Rich Bright Days: Six Writers on Nature and Life

Abstract

Rich Bright Days:Six Writers on Nature and Life Sam Pickering (bio) Thorpe Moeckel, Down by the Eno, Down by the Haw. Mercer University Press, 2019. 129 pages. $16.00. Paperback. J. Drew Lanham, Sparrow Envy: Field Guide to Birds and Lesser Beasts. Hub City Press, 2021. 95 pages. $13.99. Hardback. John Hess, A Perfectly Ordinary Paradise: An Intimate View of Life on Brawley Creek. Brawley Creek Photography, 2021. xi + 239 pages. Illustrated. $75. Hardback. Connie May Fowler, A Million Fragile Bones: A Memoir. Twisted Road Publications, 2017, 313 pages. $15.95. Paperback. Bob Kunzinger, The Iron Scar: A Father and Son in Siberia. MadVille Publishing, 2022. 157 pages. Illustrated. $19.95. Paperback. Julia Ridley Smith, The Sum of Trifles. University of Georgia Press, 2021. 238 pages. $22.95. Paperback. In the woods bordering and running into old farm fields and along riverbanks around Storrs is an arboretum of trees: red and sugar maples; massive white pines; beech; black, yellow, and sometimes white birch; shagbark and mockernut hickories; hemlocks; the occasional cottonwood; small tulip trees; and among others a congregation of oaks. If I were to shut my eyes and stray from the trails I walk, and, of course, not tumble over an elbow of granite, I'd probably bump into a white oak. Nature writers are as various as the trees of "my" forests, but there are the great oaks, some defoliated by an absence of readers but still [End Page 173] predominant. Towering above others in my study is Gilbert White's The Natural History of Selborne, a collection of letters White wrote in the eighteenth century describing his ramblings around the parish of Selbourne in Hampshire. He described the landscape, the people, and, above all, the birds. Because his observations were parochial and specific, they transcended the limitations of mind and hedgerow. In the nineteenth century, the book became the nature lover's Pilgrim's Progress, and almost every naturalist worth his sap genuflected to Shelborne. The other big oak on my shelf is Nan Shepherd's The Living Mountain. Published in 1977, 184 years after Selborne, the book describes Shepherd's love for and wanderings in the Cairngorm Mountains in Scotland. Much as White was born and died in Selborne, Shepherd states that she "had the same bedroom all my life." Like White, she describes her world in learned, appreciative detail: its frost and snow, the air and light, plants, insects, people. Her prose, however, is more poetic and evocative of mood. "A mountain," she writes, "has an inside." Repeated walks are not repetitious. Although details become clearer, the walker's vision and understanding shimmer. White is a sensible eighteenth-century spectator. Exteriors not only please and startle; they also satisfy. They are what senses perceive. Shepherd, on the other hand, is a modern quick to ponder and envision interiors. "As I penetrate more clearly into the mountain's life," she writes, "I penetrate also into my own." Down by the Eno, Down by the Haw. Thorpe Moeckel. Mercer University Press, 2019. 129 pages. $16.00. Paperback In varying degrees, the books of most nature writers are hybrids of White and Shepherd. The Haw and the Eno are rivers in the Piedmont of North Carolina. In Down by the Eno, Down by the Haw, Thorpe Moeckel canoes and roams the watersheds of the rivers. He says he follows "slants of light." For me, the slants are usually deer trails. For Moeckel, the light is actual but also metaphoric and freeing. It shines in the broken woods and creeks behind big-box stores and strip malls, churches and schools, unexpected places that surprise and inspire. Moeckel's nature is not a landscape fenced in by topic sentences. [End Page 174] He knows that words shackle, and he tries to capture the truths of refracting moments in the moments themselves rather than by recollecting and framing them in a later falsifying tranquility. As a result, his prose often smacks of the automatic writing popular a hundred years ago. Ordering observation, proponents of automatic writing argued, distorted the truth of spontaneity. Of course, words themselves are artifacts. By their very nature, they shape fictions, much as a well...