On a cold, rainy night, the D&R Society gathered in front of the fire at the Laurel Tavern. In typical independent fashion, since we couldn’t exactly choose a book this month, we read six among the six of us. The Book of Yaak, The Lost Grizzlies and The Ninemile Wolves, all by Rick Bass. Red: Passion and Patience in the Desert; Coyote’s Canyon; and An Unspoken Hunger: Stories from the Field, all by Terry Tempest Williams.
I think we all agreed that Rick Bass has a more consistent voice and one we are all more comfortable with, but a bit too strident, political and polemical when it comes to protecting his beloved Yaak valley. I suppose we would all feel the same way about our own chosen homes. His stories of wolves prompted a story by Harry and David about watching a pack of nine wolves on a kill in Yellowstone – the kind of sight that would have been unheard of anywhere a decade ago, even for skilled naturalists in the wild. This pack had an audience of RV-bound wolf-watchers sitting comfortably in lawn chairs at the side of the road.
It’s harder to say what any of us thought about Terry Tempest Williams. Doug loved the descriptions of the land and recommended his book (Unspoken Hunger?) to daughter Josie. David almost didn’t finish Red and Harry was a bit put off by it also. I thought Coyote’s Canyon lived on the mystical plane – which is OK if you want religious or religio-cultural experiences, but it invites the danger of making the land, animals and even people into mythology and thus separating them from the real things. That’s how we got into our current mess – by objectifying the world and believing that God gave us all these things to do with as we wish. Sure, the Navajo myths don’t have the same outcome, but there’s nothing fundamentally different about the process of objectification that’s going on, is there?
We also lamented that Aldo Leopold remains virtually unknown outside of Wisconsin. I looked him up. Google has 833 individual references, but many of them are closely related. If you search for land ethic, Leopold is the first reference.
Next meeting date Wednesday, Dec. 19. Book TBD.
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