Reading the Mountains of Home: books about wilderness, place and solace

There is no doubt that one of the notable trends of recent years is an attraction to the outdoors. From the ubiquitous SUVs to the popularity of outfitter stores and wilderness sports, many, many folks desire greater connection with land, sea and sky. While many Americans are still drawn to traditional outdoor recreational activities—hunting, boating and the like—there is a large and growing interest in rock climbing, back country backpacking and mountaineering. Even a recent IMAX documentary portrayed the story of a fatal expedition to Mt. Everest, inspired by the extraordinary mega-seller, Into Thin Air. In the new millennium, wilderness, as they say, is huge.

The CCO has been on the crest of this wave for over 20 years. For many, wilderness trips, spelunking adventures, and day trips to the Yough for white-water rafting have been routine planks of our ministry plans. The CCO has developed a reputation for thinking seriously about the nature and meaning of outdoor experiential education, considered from a thoughtful Christian perspective. CCO staff have, in fact, presented papers and offered workshops on wilderness experiences at national education events.

I could list numerous books that these wild guys and gals have found helpful—from Parker Palmer’s little booklet on experiential education (complete with his classic rappelling story) to Houghton poetry professor John Leaux’s wonderful Out Walking to Christian views of creation-care like Remembering Creation by Scott Hoezee or An Earth-Careful Way of Life by the late Lionel Basney. (I’ve added a new brief biblio of some remarkable books I’ve recently discovered at the end of this review, all related to this month's topic.)

Now, however, I would like to tell you about one truly extraordinary book entitled Reading The Mountains of Home by John Elder (Harvard University Press, $14.95). It is a calm book about a series of hikes taken by an experienced outdoorsman and literature professor over the course of a year. Reading... could have appeal not only to those interested in the out-of-doors, but, because it is so deeply reflective about poetry, it will be treasured by lovers of literature. Indeed, this extraordinary work combines natural history and literary criticism in such a wondrous way that I think it is best read, as I did, under a New Hampshire pine grove, by a 200-foot-deep mountain lake. Or, at least, take it slowly on your back porch or in a good chair. (I often study in the fields of contemporary culture, so my habit of reading in coffee shops and noisy public places seems fitting. This book calls out to be enjoyed with the sky in view.)

Significantly, though, Mr. Elder’s work pushes us not only to the woods, but to the communities in which we find ourselves. Not unlike recent authors like Wendell Berry, Barry Lopez or Scott Saunder (Staying Put: Making Home in a Restless World) Elder is an author developing a “sense of place.”

Although in league with Annie Dillard, Bill McKibben, Aldo Leopald, Gary Snyder or any number of wonderful “nature writers,” Elders talks about his Vermont town and family as much as nature itself. Here is his penultimate point, I think; it is important and nearing brilliance, and should generate tons of discussion among those who specialize in wilderness trip ministries. Less in Thoreau and more in the tradition of nature writers since Sierra Club founder and explorer of the American West, John Muir, on through the recent flurry of books about high adventure, there is a sense that they despise human culture. Extreme wilderness terrain is overestimated and sought out in contrast to less dramatic landscapes. Elder thinks it is because those writers and naturalists who helped shape our understanding and assumptions about wilderness cut their teeth on the truly extraordinary and spectacular landscapes of the American West. Also, from the earliest days of the modern environmental movement (growing, as it did, again, largely in the West), there has been an emphasis on awesome, pristine and far-removed regions of wilderness. The ecological crisis has been framed as a conflict between (bad) human culture and (pristine) nature. The context of the exceptionally rugged Western terrain caused the earliest environmental writers to see wilderness as spaces untouched-by-human hands, something wholly other than the places in which we normally live. (Notice, too, the echoes of the philosophy called Romanticism. Did this ideology so shape their worldview that it led them to disdain modern industrial culture and over-emphasize pure nature? Or did the geographic facts of their truly incredible terrain push them toward a sort of romanticism?) This vision of wilderness as Something Other shows up in John Muir’s dismissal of Thoreau’s claim to find wildness in Massachusetts' huckleberry patches, in the famously feisty disdain for fellow humans in Edward Abby and his macho trip down the Colorado River (Desert Solitaire) and in the militant Earth-first activists who see humans as always hurtful of and inevitably pitted against nature.

At any rate, Elder describes this tendency much better than I can, and in much more eloquent ways. Of course, he favors protected wilderness areas; the hikes he describes in the book are, in fact, mostly taken in a legally-protected wilderness area, for which he has been a political advocate. Still, he describes the “Western wilderness ethic” which was oriented—in contrast to the less remote East coast—to “sublime religious visions in mountains so much loftier and more monolithic than these rounded, tree-wrapped ridges.” He explains, discussing his fondness for the approach of Robert Frost:

"Frost...values wildness at the edge and even in the midst of civilization; he sees it not as a factor of extent or separation, but rather as a quality of mindful attentiveness promoted by vivid, sensually impressive contrasts. Thoreau loved the wetlands and other 'unproductive' areas not apart from but in relation to the cultivated lands, as revitalizing elements for entire regions. Growing up in the Bay Area, I relished occasional car trips into the vastness and beauty of the Sierra Nevada. But as a householder in Vermont, I love even more the tattered, recovering wilderness just outside our back door, where in every season our family can ramble among the crags that overhang our roof and that frame the playing fields of the children’s schools.”

Thus, Professor Elder gives us an exciting question to consider as we think about wilderness: why do we tend to think of wilderness in such ways—taking lengthy, expensive and sometimes dangerous adventure trips, relishing close-to-the-breaking-point experiences, requiring that we traverse literally on some of the most stunning pieces of geography on God’s earth? Reading the Mountains of Home is a story of enjoying and engaging the local woods, climbing on nearby ragged cliffs, caring for the nearby flora and fauna, studying regional roads, once logging routes, meandering on streams which flow through his own village. Elder’s hikes are not done far away from home, but nearby, as he becomes increasingly familiar with his own bio-region. They are hikes, in fact, that his wife and children have either taken with him or on their own; gone is the machismo of a mountain man telling stories of far-off expeditions, but rather the observations of a wanderer drawing insights about places with which he and many of his neighbors are familiar.

I’m ahead of myself in describing this insight of this great book. I am not sure that Elder set out to write a book contrasting the Western pure wilderness paradigm versus the East coast model of human culture in the midst of nature. This is just where his attentive hiking and reading led him. And this—the journey to read his own local wilderness area in the Green Mountains of Vermont—is what this wise book is about. It is really an intimately personal memoir of a man and a year's worth of day hikes.

But there is more, much more. Elder’s journeys are inspired by a particular Robert Frost poem, “Directive,” a long and perplexing work, considered by some to be among the poet’s best. Let me quote from the first pages:

"In my crisscross explorations of these broken and thickly wooded slopes, I’ve relied upon the parallel guidance of the Forest Service’s topographic maps and Robert Frost’s great poem.... 'Directive' does more than any other text to illuminate this particular stretch of New England countryside for me. It integrates the narratives of geology, human settlement, and forest succession into a single, ongoing story. Reflecting about this poem has helped me understand how the mountains around our home assumed their present form, as well as what it might mean to identify with such a place on earth. 'Directive' opens by inviting a reader up into the heights. This is an invitation I’ve accepted with gratitude.... The seasons, boulders, trees, and animals of the Green Mountains deepen its meaning, image by image, and line by line."

In biblical studies we sometimes refer to the hermeneutical circle—that is, our insight from the text illumines our lives as we do what it says. Our insight gleaned from reflecting on our lives gives us (re)newed insight into the text which, again, sends us into life with yet an even more (re)formed worldview. There is a playful and essential interpretive interaction between text and life, living and reading. This exactly what Elder does with Robert Frost and his hikes.

So, our man takes up the poem, laces up his boots, and goes where it sends him. And what he sees in the Bristol Cliffs Wilderness Area, Hogback Mountain and in the ledges above Bristol, informs his rereading of the poem. Through this remarkable pilgrimage—poem in hand, Peterson Field Guides (“to atone for my liberal arts education”) in his backpack—he comes to deep and serious realizations not just about his bio-region, but about his community, his family, his life.

There are pages here (lots of pages) about geology, flowers, leaves, rocks. Lots about glaciers. More natural history than I might otherwise care to know. But right when I was growing tired of talk about soil horizons, botany or bedrock, Elder slides seamlessly into breath-taking prose and then profound reflections, such as this passage, as he writes in December:

"The August woods retained a memory of July. And now, as the earth undertakes its cold passage through December, orbiting back toward June, I return in writing to the scene of my reiterated hike. Memory compounds and thickens like the third-growth woods above my Bristol home."

And, oh, how he loves the poets. Professor Elder cites Wordsworth, Wendell Berry, T.S. Elliott, St. Mark. The literary criticism is fabulously rich—-cross-referencing authors and books and titles, doing exegesis of one line in light of the Vermont woods and another in light of the literary influences of Frost and his times. What a joy to have such a capable teacher as a trustworthy guide to these poet’s voices. This, it seems to me, is how literary studies can be done—down-to-Earth, rooted in the real world of place: community, bridges, farms and fields. The book has garnered rave reviews from environmentalists, writers and literary scholars like.

***

Walter Brueggemann has categorized the Hebrew Psalms in three ways: Psalms of Orientation, Psalms of Disorientation and Psalms of Reorientation. I kept thinking of this as I reflected on my own recent year of losses and disorientation and new growth; Elder’s father dies part-way through the writing of this book. His work (that is, reading and walking) with “Directive” helps him struggle with lostness and foundness, with disorientation and reorientation. (Some of the poem deals specifically with such themes.) It is not an overstatement to say that Elder’s work with this poem—experienced in the regenerated Vermont wilderness—was healing for him. And to this reader as well.

There were other sorrows as well. After the death of his beloved dog, Elder was reluctant to hike much further. Again, through Frost, he copes with grief and redefined expectations. He writes:

"When I read about the life of Frost, I resist focusing too much on the troubled and troubling aspects of the person behind the extraordinary poetry. I read these matters in the opposite direction. What triumph it was for this grief-beset and difficult man to affirm in lucid verse the world’s health and wholeness, while at the same time never scanting the confusions of our human condition. Frost could only accomplish such a personal alchemy because he ventured forth faithfully to encounter nature’s news..."

There is, I think, a biblical realism that undergirds much of Elder’s ruminations. He knows the goodness of created things, he also knows that things are broken and less than whole (not the least of which is our alienation from and mistreatment of the Earth itself). He trusts for some sense of redemptive hope. He finds deep solace in his attentiveness to creation and in his love of good words written well. It is pivotal that such human healing and renewal can be facilitated in East coast wilderness exactly because it has been so used. We simply do not see in virginal forests and untouched mountain peaks the sense of redemptive restoration that one sees in once de-forested, now nearly wild, third-growth forests, growing up once again even amidst signs of human culture.

And this, I think, is how he came across hope: in God’s faithfulness to the creation itself there is hope for us all. No where do I see this theme (with resonance from Jeremiah 31:35-36) more clearly than in Brooks Williams' marvelous song "Seven Sisters" (from Dead Sea Cafe) which could be considered a five-minute summary of Elder’s book. Brooks tells us that the New England mountain chain of the song title is coming back, being renewed. Although he does not say it precisely, the images suggest that creation is healed, not as pristine, virginal mountains but amidst old logging settlements, 300-year-old villages, long-abandoned homes, amidst the anguish of our history of Native displacement, amidst highways, factories, schools, and governments. We need not be Romanticist about pure wilderness; we can appreciate and commune with God’s creation even as it is found intermingled with the (sustainable) development of human culture. We can, as Wendell Berry often reminds us, develop a sense of place. We can find a groundedness in contemporary life, bringing together culture and agriculture (to use the subtitle of Berry’s classic The Unsettling of America). If we pay attention to language and landscape, texts and topography, we can develop a properly human and humane environmental ethic which can help heal our land and, perhaps, as in both Elder’s book and Williams’ song, our own hearts as well.

Reading the Mountains of Home is a unique memoir, a delightful bit of natural history and glorious nature writing. It is a helpful reminder of the power of poetry and a fruitful take, particularly, on Robert Frost. I found it generative for my own ruminations on my life’s connections with the Earth and very provocative in its discussion of a philosophy of wilderness that is less grand, mythic and Romantic and more natural, mundane, Easterly. And, like that favorite BW song, it gave me hope as my life finds its place in God’s grand promise of the restoration of creation. Without knowing it, perhaps, nature lover, father, husband, small-town citizen and literary critic, John Elders, has given us a down-to-Earth explication of biblical hope. As a Hebrew poet and nature-lover from ancient Israel declared so many centuries ago, “The Earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof.”

Click here for more books about wilderness, place and solace.

October 2001