A Walker in the Suburbs

Usually when I stick with a book I’m originally not sure I’ll finish it’s because I like the author’s voice. In this case, the voice belonged to Wendy McClure, who recounts her obsession with Laura Ingalls Wilder’s “Little House on the Prairie” series in her funny, tender, offbeat book The Wilder Life.

I read Laura Ingalls Wilder books as a girl — some of them, at least. The one I remember best is On the Banks of Plum Creek, with its Garth Williams illustrations. (I can thank McClure for that tidbit.) My main memory of that book is dropping it in a puddle on the way home from the bus stop in fourth grade. It was a prized library book! How could I let that happen?

But the pages dried, and I continued to immerse myself in the stories of a sod house, a girl in a bonnet, a cloud of grasshoppers and other prairie adventures.

But back to authorial voice. In this case, I liken it to the writer’s grabbing me by the hand and pulling me in a direction I had no intention of going. I wasn’t sure I wanted to learn much more about Laura Ingalls Wilder than I already knew, but darned if I didn’t learn it anyway.

Thank you, Wendy McClure — or something like that.

Books in the woods. These volumes and their inconspicuous case blend in so well with the trees that I walk past them half the time. But that makes finding them all the more special.

Little Free Libraries are one of the more positive “shopping” developments of the last two decades. Having a safe, dry place to trade books is inspired and simple. It’s further evidence that a barter economy is taking hold.

Most Little Free Libraries are stationed on suburban lanes, but this one is accessible only on foot. Only walkers can partake of its bounty, which seems to improve its stock.

Because this small bookcase is available only to those who happen upon it in their woodland walks, it seems akin to fairy forts and pots of gold at the end of rainbows. Not exactly magic … but close to it.

I first read Lynn Darling’s Out of the Woods: A Memoir of Wayfinding shortly after it was published in 2014, and I wrote about it here. It was a Kindle book, one I can no longer access easily, so I put it on my birthday wish list, and just finished reading it again, this time in hard copy.

Re-reading a book that struck a chord is always risky. Will it still put the world to rights? Will it still make my heart sing?

I’m happy to say that this book did. Whether it means I’m still finding my own way (I am) or that the writing holds up (it does), I can’t say exactly. Probably a little of both.

I pulled out my pen often to scrawl notes on an index card. “So much of direction, of having a sense of direction, is bound up in a sense of place, of knowing where home lies even when you don’t know exactly where you are,” Darling writes.

She makes an argument here for long acquaintance with a locale, for knowing it so well that you’ve named the trees. But at the end of her memoir she leaves her home in the Vermont woods and moves back to Manhattan, a place that was “both present and past.”

What I took from this book upon second reading is the importance of remaining flexible as we age. Yes, we might move to the Vermont woods in search of solitude. But what’s to stop us from moving back to a bustling city four years later, if we can afford it and that’s what we want? Finding our way means staying open to all the possibilities of life, to changing our minds and accepting the detours, no matter when or how often they come.

I’ve been reading about Robert Louis Stevenson and his wife, Fanny, widely credited with keeping the writer alive to the age of 44. The author battled illness all his short life, spent months at a time in bed. Perhaps that was the inspiration for one of his delightful poems from A Child’s Garden of Verses, “The Land of Counterpane,” about playing with toy soldiers on his bedcovers.

Fanny made it her life’s work to find an environment that would allow her husband to live a full and creative life — even it meant long and ardulous sea voyages. She was as sickened by sea air as RLS was invigorated by it.

Prone to queasiness myself, I thought about the sacrifices she made, the discomfort all travelers used to endure. We think a delayed and crammed-full flight is bad; try weeks at sea in steerage! Adventurers of yore either dealt with the pitch and roll … or they stayed put. I wonder, how many of us would have toughed it out?

(The schooner Casco carried the Stevensons from San Francisco to Hawaii in 1888. Photo courtesy the RLS website.)

I’m an avid reader but a timid book buyer. These days I’m as likely to be reading a Kindle as a physical book. This is not because I’m digitally advanced. It’s because this practice holds down the accumulation of printed matter in my house.

Still, when the book piles on my floor reach tipping height, the time has come to invest in a new bookshelf. But what happens next? I’ve almost filled this new one, and wall space is limited.

I’m thinking that shelves are to books as roads are to cars. Just as additional highways worsen traffic, new bookshelves invite filling. Which is why, before I re-shelved books yesterday, I culled a few for resale and donation. Not even a shelf’s worth, but enough to leave a little wiggle room. Let’s see how long it takes me to fill it.

I’ve broken through a reluctance to write in my books, scribbling happily in review copies and textbooks. But last night I felt similarly compelled to mark up a magazine article. There were just too many passages I wanted to ponder, so I pulled out a pen.

The article was “The Anti-Social Century” in the February Atlantic, which discusses how Americans are spending more time alone than ever before. Riffing on the famous “Bowling Alone” work of Robert Putnam, the article explores the effect of social media, ordering takeout and the lingering effects of the pandemic, among other causes of isolation.

Like any writing that offers aha moments, this article hits on truths I’ve experienced in my own life. For instance, when I enrolled in a graduate program I wanted only to meet in person. But many classes met online. At first I actively avoided them, but now I seek them out. I choose what’s easiest in the short-term rather than what’s better in the long-term. (Though I may complain about the traffic, I enjoy in-person classes the most.)

But it’s the way author Derek Thompson explores the topic that made me highlight sentences and paragraphs. What we’re missing, he says, is not the inner ring of companionship — we are in closer touch with family and friends than ever before, given our technological tethers — or the outer ring of social media contacts —which connect us to our tribe. What’s missing is the middle zone, the village, our neighbors and acquaintances. “Families teach us love, and tribes teach us loyalty. The village teaches us tolerance.”

Social isolation has a price, and we are paying it, as Thompson explains. According to one analysis a “five-percentage-point increase in alone time was associated with about the same decline in life satisfaction as was a 10 percent lower household income.”

With journalism like this it’s no wonder that the Atlantic has returned to 12-month-a-year print circulation after 20 years of a reduced schedule. It’s the rare print success story, and good news for “printophiles” like me. Now I have two more issues a year to mark and underline.

I read an essay the other day about Aldo Leopold, which got me thinking about the great conservationist and some writing I did about him a few years ago.

At first glance Aldo Leopold’s book A Sand County Almanac (1949) seemed to be like other evocative writing about place — books by Annie Dillard or Henry David Thoreau, for example, books that shed light not only on cities or rivers but also on the author or the human condition, books in which the landscape is a vehicle to the self.

What I got was much more. It was not just a book about the transformation Leopold and his family underwent as they fixed up an old chicken coop in Wisconsin and lived there on weekends. It was in this place that Leopold wrote the essays that became his masterpiece, A Sand County Almanac, a book that encapsulates the philosophy of place that makes him one of our earliest prophets of ecology and wilderness preservation. This book, like the twisted little apples of Winesburg, Ohio, is the hard-won fruit of the deep thinking Leopold brought to the land on which he chose to live.

“There are those who can live without wild things, and some who cannot. These essays are the delights and dilemmas of one who cannot,” writes Leopold in his introduction. But from such big pronouncements the work quickly becomes more specific: the winter awakening of a skunk, the trail of a meadow mouse, the fate of the passenger pigeon, the life of a downed tree, the difference between a shovel (which makes us givers) and the axe (which makes us takers).

To Leopold, place is much more than a vehicle for self-discovery. It is essential to the health and welfare of our planet. The landscape is not here for our amusement or to further our self-awareness; we are working parts of it. Leopold sings of the wilderness, the wild creatures, the original grasses and grizzlies and wolves and weevils that are born and nurtured by a particular soil and rainfall. Here is the moral work of place, the ecology of belonging.

(Fox cubs frolic in a clearing.)