A Walker in the Suburbs

The other day, on a tip from another book, I picked up The Fields by Conrad Richter. I wanted to read Richter’s depiction of frontier life — not the frontier of buttes and canyons and wagon trains, but the “new lands” of what was then Ohio territory, a closer and older frontier.

I’m only about halfway through the book, but I already have a feel for the place that was long-ago Ohio. It was dark, smokey and unrelievedly claustrophobic. The thick woods that blanketed much of the eastern United States must have seemed impossible to tame. I try to imagine a life without clearings and openness, the sky a distant square of light. It is gloomy, all right. But the people who live there are what make it bearable. To each other and to the reader. They are funny and wise and strong beyond imagining.

There are three books in this series: The Trees, The Fields and The Town (which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1951). I hope to read them all.

I was already writing another post this morning when I learned from “The Writer’s Almanac” that today is the birthday of Aldo Leopold. I had never heard of Leopold until I took the class last fall. Now I can’t imagine not knowing about him. Here’s an excerpt from a review I wrote of his book A Sand County Almanac:

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. I was to learn otherwise.

I scanned the bio of Leopold on the back of the book before I started reading it, and I learned that he grew up in Iowa, graduated from Yale Forestry School and worked with the U.S. Forestry Service in New Mexico and Arizona before becoming a professor of game management (a field he is credited with creating) at the University of Wisconsin. Leopold bought some poor, down-on-its-heels farmland near Baraboo in south-central Wisconsin, rehabbed an old chicken coop on the property and lived there with his family on weekends and vacations. It was there that he 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.

Sand County was not as conversational or as revelatory as I first thought it would be. It was not a book about the transformation Leopold and his family underwent as they lived in the “shack” and fixed up the farm. It was so much more.

“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).

Eventually, Leopold does share a few personal details: “To conclude, I have congenital hunting fever and three sons. … I hope to leave them good health, an education and possibly even a competence. But what are they going to do with these things if there be no more deer in the hills, and no more quail in the coverts? … And when the dawn-wind stirs through the ancient cottonwoods, and the gray light steals down from the hills over the old river sliding softly past its wide brown sandbars – what if there be no more goose music?”

So there is a place for the personal in Leopold’s ruminations after all, a subtle place and an effective one. But the most important lesson I learned from reading this book is to let go. Let the place teach me.

I’m making my way through Bill Bryson’s oddly titled At Home: A Short History of Private Life (oddly because it often reads more like a history of building materials and inventions than of private life) and learning about the Crystal Palace at the Great Exhibition of 1851, gas lighting, Palladian architecture, falls down stairs and the quality and hues of 18th-century paints.

What the book makes abundantly clear is just how recent the comfortable home of today actually is. How not too long ago people slept on mattresses full of vermin, huddled around a single candle and bathed once a year.

A passage I read last night mentions that in the second half of the 19th century the world still lacked two very basic colors — “a good white and a good black.” So “all those gleaming white churches we associate with New England towns are in fact a comparatively recent phenomenon” and the glossy black front doors, railings and gates of London are new, too. In fact, Bryson writes, “If we were to be thrust back in time to Dickens’s London, one of the most startling differences to greet us would be the absence of black-painted surfaces. In the time of Dickens, almost all ironwork was green, light blue or dull gray.”

What was missing, then, was contrast, at least in a decorative sense. What a soft, muted palette that world must have had. What would it have been like to live in that world, to see those colors, rather than the ones we have now?

We gathered last night as members of a vanishing tribe. As usual we found a table then raced to pull books off the shelves. Every December my book group meets in a book store — a real, brick-and-mortar bookstore — to pick our readings for the coming year. The idea is that we are right there with the books; we can quickly learn whether a title has been published in paperback.

Last night was different. We changed our location, for one thing. Our old Borders is no more. And the Barnes and Noble we chose didn’t have a lot of the books we were after. There were calendars and toys and journals and Nook displays but of books themselves there was a definite lack.

I can’t say I’m surprised. Many of us read on Kindles or iPads. And even I, Luddite that I am, order books online. This revolution is much bigger than us, and I can’t say we didn’t see it coming. But as we said farewell last night I wondered where we’ll meet next year. I hope there will be a bookstore left to host us.

Photo: Renton (WA) Library News

Some books start strong and peter out as they go forward. Others pick up steam in the middle and race you to the finish. The Social Animal, by David Brooks, is neither of these. It’s a strange hybrid of a book, an attempt to explain the latest research on learning and emotion through the stories of two fortunate, happy (fictional) people, Harold and Erica.

Harold and Erica for the most part make their own good fortune, and they are likeable people, or at least Brooks makes you like them. My problem was, I wanted to know them better. The fiction part of the book kept getting in the way of the nonfiction part, at least for me.

But as the book progressed, I got used to its split personality and was uplifted by Harold’s final revelations:

“Harold tried and failed to see into the tangle of connections, the unconscious region, which he came to think of as the Big Shaggy. The only proper attitude toward this region was wonder, gratitude, awe, and humility. Some people think they are the dictators of their own life. Some believe the self is an inert wooden ship to be steered by a captain at the helm. But Harold had come to see that his conscious self — the voice in his head — was more a servant than a master. It emerged from the hidden kingdom and existed to nourish, edit, restrain, attend, refine and deepen the soul within.”

This is a book about depth — and the depth makes all the difference.