12 Days of Reading Recommendations, Day 4: To Live and Die Deliberately in the Woods
Like a lot of people this year, I've availed myself of a few different excellent library systems and gotten a lot of reading done. I thought for an end-of-year treat, I'd share the books I'd recommend and what makes them worth reading. And wouldn't you know it, my reading just happens to sort of self-sift into twelve different subject areas, so it's twelve days of reading! Each day's recommendations newsletter will clock in at 600 words or less, so you can gulp this quick bite when you need a minute to yourself. Enjoy giving your Libby app a vigorous workout or making some independent bookseller very happy.
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TO LIVE AND DIE DELIBERATELY IN THE WOODS
Outside magazine's stalwart commitment to documenting all the ways in which the outdoors can kill you is definitely one of the most compelling reasons to subscribe. Whenever I get a drink or two in me at backyard get-togethers, I will recap the story of explorer Hendrik Coetzee and a Nile crocodile's shocking attack, and I will never not be horrified by his final moments. And yet -- I get why someone would want to canoe the Nile. As Jon Krakauer wrote when explaining the allure of risky outdoors activities in Into the Wild:
The accumulated clutter of day-to-day existence -- the lapses of conscience, the unpaid bills, the bungled opportunities, the dust under the couch, the inescapable prison of your genes -- all of it is temporarily forgotten, crowded from your thoughts by an overpowering clarity of purpose and by the seriousness of the task at hand.
Before there was Jon Krakauer plumbing what it means for a human to search for meaning in the clarifying crucible of the wild, there was Norman Maclean, lyrically wrestling with the same human tension between society and solitude in the outdoors. His collection of writing, A River Runs Through It, comes from an earlier age, where he summed up the appeal of his labors in the Forest Service with, "to all those who work come moments of beauty unseen by the rest of the world."
Maclean also wrote a haunting book, Young Men and Fire, the story of the Mann Gulch fire of 1949 and the 13 smokejumpers who died there. With a gift for insight and writing that is unmatched, he sums of the sense of loss that permeates all those purposeful, doomed pilgrimages:
It is very important to a lot of people to make unmistakably clear to themselves and to the universe that they love the universe but are not intimidated by it and will not be shaken by it, no matter what it has in store. Moreover, they demand something from themselves early in life that can be taken ever after as a demonstration of this abiding feeling.
I thought of both quotes often while reading Roman Dial's The Explorer's Son -- in which he grapples with his son's disappearance while hiking and how his own outdoorsy encouragement might have led to his son's fate -- and Jon Billman's The Cold Vanish.
That last book details the myriad reasons people get lost and die in the woods, some by random chance, some by their own human frailty, still others by human evil. And it points out how few resources we have dedicated to finding the people who try to find a clear sense of themselves in the wild. The federal government, which should have at least coordinated protocols to look for the missing across our national parks, is missing there.
Another book I read this year, one which left me mired in fury and sorrow even before pandemics wracked my country and wildfires ripped through my state, was Michael Lewis's The Fifth Risk. A brisk and well-reported tome on the way the outgoing administration has strip-mined the American people of the expertise, competency, and good will contained within the agencies charged with keeping our country going for its residents. A quote from that book seemed a bitter epitaph for 2020:
One day someone will write the history of the strange relationship between the United States government and its citizens. It would need at least a chapter on the government’s attempts to save the citizens from the things that might kill them.
No wonder so many more of us went into the woods this year. It is a miracle how many of us came out of whatever woods were left unburned.
BOOKS MENTIONED IN THIS NEWSLETTER:
The Cold Vanish, by Jon Billman
The Explorer's Son, by Roman Dial
Into the Wild, by Jon Krakauer
The Fifth Risk, by Michael Lewis
A River Runs Through It, by Norman Maclean
Young Men and Fire, by Norman Maclean
BONUS INTERNET FUN:
I've spent a lot of time this year trawling through the East Bay Parks Trails Challenge, the Peninsula Open Space Trust hikes list and the Weekend Sherpa archives looking for day trips that will let us get outdoors without getting up on other people's grills. I encourage all of you to cast about for your local parks' websites and events calendars to see how you can get out without getting eaten by Nile crocodiles.
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