Robert Root

 

I started reading William deBuys' books about the southwest around the time I enrolled in a writer's workshop he taught in Santa Fe. I had been working on early drafts of Recovering Ruth: A Biographer's Tale and he gave me sound advice and a lot of encouragement on the book. When I read his books, I could tell that we had similar ideas about what we wanted to accomplish in our writing about place. Enchantment and Exploitation: The Life and Hard Times of a New Mexico Mountain Range (1985), River of Traps: A New Mexico Mountain Life (1990, with photographer Alex Harris), and Salt Dreams: Land and Water in Low-Down California (1999, with photographer Joan Myers) were all thoroughly informative narratives of place. A Great Aridness (2011), in some ways a culmination of the earlier series of books, sweepingly surveys the effect of climate change on the American southwest. I suspect that some of my writing about place is much indebted to deBuys' books, especially Following Isabella: Travels in Colorado Then and Now, written while we lived there. During that period, I heard him read at The Tattered Cover Bookstore from The Walk (2007), his most powerfully personal book, and the next day I interviewed him for Fourth Genre.

 

In that interview, deBuys mentions having discovered "a certain paradox. The exploration of the familiar can lead you to surprising new places and new discoveries as easily as—or maybe more easily than—exploration of the unfamiliar. The familiar can take you into unusual personal territory faster and more deeply than the exploration of what you never encountered." The paradox arises from consideration of the opposite experience: "if I'm traveling in wilderness—that's what wilderness is, where it's really wild, where it's unfamiliar—I'm so fascinated by the newness that I don't go inside. There are so many connections to be made on the sensory surface of experience that you don't necessarily go as deeply into those senses." In his latest book he goes to somewhere unfamiliar.

 

I was unaware of how far he'd ventured from the southwest in his explorations and his writing until I discovered copies of his most recent books in a local library. The Last Unicorn records his search in mountainous areas of Laos for a saola, a rare, virtually undocumented horned animal. In The Trail to Kanjiroba he recounts his journey on a medical expedition to remote regions of Nepal, in the Himalaya. I started reading it on my twice-weekly library visits and, soon needing to dogear pages in chapter after chapter, I bought my own copy to read daily at home.

 

DeBuys tells us in his introduction that, like his books about climate change and the likely extinction of the saola, this one will "look into dilemmas posed by human transformation of the planet," but he expects The Trail to Kanjiroba to be "about preserving one's sense of joy. It is about finding grace amid the grief." The primary narrative of the book is a recounting of a "five-week, one-hundred-forty-mile medical expedition, in a remote corner of Nepal, hard against the border of Tibet, a land known as Upper Dolpo." The group he travels with, the Nomads Clinic, brings primary medical care to people who are remotely isolated from modern health care services. The route they travel takes them on a long circle, climbing to altitudes of seventeen thousand feet, where deBuys describes "turn[ing] in a slow circle, and in every direction I see the majesty of Tibet and the high Himalaya [. . .] All around me, brilliant in the light of the sun, I see the world resplendent." Kanjiroba, we learn, is "a massif cresting just shy of twenty-two thousand feet, a height taller than the highest points of Europe, Africa, and North America." They view it on their downward passage, its summit deep in clouds, aware that the glaciers of the Himalaya are shrinking and places that some people remember as having been ice-covered twenty years earlier are barren now.

 

At one point, deBuys wrestles with his awareness of both how magnificent the landscape is and how its remoteness doesn't isolate it from change. "Let's be real: we don't live in the gentle Holocene anymore. Alteration of the climate has delivered us to the Anthropocene, and the heat already loaded into the climate system guarantees increasing impacts for decades to come." He had been advised that "Everyday is a yatra"—a pilgrimage, and he accepts the possibility that the way past grief is to stay in motion, as the people he's been traveling with have been doing: "And always, all around us, the land presided. It contained our traveling and our living. It immersed us in an immense, austere beauty that was at once impermanent and eternal, thrilling and stern."

 

Notes:

 

deBuys, William. The Last Unicorn: A Search for One of Earth's Rarest Creatures. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2015.

 

deBuys, William. The Trail to Kanjroba: Rediscovering Earth in an Age of Loss. Oakland: Seven Stories Press, 2021.

 

Root, Robert. "Interview with William deBuys," Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction 10:2 (Fall 2008): 133-145.

 

SHELF LIFE: "Rediscovering Earth: A Conversation with William deBuys and Bill McKibben." April 21, 2022. A video recording at VaBook.org/watch.

 

 

Sometimes among the extraneous postings emerging on my laptop, one provokes my curiosity enough to send me searching for further information. Decades ago, I'd viewed the Hoover Dam and its creation Lake Mead and further upstream Lake Powell, behind the Glen Canyon Dam, when the water in them was abundant. But times have changed in the 21st Century. Among several on the subject, an online article for Grist by Jake Bittle reported that recently at Lake Powell "water levels fell to their lowest threshold ever, since the lake was created by the damming of the Colorado in 1963 . . . forcing unprecedented water cuts in states like Arizona" and affecting the production of hydroelectric power. Bittle writes, "When Lake Powell is full, its surface sits some 3,700 feet above sea level," but at a low level of 3,525 feet this March, it is "now only a quarter full, and water levels are just 35 feet about the dead pool threshold for power generation." Power production there has dropped "consistently," as well as at nearby Hoover Dam, and "there's a 1 in 4 chance [the Glen Canyon Dam] won't produce power by 2024." If I lived in the Southwest, I'd be concerned, perhaps alarmed.

 

Exposure to current events often provokes memories of earlier reporting on the same or similar subjects. This news reminded me of a 20-year-old book review of mine published in the Spring 2001 issue of Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction. That book, Salt Dreams: Land and Water in Low-Down California by author William deBuys and illustrator Joan Myers, explored the consequences of human efforts at irrigation and climate change in the arid southwest. I claimed that the authors "are, in Robert Coles' memorable phrase, 'doing documentary work' in the tradition of such exemplary verbal and visual texts as American Exodus by Dorothea Lange and Paul Taylor (1939) and Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by James Agee and Walker Evans (1941). Combining thorough research with on-site observation and sharp, vivid images, they produce a haunting and compelling portrait of place." Salt Dreams concentrates on the Salton Sea, in the corner of California "abutting Mexico on the south and Arizona on the east." DeBuys writes that "here is the lowest of the low: Salton Sea, growing saltier by the day and stewing with the waste of the upstream world."

 

In an effort to make the Imperial Valley in that part of California more fertile and productive, dams and canals were built to divert the flow of the Colorado River. For the most part it succeeded, but it also created the Salton Sea, "what deBuys calls 'the most spectacularly bungled development scheme of the century, perhaps of all time.' Floodwaters overran inept diversion schemes and, guided by irrigation channels, emptied the Colorado River into the Salton Sink." The man-made lake—the world's largest—had no outlet, but entrepreneurs hoped to create a lucrative planned community, with marinas and country clubs, expecting that "determination and high finance [could] transform any terrain into a promised land of opportunity and profit." It didn't work out. "In the end, the Salton Sea became a receptacle for raw sewage flowing north from Mexico and agricultural run-off from the Imperial Valley, its size reduced by evaporation, its salinity ever increasing [. . .] a way station and refuge for birds which feed on contaminated fish and suffer recurring cycles of avian disease [. . .] an ecological disaster both nightmarish and irremediable."

 

Salt Dreams is a complicated book, one that "tells the story of this region, the lives of those who still live here, the environmental and social consequences of actions by governments and investors and exploiters and entrepreneurs." Joan Myers' "pictures of barren landscapes, encrusted shorelines, flooded ruins, and desert faces reward close viewing with multiple levels of detail." Reading my review again, much of the experience of the book comes back to me. It's still on a bookshelf in our guest room, beside several other books by deBuys.

 

I confess to having a rather Thoreauvian outlook on life and it affects what I choose to read. I discovered deBuys at a Santa Fe writer's workshop I attended and read him and many other southwestern nature writers when I lived in Colorado Those writers gave me a vivid sense of where they were, a present hindsight panorama. But the essayists and outdoor memoirists I've read recently have increasingly uneased me about the future of life on our planet: extinctions in Elizabeth Kolbert's The Sixth Extinction and Barbara Hurd's The Episodes, flooding in Elizabeth Rush's Rising, and others. It's likely those earlier authors provided awareness of where we've been heading, but the discouraging thing at the moment is that foresight currently offers little to be optimistic about in the coming age.

 

 

Notes:

Agee, James, and Walker Evans. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1941.

Bittle, Jake. "Lake Powell water crisis is about to be an energy crisis," Grist, March 21, 2022

Coles, Robert. Doing Documentary Work. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.

deBuys, William, and Joan Myers. Salt Dreams: Land and Water in Low-Down California. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999.

Lange, Dorothea, and Paul Taylor. American Exodus. New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1939.

Root, Robert. "Interview with William deBuys," Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction. 10:2 (Fall 2008): 133-145.

Root, Robert L., Jr. Book Review: "Salt Dreams: Land and Water in Low-Down California by William deBuys and Joan Myers," Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction. 3:1 (Spring 2001): 203-205.

 

When, under Michael Steinberg's editorship, the first issue of Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction appeared in Spring 1991, I served both as Interviews Editor—in that issue my interview was with essayist Scott Russell Sanders—and as one of its reviewers. I sometimes wrote full-length reviews of a single book and sometimes wrote short ones for the Reader-to-Reader: Capsule Reviews section. My first capsule subjects were The Diving Bell and the Butterfly by Jean-Dominique Bauby, Field of Vision by Lisa Knopp, About This Life: Journeys on the Threshold of Memory by Barry Lopez, Thistle Journal and Other Essays by Daniel Minock, and Reaching Keet Seel: Ruin's Echo and the Anasazi by Reg Saner. The Spring 2008 issue published my last Fourth Genre review, of Deborah Tall's A Family of Strangers. By then I was chiefly Interviews and Roundtable Editor. My final interview was with Carl Klaus in the Spring 2012 issue, before an editorial change ended my involvement. Since 2014, I've occasionally written reviews online for River Teeth: A Journal of Nonfiction Narrative. The most recent one was about a new essay collection by Scott Russell Sanders.

 

I resist rummaging through cardboard boxes in our garage containing most of what I've ever published, but I recall writing reviews of stage productions or movies for my college newspaper as an undergraduate. As a high school teacher, I wrote 100-word reviews of television programs for the weekend edition of the Buffalo Evening News, an enterprise that taught me to write rough drafts of whatever length and tighten them up gradually in rewrite after rewrite. I'm confident one of those reviews was of a first season episode of Star Trek. I continued reviewing as a grad student and as a college professor. A good many of my current blog entries almost amount to reviews, usually in the context of what affected me in what I read or heard or saw.

 

Of course, I've also read or heard or viewed a great many reviews by other writers over the years. For an early academic book of mine, Working at Writing: Columnists and Critics Composing (when my scholarly and instructional interests were in rhetoric and composition), I interviewed drama critic Walter Kerr and film critics David Denby and Neil Gabler (as well as essayists Jim Fitzgerald and Kathleen Stocking and political columnists Richard Reeves and Tom Wicker) about their composing processes. I also watched Siskel and Ebert in their various television series. My newspaper reading usually skipped news, sports, and business sections but always opened to entertainment or book sections. My wife and I have subscribed for decades to weekly editions of The New York Times Book Review and The New Yorker, from which at breakfast each day I read reviews of books, films, plays, musical performances, and television programs.

 

Sometimes I find myself reading conflicting reviews of the same work, perhaps a positive one in The New Yorker, a negative one in the Times. Those occasions reinforce my awareness that, no matter how intelligent or well-educated or accomplished in their professions—(not all critics are literary people)—all reviewers read like individuals and their reviews attend to their priorities, if not flat out to their tastes or biases. I sometimes feel that the Times editors urge each reviewer to find something to complain about or disapprove of even in the most approving review but allow them to relent somewhat to end on a positive note.

 

I've mostly had the option of choosing what books (or recordings or films or plays) I want to review. That means I never have to let readers in on any works I was disappointed in or bored by or infuriated with. Since I mostly read books all the way through, I'm selective about what I intend to read and usually choose something by a writer I've liked in the past or on a subject I've wanted to know more about or in a literary form that promises clear communication. I seldom have to give up on what I'm reading and usually find myself personally invested in what I've chosen.

 

The writing that I do about another writer's work bridges the gap between what that writer is sharing and what I react to in what I read. What I write may start out as random commentary, a note to help me remember what the work was about, or a journal entry to explore my reactions further. If that doesn't seem sufficient, I'm likely to go back at what I've written, to clarify it further, to express it more accurately. Sometimes it ends up being much like a review, maybe something I could share as a blog post. It may even prompt someone else to read that other writer's work. I'd rather encourage more reading than discourage it.

 

 

Note: Twenty-three volumes of Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction are available online at JSTOR <https://www.jstor.org/journal/fourthgenre> and Project Muse <https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/217>.

 

Reviews for River Teeth: A Journal of Nonfiction Narrative are available online at https://www.riverteethjournal.com/blog/keyword/book-review,

 

Root, Robert. Review of A Family of Strangers by Deborah Tall. Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction. 10:1 (Spring 2008): 175-178.

 

Root, Robert L., Jr. Reviews of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly by Jean-Dominique Bauby, Field of Vision by Lisa Knopp, About This Life: Journeys on the Threshold of Memory by Barry Lopez, Thistle Journal and Other Essays by Daniel Minock, and Reaching Keet Seel: Ruin's Echo and the Anasazi by Reg Saner. Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction. 1:1 (Spring 1999): 171-173.

 

In June 2019, when Michelle Tom, an Australian memoirist, emailed me to ask about an article of mine, "Beyond Linearity: Writing the Segmented Essay," I was both delighted and surprised. It had appeared in the journal Writing on the Edge and was twenty years old. I attached longer articles I'd published later on that non-linear theme to an online response I soon sent her. As I drafted it, I realized how much that article had set in motion a chain of articles and essays in my writing over the years, and I thought about the influences and motivations behind past writing decisions, the way one thing led to another. Michelle soon replied, explaining who else she'd read "to teach myself how to write in fragments/vignettes."

 

Over a year-and-a-half later she sent me her published book. Ten Thousand Aftershocks blends events in two narrative strands, one recounting a chaotic childhood and its impact on family relationships, the other recording recurring episodes leading up to a devastating earthquake and its aftermath in Christchurch, on New Zealand's southern island. The persistent aftershocks eventually impelled her to move with her husband and children away from family in New Zealand, where her brother and father are buried, across the Tasman Sea to eastern Australia to start life anew in Melbourne. She would return only intermittently when further family losses occurred. She draws parallels between her growing estrangement from her self-absorbed mother and seeking a more stable environment in another country.

 

The book opens with an introductory section titled "Aftershock" which presents two dictionary definitions of the term: "1: an aftereffect of a distressing or traumatic event," and "2: a minor shock following the main shock of an earthquake." A sentence dated July 2013 follows and declares: "We buried Meredith between two fault lines, and I wondered if she would ever rest in peace." Meredith was her sister. At once we are aware of the autobiographical dimension of the memoir and its metaphorical resonances.

 

Five narrative sections of the book following that opening are introduced by short passages describing progressive stages of an earthquake. Stage One informs us ominously, "Long before violence is unleashed, an earthquake initiates in secret. [. . .] immense seismic pressure accumulates in rocks for decades or even millennia, its latent potential for catastrophe unseen, and inevitable." It implicitly foreshadows traumatic moments not only in geology but also in family history. The chapters of each section all begin with dates that the events narrated took place and move back and forth in time, not following strict chronology yet establishing a developmental movement suggestive of those stages of an earthquake.

 

As in life, her memoir narrative concentrates attention on tensions and interactions among members of the family with only occasional but increasingly frequent reminders of the tensions rumbling below the surface of their island. Tremors and troubles occur throughout subsequent stages until, at Stage Four, the 6.3 earthquake occurs: "Rocks weakened by continued pressure and an influx of water no longer resist the strain from the fault, and a rupture occurs. An aggregation of elastic tension is finally released, and that energy, forced out through the landscape in seismic waves, results in violent shaking." Several chapters dated 22 February 2011 record the family's experience of the earthquake and let us live with them through the terror and persistent danger as they try to adjust to an unstable house and an altered landscape:

 

"Greg and I dived for the doorframe between the dining and living rooms, but Jack was thrown from his stool to the floor and froze in shock, on his knees. [. . .] The familiar sound of the earth wrenching itself back and forth gained volume beneath us, and every timber in the house screeched. Glass shattered, and I knew it was the sound of bottles crashing out of cabinets into a porcelain basin in the bathroom [. . .] The house bounced as if being catapulted off an enormous trampoline during a simultaneous and dynamic tug of war."

 

"Unpredictable by nature," she reports of the final stage, "aftershocks can be notable for their size and prevalence." They can "bring down already weakened structures." Aftershocks from the traumatic family life she and her siblings led include her sister's death from Melanoma, her brother's suicide, her father's death, and her never-to-be-resolved distance from her mother.

 

The aftereffects of what happens to us in our lives aren't always immediately obvious; we don't get over grief or terror once our situations have changed and we likely don't dwell on moments of accomplishment or triumph very long either. Daily living camouflages portents and foreshadowings as we move on, but the past will resonate within us much longer than we might consciously be aware. Ten Thousand Aftershocks is an observant reminder of that.

 

 

Note: Michelle Tom. Ten Thousand Aftershocks. Sydney, Australia: Fourth Estate, 2021.

 

Robert Root. "Collage, Montage, Mosaic, Vignette, Episode, Segment", The Nonfictionist's Guide: On Reading and Writing Creative Nonfiction. New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008: 65-84.

 

Robert Root. "This Is What the Spaces Say", The Nonfictionist's Guide: On Reading and Writing Creative Nonfiction. New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008: 85-94.

 

 

 

 

We live in an age when our long familiar culture is undergoing reinterpretation. Much is hopeful, as we more fully recognize our fellow citizens as equals regardless of racial and cultural differences; much is alarming, as we realize how dangerous and foolish has been our belated understanding of human communities, of the nature of other species, and of impending changes to our planet. Everywhere now, we encounter literature and media much more attuned to raising our awareness of our commonality across the world. The near universal response to the Ukrainian crisis and the Russian president's refusal to let the world keep moving forward together demonstrate the difficulty in achieving long overdue humane resolutions to such conflicts.

 

One influence prompting reinterpretation, more inadvertent than intentional, comes from reading recent multicultural literature. Not long ago I read Pachinko by Min Jin Lee, a historical novel focused on a Korean family in mid-20th century Japan, and two powerful graphic memoirs, Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi's depiction of life in politically oppressive Iran, and They Called Us Enemy, George Takei's account of the confinement of Japanese Americans during World War II. For me, those books set the stage for a stronger engagement with reinterpretation when I recently read The Best We Could Do, a graphic memoir by Vietnamese author/illustrator Thi Bui. One of the strengths of the graphic memoir in recent years has been its ability to offer an almost cinematic representation of its author's history. Like those books by Satrapi and Takei, as well as Art Spiegelman's Maus and Alison Bechdel's Fun Home, Are You My Mother? and The Secret to Superhuman Strength, The Best We Could Do manages to simulstaneously present an insightful and intelligent family memoir and a suspenseful and moving account of troubling periods of political history. It helped alter what I took for granted about the history I had lived through.

 

Bui's memoir includes a brief illustrated timeline covering Vietnamese history from the beginning of Chinese rule in 111 BC to its eventual liberation in 1975, but the graphic narrative centers on 20th Century history, covering the country's inclusion in French Indochina, the Japanese occupation in World War II, the post-war return of the French and subsequent conflict with the Communist Viet Minh, the internecine warfare between North and South Vietnam elevated by the military presence and eventual retreat of American forces, and the final liberation and unification of Vietnam. Throughout this history, generations of the Bui family continue to adjust to military events and political changes, until finally, as refugees, they make a harrowing emigration by secretly sailing to Malaysia and eventually resettling in the United States.

 

The narrative moves both forward and backward in the lives of the characters. In early chapters set in the present Bui establishes family relationships and the various tensions that make her need to explore family history back to the period of her parents' birth and upbringing. She establishes the nature of the culture in which they lived and the conflicts that affected family decisions about their own lives and their children's lives. The movement back and forth in time gets the reader close to the characters, watching them interact with each other and with the culture they inhabit, and charts the impact of historical events upon them. Thi Bui is the essential narrator of the memoir but her parents each tell their own stories, allowing us to understand central characters across generations and sense the challenges of growing up in the times and the culture they did. The immersion in their private lives keeps readers absorbed in highly dramatic and sensitively intimate moments they all experience. The memoir makes it clear that, whatever the family complications may be, the challenge of adjusting to the world outside the family is unavoidable and stressful.

 

The way we react to what we read depends upon what we bring to the reading and the degree to which the text sets off reverberations in our consciousness, whether remote or intimate. Bui's book reverberated with my memories of the eras she portrays. I was, in every way, a distanced bystander to that history, my opposition to American engagement in Vietnam irrelevant and ineffectual, my attention focused primarily on American military, on literary and cinematic dramatizations of American perspectives. Bui presented a community perspective, a citizen perspective, a family perspective, an internal depiction of people trying to get on with their lives in the midst of politically imposed chaos and destruction. I didn't see events from their perspective 50 years ago.

 

This is an age of reinterpretation and I appreciate having my perspective widened, my understanding broadened. Still a bystander, my understanding of how all our lives are universally connected has been strengthened and given greater range by reading this book. I know I still have further to go.

 

 

Note: Thi Bui, The Best We Could Do: An Illustrated Memoir. New York: Abrams ComicArts, 2018.

 

I was either falling asleep or slowly waking up when I found myself thinking how isolated I have usually been from events that created what we call history. I was born just after American involvement in the Second World War began— my parents married on Valentine's Day 1942 and I was born nine months and two days later while my father was serving in the U. S. Marines. He was absent for the war's duration; I first met him, briefly, after I turned one, and I was three when he came home for good. The war had no other impact on me. Throughout the Korean war, I was in elementary school and, except for school air raid drills that taught us to cower in the halls or cower under our desks and glimpses of news programs my father watched or newspaper front pages I didn't read, I focused on tv westerns and superhero comic books. In the sixties I was aware of the Communist presence in Cuba and the assassinations of the Kennedy brothers and Martin Luther King and the expansion of the Vietnam War, but I was either in college, concentrating on literature and creative writing, or later teaching high school English among older teachers who were WWII vets. I was relieved to have evaded the draft and though I urged students to avoid military service, I persistently stuck to the curriculum.

 

Race issues around the country had come up one day when college classmates and I drove into Rochester to tour riot sites, but I barely interacted with any African Americans except for a few older college students. What generated headlines and televised news could have happened anywhere in the world except where I was teaching or studying. I mimicked my parents' and grandparents' values and generally disapproved of war and racism just as I disapproved of murder and rape and crime in general. I felt that by being law-abiding and generally ethical, I was sufficient in my citizenship and in my—what can I call it?—righteousness.

 

No particular political or moral motivation justified my remoteness from the world's dilemmas. I was a small town-boy interested in books and at first radio programs and then television shows and continually movies, and I was continually preoccupied with personal interests—reading voluminously, constantly writing about something or other, living inside my own head rather than venturing out much into the world or taking up causes. Only occasionally did I acknowledge having an opinion about something, one I made up on the spot if asked about it since I probably didn't already have one handy. I primarily focused on my teaching and concentrated on classroom interactions with students (though I did occasionally reveal an opposition to the Vietnam conflict). I had a few friends for awhile, once in a while, people much like me—academic, aesthetic, personally responsible, though probably less self-absorbed. I mostly concentrated on the work I did professionally or the creative projects that preoccupied me—that is, when I worked professionally or was creatively preoccupied.

 

At the moment, I'm aware of how much the pandemic life I've been living is like my adolescent life and the habitual tendency toward self-isolation that followed it. And yet the world seems now more present in my life than it would have been decades ago. We can't seem to avoid encountering the most persistently intrusive elements of the times we live in. The library where I write has strict regulations about face masks and nobody enters without one. That's also true of the people delivering curbside orders to my open car trunk. For two years now I've parked weekly in the exact same spots in those stores' parking lots. Most of my communication with family and friends has been through the internet: online mail, online conversations, Facetime chatting, Zoom calls. It seems now as if my sense of isolation is less something I thoughtlessly accepted in myself and more something being imposed on me, on us, on everyone I know, something we can't avoid and are constantly being reminded of.

 

And then there's Russia's invasion of Ukraine and the almost universal disapproval of it, the Ukrainian flag posted everywhere, Ukraine's president's eloquent address to the world, the threat of nuclear war, as if the last two years hadn't had enough deaths across the planet. Now my grandchildren may be living through a time more fearsome and more ominously present on a wider scale than I was present for decades ago, when I was at their ages, during the last World War and through continual Asian "conflicts." It is less likely that they'll be able to ignore or overlook the current war as it escalates—less likely that they'll develop a sense of isolation from the events decimating the world.

 

 

 

Journal Entry February 27, 2022: The oddness of our existence continues. Last week, because of scheduled school cancellation early in the week, Sue taught in person only one day, on Thursday, instead of twice. This week, because of a fierce ice storm, her Tuesday in-person teaching was called off again. Luckily, we learned of it a dozen minutes into our commute, in time to head safely back home before traffic got heavy. She'd again tutor in-person only on Thursday. Yesterday, at sunrise, the sun shown directly into our study window for the first time this year, a sure sign that we are headed for spring, and today we woke early to the sound of plows attacking the five or six inches of snow that fell overnight.

 

On those in-person teaching days in the past, I'd drop Sue off at the school and head for a coffee shop to while away the time before the local library opened. In this fiercer pandemic time, I avoid the coffee shop and visit our daughter's home for an hour or two. Often our daughter has already gone to work and her husband takes the kids off to school and then goes into his office. Yesterday, when I sat down on a couch near windows overlooking their back yard, I opened my briefcase and realized I'd forgotten to pack my laptop. The cord was there and a yellow pad and a small empty notebook and my journal, some pens, a second pair of eyeglasses, but no computer. The radio was on, and I sat there listening for at least an hour and a half to NPR reports about Russia's invasion of Ukraine and commentator speculation about the consequences. Then I packed up and went to the library.

 

After two years of pandemic, accelerated climate change, the threat of Republicans returning to power, and dangerously repressive Supreme Court decisions, a major war suggested the nearness of an apocalypse that we don't want to believe in. So, I am content to be in a very quiet space in the library, with only hints of snow flurries beyond the windows to connect me to the outside world. It was good to get away from hearing reports about yet another world crisis, but then I remembered a blog draft I started about how out of touch with the world I have been throughout my life.

 

That draft was on my laptop. My laptop was probably at home on my desk. Its cord was in my workbag on the library table. I could've driven back to Waukesha to fetch it but decided not to, though I wouldn't pick up Sue for another five hours—I drop her off at 7:00, pick her up at 2:30 or 3:00. In total that's an eight-hour day, six of them for me in the library. I looked at my cellphone to make sure I had no email I had to take personally—I didn't; I usually don't—but then turned it off to save the battery so we could contact each other later.

 

That meant I'd have no touch with my Facebook page or CNN, NPR, or BBC news or any of the links to the outside world my laptop usually provides. I'd see no ads, no commercials, no images of people's cats or dogs or backyard birds, no updated profile pictures or selfies, no shared articles or blog posts on political or cultural matters, no videos of gymnastic events or Olympic events or excerpts from ballets or operas or Broadway musicals or dramas or comedy skits, no beloved or respected quotes from literary works or psychological advice columns or philosophical pronouncements or health reports, no invitations to join or donate or celebrate, no chances to send birthday greetings or family loss commiserations or acknowledgements of all kinds of anniversaries, no notices of spam mail or blocked efforts to hack my computer. (There's no one near me in the library—no likelihood of my journal, in which I'm composing this, being hacked.)

 

It also meant I couldn't review any log entries or journal entries or rough drafts I composed on my computer. I could only review handwritten entries in my journal. What I wrote last time, on February 8, interested me but I wasn't sure it provoked anything on my laptop or not. I wondered if I should print everything I compose on the computer but then, I couldn't trust myself to bring a mass of printouts—or at least certain pertinent ones—with me when I left the house on a day like today.

 

So, this all brings me around to a persistent question that seems to arise with increasing frequency. What do you do when you have nothing to do other than write about having nothing to do?

 

 

I've been to Alaska only once, in 2009, to teach and read at the Kachemak Bay Writers Conference. My friend Mike Steinberg had taught there the previous year and I was invited on his recommendation. The conference was held at the Land's End Resort, at the tip of a narrow spit of land extending out from Homer, a small city on Kachemak Bay opposite a longer arm of the Kenai Peninsula. To prepare for the conference I read books by other presenters, especially those essayists and memoirists who lived and wrote in Alaska: Marybeth Holleman, Nancy Lord, Peggy Shumaker, Miranda Weiss, Sherry Simpson, and the poet Eva Saulitis. I was eager to hear them read at the conference, eventually acquired some of their subsequent books, and was saddened to later learn of Eva's and Sherry's deaths.

 

Sue came with me to Kachemak Bay and our son Tom flew up from LA to wander some of Alaska with us for a few days. We visited Anchorage and locations on the Kenai Peninsula and, perhaps most memorably, toured Harriman Fiord on a vessel that took us close to a glacier that sheared tremendous sheets of ice into the water. I had wanted to see the glacier because, prior to the trip, I'd read both John Muir's Travels in Alaska and another book about Muir's experiences with naturalist John Burroughs on the 1899 Harriman expedition, gathering material as if I might write a book about John o' Mountains and John o' Birds. (I didn't, but I still have folders full of notes and printouts.) We three then returned to our homes in California and Wisconsin and I didn't keep in touch with many of those Alaskan writers for long, except for one.

 

Bill Sherwonit, a journalist and outdoor essayist, shared his experiences in the wild reaches of Denali National Park and what he terms Anchorage's "backyard wilderness," Chugach State Park. He'd written To the Top of Denali: Climbing Adventures on North America's Highest Peak (it's 20,310 ft high), and I knew I wouldn't emulate him there, but his later books, Living with Wilderness: An Alaskan Odyssey and Changing Paths: Travels and Meditations in Alaska's Arctic Wilderness, gave me a somewhat less intrepid model for the kind of nonfiction of place I wanted to write. We talked some at the conference, and in later years I linked up with his writing on Facebook. "City Wilds," his column for the Anchorage Press Sports and Outdoors section, is accessible online and its subjects are wide-ranging, including remembrances of poet Robert Bly and Anchorage birder Dave DeLap; considerations of ravens, Bohemian waxwings, snowshoe hares, snow spiders, hiking in the Chugach Front Range; a celebration of the black-capped chickadee; a call for a "healthier relationship with our home planet, the wild earth"; a celebration of the "wondrous wild."

 

These memories of Kachemak Bay and Alaskan nonfiction were triggered by reading Bill Sherwonit's recent column taking "a brief look back at 40 years of writing in Alaska." It provides an overview of his writing life since he left southern California in February 1982 and anchored himself in the north. He mentions coming "to identify [him]self as a 'nature writer'." I especially appreciated his perspective on what being a writer has meant to him. He writes that whenever he's asked when he'll retire, he responds, "A writer never retires," yet acknowledges to himself that he doesn't "devote the time and energy to writing that [he] once did," spending more time now "in the close company of nature." He adds that "writing for me has long been more than a job or career, and something closer to a way a life, a way of being in the world." Those comments are the ones that I related to the most in that particular column.

 

Last week, when I finally opened the log I keep to record thoughts about this blog, I pondered some reasons for taking time off for so long but also found myself imagining topics that might prompt more new entries in the coming months. Every so often I seem to need to be reminded that writers usually keep on writing even when there's no likelihood of—or any particular interest in—publication. Writing does something for them that they need to let it do. It's a psychological necessity, perhaps even a spiritual one. It helps them come to terms with themselves—to know who they are and where they are and why they need to be there. They don't always remember those things—I haven't lately. The next time I read Bill Sherwonit's "City Wilds" column, I hope it will remind me of them and I will be able to reassure myself that I am still writing.

 

 

Notes: Bill Sherwonit. "City Wilds: A brief look back at 40 years of writing in Alaska," Anchorage Press. (February 9, 2022). [If you scroll below this particular column, you'll find other "City Wilds" entries.]

 

My wife and I are mostly creatures of routine. We get up around the same time each morning, have breakfast at the same time, have dinner at the same time, sit in our bedroom watching television for about the same amount of time each evening. We call our far-flung children and grandchildren each Sunday, visit our nearby daughter, son-in-law, and grandchildren usually once a week. Each Saturday I make out a weekly task list to run off on Sunday morning after I start the past week's laundry. For a good long while, I worked off and on during the week preparing a blog entry to post on Friday morning. A calm and predictable routine, modified and tightened somewhat lately by pandemic precautions, the specifics modified by changes in location and employment over past decades but essentially stable and orderly. What varied this year was adjusting our schedule for Sue's in-person tutoring at a Milwaukee elementary school and my fetching curbside orders near there some of those days.

 

Then the accident happened. Traffic lights were off in Elm Grove when we passed through around 6:40 that morning and were still out on our way home from Sue's tutoring just after 3. At one familiar intersection, traffic had stopped in all four eastbound and westbound lanes of a major avenue. We stopped there southbound on a single lane road. On our turn to cross, we were barely midway when an eastbound car surged in front of us and we collided. Instantly smoke across our windows cut off our vision, our car swerved eastward, hit a signpost and rose onto a curb, our seatbelts yanking us backward, airbags slamming into our chests, emptying them of breath. I remember yelling, from shock and fear and pain. Somehow the car stopped. Somehow I turned it off. Bystanders came by to offer help, Sue already mobile. Struggling for breath, I wondered if, completely unprepared, I were about to die.

 

The other driver and we two lived. A firehouse ambulance crew thought I'd be alright, but drove us to a Hospital where their emergency team thought I'd be alright, and our daughter the nurse attended to us there, eventually helping to get us home. Our Honda Civic, purchased in 2010, nearly 174,000 miles on it, with brand new rear and right front tires and our daughter's birthday gifts in the trunk, was totaled. The street corner where it sat when we left was littered with parts of the car, a great deal of whatever flowed out of the engine, and the pole with a stop sign attached that we knocked over. The next morning Sue filled out a police report and an insurance report and located our car so we could get birthday presents out of the trunk and empty the glove compartment in the dashboard. We both forgot to grab our garage door opener. Our daughter drove us to get a rental car. Our son-in-law drove us to a celebration of his wife's birthday. On the fourth day after the accident, we commuted to Milwaukee again for Sue's tutoring. By the eighth day, we'd leased a new car. Three weeks later the scrap yard sent us our garage door opener. Nine weeks later I barely felt any pain in my chest or back. We still commute several days a week, alternating drivers, both of us alert and sometimes tense, not completely trusting ourselves on the road and ever wary of other drivers.

 

The day after the accident, December 17, I posted the blog entry I had prepared earlier that week, originally intending to take the next two holiday weeks off. I've taken ten weeks off. Some of what I've written here was adapted from an accident report I was required to write as the driver of one of the vehicles. Our insurance company was reliable and responsible. I just made the second monthly payment on our new car's lease. We still drive through that intersection several times each week and never see any remaining sign of the accident. Except for driving a white Kia instead of a dark blue Honda, we seem to be living through the same routine we'd been living all along.

 

Except for the persistent anxiety.

 

Except for the awareness that if I'd turned right at that intersection, the way I usually did and again usually do, instead of crossing it in hopes of getting to an area where traffic lights were still working, we wouldn't have been in that collision. And, yes, if that woman hadn't ignored the stopped vehicles and the dark traffic lights and blithely stayed in motion into our path, we wouldn't have collided. But, in a matter of seconds we did. And now our routine has an added element—it repeatedly, consistently, feels ominous.

 

 

When a publisher recently accepted my book about the Niagara Escarpment, expecting to publish in a year or two, I started rereading it. I needed to be specific about its history when I added entries to my Escarpment Log, so I opened that file to the first entry, dated March 18, 2013. I'd forgotten some particulars of how the book got started; reading the earliest entries reminded me how much a book may have a rather haphazard origin.

 

That first entry claims that, while lying in bed the day after having completed an advanced draft of another project, I thought about the mention I'd been making of an escarpment book over the past several years and decided to start this log as a way to figure out what information I had and what I needed to have "if I were to do such a book." I had journal entries about escarpment sites in Wisconsin, photos from a trip to Michigan's Drummond Island, the draft of an escarpment essay set in western New York, and a potential subtitle, A Personal History. By the end of March, I'd begun to imagine what an escarpment book would be like and to plan how to get material; April 1st's log entry was essentially a draft of the manuscript's prologue; in September I reviewed substantial research entries I'd made.

 

I scrolled a long way ahead to the October 25, 2018, entry where I claimed to have finished a full revision of the manuscript: "By my present count The Arc of the Escarpment runs 88,685 words and 350 pages, 357 with Acknowledgements and Works Cited, which I tightened up today." I thought pruning it down from 100,996 words and 383 pages had improved it and I had begun to submit selective and intermittent proposals to publishers. My subsequent submissions files—three different versions—record four outright rejections and a great many silences, until the end of 2021 when Cornerstone Press offered me a contract.

 

There's a hitch. The manuscript is still too long. I need to cut it down substantially. I'm not so much worried about shortening the book further than I did in the past but uncertain about what I'll be changing. Much of this kind of self-editing involves not merely deleting words or sentences but also replacing longer stretches of words with shorter ones, tightening up ideas already expressed, making substitutions as well as eliminations. The joke I've repeated too often suggests copyediting by removing every instance of "the" and "of"—Escarpment Arc in place of The Arc of the Escarpment, for example—not to mention "is" and "and" and "a," and using "I'm" and "I've".

 

I last read the book maybe two or three years ago. A curious thing happens when you've been that long away from your own manuscript. It seems less like your writing, more like someone else's. You don't tend to spot passages where you think, "No, what I meant to say was . . ." because the prose strikes you almost as if it were another writer's expression. You need to read the manuscript entirely to be certain what the author is driving at, how the various parts fit together, what the cumulative effect of its chapters adds up to. You may not completely recognize yourself in what you're reading.

 

For example, at times I will reread a long sentence and start wondering how to condense it but then realize it sets up a sequence of sentences leading into other sentences that follow it; it's expressed exactly the way it is in order to develop a thread of specific ideas or a certain narrative immediately after it. Revising won't simply be getting rid of something superfluous—it will be replacing something essential in fewer words than expressed in the previous revision.

 

To figure out where things stand, I've gone through the manuscript, correcting obvious errors like spacing problems or occasional misspellings and counting the words in each chapter of each section. The sections include a prologue and an epilogue, nine introductory segments, and 25 chapters. Two days ago, at the end of the sixth section and the 20th chapter, I reached my preferred word count for the book with three sections, two introductory segments, and five chapters yet to be reviewed. Yesterday I completed the word count for those portions. Today I know roughly how many words I need to delete—the equivalent of two segments and five chapters and the epilogue. All I have to do now is delete that number of words throughout the entire manuscript, shortening everywhere so that the epilogue ends at the exact number of words where the 20th chapter now ends. Piece of cake.

 

I wonder how many "the"s and "of"s are in the manuscript.