi, could one day divert it entirely. When Kolbert focuses on the Atchafalaya in her second chapter, she remembers first reading about it in the opening section of The Control of Nature by John McPhee, which she calls "a classic piece" and "a morality tale of a darkly comic cast." Finishing her chapter, I went immediately to my bookshelves for McPhee's book, which I'd read some thirty years earlier.

 

"Atchafalaya," McPhee's long first section, explains the earliest geology and ecology of the lower Mississippi region and its history through French, British, and American occupation, particularly the tendency of the river to flood the lands around it, including the persistent city of New Orleans. Because of ever-rising levees surrounding it and the tendency of its land to subside, the city is now lower than the river. McPhee recounts flood after flood and futile efforts to counteract the possibilities of future floods. I remember being haunted by that book when I attended a conference in New Orleans and visited above-ground graves that they might one day sink or float away. Rereading McPhee revived many of those memories.

 

Earlier in that second chapter Kolbert flies over Plaquemines Parish, the southernmost tip of Louisiana. On a map, she writes, it "appears as a thick, muscular arm thrust into the Gulf of Mexico, with the river running, like a vein, down its center," but from the air, "What little land there is clings to the river in two skinny strips." The parish has the distinction, she claims, "of being among the fastest-disappearing places on earth." A map in the book distinguishes between locations underwater and locations above ground, a clear contrast with the online Google map. Kolbert visits Isle de Jean Charles, "fifty miles southwest of New Orleans and a few decades ahead of it," and explains why it is disappearing. Her account of it sends me back to my bookcase for another book, published around the time when an earlier version of Kolbert's chapter appeared in The New Yorker.

 

In Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore, Elizabeth Rush walks a narrow, single-lane road on "the highest and most stubborn spine of land" out onto Isle de Jean Charles, now "two miles long and a quarter mile wide" but once ten times larger less only fifty years earlier. It's a vivid and unnerving stretch of narrative. Kolbert blurbed the book, asserting that, "Sea level rise is not some distant problem in some distant place" and crediting Rush with having written "a compelling piece of reporting, by turns bleak and beautiful." My review of the book quoted Rush's contention that "our particular brand of western knowledge has lulled us into thinking that we are separate from nature," and argued that her "travels along the new American shore confirm that we're not separate at all."

 

Conditions are worse for the Louisiana Coast in Kolbert's viewing than in McPhee's reporting thirty years earlier. Climate change, rising seas and land subsidence continue, as will futile efforts to control nature along the Mississippi River. Returning now to later chapters in Under a White Sky, I'll follow Kolbert to the Mojave Desert and Iceland and Australia. I'll learn a lot, I know, but I also wonder what further reverberations she'll set off in my reading memory.

 

Notes:

 

Kolbert, Elizabeth. Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future. NY: Crown, 2021.

 

McPhee, John. "Atchafalaya," The Control of Nature, NY: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1989; 3-92.

 

Root, Robert. Review, "Keeping Connected to the Natural World," River Teeth: A Journal of Nonfiction Narrative. Reviews of Lab Girl by Hope Jahren and Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore by Elizabeth Rush

 

Rush, Elizabeth. Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore. Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2019.

 

 

In her afterword to her new book Gretel Ehrlich tells us, "The writing of Unsolaced began in the spring of 2017 as a bookend to The Solace of Open Spaces, which was published in 1984. The fuel for writing Solace had come from the loss of a loved one and the discovery that my heart's home would always be Wyoming, a home on the range for a wanderer. Little did I realize that as I finished this new book, another similar kind of loss was at hand." As a bookend, Unsolaced: Along the Way to All That Is gives us a powerful perspective on the writing that came between the two books and also on the landscapes she traveled over nearly four decades. She doesn't say much about that potential similar loss but having alluded to her husband's brain cancer, anyone who has read her earlier book senses what she's feeling.

 

I read The Solace of Open Spaces, her first collection of essays, and each of her subsequent books about place as they were published. Her third nonfiction book—she's published fiction and poetry as well—was A Match to the Heart, where she recounts being struck by lightning while walking across her ranch on a clear day. The very idea that she could eventually write a book about it suggests something of her resiliency. Somehow, she not only survived but recovered, and has spent the decades since adventuring around the world. Later books take her to Greenland (This Cold Heaven), around the Arctic Circle (In the Empire of Ice and The Future of Ice), China and Tibet (Questions of Heaven), and Japan in the wake of a devastating tsunami (Facing the Wave). She's had an eventful life.

 

Unsolaced takes us into many of those locales with fresh imagery and narrative, not so much revisiting earlier writing as reflecting further on the places and experiences that occupied chapters of her personal and professional lives. As she moves forward in her chronology, she revives in me not only the memories of those earlier books but also my own awareness of her as a distinctive individual.

 

Decades ago, determined to write creative nonfiction in addition to the academic articles, conference papers, and criticism I'd been generating, I occasionally enrolled in workshops led by writers whose work I knew. The Environmental Writing Institute, a weeklong workshop led by Gretel Ehrlich, took place at the Teller Wildlife Refuge, a Montana ranch on the edge of the Bitterroot Mountains. We workshopped our writing in the morning, wandered in the mountains in the afternoon, and hung out in the evenings. About a dozen eager outdoor writers were in the group, gathering in a barn where swallows continually flew in and out. We all had read The Solace of Open Spaces; Islands, the Universe, Home; and A Match to the Heart.

 

On late morning breaks we strolled out into mountain sunshine, hoping Gretel would join us for conversation. Often, we formed a circle around her and talked about writing, hers and others'. We might have marveled at how well she had recovered from that lightning strike. The sky was mostly clear and bright. Suddenly a clap of thunder exploded close by; everyone instinctively stepped back away from Gretel, as if she would draw lightning to her again. As we sheepishly tried to recover our positions, Gretel laughed, undaunted by the thunder and amused by our sensing the potential for lightning in her presence. Happily, she wasn't offended.

 

Ehrlich's return in Unsolaced to locales from earlier books makes readers familiar with her writing aware of how climate change has accelerated the alteration of those landscapes, especially when she and fellow travelers risk crossing crumbling ice and shrinking shorelines in the Arctic and also when she encounters the changes in prairie grasslands from settlement and industry. She tells us in her afterword, "Finally, the sharp lessons of impermanence I learned while writing Solace still hold true: that loss constitutes an odd kind of fullness, and despair empties out into an unquenchable appetite for life." That awareness of loss and appreciation of life are vitally present throughout the book.

 

I don't remember now what work-in-progress I brought to that workshop, but recall that no one, especially Gretel, was much impressed with it. Still, at the end of each day, I journaled about my walks in the mountains, and eventually composed my earliest polyptychal essay, "Knowing Where You've Been." I reread it recently, after reading Unsolaced. It doesn't mention Gretel Ehrlich, but I'm sure her influence emanates from its pages—it may well hover over the best of the environmental writing I've done since that workshop.

 

Notes: "Knowing Where You've Been," Ascent 27:3 (Spring 2003): 45-55; "Knowing Where You've Been (The Bitterroot Mountains, Montana)," Postscripts: Retrospections on Time and Place. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2012: 97-107.

 

 

Robin Wall Kimmerer's books are well-regarded. Gathering Moss won the John Burroughs Nature Writing Award, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants the Sigurd F. Olson Nature Writing Award. In 2020, after that second book made national bestseller lists, she shared online interviews with such prominent nature writers as Terry Tempest Williams, Robert Macfarlane, and Helen Macdonald (Macdonald's Vesper Flights was my most recent bedtime read). A back cover quote on Braiding Sweetgrass from Jane Goodall asserted, "Robin Wall Kimmerer shows how the factual, objective approach of science can be enriched by the ancient knowledge of the indigenous people." Other books I'd been reading had been shifting my sense of the way the world—maybe the universe—works. It seemed timely to examine Kimmerer.

 

The literary scholar Jane Tompkins has noted that Kimmerer's "native heritage, and the teachings she has received" from it, gave her a perspective that "transforms her experience, and her perception, of the natural world," one removed from what most non-Indigenous readers would expect. As both a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation and a Distinguished Professor of Environmental Biology, "two radically different thought worlds," Kimmerer "draws not only on the inherited wisdom of Native Americans, but also on the knowledge Western science has accumulated about plants." The blend that emerges is powerful and persuasive and allows the reader to simultaneously enter both perspectives.

 

Sweetgrass when braided has sacred uses among Indigenous peoples in prayer and purifying ceremonies. Sections of Kimmerer's book are organized around planting, tending, picking, braiding, and burning sweetgrass, and her preface suggests that she is braiding stories in the three strands of her subtitle, merging Native American, European, and botanical perspectives. Her approach doesn't simply harmonize cultural perspectives, though she does that well, but also raises the reader's consciousness of interaction with the natural world. From an indigenous perspective the interaction between people and plants and animals is never one-sided; it's a system of mutual benefits, of give and take, of giving back to the natural things that sustain us, helping them thrive even as they help us thrive.  

 

In a chapter about basket making, Kimmerer is told by the man who helped her shear strips from a black ash, "Just think of the tree and all its hard work before you start." Gathered with others for craft classes, she quotes her teacher often. John Pigeon's approach to the craft of basket making insists on starting with the generation of the materials in a forest tree that "gave its life for this basket, so you know your responsibility." Kimmerer tells us, "Responsibility to the tree makes everyone pause before beginning." She claims to have that same sense when facing a blank sheet of paper: "For me, writing is an act of reciprocity with the world; it is what I can give back in return for everything that has been given to me. And now there's another layer of responsibility, writing on a thin sheet of tree and hoping the words are worth it. Such a thought could make a person set down her pen."

 

Anchoring her reflections on the natural world in an Indigenous perspective, Kimmerer thinks of our relationship with everything other than ourselves in terms of reciprocity. She emphasizes existence, being alive and being grateful for natural forces that contribute to her being alive—plants and animals and elements. Her gratitude extends toward everything she encounters, witnesses, experiences—berries, rain, maple sugar, waterlilies, corn, air itself—every aspect of existence. In contrast to seeing everything in European cultural terms—emphasizing technology, production, exploitation, profit—she establishes the idea of a simpler, more direct, more rewarding way to perceive everything.

 

Arguing against an "economy that grants personhood to corporations but denies it to the more-than-human beings," Kimmerer advocates the Indigenous teaching "of 'One Bowl and One Spoon,'" where "the gifts of the earth are all in one bowl, all to be shared by a single spoon" so that "resources fundamental to our well-being, like water and land and forests, are commonly held rather than commodified." She claims this idea echoes "the Indigenous worldview in which the earth exists, not as private property, but as a commons, to be tended with respect and reciprocity for the benefit of all." That worldview contrasts thoroughly with the commercial, competitive perspective of the society most of us are accustomed to.

 

Kimmerer suggests an alternative to the relationship our dominant culture has had with the planet. Suppressing that alternative has brought us to the cultural and ecological and economic and political place we face now in the 21st century. Braiding Sweetgrass puts those consequences in perspective, revealing options we've been ignoring that we might not have for our future.

 

Notes:

 

Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2013; 2nd Ed., 2020.

Tompkins, Jane. "Book Review: Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer." Andes, NY: The Andes Gazette. April 30, 2020.

 

As a child, living with or near my grandmother, I enjoyed solid, nutritional, home-cooked meals. In certain seasons, we drove out to farmers' roadside stands for fresh produce and meat. Later, when my mother worked at a supermarket, my siblings and I adjusted to packaged meals she brought home—TV dinners, pot pies, canned soups, and frozen vegetables. Meals were predictable: fish sticks, French fries, and frozen peas or corn (or both), especially on Fridays; Kellogg's or General Mills cereals or toasted Wonder Bread for breakfast; meat, potatoes, and vegetable for dinner most nights. Our diet was now store-bought, local, and predictable.

 

Remembering those meals when I read about different approaches to culture and cuisine, I realize how isolated is my sense of how people not raised like me lived their lives. We take a certain way of living for granted until we're confronted with an alternative way. Recent memoirs have raised my awareness of alternatives quite a bit.

 

In Feasting Wild: In Search of the Last Untamed Food, Gina Rae La Cerva compares past and present food preparation. "For 99 percent of our history," she points out, "humans ate hunted and gathered foods. [. . .] As recently as two hundred years ago, nearly half the North American diet still came from the wild [. . .] Today, most people will never eat anything undomesticated or uncultured." It's rare to eat untamed food. She sets off to discover what it's "like to consume the least processed foods, the most unadulterated," food not "overbred, monocultural."

 

Her observations of what she sees—and tastes—are lively, vivid, and detailed. In Borneo she is given a sautéed caterpillar. "It bursts in my mouth, releasing hot eggy water. The chewy body gets caught in the back of my throat like the caterpillars I ate in Congo." The image slowed my reading. (A few days later a Facebook friend posted a photo of "fresh fried tarantulas" she'd eaten in Phnom Penh: "Crisp, sweet and spicy--once you get up the nerve to pick them up and bite into a couple legs"). I now think of sautéed caterpillar and fried tarantula much too often.

 

In Congo La Cerva witnesses the trade in wild foods. She watches "men unload crates of smoked game," sees monitor lizards, forest turtles, piles of river fish, a live river crocodile strapped onto a motorcycle, its mouth tied shut. "A man in green flip-flops and a Central Michigan Football Champions T-shirt carries a pair of freshly killed monkeys with rust-red and grey fur. Their long tails have been tied to their necks, making for a sort of handle. The man holds them in one hand and his cell phone in the other as he walks through the market. Monkey arms and legs and hands and feet dangle downward and swing slightly in the air."

 

As a CMU emeritus professor, I'm startled by the man carrying monkeys, but mostly impressed by how thoroughly the scene comes alive, turning the reader into an observant bystander. Everywhere she visits, she notices how changes in population, politics, and commerce affect the availability of wild foods. In Borneo, she hopes to "study the trade in edible bird's nests, [. . .] one of the most expensive wild food products in the world." The nests of the cave-dwelling white-nest swiftlet consist of 95 percent saliva; black-nest swiftlet nests contain around 50 percent feathers. The swiftlet population was sorely depleted by commercial exploitation until people figured out how to farm the birds and their nests. Wild cave nests are now hard to find.

 

La Cerva distinguishes between farmed nests, "pure white and uniform, an accurate reflection of their industrial production," and nests from wild caves, "beautifully complex and aesthetically disordered." Wild cave nests "look like stalagmite seashells," multi-colored with "just a few traces of grey downy feathers." Served bird's nest soup by a friend, she finds the nest "soft, but discernible, with a chewy, slippery, almost leathery texture."

 

While sampling other wild foods—Swedish moose, Polish boar, Maine lobster, garlic from a Copenhagen cemetery—she ponders how commercial enterprise and environmental alteration separates people from ancestral history, their connection to the land that gave them existence. She warns us, "I've often felt wary of trusting the future, especially if the past is any measure of its path. But if we don't believe in the future, we must live in the unreliable present."

 

We dwell in the present—it demands our attention—but considering the past with the depth and breadth La Cerva provides helps us better understand where we are, makes us more alert to where we're heading,

 

 

Note: Gina Rae La Cerva, Feasting Wild: In Search of the Last Untamed Food. Vancouver/Berkeley: Greystone Books, 2021