Guest contributor: Mac Bates

Farewell to Ivan Doig, Another Great of the American (North) West

categories: Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence

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Growing up in the small town of Snohomish in Western Washington in the 1950s, it often felt as if the rest of the world had forgotten about us. Mountain ranges, desert and plains separated Northwesterners from the white hot center of culture in New England, and its glitzy pop cousin, Los Angeles. And Eisenhower’s dream of interstate freeways connecting us all, was 15 years from being realized. Not that I didn’t feel the pull of the world out there as I sat in the Snohomish Theater, transfixed by Around the World in 80 Days or staring agape as a young Elvis pretzel twisted his hips and sneered on our teeny-tiny TV, or tuning in to San Francisco’s KGO at night to listen to Ira Blue at the Hungry I as he birthed talk radio. But it seemed that in the Northwest we were free to invent ourselves. Thank God for parents who allowed us almost free rein to explore the Pilchuck River, or on one Sunday afternoon, to walk across the Snohomish River Valley on the railroad tracks to hunt for fossils at Fiddler’s Bluff; had a train come while we were on the last high trestle, we would have had a tragic Stand By Me moment. And to the east, the glacier-carved valleys and peaks of the Cascade would soon become an even larger playground. Our earliest jobs were outside, picking strawberries and raspberries and later wandering behind trucks in the pea fields with pitchforks or milking cows. Continue reading →

Here Come the Summer Birds!

categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside

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Today was a warm one in western Maine, sixty-some degrees and sunny.  Warm enough for the bugs to wake, which means the arrival of the breeding crowd, our summer birds. I took the usual hour’s walk in the woods this morning and to the stream, a great meeting place of forest and field, stream and sandbar.  And what singing!  It always takes me a minute to remember my birdsongs, but they do come back.  Black and White Warbler like a squeaky wheel.  Common Yellowthroat, witchety-witchety-wichety.  That kind of insistent and snotty-seeming and much-repeated Chestnut-Sided Warbler song: I’m a chestnut sided, what d’ya think of that?  And the oven birds are back: Teacher! Teacher! Teacher!  Also a Black-Throated Green Warbler, plenty to say. Continue reading →

Bad Advice Wednesday: Naming is Knowing

categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour

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I always noticed it in student work, but you see it in the big-time books, too.  “He stood under a tree.”  My question as a reader is always: what kind of tree?  It’s a lot different standing under a white pine and a white ash.  Your feet are in needles in case one.  In case two, old leaves.  The woods are darker among pines, too.  If it’s a Douglas fir, you’re in the Pacific Northwest.  What’s the right tree for Tokyo?  For Kolkata?  For Brisbane?  For your town, as well.  A bird flies by.  What kind?  Gray Jay?  That tells us something too–those camp robbers like wild places, a bit of elevation.  A bug bit him.  A bug?  Not a mosquito?  Horsefly?  Blackfly?  Was it cloudy?  What kind?  I like the precision, I guess, but there’s something more, the names of things. And the names of things carry within them states of being, unstated inferences, geographies, even eras, also music, the rhythm of the particular, of a place. Continue reading →

First Sight

categories: Cocktail Hour

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Since I am heading back to Colorado today it seems the right time to post this tidbit from the second chapter of All the Wild That Remains, “First Sight”:

 First Sight

The land buckles and rises.

 

For a thousand miles it rolls out, sometimes up and down and sometimes flat like a carpet, all the way from the old crumbling eastern mountains. But then comes a kink in the carpet. A big kink. The continent lifts itself up, its back rising, and most homo sapiens who are seeing that lift for the first or second or even the fifty-third time feel a corresponding lift in their chests. A feeling of possibility, of risk, of excitement.

 

That was what I felt, at least, as the West announced itself. What had been a sometimes imperceptible rise for the last few hundred miles suddenly became an undeniable one. The continent convulsed and lifted, mountains thrusting into the sky.

 

It is an inherently American moment. The same moment that trappers and early pioneers wrote about in their diaries. That mystical moment when East becomes West. The place where the country finally gets bored with itself and reaches for the sky.

Here is the eighteen-year-old Ed Abbey’s reaction upon first seeing the sight he had dreamed of: “There on the western horizon, under a hot, clear sky, sixty miles away, crowned with snow (in July), was a magical vision, a legend come true: the front range of the Rocky Mountains. An impossible beauty, like a boy’s first sight of an undressed girl, the image of those mountains struck a fundamental chord in my imagination that has sounded ever since.” Continue reading →

Guest contributor: Debora Black

Table for Two: Debora Black Interviews Abigail Thomas

categories: Cocktail Hour / Table For Two: Interviews

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Debora: Congratulations, Abby, on the release of your new memoir, What Comes Next and How to Like It. I’m delighted to be able to speak with you about this meaningful book and your writing life.  Your writing is truly impressive—precise and perceptive. It often surprised me, the particular way you shined the light. For example, in the final chapter, reflecting back over the events in your book, you write:

Love can accommodate all sorts of misshapen objects: a door held open for a city dog who runs into the woods; fences down; some role you didn’t ask for, didn’t want. Love allows for betrayal and loss and dread. Love is roomy. Love can change its shape, be known by different names. Love is elastic.

And the dog comes back.

This is the best definition of love I’ve ever heard. It’s beautiful. Poignant (for the person who has read your book), except that it’s stronger than that, in control of itself. And then so practical and funny at the end, this dog love. All I could do was close the book, and hold it to my chest while all of the emotions and thoughts flooded through. The total of which has me wondering this: When you write, do you sense the quiet power of what you’re writing? Is it something that forms on its own from an unconscious space or do you construct it purposefully?

Abby: First, thank you for saying such extremely nice things. It’s not really a conscious choice, the way I write, except when I revise to make it succinct. I love what you said about its forming on its own from an unconscious space. That describes exactly what writing is like. Continue reading →

Bad Advice Wednesday: Don’t Read Your Reviews

categories: Cocktail Hour

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Many writers have claimed they don’t, Papa H. included. But I don’t have the discipline to resist myself. And hey, if I did I wouldn’t have gotten to read this one by Nick Romeo in the Christian Science Monitor, which chose All the Wild That Remains as their top book in April:

“The massive droughts and forest fires that have scorched large swaths of the American West over the past decade would not have surprised Edward Abbey and Wallace Stegner, two of the region’s greatest 20th-century authors. Stegner was prophetic in articulating the defining scarcity of the environment west of the hundredth meridian: “The primary unity of the West is the shortage of water,” he wrote. Abbey, meanwhile, blamed the greed of those settling the West rather than the landscape itself; he saw in developers a blind pursuit of growth that resembled the “ideology of the cancer cell.”

 

These two men are the contrasting heroes of a profoundly relevant and readable new book by David Gessner: All the Wild That Remains: Edward Abbey, Wallace Stegner, and the American West. In this artful combination of nature writing, biography, literary criticism, and cultural history, Gessner studies two fascinating characters who fought through prose and politics to defend the fragile ecologies and transcendent beauties of the West.

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Idiots with Phones

categories: Cocktail Hour

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The “All The Wild” Tour: Rough Draft!

categories: Cocktail Hour

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Here is what I got so far. Pardon (or tell me to correct) any mistakes. Just wanted to get something down for now.  Come on out and see me!

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Bad Advice Wednesday, Earth-Day Edition: Cross Borders!

categories: Cocktail Hour

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Here was the phone conversation, as recounted later by my wife.

“Is this Nina de Gramont, mother of Hadley Gessner?’ asked the Canadian Border Officer.

“Yes it is.”

“Does Hadley Gessner have permission to cross into Canada with David Gessner?”

“Yes, she most certainly does.”

“Well, that’s good because they crossed the border about half an hour ago.”

Nina and I had been unaware that any single parent crossing the border with a child needs a letter from the absent parent. So Hadley and I ended up in the Border Patrol office, talking with the officer for close to an hour while he tried Nina’s phone again and again. At the end of that hour, the officer had learned some things, including how Labrador Retrievers got their name–they were originally from Newfoundland but that name was taken so they were named after the surrounding sea—and was also pretty sure that Hadley was not being kidnapped. Continue reading →

Guest contributor: Bill Lundgren

Lundgren’s Lounge: “All the Wild That Remains,” by David Gessner

categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside / Reading Under the Influence

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The natural world is out of balance. That much is clear to all but the most myopic among us. Global warming, annual ‘once-in-a-lifetime’ weather events, water scarcity, toxic pollution, species extinction… the list is a depressing drumbeat foretelling catastrophe. Yet despite this impending crisis the environmental movement seems to have lost its mojo. Where are the iconic leaders of this generation, the Ed Abbeys and the Wallace Stegners, wordsmiths who could awaken a movement with their well-chosen words? Continue reading →