Good Morning Midnight: Life and Death in the Wild
By Chip Brown
Riverhead, 320 pages, $24.99
Chip Brown’s “Good Morning Midnight: Life and Death in the Wild” is a deep thriller: deep because it raises more questions than it answers, thrilling because of the urgency of these questions. Which is colder, darker, more of a test: nature out there or nature in here? The wild of the mountains or the wild of the soul? Which is more orderly, which more beautiful?
Brown raises these and related questions by investigating Guy Waterman, a man who lived them. Waterman was the kind of man who begs to be written about: He was a rebellious son, a father of three, a husband of two, a reformed alcoholic; a jazz pianist, a baseball historian, a Republican speechwriter, a recorder and reciter of things poetic and otherwise; a homesteader, a naturalist and, perhaps most significantly, a climber and teacher of climbers.
He was also a suicide, and suicide, the act at the center of Brown’s book, also deserves to be written about, particularly the suicide of a man as vital as Guy Waterman. “Good Morning Midnight” thus tells multiple stories: first, of descent followed by recovery; then, of inspiration and the turn to nature; finally, and most surprisingly, of love.
Waterman came to climbing late, in his 30s. “It was,” Brown says, “rescue and salvation”–from alcohol, from a disastrous marriage, from failure. As Waterman himself put it, with an allusion to Shakespeare’s “The Tempest”:
” ‘Here was a whole new world of aspiration and effort, contrasting with the nightmare my life had become. A flight of Ariel way up in the sunshine, distantly seen from the depths of Caliban’s black hole.’ “
Waterman employs this conceit repeatedly–two warring parties within him: bright, high Ariel and dark, low Caliban. The conceit is evocative and allusive, but, as Brown’s book reveals, it oversimplifies: The dark and low in Waterman–and in his sons–is at the same time the bright and high. Waterman is not alternately pulled up and down by two competing elements but driven by one complex urge, the urge, as Nietzsche would have it, not to preserve himself but to discharge his strength.
Waterman’s self-imposed physical trials–his chosen tests of strength, endurance and hardness–are in a deeper sense spiritual trials. Wilderness, Brown suggests, is for Waterman “an amalgam of cathedral, gauntlet, and jungle-gym”; he goes to the mountains to experience awe, an ordeal, and play, and thereby to experience himself being in the world.
What to make then of Waterman’s last act, his decision to go to mountains to remove himself from the world? And what to make of the relationships (particularly with his second wife, Laura), the memories and the meticulous writings he left behind?
Waterman’s poet of choice was Milton, and Brown’s seems to be Dickinson (as indicated by the title), but Brown’s account of Waterman points toward a third poet, Philip Larkin, and specifically to his “Poetry of Departures.” It ends this way:
But I’d go today,
Yes, swagger the nut-strewn roads,
Crouch in the fo’c’sle
Stubbly with goodness, if
It weren’t so artificial,
Such a deliberate step backwards
To create an object:
Books; china; a life
Reprehensibly perfect.
Brown poetically reveals that Waterman’s “audacious, purifying/Elemental move” (again to quote from Larkin) is such a deliberate step.
High Latitudes: An Arctic Journey
By Farley Mowat
Steerforth, 300 pages, $15.95 paper
Most travel narratives seem to be animated and limited by the allure of their writers’ voices. Farley Mowat’s “High Latitudes: An Arctic Journey” succeeds as travel narrative in large part because Mowat approaches his project humbly; he travels and writes in order to make audible voices that would otherwise go (and have largely gone) unheard.
In fact Mowat’s narrative is not principally about his journey across northern Canada in a cold shell of a plane in 1966, but about a number of other journeys, most belonging to the Inuit, the Dene and other denizens of Canada’s northernmost places. Mowat’s puddle-jumping itself constitutes a snappy adventure story, but the deeper story here is more adventurous and much sadder. It is, as readers of Mowat will expect, a tale of colonization, of white man’s greed and its catastrophic effects on the lives–human and otherwise–it touches.
If Mowat’s account causes in the reader some of the despair it describes (by, for example, the ubiquity of the native utterance “ayorama”–“nothing to be done”), it also inspires the opposite response–the desire to give the indigenous peoples of northern Canada what they say they want, namely, “a chance! Just give us half a chance!”
Watershed: The Undamming of America
By Elizabeth Grossman
Counterpoint, 320 pages, $27
Elizabeth Grossman’s “Watershed: The Undamming of America” might also be called “The Undamning of America,” for Grossman identifies in the condition of our rivers a moving reflection of the condition of our souls. Dams, Grossman suggests, kill rivers, as well as the myriad life forms rivers support. By killing our rivers, Grossman goes on to imply, we kill ourselves, or at least those parts of ourselves most in need of saving.
The great accomplishment of Grossman’s book is to align the moral exhortation to free rivers and to free ourselves with scientific and historical evidence that dams harm human and most other kinds of communities. Grossman’s lively and well-researched reports on dam-removal proposals and projects across the country thus become a kind of call to life. ” ‘Rivers,’ ” says a small-dam-program manager in Wisconsin, ” ‘aren’t just about water.’ ” Nor, based on Grossman’s account, is the flourishing of fish just about the fish.
Hawks Rest: A Season in the Remote Heart of Yellowstone
By Gary Ferguson
National Geographic Adventure Press, 214 pages, $15 paper
One of the virtues of backcountry activity is that things we normally take for granted, overlook, or even complain about suddenly reappear as fresh and wonderful: a chunk of cheese, the sound of a bird’s wings, morning. One of the dangers of backcountry writing is that the writer, in the backcountry, will describe or announce his own sense of delight without quite conveying it. “Here I am, and so whatever I write will be as delightful and fresh as the mountains that surround me,” the nature writer sometimes seems to assume.
In “Hawks Rest: A Season in the Remote Heart of Yellowstone,” Gary Ferguson faithfully fills in the details of his subtitle, but his art fails to summon or to match the nature around him. Ferguson writes about wolves, outfitters, hunters, elk and other beings and situations he encounters (including his yarny companion, LaVoy), but we never quite go there to join them. In a strange way, then, Ferguson’s heartfelt account of his surprisingly crowded season in a remote part of Yellowstone National Park remains more remote than the cabin that housed him and his notebook.
