To take the most curmudgeonly one first, if Killer Whales have legal rights comparable to those of humans (or at least natural born US citizens), do they have legal responsibilities as well—and can Tilikum thus be prosecuted for murder or manslaughter for the death of Sea World trainer Dawn Brancheau? Or will his plea be self-defense?

That’s stretching it, obviously, but one of the interesting questions posed by this case—much like the general questions that arise when we talk about “animal minds”—is where is the dividing line? This question came up repeatedly in the 1970s and 1980s with reference to all of the chimp/language studies, around which the linguistics and psychology community was sharply polarized until everyone got bored and forgot about the chimps and moved on to the more ivory-towerish questions posed by Artificial Intelligence instead. Then there’s John Lilly’s work, which galvanized a lot of people (including me) by being tantalizing, but never as much as Lilly thought it was, and Lou Herman’s work, which was a lot more detailed and orderly, but also a lot more cautious. But that these are animals with minds is no longer in question.

PETA, I have to say, has a point here. A number of observers and even some scientists have, over the decades, questioned the appropriateness of keeping dolphins and whales penned up. I remember some absolutely horrible facilities from the 1970s around Tampa where dolphins were kept in tanks not much larger than a bathtub, and a comparison to human solitary confinement in a small dark cell designed for sensory deprivation would not be unjustified. And one could argue that Sea World’s facilities, while spacious, aren’t really designed to avoid stress. In addition, orcas and dolphins are smart, like chimps and some other primates—whether they’re as smart as people are isn’t really the appropriate question. But they do seem to be smart enough to cause a great deal of head-scratching and revisions to the kinds of assumptions made forty or fifty years ago about the question of animal intelligence. This knowledge has been hard earned, by both humans and dolphins (which Killer Whales actually are, by the way—they’re a big species of dolphin). Let’s face it—we’re talking about Killer Whales (and dolphins, presumably, and possibly chimps and some other primates)—we’re not talking about anteaters, or bats, or lizards. And even if we’re not smart enough ourselves to articulate why this is, we sort of know that it’s true.

And yet, and yet…once past the obvious quandary posed by the fact that it’s PETA, who can be some of the most annoying people on the face of the planet when they put their minds to it, who are actually doing an interesting thing here, there are some other issues. First of all, legal systems take a while to catch up to events, yes, but there are already a bunch of laws on the books relating to the protection and preservation of marine mammals—although they don’t go so far as to define “slavery” as the equivalent of a large tank at Sea World.

That outfits like Sea World could see some financial hit here is pretty clear, but also irrelevant. Obviously, no one would go to Sea World to see a Herring show. Well, maybe they would—I don’t know. But there is also the consideration that Marine Parks, like Zoos, provide an educational function—and it’s not trivial. Well, maybe with the mass adoption of the internet over the past two decades a bit less so, but it’s hard to tell. There are genuine animal rescue programs. There are (or used to be) petting pools. These are fun places, but people learn stuff too–and while it’s one thing to see an animal on television or a computer screen, it’s another thing see see one in person–so to speak.

Additionally, one can foresee a not completely impossible scenario in which several interesting legal rulings result in Zoos and Marine Parks having to decide which animals they would keep, and what to do with those big tanks now that they had to let all the dolphins and killer whales go. Not to mention where all those very large dolphins and killer whales would actually go to. There are chimp retirement parks around the US—but there’s nothing comparable for marine mammals. Since many of these animals only know a life in captivity, it’s plausible that release in open water could be a death sentence. This is just one of the imponderables. Remember the Free Willy whale that there was a massive campaign to release, and which raised millions to send him to Iceland where he could be released? That didn’t turn out so well, although that certainly isn’t an argument that he should have stayed where he was. On the other hand, there are clearly cases where a return to open water, especially back to an original population, is not only possible, but seems like the right thing to do.

So this will be interesting to watch unfold–one of those dilemmas posed by modern life for which whatever the resolution, someone will be deeply unhappy. I don’t know enough law to know which way this might go, but the fact that the judge is even entertaining the possibility of letting this proceed probably seems like some sort of milestone–whether a good or a bad one depends, of course, on how this gets resolved.

Today, the Journal published a response by 38 climate scientists to the commentary as a letter to the editor. This continues a pattern at the Journal of refusing to grant equal space and prominence to refutations of factually deficient commentaries. But given the Journal could have simply refused to publish any response, this is something a reasonably significant accomplishment. (Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway document the Journal‘s long and iniquitous history of refusing to publish rebuttals in great detail in their book Merchants of Doubt, reviewed by S&R here)

Here are the opening lines from the rebuttal:

Do you consult your dentist on your heart condition? In science, as in any area, reputations are based on knowledge and expertise in a field, and on published, peer-reviewed work. If you need surgery, you want a highly experienced expert in the field who has done a large number of the proposed operations.

On January 27, the Wall Street Journal published an op-ed on climate change by the climate science equivalent of dentists practicing cardiology….

Please click on the link above (or this one, which could move the rebuttal behind the Journal‘s paywall at any time) to read the rest.

Dear Mr. Rutan,

Ever since you won the Ansari X-Prize in 2004 you’ve been a minor hero of mine. I’ve felt that the development of private human spaceflight was the critical next step toward moving humanity off our small blue marble since I was in high school, and SpaceShipOne was the first major step in that direction. The commercialization of space travel is a large part of why I work in aerospace myself designing satellite and space vehicle electronics.

This is why I was disappointed to find that you had co-signed a Wall Street Journal commentary regarding human-caused climate disruption along with 15 other scientists and engineers. The commentary was replete with incorrect and misleading information. So much so, in fact, that I was surprised that you, as an engineer, would attach your name to it.

You may not be aware of this, but greenhouse crops are very productive because farmers take great care to ensure that the crops have optimal nutrition. The farmers ensure that the crops in the greenhouses have enough water, nitrogen, phosphorus, and other nutrients in addition to higher carbon dioxide. Without increasing all of these nutrients merely increasing carbon dioxide in the greenhouse’s air will not produce fast growing, nutritious crops. This is why the greenhouse claim made in the Journal commentary was incomplete and misleading – higher atmospheric carbon dioxide only leads to greater productivity when all other nutrients are also more available. It’s not a foregone conclusion that, outside of greenhouses, the other nutrients plants need to flourish will be more available. In fact, a great deal of research over the last few years suggests the opposite, that usable precipitation and fixed nitrogen will actually become rarer, counteracting most if not all of the improvements in crop yields and overall carbon sequestration by plants worldwide.

This is one example of incomplete and misleading information from the commentary you signed. There are at least five more. I can detail them for you if you are interested.

Mr. Rutan, as a successful engineer you have certainly developed an innate understanding that the quality of your opinions can only be as good as the information you have. In the case of human-caused climate disruption, I’m afraid that the information upon which you’re basing opinions appears to be rather poor quality. Climate realists like myself accept that the case for human-driven climate disruption is supported by multiple independent lines of evidence and that no alternative hypothesis yet presented has withstood scientific scrutiny or explained the observed climate changes. In this case, the strongest and best available data supports the proposition that humans are driving global climate disruption, that the disruptions to the Earth’s climate will continue to worsen this century, and the sooner we address the root causes of climate disruption, the better.

Mr. Rutan, if you our your people are reading this, I’d love to sit down with you sometime, engineer to engineer, and discuss why I think your opinions are based upon incorrect and incomplete data.

Very truly yours,

Brian Angliss

After feeding twenty-six books into my head in thirty days, I’d like to say that I’m letting my brain decompress, but I’ll be honest: I’m still reading. In fact, I have two books going right now, Bill Bryson’s I’m a Stranger Here Myself and Barbara Kingsolver’s High Tide in Tucson. I want to hit up Barry Lopez’s Arctic Dreams and Wendell Barry’s agrarian essays, too, and I want to spend some time with David Cushman’s book on The Wilderness, Bloody Promenade. Maybe then I’ll be done. Maybe.

But there’s David Gessner’s Sick of Nature. There’s Susan Jane Gilman’s Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven. There’s George Orwell’s Road to Wigan Pier. And there’s still John Muir looming over everything, a backdrop to much of what I’ve read, as significant as the Sierra Nevadas, as significant as Thoreau and Walden.

So many books, so little time.

I’ve been cramming books into my head at an alarming rate–so fast that I literally lost count. Only after I finished did I realize I’d counted two books at #14 and so had, unbeknownst to me, finished a day early. My effort to jam in a final book before midnight on the last day turned out to be gravy, and I didn’t even know it. (I’ve since gone back in true Orwellian fashion and corrected the record–a little ironic since I didn’t get to Orwell yet, although he’s on the list.)

I’m a voracious reader, but even by my standards this reading endeavor has been grueling. But it’s also been intellectually rewarding and, just as important, fun. I even had the author of one of the books I reviewed write to say he was “pleased to see such a
thorough understanding of what I was getting at vs the BS I’ve seen in other reviews. Please pass along my kudos….” That was gratifying.

As I read these books, I was looking, specifically, at the way creative nonfiction writers write about place. So what did I learn?

Upon first reflection, there seemed to be three different ways to approach the notion of place: One could travel through it, one could be in it, or one could piece it together indirectly. For purposes of simplicity, I’ll refer to travel writers and nature writers. As you might guess, the travel writers travel through a place; nature writers exist in a space. I’ll hold off on talking about the third category for a few minutes.

Travel writers and nature writers tended to write about place in much different ways:

1) For a travel writer, a place is something to be experienced. For a nature writer, a place is to be reflected on. Certainly a travel writer may try to figure out what his/her experiences mean as he/she passes through. A nature writer might, indeed, have very meaningful experiences to reflect on, but it seems the real objective is to figure out what the place means.

2) Travel writers tend to weigh their travel experience against what they know about home. They contrast the new with the familiar. In doing so, they frequently learn something about both places, and they learn something about themselves, too. Nature writers tend to examine humankind’s relationship with nature and their own place within that larger scheme. They contrast the natural with the man-made. In doing so, they learn something about the relationship.

3) Travel writers tend to get energized by their experiences, as exhausting (and sometimes scary) as travel is. Nature writers tend to get inspired by nature but then get frustrated and/or depressed when they realize how unrelenting humankind is when it comes to pillaging the planet.

4) Travel writers tend to “show” by recounting experiences; nature writers tend to “show” by evoking mood and wonder. I didn’t read many “poetic” travel writers, but I read lots of beautiful nature writing. Likewise, I didn’t read a lot of humorous nature writing, but I read a lot of funny travel writing. (Bill Bryson falls into both categories, I think—and he’s freakin’ hilarious.)

5) Nature writers tend to value place for its intrinsic worth, while travel writers tend to value place for the experience they can get out of it. That comes across in the ways in which various writers interact with a place and communicate their reflections about it.

Those are all, of course, generalities, and they’re based on a sampling of twenty-five or so books. I’m noting the patterns that jumped out at me, but any other collection of twenty-five books read under saner conditions would, no doubt, produce different patterns for different readers.

The third category of writers I encountered created a sense of place through travel and occupation, and through experience and reflection, but the journey was the destination, so to speak. They created cultural landscapes. I’m thinking of Andrew Ferguson’s Land of Lincoln—what is Lincoln’s America and who is America’s Lincoln? Or Bill Bryson’s I’m a Stranger Here Myself—what are these crazy, quirky everyday experiences that comprise the experience of living in America? Or Tony Horwitz’s Confederates in the Attic—what do “North” and “South” look like today? Barbara Kingsolver’s High Tide in Tucson is shaping up to be that kind of book, too.

I think of the definition of “creative nonfiction” offered by Philip Gerard, a writing prof at the University of North Carolina and author of Creative Nonfiction: Researching and Crafting Stories of Real Life. He says a creative nonfiction piece must have an apparent subject and a deeper subject—that is, what’s the story about on the surface and what’s really going on, what does it really mean. It’s like plot and theme in a way. That’s exemplified in the relationship between fact and truth. The “apparent subject” might include the history, geology, geography, and ecology of a place; the “deeper subject” might turn that place into a metaphor or a symbol that relates to the writer’s inner journey. Successful pieces balance the two.

Travel pieces worked best for me when they didn’t just overload me with the apparent subject (the trip) and all the factual information that went with it. For example, Maarten Troost’s Lost on Planet China was obviously a travel book, but the focus of Troost’s trip always came back to his quest to understand the potential impact China’s awakening was going to have on the world—and on him.

Other books, like Julian Smith’s Crossing the Heart of Africa gave lip service to the deeper subject (“Who am I?”) and emphasized the apparent subject (getting from this place to that place and offering background about the places as he goes).

Nature books that were most effective used the apparent subject (life at Walden Pond, the travails of a flooded wildlife refuge) as a way to contextualize the deeper subject (self-sufficiency, coping with loss).

Linda Hogan’s Dwellings almost entirely abandoned the apparent subject (the natural world) to reflect on the deeper subject (how to redefine our thinking about our relationship with the natural world). John McPhee’s grounded his Pine Barrens in the apparent subject (the pine barrens and the people who live there) and let largely left it to readers to find their own deeper subject (the importance of the barrens as a unique landscape).

As I mull over these things, I realize that they’re just convenient constructs for me to organize my thinking. I could easily look past these conveniences and set these books into conversation with each other (and with me) in other ways. For instance, I could reframe my thinking so that I could look at how writing about place helped these writers understand the human condition.

I will spend the next week and a half mulling over these and other connections between the books. I’ll step back and, like Tom Hanks’ character from The DiVinci Code, wait for more patterns to materialize for me out of thin air. Then I’ll write a long, long paper about it for my doctoral program and see if I can make some cohesive sense out of all of it.

And then I’ll start reading another book.

————

For anyone keeping track, here’s the original list I chose my books from. I’ve indicated which ones I read, and I’ve made note, too, of any book that got added in after I compiled the initial list.

Abbey, Edward. Desert Solitaire.

Berry, Wendell. The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry.

Bryson, Bill. A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail.

Bryson, Bill. I’m a Stranger Here Myself: Notes on Returning to America After 20 Years Away. (In progress!)

Carson, Rachel. The Edge of the Sea.

Carson, Rachel. The Sea Around Us. (added)

Carson, Rachel. The Sense of Wonder. (added)

Carson, Rachel. Silent Spring.

Casey, Susan. The Devil’s Teeth: A True Story of Obsession and Survival Among America’s Great White Sharks.

Cushman, Stephen. Bloody Promenade: Reflections on a Civil War Battle.

Dennis, Jerry. The Living Great Lakes: Searching for the Heart of the Inland Seas.

Elder, John. Reading the Mountains of Home.

Elder, John. The Frog Run: Words and Wildness in the Vermont Woods.

Ferguson, Andrew. Land of Lincoln. (added)

Gilman, Susan Jane. Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven.

Gessner, David. My Green Manifesto: Down the Charles River in Pursuit of a New Environmentalism.

Gessner, David. Sick of Nature.

Heinrich, Bernd. A Year in the Maine Woods.

Hogan, Linda. Dwellings: A Spiritual History of the Living World.

Horwitz, Tony. Confederates in the Attic.

Junger, Sebastian. The Perfect Storm.

Kingsolver, Barbara. High Tide in Tucson: Essays from Now or Never. (In progress!)

Kohnstamm, Thomas. Do Travel Writers Go to Hell?: A Swashbuckling Tale of High Adventures, Questionable Ethics, and Professional Hedonism.

Lopez, Barry. About This Life: Journeys on the Threshold of Memory.

Lopez, Barry. Arctic Dreams.

McKibben, Bill. Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet.

McPhee, John. selections from The John McPhee Reader and The Second John McPhee Reader.

McPherson, James. Hallowed Ground: A Walk at Gettysburg.

Muir, John. Nature Writings.

Orwell, George. Road to Wigan Pier.

Smith, Julian. Crossing the Heart of Africa: An Odyssey of Life and Adventure.

Tayler, Jeffrey. Facing the Congo: A Modern-Day Journey into the Heart of Darkness.

Thomas, Emory. Travels to Hallowed Ground: A Historian’s Journey to the American Civil War.

Thoreau, Henry David. The Maine Woods.

Thoreau, Henry David. Walden.

Troost, J. Martin. Lost on Planet China: One Man’s Attempt to Understand the World’s Most Mystifying Nation.

Williams, Terry Tempest. Refuge.

Williams, Terry Tempest. Finding Beauty in a Broken World.

Bats have a bad rep. Think bat and you likely think bat with rabies. Think bat and you likely think dirty bat or bat as vampiric bloodsucker. Think bat and you likely think evil harbinger of doom and destruction. (Okay, that last one’s a tad over the top … but you get the idea.) Bats have fewer defenders than fear-laden critics.

But bats, the only mammal structurally capable of sustained flight, are just creatures with significant ecological — and economic — roles. Hate mosquitoes and other insects? They’re on the nighttime menu for bats. Like bees, many bats pollinate plants and spread seeds. Bat shit (sorry; bat guano) is rich in nitrogen and is a profitable fertilizer. Bats’ ability to navigate in the dark (echolocation) is a subject of significant scientific study.

But in the past five years, up to 6.7 million bats are estimated to have died in 16 states and Canada, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said. Three species face extinction — the little brown bat, the northern long-eared bat and the tricolored bat. A malady called white-nose syndrome is killing them.

Researchers gleaned the estimate by counting bats in winter trips to caves. Bats roost densely, reports Darryl Fears of The Washington Post. So researchers take digital photographs of bats snoring through winter and literally count noses of bats. In 2009, researchers estimated bat deaths at about 1 million. The new figure has alarmed scientists. Says Mylea Bayless, conservation programs manager for Bat Conservation International in Austin, Tex.:

We’re watching a potential extinction event on the order of what we experienced with bison and passenger pigeons for this group of mammals, The difference is we may be seeing the regional extinction of multiple species. Unlike some of the extinction events or population depletion events we’ve seen in the past, we’re looking at a whole group of animals here, not just one species. We don’t know what that means, but it could be catastrophic.

White-nose syndrome, reports Fears, is caused by a fungus called Geomyces destructans. The fungus eats through the skin and membranes of bats. The syndrome was first observed in in 2006 in Howe Caverns near Albany, N.Y., a popular tourist destination down the road from me. Reports Fears:

Since then, biologists in Virginia, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Vermont, Indiana and other states have returned to caves and mines during the annual winter hibernation of bats and reported alarming numbers of fresh dead to wildlife and gaming agencies.

The extensive demise of bats threatens forest health — and segments of the economy based on forests.

The paper products industry could also be hard hit if pests such as the emerald ash borer proliferate in the absence of bats. Loggers in states such as Vermont “ought to be concerned, but I don’t think the word has really gotten out to these folks,” said Mollie Matteson, a conservation advocate for the Center for Biological Diversity in Richmond, Vt.

“It certainly behooves people concerned about the health of forests — loggers or ecologists — to pay attention,” Matteson said. “But it’s hard to make a direct connection between 7 million bats dead and what happens to forest pests.”

I still don’t like bats. I’ll still duck when they flit over my deck. But none of us should be happy that nearly 7 million have died with no apparent recourse to a cure. The potential extinction of any species — even one that fills many of us with fear and loathing — must concern us.

More on bats:
• white nose syndrome
• the economic cost of losing bats
• the science of bats (video)
• Bat Conservation International
• Organization for Bat Conservation

photo credit:
• vampire bat by Michael & Patricia Fogden/Corbis

#23

I’ve written before about my fascination with the Congo and Africa’s mythical “dark heart.” Conrad. Tarzan. Mkele-Mbembe. Stanley and Livingston and Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner. “Mistah Kurtz. He dead.” Oh, the horror, the horror.

Beyond all the myth is a country torn by war, wracked by poverty and tainted by the overexploitation of colonialism. It might hold allure as an exotic place to go for adventure, but really, it’s a place to die—or nearly so, as Jeffrey Tayler chronicled in his book Facing the Congo: A Modern-Day Journey in the Heart of Darkness.

“With its sonorous o’s, the word Congo resonated with the power of a village drum to conjure up visions of jungles and thrashing crocodiles along a great African river,” Tayler thought, falling for the romance of it much the way I always have. He was living in Moscow and, entering his thirties, facing an existential crisis. “I needed to know who I was and what I was good for. I did not,” he said.

Tayler decides to make a descent by pirogue—a kind of dugout canoe—from the upper reaches of the river to the capital of Kinshasa. The route would in part, recreate Henry Morton Stanley’s journey in the 1870s. “[O]ur days are numbered and our time runs out,” Tayler wrote. “I hoped that the expedition would settle once and for all my doubts about who I was and what I could accomplish.”

If the premise sounds vaguely familiar, it’s similar to (but more exciting than) Julian Smith’s Crossing the Heart of Africa. Smith traverses the continent south to north, following the route of explorer Ewart Grogan. Smith’s book, published in 2010, ties together his own adventures, written as a travelogue, with Grogan’s story, and he weaves in a whole bunch of the continent’s history and natural history, too.

Tayler’s book, published in 2000, is almost pure plot. Yes, he weaves in some of the Congo’s recent history—in fact, one of the themes of the book is that he cannot escape the recent history—and he uses Stanley’s experience as a sort of touchstone that he comes back to now and again (nothing like Smith does with Grogan’s story, though). But overall, Facing the Congo is gripping narrative, written like an adventure story. And what an adventure.

Tayler considers his plight as it unfolds—and “plight” is probably an understatement because, it turns out, his life is in almost constant danger from bullying soldiers, hostile tribes people, civil war, the weather, crocodiles and hippos, and the river itself. “It’s very dangerous,” one tribesman tells him, “We Bangala don’t care for life. If we see a mondele [a white foreigner] many of us think only to kill him and take his things.”

Even sleeping becomes an ordeal along the danger-fraught river. “The moon hung a giant pale orange orb,” he writes,

the forest echoed with hoots from monkeys, with the tumultuous splashings of hippos in the shallows somewhere behind us. We had bivouacked early in a malodorous and desolate bight of palm and rubber vines. Biting ants, fat and black, infested our camp, scuttling over our legs, chomping away before we could scrape them off….

Compounding his travails is his inability to understand his guide, Desi—not linguistically but, rather, psychologically. “For me, everything here was new and urgent and unique,” Tayler writes; “for Desi the Congo was a harsh and ancient waterway out of which to wrest a meager living while he battled constant fatigue from worms or fevers or whatever it was that was afflicting him. He would not hurry because, danger or no, this river was his home and he lived by rhythms that allowed him to conserve his strength, enjoy himself when he could, and go on.

Only later does he realize “that I had exploited [the Congo] as a playground on which to solve my own rich-boy existential dilemmas.” He adds that his “drama of self-actualization proved obscenely trivial beside the suffering of the [people] and the injustices of the past.” Ah, to follow in the well-worn footsteps created by a hundred years of European exploitation….

Tayler comes to nothing more profound—or less powerfully obvious—than “time will always be show, and there is always much to be learned from living.” Oh, and “value what I have and…strive to preserve it.” I’m not really giving away the ending because, honestly, his flashes of genius felt underwhelming and anticlimactic following his journey.

It’s an excellent book overall, though. It truly is an adventure through the dark heart of the continent—one I’m glad I can take on the page and not in the pirogue.

#22

It isn’t often that I get to read someone else’s love letters. But read Rachel Carson’s work and you’ll see that’s just what she’s writing. She writes of the sea with a profound, abiding love.

When I spent time with Carson along the edge of the sea a few weeks ago in Maine, I came across references to a Carson book I’d not heard of before. I had already added one extra Carson book to my reading list, and worried about the possible tangent a second might take me on, but in the end, her work resonated with me too strongly to pass it up. The title was too alluring to pass up: The Sense of Wonder.

A sense of wonder, I tell my students, is the first step in exploring the world and finding worthwhile stories to tell. Be curious. Ask questions. Engage in wonder.

“Wisdom begins in wonder,” Socrates said.

Carson’s book, The Sense of Wonder, could very well be a primer for all freshman writing students.

The premise behind the book is deceptively simple: Teach children to appreciate nature. Don’t overwhelm them with species names but, rather, unlock their sense of wonder. “[I]t is not half so important to know as to feel,” she says. “Once the emotions have been aroused—a sense of the beautiful, the excitement of the new and the unknown, a feeling of sympathy, pity, admiration or love—then we wish for knowledge about the object of our emotional response. Once found, it has lasting meaning.”

Exploring nature is largely a matter of becoming receptive to what lies around you, Carson says.

[W]herever you are and whatever your resources, you can still look up at the sky—its dawn and twilight beauties, its moving clouds, its stars by night. You can listen to the wind, whether it blows with majestic voice through a forest or sings a many-voiced chorus around the eaves of your house…and in the listening, you can gain magical release for your thoughts. You can still feel the rain on your face and think of its long journey, its many transmutations, from sea to air to earth.

Such things might be so commonplace that we take them for granted. We literally lose sight of the wonder right in front of us. “[B]ecause they could see it almost any night perhaps they will never see it,” she laments.

Originally written in July 1956 as an essay for Woman’s Home Companion, Carson dreamed of expanding the essay into a longer piece. “I want very much to do that Wonder book,” she said. “That would be Heaven to achieve.” She died—at age 56—before she was able to complete the project.

In 1998, photographer Nick Kelsh resurrected Carson’s dream. The result is gorgeous. Carson’s essay, artfully laid out with generous leading and wide margins on high-gloss, parchment-colored pages, is interspersed with pages of Kelsh’s nature photography. The photographs loosely illustrate the settings and landscapes Carson mines for wonder. Kelsh’s work enhances Carson’s while remaining respectful of it, too. Carson’s writing, and her love of nature, remain at the heart of the book.

It’s easy to reveal in her language. Take, for instance, a sentence like this, capturing an image like this: “Out there, just at the edge of where-we-couldn’t-see, big waves were thundering in, dimly seen white shapes that boomed and shouted and threw great handfuls of froth at us.” Carson makes me feel like I’m there with all the emotional richness of the moment. I want to close my eyes, cross my arms, and smile at the breath of sea spray misting my cheeks.

While I found great delight in Carson’s writing, it’s her vision that I found most remarkable, most alluring.  “If I had influence with the good fairy who is supposed to preside over the christening of all children,” she says, “I should ask that her gift to each child in the world be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life, as an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchantments of later years, the sterile preoccupation with things that are artificial, the alienation from the sources of our strength.”

Carson’s unabashed love of the natural world represents a way of seeing that we could all benefit from. The world would benefit from it, too. How could we rape and pillage the land if we treated it with reverence, respect, and awe.

What an amazing gift we could pass on to future generations if only we awakened their sense of wonder. What amazing power that wonder would hold.

In my piece this morning about Bill Bryson’s Appalachian Trail book, A Walk in the Woods, I mentioned that a friend of mine was going to be hiking the AT today. She happened to read the piece before she set out, so she decided to send us back some pictures. (Photos by Caity Stuart)

Caity and two of her coworkers were hiking in Shenandoah National Park. Most of their hike went along Shenandoah’s trail system, but for a three-mile stretch, between mile markers 46 and 43, they hiked the AT.

It was a clear day with blue skies and lots of sun and just a touch of wind. Temps along the base of the Blue Ridge rose to 40 degrees or so, but they only barely cracked 25 along up on the crest. There were still plenty of signs of winter up there.

As cozy as my office was on this first day of classes for the semester, I wished I was out on the trail. Even painted in browns and grays, mottled with a dusting of white, the forest looks beautiful.

#21

I’m sure I’m not the only person who’s read Bill Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods and had a burning urge to go hike the Appalachian Trail. Of course, that might also have something to do with the fact that my girlfriend is heading there today to hike part of it. But whatever.

My experience with the AT is pretty limited, although the few places I’ve crossed its path are places I’ve crossed it a lot. The spot that comes to mind most is a foot bridge that crosses over I-90 in the Berkshire Mountains of western Massachusetts. I’ve never stepped on that leg of the AT, but I’ve driven under it about a thousand times.

By foot, I’ve encountered the AT most frequently at Harper’s Ferry, WV. The trail crosses the Potomac River and rises up to Maryland Heights where it vanishes into the woods before climbing even further to run along the crest of South Mountain. In fact, my favorite stretch of the AT heads into the woods at the northern border of Gapland State Park several miles north of Harper’s Ferry. I remember a misty afternoon that cast a primeval air around the trail as it climbed into leafy greenness. Rain dripped from everything. The mud glistened.

I’ve intersected the AT at the top of Mount Washington in New Hampshire. I’ve always wanted to follow it to the top of Mount Katahdin in Maine. I’ve wanted to avoid it in Duncannon, PA, where a double-murder took place in September of 1990. Because I grew up in that area, the town’s name jumped out at me when I heard about the crime on the news. It struck me with such foreboding that it still sticks to me like a bad superstition.

My girlfriend and I hiked several hundred yards of the AT over the summer at Shenandoah National Park. We were, in fact, hiking up the impossibly never-ending trail to Hawksbill Mountain. The AT ran along the top of the ridge, so we made a point to walk out to it just so we could say we did the AT—only to discover that it also ran right by the parking lot where we’d left Caity’s car. For principle’s sake, we walked the trail there, too.

It was on that jaunt that I discovered an important truth about hiking, which Bryson so perfectly articulates:

The hardest part was coming to terms with the constant dispiriting discovery that there is always more hill. The thing about being on a hill, as opposed to standing back from it, is that you can almost never see exactly what’s to come…. Every time you haul yourself up to what you think must surely be the crest, you find that there is in fact more hill beyond, sloped at an angle that kept it from view before, and that beyond that slope is another, and beyond that another and another, and beyond each of those more still, until it seems impossible that any hill could run on this long…. Still you stagger on. What else can you do?

Bryson’s book is at once clever, engaging, and chock-full-o information. I’ve read some of Bryson’s other works before—his A Short History of Nearly Everything is one of the more brilliant books I’ve ever read—but I’ve not read any of his more memoirish stuff before.

It’s not for lack of wanting to. A former NPS colleague of mine tried to get me to read A Walk in the Woods a few years ago. I wanted to, sincerely, but knew I didn’t have the time just then. She urged me to take her book; I reluctantly did so only because I knew it might be a while before I could get to it. It has sat there ever since (right next to the John McPhee reader I’d mentioned the other day, in fact).

Oh, my, am I glad I finally had the excuse to read this book. I have laughed out loud over and over.

Bryson discovers the AT almost by accident when he moves to a small town in New Hampshire after years abroad. He decides to check it out. “Running more than 2,100 miles along America’s eastern seaboard, through the serene and beckoning Appalachian Mountains, the AT is the granddaddy of long hikes,” he writes. “From Georgia to Maine, it wanders across fourteen states. Through plump, comely hills whose very names—Blue Ridge, Smokies, Cumberlands, Green Mountains, White Mountains—seem an invitation to amble.”

Bryson decides to take up that invitation, and the story of that amble becomes the premise of the book. Accompanying him is an old high school buddy he hasn’t seen in years, Katz, who is woefully overweight and underprepared. But Bryson soon discovers he’s not really ready for the mission, either. “I had never encountered anything so hard, for which I was so ill prepared,” he writes after being on the trail just a few short days. “Every step was a struggle.”

He doesn’t help his case by psyching himself out with horror stories about bear attacks, either.  “What on earth would I do if four bears came into my camp?” he frets after seeing a four-bear photo. “Why, I would die, of course. Literally shit myself lifeless. I would blow my sphincter out my backside like one of those unrolling paper streamers you get at children’s parties—I daresay I would even give a merry toot—and bleed to a messy death in my sleeping bag.”

Aside from liberal doses of humor, Bryson weaves in a lot of biology and ecology and a lot of history. He’s particularly damning of the U.S. Forest Service and National Park Service—both so underfunded that their management borders catastrophically on negligence. Best of all, though, his removal from the modern world and immersion in the natural world provide ample opportunity for juxtaposing one against the other, resulting in rich, rich reflection.

The trail itself, he says, serves as a symbol of that contrast. “If a product or enterprise doesn’t constantly reinvent itself, it is superseded, cast aside, abandoned without sentiment in favor of something bigger, newer, and, alas, early always uglier,” he writes. “And then there is the good old AT, still quietly ticking along…unassuming, splendid, faithful to its founding principles, sweetly unaware that the world has quite moved on. It’s a miracle, really.”

Bryson finds miracles all along the way, too. His sense of wonder never shuts off even when his body winds down and his spirit flags. One of my favorite descriptions comes in the Shenandoah National Park, not far from Hawksbill Mountain, in fact. It evoked my own sense of awe being in those same woods:

a broad, ancient-seeming, deeply fetching glade cradled by steep hills, which gave it a vaguely enchanted, secretive feel. Everything you could ask for in a woodland setting was here—tall, stately trees broken at intervals be escalators of dusty sunshine, winding brook, floor of plump ferns, cool air languidly adrift in a lovely green stillness….

Caity will walk through that same terrain tomorrow, although winter will have stripped the lush forest down to its bare brown bark. All the bears will be hibernating. Most of the tourists will be home, waiting for spring to invite them back to the park.

I’ll cross paths with the AT later in the week, where it crosses I-66 outside of Linden, Virginia, on its way northward towards Harper’s Ferry. I’ll be driving east on the highway, on my way south to Caity’s. She’ll show me pictures from her hike, and I’ll tell her about my favorite passages from Bryson’s book, and we’ll both want to go hiking together. We’ll wait for spring, I suspect, but when we do finally go, Bryson will come along as company—it’ll be impossible to ever hike the AT without him.

No one seems to know when “creative nonfiction” emerged as a genre, but John McPhee’s name is frequently cited as one of the seminal figures. I decided I should check out his work. Rather than hit up one of his twenty-five-plus books, I decided to dip into a pair of John McPhee readers so I could get a wide sampling, looking at essays that specifically dealt with places.

I first came across McPhee’s work while I was waiting for an oil change. A member of the university’s English faculty happened to come in, and we started chit-chatting. This colleague’s particular expertise rests with Milton, so I was surprised when the conversation turned to McPhee. “Your work reminds me of his,” he told me.

I had no idea at the time what an immense compliment that was. I ordered one of McPhee’s readers from Amazon so I could see for myself, but by the time it arrived a week later, I’d already gotten caught up in another project and wasn’t able to delve into the book. It has sat on my shelf, patiently waiting, ever since. It’s been years.

I came across McPhee’s work again last spring in the book In Fact: The Best of Creative Nonfiction, edited by Lee Gutkind, the so-called “Godfather of Creative Nonfiction” and editor of Creative Nonfiction magazine.

“McPhee’s work is distinguished by his ability to see the world through the points of view of other people and communicate them intimately and intricately,” Gutkind wrote. “But he also recognizes the compelling nature of personal history and the insight into character and the human condition it can provide.”

McPhee’s work reminded me very much of Lilian Ross’s “fly-on-the-wall” reporting. Ross, a predecessor of McPhee’s at The New Yorker, was an innovator in that regard, although as journalism scholar R. Thomas Berner points out, her innovation has since become standard practice. Ross is present in her stories, but she functions as an observer. She interacts with her subjects but doesn’t offer commentary about them.

“To this point, McPhee has pretty much kept himself and his life out of the narratives,” Gutkind says. McPhee sometimes interacts with his subjects, but when he does, he avoids overt commentary, although his descriptions are so evocative it’s impossible not to start drawing conclusions. In The Pine Barrens, for instance, he describes a man named Bill:

In a straight-backed chair near the doorway to the kitchen sat a young man with long black hair, who wore a visored red leather cap that had darkened with age. His shirt was coarse-woven and had eyelets down a V neck that was laced with a thing. His trousers were made of canvas, and he was wearing gum boots. His arms were folded, his legs were stretched out, he had one ankle over the other, and as he sat there he appeared to be sighting carefully past his feet, as if his toes were the outer frame of a gunsight and he could see some sort of target in the floor. When I had entered, I had said hello to him, and he had nodded without looking up. He had a long, straight nose and high cheekbones, in a deeply tanned face that was, somehow, gaunt. I had no idea whether he was shy or hostile. Eventually, when I came to know him, I found him to be as shy a person as I have ever had a chance to know.

It’s harder to explain McPhee’s descriptions of place because, it seems, in some of his essays everything always seems to come back to place. The Pine Barrens, as an example, is about place, and McPhee explores it through research, history, culture, and adventures with people who live there. “The picture of New Jersey that most people hold in their minds is so different from this one that, considered beside it, the Pine Barrens, as they are called, become as incongruous as they are beautiful,” he writes. He engages readers with his pieces by juxtaposing what they think they know with the discoveries he wants to share with them.

In “Traveling Through Georgia,”

pine trees kept giving us messages—small, hand-painted signs nailed into the loblollies. ‘HAVE YOU WHAT IT TAKES TO MEET JESUS WHEN HE RETURNS?’ Sam said he was certain he did not. ‘JESUS WILL NEVER FAIL YOU.’ City limits, Adrian, Georgia. Swainsboro, Georgia. Portal, Georgia. Towns on the long, straight roads of the coastal plain. White-painted, tin-roofed bungalows. Awnings shading the fronts of stores—prepared for heat and glare. Red earth. Sand roads. House on short stilts. Sloping verandas. Unpainted boards.

He not only picks vivid details, he pieces them together with a real ear for rhythm. Consider part of his description of Anchorage, Alaska in Coming Into the Country:

Roads are rubbled, ponded with chuckholes. Big trucks, graders, loaders, make the prevailing noise, the dancing fumes, the frenetic beat of the town. Huge rubber tires are strewn about like quoits, ever ready for the big machines that move hills of earth and gravel into inconvenient lakes, which become new ground.

As I explore McPhee’s work, the thing I’m coming to admire most is his meticulous attention to craft. His pieces are splendidly well-written. Rhythm, vocabulary, sentence structure, description—it all falls into perfect place. He’s not a flashy stylist; in fact, I’d be hard-pressed to describe his style at all. He writes with clarity and a lack of literary pretension. Perhaps a kind of journalistic formality? His voice isn’t there, yet it is.

I’ve also come to appreciate his versatility. I read something last week that described Barry Lopez as America’s most versatile reporter, but I’ve gotta think McPhee set the bar. Aside from The Pine Barrens and Coming Into the Country, I particularly enjoyed Oranges, The Control of Nature, and a blurb I read from Founding Fish (not in the readers).

I’ve also come to appreciate just how crazy my colleague from the English Department is. While incredibly flattered by the comparison, I’m so far below McPhee’s league that I shouldn’t even share a last initial with him.

I only got a sampling, but I’ll have to go back for more.

#19

I never read The Perfect Storm until I saw the trailer for the 2000 movie. There, on the big screen, a fishing boat tried to bull its way straight up—literally straight up—a gigantic wall of water. “Did you see that?” I said to my wife, smacking her lightly on the shoulder. “Did you see that? Straight up a wall of water!”

That same image would appear on movie posters when the film finally came out a couple months later.

I had to get the book.

By then, The Perfect Storm had been released in paperback, and I was able to find a copy whose cover had not yet been co-opted by the movie studio. The edition did benefit from a new afterward by the author, Sebastian Junger, which has proven to be one of the most useful “case studies” on literary journalism that I’ve ever read.

When Junger chose to write about the loss of the swordboat Andrea Gail out of Gloucester, Massachusetts, he was, in effect, choosing to write about something unknowable. Andrea Gail, lost at sea in October 1991 during a storm of cataclysmic proportions, left no final trace. Junger had a few final radio conversations to draw on, but what happened to the boat and the five men aboard in its last hours was a mystery.

“I’ve written as complete an account as possible of something that can never be fully known,” Junger said in his afterward. “It is exactly that unknowable element, however, that has made it an interesting book to write and, I hope, to read.”

Along with the challenge of piecing together the story of the boat and crew, Junger had to explain the way of life aboard a swordboat. He had to recreate the way of life in a Massachusetts fishing village. He had to delve into the meteorological facts that explained “the perfect storm.”

“On one hand, I wanted to write a completely factual book that would stand on its own as a piece of journalism,” he said in his introduction. “On the other hand, I didn’t want the narrative to asphyxiate under a mass of technical detail and conjecture.”

And here’s why I’ve come to admire the book so much: Junger immerses himself in the story (much the way Tony Horwitz did for Confederates in the Attic). He spent a lot of time hanging out in The Crow’s Nest, the Gloucester bar where the Andrea Gail’s crew hung out. “By and large it’s a bar of people who know each other; people who aren’t known are invited over for a drink,” Junger wrote. “It’s hard to buy your own beer at the Crow’s Nest, and it’s hard to leave after just one….”

While there, Junger spent time soaking up the atmosphere. His presence there over weeks allowed him to eventually earn the trust of locals so they’d open up to him and talk about their lives, their jobs, and their experiences at sea. “Look, I don’t know a thing about fishing,” he’d say. “So if you don’t tell me about it, I’m going to get it all wrong.”

Sometimes they’d talk to him; sometimes not. Sometimes he’d have his pen and notepad out; sometimes he’d have to excuse himself, run the men’s room, and scribble a few notes there in private. Some people, like Ricky Shatford, the older brother of crewmember Bobby Shatford, didn’t take kindly at all to what they saw as the intrusion. “I told people I was going to kill you,” Shatford eventually told Junger when they’d made piece with each other.

By that point, the book had come out and become a bestseller. Shatford had finally been able to see for himself that Junger treated the story—and his younger brother—with respect.

“Had they not lived the lives they did, and agreed to talk with me about them, the book would not exist,” Junger conceded in his afterword.

He constructed his narrative by gathering everything he could through interviews and research. In instances when he couldn’t answer a question directly—like, what must it have been like for guys on the boat to be caught in the storm—he interviewed people who’d been in similar situations. He never takes that information and projects it onto the crew of the Andrea Gail, but he does suggest parallels and lets readers draw their own conclusions.

In the end, Junger sticks to facts “in as wide-ranging a way as possible,” he said. As a result, there are “varying kinds of information in the book.”

For instance, he uses direct quotes for anything he recorded in a formal interview, but dialogue, based on people’s recollections, appear without quotation marks. “No dialogue was made up,” he emphasized. For radio conversations, he uses italics. He incorporates a lot of research from reading, although he typically doesn’t cite any of his sources, an attempt on his part to keep the narrative lean and readable. In fact, it reads much like a novel, and he uses present tense to keep the story immediate.

Except for the first-person introduction and afterward, Junger keeps himself entirely out of the book. By some definitions, that means The Perfect Storm doesn’t qualify as “creative nonfiction.” By other definitions, Junger’s style of “literary journalism” does qualify. (I realize that’s a question more germane to my own reading at present than it is for most readers, who probably don’t give a rat’s ass how to categorize it!)

In the context of “place,” which is the lens I’m using to look at these books, The Perfect Storm certainly captures a good sense of Gloucester and, even better, of the sea. However, it’s most useful to me now as a model of how a writer interacts within place as he attempts to capture it.

When I first read it, The Perfect Storm was a watershed book for me. It helped show me what else nonfiction could be. It showed me how to tackle some of the ethical questions that arise from being a writer in pursuit of a story. Those are lessons I still reflect on, and pass along to my students, to this day.

“Writers often don’t know much about the world they’re trying to describe, but they don’t necessarily need to,” Junger concluded. “They just need to ask a lot of questions. And then they need to step back and let the story speak for itself.”

#16

Walden is one of those books everyone’s heard of, but I frequently wonder how many people have actually read it.

It is, of course, the very stuff of high school English classes. I still remember by eleventh grade teacher, Mrs. Cummings, tell us that Thoreau lived what Emerson preached. Ralph Waldo Emerson was the great American philosopher of his day, advocating a simpler lifestyle and harmony with nature; Henry David Thoreau lived a simpler lifestyle in a small log cabin next to Walden Pond, outside Concord, Massachusetts, where both men live. Together, they made up the Janus of American Transcendentalism.

“I went to the woods because I wanted to live deliberately,” Thoreau wrote of his experience, “to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”

His book, Walden, has since become part of the American literary canon, part of American myth, It’s a seminal work of nature writing.

But has anyone actually read it?

The first time I hit up Walden, I was studying for my comprehensive exams for my master’s in English at the University of Maine. On an early-autumn Saturday, I pilgrimaged to Walden, a four-hour drive, to read the book on the shores of the pond. I bought a copy at the bookstore there, read several chapters, then decided to hike around. Swimmers frolicked at the small beach near Walden’s east end. Canoeists drifted across the pond’s center. A train rumbled along the far ridge. This was hardly a natural setting of silence and solitude.

A hiking path rings Walden’s shores while another runs the crest of the ridgeline that circles the pond. Footpaths criss-cross between them like cobwebs. I always took the route that let me be as close to the water as possible. I wanted to see the pond’s nooks and crannies. People were tucked into almost every one. At least one couple, figuring it was “private enough,” were getting it on in the water a few feet offshore.

In later years, the Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation would string barbed wire sans barbs along most of the footpaths as part of an erosion control project. So many feet trammeled the pathways that the hillsides themselves were getting packed and beaten. The fencing gave the woods a kind of concentration camp feel, if you can believe it. No one seemed to give the fencing any heed, anyway, though.

I spent so much time exploring on that first day that I didn’t have time to finish the book. Instead, I dipped it in the pond. I made sure it was sopping wet. Gingerly, I carried it, dripping, up the sloping paved walkway to the parking lot and tucked it into the truck of my car.

I’ve repeated the drenching only a few times since, giving away Walden-soaked copies of Walden as special gifts to a few dear friends over the years, people who’d “get it.” For such folks, the gift is a treasure.

I’ve returned to Walden several times over the years. On one early trip, my daughter talked me into swimming with her, although I’d not anticipated it at all. I waded into the pond with her and let her splash around, and I lifted her high into the air. My wife took pictures. Thereafter, my daughter always loved to return to “The Pond.”

I’ve returned to Walden, too, although I’ve never made it all the way through the book. I’ve read snippets. I suspect a lot of people can make that claim, at least. It helps that Thoreau virtually speaks in aphorisms—“to maintain one’s self on this earth is not a hardship but a pastime, if we will live simply and wisely”…”a man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone”… “If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them” … ”Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!”

When I graduated from high school, Mrs. Cummings gave me a dictionary as a gift. She inscribed it with what has become my favorite Thoreau-ism: “If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.” I post that quote on my office door every few weeks.

Thoreau’s aphorisms are as rich as the maples along Walden’s shores as they flush gold and red in autumn. He gives himself over to a (mostly) self-sufficient lifestyle in the woods, and he finds delight in it. “I have, as it were, my own sun and moon and stars, and a little world all to myself,” he says. He spends most of his days carrying out the daily business of living—building his cabin, tending to his beans, cutting firewood, fetching water—or exploring his surroundings. “[F]or I was rich,” he says, “if not in money, in sunny hours and summer days, and spent them lavishly.”

I love, love, love the way Thoreau revels in the world around himself. It is enough to just be: “It is true, I never assisted the sun materially in his rising, but, doubt not, it was of the last importance only to be present at it.”

Thoreau spent two years in the woods along Walden Pond. During that time, he frequently walked into town, where he had his mother cook for him sometimes. He took the first of his trips to the Maine woods during that time, too. So, he wasn’t the reclusive hermit history has sometimes led us to believe—an image he himself cultivated. “I love to be alone,” he wrote. “I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.”

After his two-year sojourn, Thoreau returned to civilization. “I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there,” he wrote. “Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time on this one.”

Yet, for the rest of his life, Thoreau seldom ventured too far away from his home in Concord. He went on trips—most notably to Cape Cod and back to Maine—but his tie to the lands around Concord bound him tight until his death in 1862.

Walden has never been out of print, so someone must be buying it—but I wonder if it’s one of those books that people have even if it’s one they haven’t necessarily read. Much of Thoreau’s mid-nineteenth-century style is cumbersome for modern readers, and parts of the book are downright preachy. Much of Thoreau’s prose is beautiful, too, though.

“[A]s the sun rose, I saw it throwing off its nightly clothing of mist, and here and there, by degrees, its soft ripples or its smooth reflecting surface was reveled, while the mists, like ghosts, were stealthily withdrawing in every direction into the woods, as at the breaking up of some nocturnal conventicle.”

To know such things exist in the world is reason to get up every day. That’s why I’ve come to believe that the idea of Thoreau, the idea of Walden, are what really matter most. “A lake is the landscape’s most beautiful and expressive feature,” Thoreau wrote. “It is earth’s eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature.”

My return to Walden this week—all the way through the book for the first time ever—has been a treasure. It’s not that the book awed me, even if Thoreau’s legacy certainly does. Rather, it was good to be reminded why Thoreau is worth knowing. I, like so many of the writers I’ve spent time with over the past two weeks, owe him a tremendous debt for leading the way, for showing us how, for walking to the beat of his own drum.

“I did not wish to take a cabin passage, but rather to go on before the mast and on the deck of the world, for there I could best see the moonlight amid the mountains,” Thoreau said. “I do not with to go below now.”

#15: Lost on Planet China: One Man’s Attempt to Understand the World’s Most Mystifying Nation by L. Maarten Troost (2008)

The first time I landed in Shanghai, I couldn’t believe how big everything was. The terminal stretched off to some Whovian vanishing point. It was like that driving through the city, too—mile after mile of skyscraper, each as interesting to look at as the last. This was a city that wanted to be Manhattan but bigger, richer, busier.

But the bus windows showed me something distressing, too, as we rumbled across the coastal plain from the airport to the city: muddy canals choked with floating garbage, heaps of garbage and rubble scattered in back lots and side yards, an armada of small blue flatbed trucks jockeying for first place in a race that wasn’t even happening.

China turned my brain into an Escher landscape, constantly challenging me at every turn. I found new things to be amazed about, new things to wonder about, and new things to worry about.

China, I suspect, feels Escher-esque itself, thrashing about in the throes of an identity crisis as it lumbers out on the world stage: ancient and modern, beauty and squalor, opulent wealth and crippling poverty. Everything you can imagine about China is true—and so is its opposite. And everything is go, go, go.

I blogged extensively about my trips to China both times I was there (in 2009 and 2010), so I was eager to see what fellow traveler J. Maarten Troost had to say about his adventures, just a couple years before me, in Lost on Planet China: One Man’s Attempt to Understand the World’s Most Mystifying Nation.

“I had been to dozens of Chinatowns. But this was the mother of all Chinatowns…” Troost said after arriving. “I understood nothing, a sensation that disturbed my psyche. I felt profoundly out of my element.”

In China, it doesn’t take long for a first-time visitor to realize just how very delusional he has been in terms of his assumptions about the country. If nothing else, traveling through China is a profoundly humbling experience, no more so than when you realize that nearly everything you thought you knew about the country, all your presumptions and book learning, your opinions, turn out to be utterly, completely wrong.

At times, I felt like Troost and I lived the same experience. People drive “as if to kill,” he says. He cringed at the unearthly haze that hung over the landscape and “swirled in gray and brown and yellow plumes.” He was trampled in the scrum-like surges that turned standing in queue into “a forum for physical sport.” Most of all, he was stunned by the number of people.

“From the outside, 1.3 billion people is simply a statistic,” he says. “Inside China, the enormity of the country’s population colors everything.”

For example, consider the limited number of names people can choose. “There are 88 million people in China named Zhang. There are more people called Chen in China than there are Canadians in Canada,” Troost writes. “It’s become so problematic that no one knows Hu’s Hu in China.”

Troost’s sense of humor drives much of the book. He is, quite honestly, hilarious. I’ve not laughed my way through a book like that in years. But his humor is witty and intelligent, often the result of his sharp observations. It’s also a way to make some of his insights go down a little smoother because, let’s face it, there’s much in China to worry about.

“[I]t’s difficult to spend a moment in China and not be utterly awed by the scale of the ongoing environmental catastrophe,” Troost observes. Together with India, he says, there are now 2.5 billion people in the global economy that just weren’t there fifteen years ago. “The consequences for the environment are alarming.”

The sky itself serves as a constant reminder. It’s “apocalyptic” in its smogginess. He has a buddy who lights up a cigarette so he get “clean smoke.” I, too, had heard of China’s legendarily bad pollution, although by the time I got there, I could see all the way into Beijing from the top of the Great Wall, some fifty miles distant. Apparently, in preparation for the Olympics, the Chinese government cleaned up the air—not by reducing pollution or instituting pollution control measures but by simply closing down thousands of factories and moving them elsewhere.

The water, too, usually seemed on the verge of bubbling into an open cesspool. “One third of all the freshwater in China—that is, all the rivers and lakes in this enormous country—is considered unsafe for industrial use,” Troost discovered. “When the water is so vile you can’t even use it in a lead paint factory because it’s too dirty, I’d say you have a water problem.”

Later, when he sees how sparse the once-snowy Himalayas have become, where much of China’s (and India’s) water comes from, he gets worried: ‎”and I tried to squelch that gnawing feeling that we are on the cusp of unsettling times.”

With 1.3 million people, who all need food and water and jobs and space, there aren’t a lot of options. “There is not vast empty hinterland in China capable of sustaining a huge population that isn’t already sustaining—barely—a huge population,” he says.

Add to that his “creeping awareness that there are no rules in China, that so much of life in China is essentially a flirtation with anarchy,” and you might understand Troost’s unease.

I always thought of China a little like the Wild West, but as Troost observes, China is getting impatient for the West to get the hell out of the way. “The general attitude among the Chinese toward Americans is similar to that of a young, hotshot quarterback waiting for the tired, banged-up veteran to step aside so he can lead the team,” he says.

My own experience with the Chinese was a bit different. I generally found them to be warm and friendly and intensely curious about us. I didn’t travel as freely or extensively among them as Troost did, so I didn’t get the breadth of exposure he did.

Impatience and disdain or not, part of the Chinese identity crisis stems from their fierce pride in being Chinese coupled with their hunger to embrace a Western standard of living. “Not everyone can have everything in China, not yet, but every day there are more who do,” Troost says. The future looks sunny (“okay, smoggy,) for China—“barring a complete societal collapse as environmental degradation undergoes devastating feedback loops.”

Alas, the burden of responsibility for China’s catastrophic environmental practices lies squarely on us.

In the United States, we squawk about shoddy goods, poisonous toothpaste, contaminated toys. We bemoan the lost jobs. We point to the slave labor in China, like the unfortunate people, kids even, snookered or kidnapped to work in the factories. Or we lament what China is doing to the environment…. But do we decide to buy domestically made, high-quality goods manufactured in a well-regulated environment that ensures humane working conditions? We do not.

My own travels over two years were limited to Shanghai, Nanjing, Xi’an, Beijing, and a couple smaller cities (although in China, “smaller” is relative). Troost goes far and wide, including a foray into occupied Tibet. By the end, at nearly 400 pages, the book feels long, although it doesn’t ever drag; I was just feeling travel fatigue, I suppose. Troost was, too, I think. For instance, he goes to Chengdu to see pandas but then hardly writes about what he sees. He starts to get a little perfunctory by the end, finally conceding, “What is here cannot all be seen by one man. Not in a lifetime.”

I’d agree. China is just too damn big, too larger-than-life. Too magnificent.

We need to pay attention. There’s more at stake than we could possibly imagine.