Books: Turning Homeward, and Knocking On Heaven’s Door


Today, in typical spring-in-the-Rockies fashion, the weather pivoted 180 degrees from yesterday’s sixty-five and sunny, into freezing rain, mist, sleet, snow, and then steady rain again. When I walked to the Post Office just a few minutes ago, the temperature was hovering just above freezing, and the cloud-blanket was beginning to clear, revealing new snow on the hillsides just above town. 


This kind of weather that makes me want to curl up on the couch and read. With that in mind, here are capsule reviews of two books that crossed my desk recently. The two are very different: one is memoir/nature writing of the best sort, thoughtful and insightful, and the other is crackling good fiction. What they share is that both books stretch boundaries, shift perspectives, and teach us things we didn’t know we needed to know. Which is what makes each a great read. 



Turning Homeward, Restoring Hope and Nature in the Urban Wild, by Adrienne Ross Scanlan


As a girl growing up in the suburbs of New York City, Adrienne Ross Scanlan watched her father with the other men at Temple Zion, white prayer shawls over dark suits, “swaying and chanting their prayers.” At home, she watched a different kind of movement as the tremors and other neuro-motor impacts of Parkinson’s disease robbed her father of the ability to “rise from his Naugahyde recliner, walk into a room, hug his daughters, talk and laugh with friends…”


After her father died, Scanlan, by then an adult, sold her belongings, quit her job and moved West for a new start. She wound up in Seattle and began searching for her own form of healing in volunteer work to help restore the region’s iconic salmon runs. She understood it as a way to practice the Jewish tradition of tikkum olam, a term that translates as ”repair of the world.”


Turning Homeward chronicles what Scanlan learns about the complexities of both mending the world and living as a thoughtful and conscious human being. Her meditations on the meaning of tikkum olam, and the meaning of restoration in nature and in daily life apply to all of us. How can we as fallible human beings live with our flaws and the hurts we intentionally or not inflict on each other and the world? How do we live with the knowledge that even at our best, we cause pain and suffering, simply by being? We all eat, for example, and in the doing, we consume other lives. Even if we eat a purely plant-based diet, we eat plant embryos as we consume grain and beans, and plant flesh in roots like carrots or leaves like spinach. How do we atone for those impacts, unwitting or not?


For Scanlan, the answer is in practicing tikkum olam, consciously working to repair the world in whatever form we are called to:


The call to repair is genuine, arising from our best selves, I like to think, the part of all of us capable of acknowledging the harms we’ve crated without shrinking away in guilt or fear. There’s no end to the damage we caused, just as there’s no end to our curiosity, our capacity for good work, our intelligence, and our compassion. The reasons for despair are everywhere and profound. What’s lost does matter. So does what’s still here and what’s still possible. … Tikkun, I’ve come to learn, isn’t identified by intentions but by the impact of what we hope are reparative actions.


Turning Homeward is a work of thoughtful atonement. Scanlan writes honestly and tenderly about what has not worked in mending her life, and the lives of salmon and urban streams, as well as what has. And out of despair at the havoc we have wreaked on this earth and each other, a quiet sense of hope grows in her words, the kind of active expectation of the results of conscious work that can in fact, lead to mending the wounds of the world and we humans.



Knocking On Heaven’s Door, by Sharman Apt Russell


Clare breathed in the smell of blood. Sharp, metallic, in the air, on her skin. She slipped her knife into the space between the joint and bone of the mare’s hip—a small young female but still too much meat, more than enough for their next few days of hunting. Tonight she and Jon would feast on the rump with garlic and onion, some saltbush leaves, perhaps a mint paste… Clare felt happy thinking about her dinner. She felt…lust. A fervent yearning. Her mouth filled with saliva. A violent tenderness. Her heart expanded, blossomed, pressed against her ribcage so that she mewled without sound, kittenish. She slunk forward, barely in control, through the grass…

No, no, these were not her thoughts. 


“Cat! Cat!” Clare yelled and stood, dropping the knife, picking up her spear from the bloodied ground.


It is the 23rd Century, about 150 years after a supervirus has wiped out almost every human being on Earth. The few survivors have recreated a “utopian” paleolithic hunter-gatherer lifestyle imbued with animism, informed by New Physics, and linked by solar-powered laptops (solarcomps) via the worldwide web.


Clare and her tribe live in New Mexico, moving with the seasons, feasting on abundant plants and wild game, and celebrating the cycles of nature. The only animals they do not hunt are the “paleos,” once-extinct Paleolithic species reintroduced before the virus, creatures like the saber-toothed cat who intruded into Clare’s thoughts and nearly killed her and her hunting companion at the beginning of the book. Many paleos are telepathic; as Clare says, “How could you hunt someone you could talk to?”


A widow whose young daughter died six years before, Clare has found comfort and meaning in teaching creative writing to students from around the world via the worldwide web. Now, one of her students, a younger man from her own tribe, has become her lover. Clare’s life seems settled, until she is assigned to serve as quest-guide to Brad, a “lab rat” and theoretical physicist who lives in the relative comfort of what remains of the Los Alamos National Laboratory complex.


Brad, who discovered The Theory of Everything and whose mathematics describes how life could exist in “quantum non-locality,” as holographic projections of actual cells. Brad, who has put off the required quest as long as possible, who prefers to think math in his office rather than hunt and sleep outdoors. Brad, who initially becomes interested in Clare simply a woman who might bear his children.


The quest the two set off on becomes so much more than a simple journey, bringing up classic conflicts: a life close to the earth versus a life of the mind, technology versus nature, organized society versus loners who live outside the culture, intuitive and sensory knowledge versus intellect, man versus woman. The story twists and turns through the landscape, through lives, through physics and Brad’s risky experiment to win Clare as his own. The choices the two humans make in the aftermath of that experiment will shape their future and that of their people.


Science fiction generally doesn’t interest me, but Knocking on Heaven’s Door sucked me in and kept me hooked, immersed in a culture and characters I hadn’t imagined I wanted to know. Sharman Apt Russell’s imagined future manages to be both utopian and also startlingly contemporary, relevant and illuminating to our lives and choices today.


___ 


Two excellent reads, thanks to two authors unafraid to reach deep, think way beyond the norms, and explore the world, in very different ways. Happy reading!

Looking Back, Finding Home

Near the end of my first book, Pieces of Light, a year's worth of journal-style essays about making a home and observing nature in Boulder, Colorado, I wrote a couple of paragraphs that at the time were simply poignant and now seem quite prophetic. The year in Boulder documented in that book came after we had moved from Laramie, Wyoming, where we met and married, to Morgantown, West Virginia, where Richard taught at West Virginia University, and then three years in Western Washington.

In Boulder, Molly finished third grade, and Richard finished his dissertation in Economics and then accepted a position at Iowa State University. I was, I think, in denial. All through that halcyon year of exploring Boulder and its environs, I had hoped that we would somehow be able to somehow stay in the region where sagebrush grows, the skies are intensely blue, and mountains line at least one horizon. The region where my heart is happy. 

It was not to be. So before we left for Iowa, I took a solo trip home to northwest Wyoming. I visited friends in Cody, did a little fieldwork with my geology mentor, the late, great David Love, in Jackson Hole, and then spent a few nights in Yellowstone National Park. Where I wrote these paragraphs:

Today I sit in the warm sun on a smooth-as-satin weathered lodgepole pine trunk washed up as winter flotsam on the shore of Yellowstone Lake. The lake stretches for miles, filling a collapsed volcanic dome like a piece of fallen sky, at this moment deep blue and ruffled like wrinkled velvet. The air, scrubbed clean by yesterday's rain, reveals a landscape etched with memories. Here I grew into an adult, pursued my field ecology career, lived the years of my first marriage. It is home to me still. Each valley, each undulating or craggy ridgeline, each meadow, each bit of pattern in the dark forest cover is familiar. …

How could I ever have been so naive as to think that this trip home would make leaving the landscape of the Rockies easier? … I ache at the thought of leaving again, knowing that the going will rip a part of me out, the me that is rooted in these huge, arid landscapes. I hug my arms around myself, anticipating the parting, trying to hold myself intact. It is futile. I must go; I want so badly to stay. …

Once I get up from this log and walk back to my rental car, I begin the leaving. The road away runs east along the lake shore across Pelican Valley, then up through the forests, past the sulphur yellow and ashy white earth of steaming hot springs… finally emerging in the Big Horn Basin at Cody. From there by plane to Denver, bus to Boulder, and thence, gathering my family and possessions around me, by rented truck to the cornfields of central Iowa. Once I leave this log, there is no looking back. 

Indeed, there was no looking back.

After two years in Iowa, where Molly finished Fourth and Fifth Grade, Richard began making his name in Economics, and I wrote my first book, we moved to Las Cruces, New Mexico. We lived there seven years, long enough for Richard to get tenure at New Mexico State University and establish a consulting practice as an expert witness in the economics of regulation. 

Richard and me at Three Rivers Petroglyphs, New Mexico

During those years, Molly graduated from high school and started college, and I wrote five books, most of them about the desert. I did my best to love where we lived, but I never quit missing the Rockies. So one spring Richard took a year off teaching and we moved north to Salida, his childhood home in south-central Colorado. 

We never returned to Las Cruces. Richard's expert-witness work kept him busy for nearly a decade, and when that waned, he tried real estate appraisal, but that didn't suit his thirst for intellectual stimulation. I urged him to explore the abstract sculpture he had considered a hobby his whole life, work with stone and steel and wood that expressed his innate love for this earth.

 

Richard at work on a boulder

Sculpture provided both the intellectual and creative challenge he needed. Richard's art was beginning to gain a following when one quiet summer Sunday morning, he saw thousands upon thousands of birds, transient hallucinations that were the only major sign of the brain cancer that would kill him two and a quarter years later.

Before he died, Richard asked me to stay in Salida where the community had held us so close through that terrible and beautiful journey toward his end. "Don't make any sudden decisions," he said. 

I didn't. I couldn't stay in the house he built for us, his largest sculpture with its soaring, light-filled great room, sinks carved from local boulders, and the flagstone shelves that issue from the walls like cliff ledges. The place was too big for me to maintain, and it was my largest asset: I needed the cash out of it to pay the bills. 

So I finished the house and built my own snug place, using the one basin from the big house he hadn't ever installed (because he never finished the master bath!) as the vanity sink in my bathroom, a way to take him with me.

 

That gorgeous basin, which reminds me of Richard and his saying that rocks are "ambassadors of the earth" every time I wash my hands.

And I settled in, loving the small space and the way it made my feel safe, cradled, in this new journey as Woman Alone.

Now, nearly five years after Richard's death, I realize that while Salida was the perfect place for us, it's not the perfect place for me

Which is why, 28 years after I sat on that satiny weathered pine log on the shores of Yellowstone Lake and grieved at leaving the home of my heart, I am finally looking back. I've just returned from a few days in northwest Wyoming, my third trip to Cody and Yellowstone in the past five months. 

It still feels like home, even after all these years. And I still have good friends there, some from decades ago, some new. Enough to form the beginnings of community. My heart is happy there, something I think Richard would understand. 

So, after talking to Molly and my family, I am planning a move. Not this month or even this year, but before my next birthday. It's time. Home calls. 

Cedar (also called Spirit) and Rattlesnake mountains, west of Cody

Remembering Ann Haymond Zwinger

On this hot summer-solstice day, I drove to Colorado Springs to help celebrate the life of Ann Haymond Zwinger, author, naturalist, illustrator, mentor, and one of the two writers whose work inspired me to switch careers from science to writing. (Barry Lopez is the other.) When I read their work, I knew I wanted to tell the stories I knew from science in a way that would give voice to this planet and its glorious communitiy of lives–human and wild. 

Ann was born in Muncie, Indiana in 1925 and died in Portland, Oregon last August. Her first book (Beyond the Aspen Grove) wasn’t published until 1970, when she was 45 years old and had already raised three girls (Susan, also an author and artist, Sara, and Jane). Ann went on to write and illustrate eighteen more books, including classics like Run, River, Run (about the Green River) and Downcanyon (the Colorado River).


An Ann Zwinger sketch from the Grand Canyon

The book that introduced me to Ann Zwinger was her second, Land Above the Trees, written with botanist Beatrice Willard and a finalist for the National Book Award in 1973. That book illuminated the lives that weave the alpine, those harsh and beautiful landscapes at the highest elevations on this continent.

I stumbled on the book when I was taking my first field course in college, a summer ecology seminar based out of Red Lodge, Montana, including the glorious expanse of the alpine Beartooth Plateau. The combination of Ann’s lyrical prose and sketches, plus Bea’s science took my breath away. I didn’t know until reading Land Above the Trees that the facts of nature that so fascinate me could be written in a way they were as compelling as any novel. 


Crossing the South Fork of the South Platte River in South Park

Today was a gorgeous day for the drive to Colorado Springs, the kind of day Ann would have appreciated. I took the upper route on the way to the city, heading up-valley to Trout Creek Pass and then across the southern edge of South Park, a roughly bowl-shaped mountain grassland stretching for miles between the peaks that rim its edges. 

Because I had Ann on my mind, I made a special point to notice and identify the wildflowers blooming in the high grasslands of South Park. Ann always wanted to identify what she saw, even before she drew it. 

I spotted scarlet bugler penstemon, wholeleaf Indian paintbrush, greenthread, yarrow, Lambert’s locoweed, Bessey’s milkvetch, sand daisy, prairie senecio, Rocky Mountain iris, boulder raspberry, and a pale pink milkvetch I couldn’t identify at 65 miles per hour. And green, green grass, a tribute to the incredibly wet May we had before the weather turned hot and dry.


A swath of Rocky Mountain iris (Iris missouriensis)

If I’d had Ann riding with me, we would have been hopelessly late, because we would have stopped every half-mile to identify wildflowers and sketch them–along with lichens, prairie dogs, pronghorn, and any other lives we saw. And we would have had a great time. 

I didn’t stop. It was was hot as heck in Colorado Springs, but the event, held in a hall in the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center with a great view of Pikes Peak, Ann’s favorite mountain, was the kind of party she would have enjoyed. There was great food, time to reconnect with old friends and meet new ones, singing (Susan Zwinger, muralist Pat Musick and writer/illustrator/teacher Sarah Rabkin led us in a round of Dona Nobis Pacem, Let There Be Peace), and remembrances of Ann’s life. 

At the end, I said my goodbyes and hit the road for home. (I’m feeling much better this week, but I still tire easily.)

I took the low road home, heading south across the very western edge of the Great Plains to Cañon City and then winding upstream along the Arkansas River through Bighorn Sheep Canyon.


The river at Badger Creek, running fast and high

Ann would have liked that drive too. The shortgrass prairie is the greenest I have ever seen it and the yucca is in bloom with its tall ivory candle-stick-like stalks of waxy flowers. And the Arkansas River is running at flood-stage, the water brown and muscly, full of splashing wave-trains, a powerful mountain river swollen with snow melt. In places the river was only a foot or so below the highway, its floodplain awash. 

It’s eight-thirty now and the sun has just set, the dusk lingering as it does in these long and hot days. It’s summer solstice, the longest day of the year. If Ann was here, she’d be out on the deck with me admiring the light and sketching the blazingstars as they open. She’s not, so I’ll admire them for her. 

I’ll let Ann have the last word, in this passage from the chapter “Of Cactus Wrens and Playas,” from her book The Mysterious Lands about all four of North America’s deserts. (A playa is a dry lake bed, a level expanse that fills with water only after rains, and only then temporarily.)

Striding toward the center of the playa is great walking–no cacti to run into, no vines to trip over, no rattlesnakes to watch out for. … In two hundred yards I stand, like the pivot point of a compass, in the center of the universe–a place to dance, to hoot and holler, to rearrange mountains, to count the rollicking stars at night. To redesign the world. 

Thanks for showing us all you wondered at, Ann. You are missed.