The Wild Trees

 

The Wild Trees by Richard Preston

Nonfiction

2007

Finished on November 25, 2024

Rating: 3.5/5 (Good)

Those who dwell among the beauties and mysteries of the earth are never alone or weary of life. ~Rachel Carson

Publisher's Blurb:

Hidden away in foggy, uncharted rain forest valleys in Northern California are the largest and tallest organisms the world has ever sustained–the coast redwood trees, Sequoia sempervirens. Ninety-six percent of the ancient redwood forests have been destroyed by logging, but the untouched fragments that remain are among the great wonders of nature. The biggest redwoods have trunks up to thirty feet wide and can rise more than thirty-five stories above the ground, forming cathedral-like structures in the air. Until recently, redwoods were thought to be virtually impossible to ascend, and the canopy at the tops of these majestic trees was undiscovered. In The Wild Trees, Richard Preston unfolds the spellbinding story of Steve Sillett, Marie Antoine, and the tiny group of daring botanists and amateur naturalists that found a lost world above California, a world that is dangerous, hauntingly beautiful, and unexplored.

The canopy voyagers are young–just college students when they start their quest–and they share a passion for these trees, persevering in spite of sometimes crushing personal obstacles and failings. They take big risks, they ignore common wisdom (such as the notion that there’s nothing left to discover in North America), and they even make love in hammocks stretched between branches three hundred feet in the air.

The deep redwood canopy is a vertical Eden filled with mosses, lichens, spotted salamanders, hanging gardens of ferns, and thickets of huckleberry bushes, all growing out of massive trunk systems that have fused and formed flying buttresses, sometimes carved into blackened chambers, hollowed out by fire, called “fire caves.” Thick layers of soil sitting on limbs harbor animal and plant life that is unknown to science. Humans move through the deep canopy suspended on ropes, far out of sight of the ground, knowing that the price of a small mistake can be a plunge to one’s death.

Preston’s account of this amazing world, by turns terrifying, moving, and fascinating, is an adventure story told in novelistic detail by a master of nonfiction narrative. The author shares his protagonists’ passion for tall trees, and he mastered the techniques of tall-tree climbing to tell the story in The Wild Trees –the story of the fate of the world’s most splendid forests and of the imperiled biosphere itself.

I picked up a copy of The Wild Trees at Eureka Books a couple of years ago on one of our road trips down to Santa Rosa. Having previously read Damnation Spring (Ash Davidson's novel, which is set in the California Redwoods), I was curious about Preston's work of nonfiction about the same location. It's been years since I've read The Hot Zone and The Demon in the Freezer, two of his nonfiction narratives, but I remembered how both books were page-turners, so I grabbed a copy of The Wild Trees from the local interest display.

While not as engrossing as Preston's earlier books, The Wild Trees held my interest (mostly) and I learned not only a lot about the Coast Redwoods, but also about tree climbing techniques. There is a lot of detailed information on how Steve Sillett, Marie Antoine, and Preston himself climb these enormous trees. And they don't just climb straight up (using a variety of ropes and assorted tools), but they traverse from tree to tree (skywalking), branchwalk, canopy-trek, and even sleep in treeboats (hammocks). The last time I can remember climbing a tree was in fourth grade. We had a large mulberry tree in our front yard, which my best friend and I would climb and snack on the juicy berries while hiding from my younger brother. I would bet we weren't more than 8 feet off of the ground. I can't imagine climbing 350 feet, which is about the height of some of these ancient old growth redwoods.

As I mentioned in my review of Damnation Spring, I am well-acquainted with Northern California due to our many RV road trips down Highway 101 from our home on the Oregon coast. Preston mentions places we've either camped or enjoyed roadside lunches (Chetco River, Crescent City, Del Norte Coast Redwoods State Park, Redwood Creek, Prairie Creek, Avenue of the Giants, Founders Grove, Eel River, Humboldt Redwoods State Park, Eureka, etc.), which made it easy to envision where the old growth forests exist.

Things I learned (all info is based on 2007 publication date):

• The coast redwood is the tallest species of tree on earth. The tallest redwoods today are between 350 and close to 380 feet in height--thirty-five to thirty-eight stories tall.*

• Nobody knows the ages of any of the living giant coast redwoods, because nobody has ever drilled into one of them in order to count its annual growth rings. Drilling into an old redwood would not reveal its age, anyway, because the oldest redwoods seem to be hollow; they don't have growth rings left in their centers to be counted. Botanists suspect that the oldest living redwoods may be somewhere between two thousand and three thousand years old--they seem to be roughly the age of the Parthenon.

• By the measure of overall size--the volume of wood--the largest species of living tree on earth is not the coast redwood but the giant sequoia, a type of cypress that is closely related to the coast redwood.  

• There are very few birds in the redwood canopy. Redwoods produce poisons in their wood and needles that discourage insects from feeding on them, and consequently many species of birds that feed on insects go elsewhere to look for food.

Preston's book is chock-full of detail, whether it's about tree climbing or the multitude of organisms that live in the redwood canopy. From beginning to end, he introduces numerous students, naturalists, biologists, professors, and experts in the field of botany, so many that I created a list of "who's who" in order to keep track of key players. The writing gets bogged down in spots with the intricate details of not only climbing techniques, but personal information of these folks (dating, marriage, divorce, work life, etc.), making for an uneven read. I rarely skim a book, but I skipped over a few pages and didn't feel as if I missed anything critical in this wordy story. I do know that I will never not take advantage of looking up when in a grove of redwoods. They are magnificent trees. On the other hand, I also know that I have no desire to spend the night in a hammock at the top of any tree! I am curious to know how much the technology of drones has changed the way in which redwoods are measured and studied. I'll bet there are still those who prefer the old-school method of climbing these majestic trees.

"It helps us know how the forests work as a whole and how the trees work as organisms," she said. "Then we can help them out if they're having problems--and they are having problems. It occurs to me that I have a fairly cynical outlook on so many things in the world today--this insane world. But as long as we still have these trees, there's hope for us." 

*The tallest living tree is Hyperion, which is located in the Redwood National Park, and is 380.8 feet.

Damnation Spring

 

Damnation Spring by Ash Davidson

Fiction

2021 Scribner

Finished on November 3, 2023

Rating: 4/5 (Very Good)

Publisher's Blurb:

A stunning novel about love, work, and marriage that asks how far one family and one community will go to protect their future.

Colleen and Rich Gundersen are raising their young son, Chub, on the rugged California coast. It’s 1977, and life in this Pacific Northwest logging town isn’t what it used to be. For generations, the community has lived and breathed timber; now that way of life is threatened.

Colleen is an amateur midwife. Rich is a tree-topper. It’s a dangerous job that requires him to scale trees hundreds of feet tall—a job that both his father and grandfather died doing. Colleen and Rich want a better life for their son—and they take steps to assure their future. Rich secretly spends their savings on a swath of ancient Redwoods. Colleen, desperate to have a second baby, challenges the logging company’s use of herbicides that she believes are responsible for the many miscarriages in the community—including her own. Colleen and Rich find themselves on opposite sides of a budding conflict that threatens the very thing they are trying to protect: their family.

Told in prose as clear as a spring-fed creek, Damnation Spring is an intimate, compassionate portrait of a family whose bonds are tested and a community clinging to a vanishing way of life. An extraordinary story of the transcendent, enduring power of love—between husband and wife, mother and child, and longtime neighbors. An essential novel for our times.

I read Damnation Spring in mid-2022 and thought it was outstanding. I enjoyed the story and writing so much that I decided to recommend it to my book group, and we are discussing it later this month. I wish I could say that I loved it as much the second time around, but it didn't pull me in until about halfway in. Maybe it was simply too soon for a full reread. I dropped my original 5-star rating down to 4 stars.

I won't repost my original thoughts about the book, since that review is pretty long, but you can find it here.

The Light Pirate

The Light Pirate by Lily Brooks-Dalton

Fiction

2022 Grand Central Publishing

Finished on September 3, 2023

Rating: 5/5 (Outstanding)

Publisher's Blurb:

Florida is slipping away. As devastating weather patterns and rising sea levels gradually wreak havoc on the state’s infrastructure, a powerful hurricane approaches a small town on the southeastern coast. Kirby Lowe, an electrical line worker; his pregnant wife, Frida; and their two sons, Flip and Lucas, prepare for the worst. When the boys go missing just before the hurricane hits, Kirby heads out into the high winds to search for them. Left alone, Frida goes into premature labor and gives birth to an unusual child, Wanda, whom she names after the catastrophic storm that ushers her into a society closer to collapse than ever before.

As Florida continues to unravel, Wanda grows. Moving from childhood to adulthood, adapting not only to the changing landscape, but also to the people who stayed behind in a place abandoned by civilization, Wanda loses family, gains community, and ultimately, seeks adventure, love, and purpose in a place remade by nature.

Told in four parts—power, water, light, and time—The Light Pirate mirrors the rhythms of the elements and the sometimes quick, sometimes slow dissolution of the world as we know it. It is a meditation on the changes we would rather not see, the future we would rather not greet, and a call back to the beauty and violence of an untamable wilderness. 

Imagine a time when it is literally too hot to go outside during daylight hours. If you do, your core body temperature will rise so quickly, you will suffer from heat exhaustion within minutes and die. Nocturnal life becomes the norm for survival.

Imagine a year in which there are so many hurricanes that the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) goes through the entire alphabet, only to start over again before the end of the "season."

Imagine the disappearance of Miami-Dade County, the Outer Banks, and other coastal cities, all preceded by a mass exodus of residents to safer locations where they endure perpetual wildfires in their new communities.

These calamities are not difficult to imagine. One just needs to read the news and know how close we are coming to creating the above into realities. The following  headline was published in the New York Times on Labor Day:

In a typical Atlantic Ocean hurricane season, August is the ramp-up to September’s peak. This season came to life almost overnight in mid-August, producing a record four named storms in less than 48 hours. [Emphasis mine]

I also read this in The New York Times earlier this month:

More than any past year, this summer felt like the moment that climate change came for the vacationer. It began with heat waves across Southern Europe, where popular attractions closed to avoid the intolerable midafternoon temperatures. The infernal heat cured the kindling for wildfires, which were soon raging in Italy, Turkey, Spain, Portugal, Cyprus, Greece and elsewhere, forcing holiday cancellations and, as in the case of Rhodes, large-scale evacuations. On the other side of the world, another fire, this one likely supercharged by hurricane winds, consumed Lahaina on Maui, killing at least 115 people.

Hail as big as tennis balls pounded towns in northern Italy. Torrential rain triggered flash floods across Central Europe. All of this wild weather has coincided with tourism’s great rebound, the year when tourist numbers are expected to recover to prepandemic levels.

and

There are few contingencies in motion for when the weather in today’s most popular destinations becomes a bane rather than a blessing. Many people are speculating that European summer travel patterns are bound to migrate north as prospective vacationers deem an increasing likelihood of sustained 110-degree Fahrenheit temperatures too much to bear. Uncanny sights like the ghostly hotel towers of Varosha, a once-glamorous resort in Cyprus that was abandoned after the Turkish invasion of 1974, may become commonplace across Europe’s southern coasts.

The gravity of the climate crisis should not be lost on readers of The Light Pirate, a novel so timely and smartly written, it should be required reading not only of high school students, but all citizens of this planet. Cli-fi is a new-to-me genre, but unlike its sister Sci-fi, it's far too realistic and terrifying, the imminent threat all too near and not to be ignored. As Kirby, one of the main characters, believes:

This world is worried, of course, about climbing temperatures and vengeful wildfires and rising tides. The headlines are absolutely terrible[...]. Incessant. Exhausting. But they're just that. Headlines. Things that happen to other people, elsewhere. The Middle East, Indonesia, Northern California, the Bahamas: those poor people. Southern Florida and the Keys, Louisiana, Puerto Rico: those poor people. The safe zones have shrunk, will go on shrinking, but the people still firmly attached to the idea that there will continue to be such lines--between safe and not safe, between us and those poor people--are determined to go on as they always have.

and

By the time Kirby reaches the parking lot, he realizes that he's known for weeks. Months, even. It was the same with the beaches. The same with the floods, the hurricanes, the sea level. Didn't he know all of this was coming? Didn't everyone? They've known for years. Decades. It didn't make any difference. None at all. Because now it's here and despite all that knowing, he's lost. Everyone is. They had all hung their hats on the question of proximity. Yes, it will be bad, they said to one another, but we have years. We have time. Somehow we'll solve this along the way. He doesn't even have the energy to be angry. 

I'm not a fan of magical realism, but I was willing to suspend disbelief and just go with it. The occurences are not a distraction and, truthfully, I enjoyed those parts of the story. Don't let that label dissuade you from reading this powerful book!

Thought-provoking is a hackneyed term, but I can't think of a better descriptor for The Light Pirate. It's a gripping read from the opening lines, easing up before the halfway point, but never losing momentum or growing sluggish. I haven't read a lot of climate fiction, but Ash Davidson's debut novel, Damnation Spring (an environmental story set in the California redwood forests) came to mind as I read Brooks-Dalton's provocative, cautionary tale. 

I loved this novel, which is so beautifully written with well-drawn characters I hated to say goodbye to. I couldn't put it down! The Light Pirate is one to own, to share with others, to discuss in book groups, and to inspire all of us to do more to save our planet. Highly recommend.

Damnation Spring

 

Damnation Spring by Ash Davidson

Fiction

2021 Scribner

Finished on May 28, 2022

Rating: 5/5 (Excellent!)

Publisher's Blurb:

A stunning novel about love, work, and marriage that asks how far one family and one community will go to protect their future.

Colleen and Rich Gundersen are raising their young son, Chub, on the rugged California coast. It’s 1977, and life in this Pacific Northwest logging town isn’t what it used to be. For generations, the community has lived and breathed timber; now that way of life is threatened.

Colleen is an amateur midwife. Rich is a tree-topper. It’s a dangerous job that requires him to scale trees hundreds of feet tall—a job that both his father and grandfather died doing. Colleen and Rich want a better life for their son—and they take steps to assure their future. Rich secretly spends their savings on a swath of ancient Redwoods. Colleen, desperate to have a second baby, challenges the logging company’s use of herbicides that she believes are responsible for the many miscarriages in the community—including her own. Colleen and Rich find themselves on opposite sides of a budding conflict that threatens the very thing they are trying to protect: their family.

Told in prose as clear as a spring-fed creek, Damnation Spring is an intimate, compassionate portrait of a family whose bonds are tested and a community clinging to a vanishing way of life. An extraordinary story of the transcendent, enduring power of love—between husband and wife, mother and child, and longtime neighbors. An essential novel for our times.

I went into Damnation Spring completely blind and wound up loving it, so much so that it may be my #1 read of 2022, and I'm willing to bet that it could someday become a classic. I learned a lot about the logging industry, but it was the characters who stole my heart. The novel is told from three points of view, alternating chapters between Rich, his wife, Colleen, and their young son, Chub. I loved this family and Ash Davidson does a remarkable job creating fully realized characters, the type one cannot help but come to love and care about.

The Northern California location is very familiar to me, which made the read even more enjoyable. Davidson's book is set in Del Norte County between Crescent City and Klamath. My husband and I travel to Northern California in our RV fairly often and I've driven Highway 101 and the Last Chance Grade (a 3-mile section of Hwy 101 between Wilson Creek and Crescent City), which is mentioned in this debut novel.

We have spent time in line with other vehicles, waiting to make our way along the one lane strip of highway, which hangs high above the ocean, ready to give way at any moment. Thankfully, I'm the driver, and thus too busy watching the road (and the big earth movers on the hillside), not daring to gaze down at the long drop to the ocean on my right. 

The fog was so thick she could barely make out the guardrail running along the cliff edge like a fence. She hunched forward over the wheel. Every time the ground around Last Chance Creek crumbled off into the ocean, mudslide taking a section of the coast highway with it, Caltrans talked about rerouting the road inland. 

We have driven past the golden bears on the Klamath River bridge, and have chuckled at the crowded parking lot of the Trees of Mystery (with its enormous wood carvings of Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox), more times than I can count. We've stopped for cheeseburgers in Crescent City, waited for a herd of elk to cross the quiet highway in Orick, and camped near Trinidad at the Elk Country RV Park. These locations are all mentioned in Damnation Spring, so it was easy for me to envision where the Gundersens lived and worked.

I almost took a half-point off my rating due to the disappointing (albeit realistic) conclusion of the novel, but upon further reflection, the author's choice makes perfect sense and my reaction felt appropriate. I can't reveal more details without giving away spoilers, but I hope to read the book in 2023 with my book group so I can talk about not only the ending, but also the effects of the logging industry in our area. Oregon is the number one producer of softwood lumber (primarily Douglas fir), and we are witness to the results of clear-cutting, slash burning, and road damage from the weight of heavy logging trucks.

Favorite or powerful passages:

"The real timber's gone," Lark said. "What's left, ten percent, including the parks? Two thousand years to grow a forest, a hundred years to fall it. No plague like a man."

and

They rode in silence up the crumbling highway along the ocean, asphalt pot-holed from the weight of loaded log trucks, winding along the narrow strip of coastal timber the park had annexed back in '68. Big trees hugged the road edge like mink trim sewn to a burlap coat, hiding the clear-cuts that lay just beyond.

and

Redwoods towered, disappearing into the fog above. So that was why Rich had brought them. He wanted Chub to stand here looking up at these giant pillars, ferns taller than he was, rhododendrons jeweled with dew, ground quilted with sorrel, to breathe it in before it was gone.

and

The plane's engine noise buzzed inside his chest, a hundred McCulloch chainsaws revving at once. They'd flown over 24-7 Ridge, the big tree herself lit by an errant ray of sun, glowing orange, bright as a torch, and, for an instant, Rich had caught a glimmer of the inholding's potential--an island of private land in a sea of company forest. They'd flown over the dark waves of big pumpkins in Damnation Grove--redwoods older than the United States of America, saplings when Christ was born. Then came the patchwork of clear-cuts, like mange on a dog, timber felled and bucked and debarked, trucked to the mill, sawed into lumber, sent off to the kilns to be dried. 

and

"...Chopper sprays places trucks can't. Forest Service hoses their timberlands once in March or April, then calls it good, but Sanderson sprays all season, whenever we're working. Spray kills the weeds and trash trees--broadleaf plants--everything that gets in our way. It's a growth hormone--hops them up so they grow so fast they die."

Ash Davidson's lyrical and moving novel, which is taut with even pacing, pulled me in from the opening pages. Several times the foreshadowing of events had me tense with worry, and I had to force myself to slow down. I could easily have finished in a day or two, but I savored it over the course of two weeks, not wanting it to end. This is not one I'll soon forget and I'm already thinking about a re-read on audio. Fans of Richard Power's Overstory, and any of Barbara Kingsolver's novels, won't be disappointed. Highly recommend.

The Rural Life

 

The Rural Life by Verlyn Klinkenborg

Nonfiction/Essays

2003 Little, Brown and Company

Finished on December 6, 2020

Rating: 3/5 (Good)

Publisher's Blurb:

A yearlong meditation on the deep joys of country life.

In the pages of The New Yorker, Harper's, the New York Times, and his acclaimed books Making Hay and The Last Fine Time, Verlyn Klinkenborg has mastered a voice of singular lyricism and precision. His subject is the American landscape; not the landscape admired from a scenic overlook, but one taken from a rusty chair propped against the worn siding of a screened-in porch, or from the window of a pickup driving down an empty highway into the teeth of an approaching storm. He has a keen appreciation of the peculiarly American tableau--a Memorial Day parade, or a boy riding a bike down the middle of a dusty street. Whether reporting from a small farm in upstate New York, a high pasture deep within the Rocky Mountains, or the bricked edge of a city shuddering in the wake of a "sudden Tuesday," Klinkenborg follows the momentum of the seasons in a language as simple, unsentimental, and exacting as life itself.

In the tradition of E. B. White and Henry David Thoreau, Verlyn Klinkenborg gives us in The Rural Life a fresh view of our greatest subject, the ordinary beauty of daily life.

My dear friend Nan (Letters From a Hill Farm) gifted me this book many years ago and back in January, I decided to read a chapter each month. I've tried to read other books like this over the course of an entire year and this is the first time I've succeeded! As with any collection of essays, I enjoyed some more than others, particularly those that remind me of our early years in Nebraska. We lived on three acres, just outside the city limits, and after living in San Diego for 20 years, it felt like we were living the rural life. We had a creek running through our backyard, turkeys visiting on a regular basis, and even a small herd of cattle showing up one day as I was mowing on our John Deere tractor. As I read Klinkenborg's ruminations, I found myself nodding in agreement, recognizing situations from my life as a "country mouse." Thank you, Nan, for sharing this lovely book with me. 

Notable Passages:

Every year about now, I feel the need to keep a journal. I recognize in this urge all my worst instincts as a writer. I walk past the blank books--gifts of nothingness--that pile up in bookstores at this season, and I can almost hear their clean white pages begging to be defaced. They evoke in me the amateur, the high school student, the miserable writerly aspirant I once was--a young man who could almost see the ink flowing onto the woven fibers of the blank page like the watering of some eternal garden. It took a long time, a lot of pens, and many blank books before I realized that I write in the simultaneous expectation that every word I write will live forever and be blotted out instantly.  (January)

All the days with eves before them are behind us now for another year. The grand themes--rebirth and genial carnality--have come and gone like a chinook wind, bringing a familiar end-of-the-year thaw to body and spirit. Now the everyday returns and with it the ordinary kind of week in which Friday doesn't turn into Sunday--and Saturday into Sunday--as it has for two weeks running. It's time for a week in which each morning throws off a magnetic field all its own, when it's no trick telling Tuesday from Wednesday just by the sound of the alarm clock or the mood of your spouse. (January)

If deep cold made a sound, it would be the scissoring and gnashing of a skater's blades against hard gray ice, or the screeching the snow sets up when you walk across it in the blue light of afternoon. The sound might be the stamping of feet at bus stops and train stations, or the way the almost perfect clarity of the audible world on an icy day is muted by scarves and mufflers pulled up over the face and around the ears. (January)

From solstice till equinox, summer lasts only ninety-one days and six hours, a little longer if you count from Memorial Day till Labor Day. It seems like so much time. but the closer you get, the smaller summer looks, unlike winter, which looks longer and longer the nearer it comes. From a distance--from April, say--summer looks as capacious as hope. This will be the season we lose weight, eat well, work out, raise a garden, learn to kayak, read Proust, paint the house, drive to Glacier, and so on and so on and so on. This will be the season in which time stretches before us like the recesses of space itself, the season in which leisure swells like a slow tomato, until it's round and red and ripe. (May)

Beside a country road near the town of Hygiene, Colorado, stands a cottonwood that turned completely yellow the second week of August. To southbound cyclists that tree lies hidden, lurking beneath a sharp dip in the road. They coast along in summer's full incumbency--the scent of hay practically creasing their foreheads--when all at once the asphalt slopes away, and that lone cottonwood presents itself, its leaves shimmering in a bright wind that suddenly seems autumnal, full of the brittleness, the clarity, of fall. (September)

For some reason, every stage in this advancing season has brought with it a feeling of incredulity. A few weeks ago it seemed unbelievable that the leaves should be turning so soon and then that they should have dropped so promptly. Now, just this week, it seems incredible that snow should have fallen out of a goose-gray sky, skidding eastward toward the missing sun. I wake up thinking, "November already," and realize that "already" is a word that's been with me all autumn long, always measuring how far behind the season I feel. (November)

It takes no imagination to stay synchronized with the shifting of the season, with the retracting daylight or the sudden gathering of a wet morning wind that gets behind your ears and under your hair when you feed the animals. You don't really even have to pay attention to keep up with the calendar. But you do have to be ready to part with the days that have already passed. September took far more than a month this year. It probably took two months, the one our bodies lived and the wholly different month we lived in our minds. Time fell out of gear for almost everyone. 

Some of the reluctance that comes with this autumn is mere uncertainty, a sense that no one really knows the score. Going into winter takes confidence, even in a normal year, even if it's nothing more than confidence in one's own preparations. Somehow that's not good enough this year. Like everyone, I find myself wanting the world to be right with itself again, even if only in the wrong old ways. In the heart of the reluctance I feel and hear in the voices of my neighbors, there's a longing for the inconsequential summer we were having not so many weeks ago. Longing is probably too strong a word. Better to say that the memory of what was, for many Americans, an uneventful August exerts a certain attraction right now. But the present is irrefutable. The leaves won't rise again, except on a cold wind. Before long, I hope, that won't seem so regrettable. (November) [Klinkenborg was writing of 9/11, but he very well could have been writing about any month in 2020!]

Looking Back - Refuge

Looking Back... In an effort to transfer my book journal entries over to this blog, I'm going to attempt to post (in chronological order) an entry every Friday. I may or may not add extra commentary to what I jotted down in these journals.

Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place by Terry Tempest Williams
Nonfiction
1992 Vintage
Read in August 1997
Rating: 3/5 (Good)

Publisher's Blurb:

In the spring of 1983 Terry Tempest Williams learned that her mother was dying of cancer. That same season, The Great Salt Lake began to rise to record heights, threatening the herons, owls, and snowy egrets that Williams, a poet and naturalist, had come to gauge her life by. One event was nature at its most random, the other a by-product of rogue technology: Terry's mother, and Terry herself, had been exposed to the fallout of atomic bomb tests in the 1950s. As it interweaves these narratives of dying and accommodation, Refuge transforms tragedy into a document of renewal and spiritual grace, resulting in a work that has become a classic. 

My Original Notes (1997):

Pretty good, but not great. Depressing topic - multigenerational cancer deaths due to radioactive fallout in Utah. I actually enjoyed the book when it dealt with the family and Mormon issues, but got bored with the ornithology and Great Salt Lake issues. I skimmed some of those. Rod read it, too, and enjoyed it.


My Current Thoughts:

I only have a vague recollection of this book and I'm sure I picked it up after hearing about the author in my Great Plains Lit class. I might enjoy it more now than I did back then.

One Square Inch of Silence

One Square Inch of Silence: One Man's Search for Natural Silence in a Noisy World by Gordon Hempton and John Grossman
Nonfiction - Environment
2009 Free Press
Quit on 4/30/09
Rating: DNF



See how nature—trees, flowers, grass—grows in silence; see the stars, the moon and the sun—how they move in silence... We need silence to be able to touch souls.
~ Mother Teresa

Publisher's Blurb:

Having completed a coast-to-coast mission to preserve and protect natural soundscapes, Gordon Hempton proclaims that "the extinction rate for quiet places vastly exceeds the rate of species extinction." Part road trip, part cultural chronicle, One Square Inch of Silence is an eloquent celebration of nature and an ear-opening journey into Earth's vanishing sanctuaries.

Like a sound safari, One Square Inch of Silence recounts Hempton's trek across the country to capture the sounds of American landscapes and the reflections of the American people on the importance of quiet in their lives. Birdsong, melting ice, the bugling elk all achieve immortality as the author addresses questions of surprising importance, including: Why isn't natural quiet part of the ecological agenda? Culminating in the author's arrival in Washington, D.C., where he pleads his case for the preservation of natural quiet, One Square Inch of Silence is one of the most impassioned, original environmental works ever written.

I can't tell you how many times I've toyed with the idea of going back and finishing this book. I have a dozen passages marked with sticky notes and there's just something that appeals to me about Hempton's idea to research (and fight for) silence in this crazy, chaotic world of ours. Not to mention reading about someone else's road trip!

But for now, I'm going to call it quits. However, I will leave you with several of my favorite passages and blurbs. Maybe, in doing so, I might just convince myself to keep the book for a future read.

One Square Inch of Silence is more than a book; it is a place in the Hoh Rain Forest, part of Olympic National Park—arguably the quietest place in the United States. But it, too, is endangered, protected only by a policy that is neither practiced by the National Park Service itself nor supported by adequate laws. My hope is that this book will trigger a quiet awakening in all those willing to become true listeners.

and

Silence is a sound, many, many sounds. I've heard more than I can count. Silence is the moonlit song of the coyote signing the air, and the answer of its mate. It is the falling whisper of snow that will later melt with an astonishing reggae rhythm so crisp that you will want to dance to it. It is the sound of pollinating winged insects vibrating soft tunes as they defensively dart in and out of the pine boughs to temporarily escape the breeze, a mix of insect hum and pine sigh that will stick with you all day. Silence is the passing flock of chestnut-backed chickadees and red-breasted nuthatches, chirping and fluttering, reminding you of your own curiosity.

Have you heard the rain lately? America's great northwest rain forest, no surprise, is an excellent place to listen. Here's what I've heard at One Square Inch of Silence. The first of the rainy season is not wet at all. Initially, countless seeds fall from the towering trees. This is soon followed by the soft applause of fluttering maple leaves, which settle oh so quietly as a winter blanket for the seeds. But this quiet concert is merely a prelude. When the first of many great rainstorms arrives, unleashing its mighty anthem, each species of tree makes its own sound in the wind and rain. Even the largest of the raindrops may never strike the ground. Nearly 300 feet overhead, high in the forest canopy, the leaves and bark absorb much of the moisture... until this aerial sponge becomes saturated and drops re-form and descend farther... striking lower branches and cascading onto sound-absorbing moss drapes... tapping on epiphytic ferns... faintly plopping on huckleberry bushes... and whacking the hard, firm salal leaves... before finally, the drops inaudibly bend the delicate clover-like leaves of the wood sorrel and drip to leak into the ground. Heard day or night, this liquid ballet will continue for more than an hour after the actual rain ceases.

Hempton's passion:

I listen to the world—this is my job and my passion as an acoustic ecologist. I've recorded on every continent except Antarctica. My recordings are used in everything from video games and museum exhibits to nature albums, movie soundtracks, and educational products. More than 25 years of recordings in all manner of natural setting have swelled my library to 3,000 gigabytes. I've captured the flutter of butterfly wings, the thunderous booming of waterfalls, the jet-like swoosh of a bullet train, the wisp of a floating leaf, the passionate trill of a birdsong, the soft coo of a coyote pup. I'd rather listen than speak. Listening is a wordless process of receiving honest impressions.

What is One Square Inch?

One Square Inch of Silence was designated on Earth Day 2005 (April 22), when, with an audience of none, I placed a small red stone, a gift from an elder of the Quileute tribe, on a log in the Hoh Rain Forest at Olympic National Park, approximately three miles from the visitors center. With this marker in place, I hoped to protect and manage the natural soundscape in Olympic Park's backcountry wilderness. My logic is simple and not simply symbolic: If a loud noise, such as the passing of an aircraft, can affect many square miles, then a natural place, if maintained in a 1000 percent noise-free condition, will likewise affect many square miles around it. Protect that single square inch of land from noise pollution, and quiet will prevail over a much larger area of the park.

On Peace & Quiet:

Good things come from a quiet place: study, prayer, music, transformation, worship, communion. The words peace and quiet are all but synonymous, and are often spoken in the same breath. A quiet place is the think tank of the soul, the spawning ground of truth and beauty.

On the Lack of Sound of Silence:

Sadly, though, as big as it is, our planet offers fewer and fewer quiet havens. This is especially true in developed nations, where the high consumption of fossil fuels translates into noise pollution. It's come to this: there is likely no place on earth untouched by modern noise. Even far from paved roads in the Amazon rain forest you can still hear the drone of distant outboard motors on dugout canoes and from the wrist of a native guide the hourly beep of a digital watch. The question is no longer whether noise will be present, but how often it will intrude and for how long. The interval between noise encroachments (measured in minutes) is the measure of quiet these days. In my experience, a silence longer than 15 minutes is now extremely rare in the United States and long gone in Europe. Most places do not have quiet at all; instead, one or more noise sources prevail around the clock. Even in wilderness areas and our national parks, the average noise-free interval has shrunk to less than five minutes during daylight hours. By my reckoning, the rate of quiet places extinction vastly exceeds the rate of species extinction. Today there are fewer than a dozen quiet places and by that I mean places where natural silence reigns over many square miles.

Be sure to take a look at the author's website, as well as this video clip about One Square Inch of Silence.

And then maybe consider replacing your leaf blower with a rake or broom.

Shhhhhhhhhhhhhh.