Troubled Intimacies: A Life in the Interior West by David Axelrod, and Rogue River Journal: A Winter Alone by John Daniel

Abstract

b o o k R e v ie w s 2 2 7 Troubled Intimacies: A Life in the Interior West. By David Axelrod. Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2004. 186 pages, $18.95. Rogue River Journal: A Winter Alone. By John Daniel. Washington, DC: Shoemaker & Hoard, 2005. 352 pages, $26.00. Reviewed by Kathleen Boardman University of Nevada, Reno Some years ago, two young men went west and became poets. In the mid1960s , John Daniel traveled from Washington, DC, to Reed College in Port­ land. After dropping out, he stayed on the West Coast, experiencing life as a draft-resister, logger, railway clerk, and rock climber— eventually settling into a place (western Oregon) and vocation (writing) that suited him. In 1980, David Axelrod left rural Ohio, home of his family for generations, in order to enter the University of Montana’s creative writing program. In Montana and, eight years later, in northeastern Oregon’s Grande Ronde Valley, he wrote, planted gardens, taught English, kept bees, gathered wild fruit, and observed the impact of human carelessness upon the natural environment. In their latest prose works, Axelrod and Daniel explore the nature of soli­ tude, reflect on their lives and the complexities of human attachment, and evoke the natural world in superbly crafted sentences. Each combines the perspective of the non-native outsider with an intense, intimate knowledge of the natural environment in his part of Oregon. Both urge more sanity and self-discipline in humans’ interactions with that environment. Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to place the two books on a shelf under the label “Nature Writing: Oregon.” Not only do they transcend that category, but they are also quite dif­ ferent from one another in purpose, tone, and form. Troubled Intimacies: A Life in the Interior West is a collection of fourteen personal essays, some previously published. These are essays in the classic sense: Axelrod interweaves everyday observations of bees, nests, and blackberry-pick­ ing with his reading, philosophical reflection, and impassioned argument. He draws on experiences in Montana and Oregon to illuminate topics of impor­ tance in environmental literature: the definition of wilderness, the healing of environmental violence, the problematic legacy of Romanticism, and the re­ formation of community in a mobile and fragmented society. In “Going Wild,” a brief introduction to key themes of the collection, Axelrod says, “Wilderness is not a status we grant the landscape. It is earth’s only way of being as it chooses. What it chooses to be is alive, and if cut to the quick, to knit itself again into a whole” (6). Axelrod finds this self-renewing wildness in abandoned orchards and kitchen gardens, not in visions of self-sufficient solitude in a pristine Eden. He blames Romanticism for the “impossible, loathsome longing for a ‘virgin’ world” (5), a habit of mind that paradoxically results in strip mining, clear 2 2 8 W e s t e r n A m e r ic a n L it e r a t u r e S u m m e r 2 0 0 6 cutting, careless hunting, and obscenely large “McMansions” whose picture windows vie for “unspoiled” views. In “Sane as the Mind That Makes a Nest” and “Notes on the Erotic Life of the Household,” Axelrod excoriates art that encourages the Romantic attitude: from “nominally realistic” paintings of wild animals, which he terms “a hideous form of nostalgia” to the “Egotistical Sublime” of early nineteenth-century German painter Caspar David Friedrich (whose name Axelrod anglicizes to Casper Frederick) (106, 107, 83). Axelrod scrutinizes his own life as well, criticizing himself in “Habits of Mind” for insisting on living one winter in an isolated house above the Big Blackfoot River, then leaving his wife and child behind each afternoon and evening while he took a perilous cliff trail to and from work. “For me,” Axelrod writes, “the cliff kept an unwanted world at a distance, so that I could pretend to inhabit an infinitely lovely and harsh kingdom of my own,” while, for his wife, the same cliff suggested exile and potential disaster (31). Axelrod describes other kinds of western exile—being regarded as an “interloper” by the locals...