On the Mesa by John Nichols

Abstract

88 Western American Literature the time of Thomas Jefferson.” Paul Schullery’s introduction and the selec­ tions he includes in this volume give us some fascinating glimpses into that background and into the remarkably complex mind and personality of our twenty-sixth President. ORVIS BURMASTER Boise State University On the Mesa. By John Nichols. (Layton, Utah: Peregrine Smith, 1986. 193 pages, $14.95 hardcover.) Nichols begins with an account of a breakdown in his “equilibrium between holocaust and halleleuiah,” and his subsequent decision to retreat (actually many retreats, each lasting only a few hours) to the sagebrush desert on Taos Mesa a few miles from his home. For too long he has been worrying about Nicaragua and trying to write responsible filmscripts, or worrying about the environment and making speeches; it is time to find a little space, a little healing for himself. But he discovers that even Taos Mesa is no longer marginal enough to be safe: on that first return he encounters one surveyor for an oil company, and two for an electric company which plans a high-tension line across the mesa. A couple of visits later, he encounters a middle-aged radical named Cassandra, a caustic friend and possible lover, who throws him even more off stride than do his enemies. The book tries hard, in its 193 pages, to elaborate on these various ele­ ments in Nichols’life. We visit his special Mesa stockpond when it is dust-dry, then when filled by a thunderstorm. We frequent it over the next few months as it slowly dries again. (Nichols here works within the nature-writing tradi­ tion of lovingly-detailed observation, yet seems always slightly outside the material). We attend an organizing meeting of the Committee to Save the Mesa, and other meetings as well. We fly with Nichols to hotel rooms and script conferences in Hollywood and Miami, then back to Taos. We watch his friendship and brief love affair with Cassandra. We hear—and believe— a great deal about his love for our fragile, tortured world. We admire his photographs of the Mesa—and especially the waterhole—which open each of the book’s twenty-two chapters. Yet it doesn’t come together. Perhaps the book is too short to do justice to all these things; perhaps we need to hear more than just the beginning of the fight to save the Mesa; perhaps the love affair is kept too distant, almost a rumor. Or perhaps Nichols’ 'ife, like too many today, does not allow time to ponder deepest meanings. When no place is so barren and remote and margi­ nal as to be unprofitable, we spend our time defending rather than meditating upon the things we cherish. In that respect, this little book is as intermittently Reviews 89 lovely and unsatisfying as are our lives. It would have needed greatness to bring together all of Nichols’ varied concerns; and greatness the book misses. Our Nature. By Bil Gilbert. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986. 267 pages, $18.95.) In “Nature Loving,” the concluding piece in this collection of fifteen essays (fourteen of which appeared either in Audubon or Sports Illustrated), Bil Gilbert writes that “far from being an elitist avocation, [enjoying the out­ doors] must be close to being our most popular form of recreation, the com­ monest sort of esthetic activity and a very general source of satisfaction.” This assertion seems incontrovertible: since the publication of Silent Spring in 1963 nature appreciation has boomed in this country. Concomitantly, so has nature writing. The appearance of Our Nature marks the arrival of yet another contemporary Thoreau on the nature writing scene. Speaking generally, the essays here are of three types. On occasion the author attempts to make better known (and in the process to humanize) ob­ scure nineteenth century explorer-naturalists such as the eponymous Thomas Nuttall, whose name, because of his many discoveries while working the North American continent between 1811 and 1836, appears frequently in the Linnaean taxonomy. In other personal-experience-in-nature essays, Gilbert recounts his adventures with friends (sometimes retracing the routes of nine­ teenth century explorer-naturalists) in locations as varied as the Northwest Territories, the...