Nature, ordinary to extraordinary

By Lisa Parsons
HippoPress.com

From the ordinary to the extraordinary, nature is thriving in the bookstores this year. For the serious reader or for the coffee table, for nature buffs or for the book buffs on your gift list, take a good look at these three recent offerings.

The ordinary

"In Season: A Natural History of the New England Year," field illustrations and notes by Nona Bell Estrin, essays by Charles W. Johnson, 2002, University Press of New England, 276 pages.

"A new or renewed relationship with nature" is what authors Nona Bell Estrin and Charles W. Johnson of Vermont want their readers to get from their new book, "In Season."

Their focus is on the nature at their fingertips-the frogs, birds, sand, rocks, trees, and wind in whatever patch of New England they happen to be inhabiting on a given day. "In Season" is organized like a diary, sectioned off by month. Between sections are essays (written by Johnson) on such grand topics as "Migrations" and "The Next Generation." Within each month's section are Estrin's notes and hand-drawn sketches, ordered by date. April 2, 1998: "Sun coming and going. Not a bit of snow left on Clark's big field." April 3, 1998: "Kestrel on wing and then to Weiss's television antenna. It's considering our kestrel nesting box just put up."

"In Season" is appealing as a basis for comparison with the reader's own experience. When you look out your window in mid-October, is your view like hers? Have you noticed the same birds? Will you from now on?

The extraordinary

"Remarkable Trees of the World," by Thomas Pakenham, 2002, W.W. Norton & Co., 192 pages.

With "Remarkable Trees of the World," British writer Thomas Pakenham brings us back to what the word "awesome" used to mean.

"Remarkable Trees" is a showcase of 60 trees, each photographed beautifully and described amiably in two or three glossy pages. Pakenham's criteria were that each tree be "alive (or dead on its feet)," that it have "a strong personality," and that it possess "a good face... which will make a portrait."

Each of these 60 is remarkable in its own way. Some are huge in height or in girth-with people standing at their bases looking like tiny Lego figures. Some are remarkably located-embedded in stonewalls, perched on rocky ledges or enmeshed in houses (it's hard to tell which was there first, the tree or the house). Some are mind-bogglingly old-more than 4,000 years. Some look friendly; some look gnarled and otherworldly.

They are situated all around the world-Asia, Africa, Europe, many in California, one in Martha's Vineyard-but none in Britain or Ireland. Pakenham's first tree book, "Meetings with Remarkable Trees," showcased 60 trees in Britain and Ireland.

Some of these trees come with longstanding legends. There is a fig tree that is revered as a direct descendent of the tree under which Buddha sat. There is an oak in South Carolina said to be "haunted by the ghosts of murdered slaves."

In short chapters with titles like "Kiss Me, I'm a Baobab," "Sherman v. Grant in the Sierras," and "Any Fool Can Climb a Gum Tree," Pakenham offers polite British wit and stunning photographs. This is a book to linger over.

And all the nature in between

"Northeastern Wilds: Journeys of Discovery in the Northern Forest," by Stephen Gorman, 2002, Appalachian Mountain Club Books, 178 pages.

You'll be tempted to just look at the pictures and ignore the words with Stephen Gorman's "Northeastern Wilds"-and if you did that you'd still get your money's worth-but don't.

Gorman explored Alaska, the Rocky Mountains and other faraway places. When he finally turned his attention to his home, the northeast, he found "a wild realm as vast as anything I'd seen out West."

The Northern Forest encompasses northern Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, New York, and parts of eastern Canada.

Gorman shows both the ordinariness and the majesty of the northeastern wilds. He points out that this is nature every bit as wondrous as the parks at Yosemite and Yellowstone. He also emphasizes that even the unremarkable is remarkable-high peaks and stunning vistas are nice, but so are beaver flowages, small swamps and little-noticed rivers.

"My explorations in southern New Hampshire usually lead to remote backwaters... places where you can still get a remarkable sense of solitude in an area that is growing far too rapidly," Gorman told HippoPress. "The Lamprey River is an excellent example-you can spend the day on this meandering stream flowing through remote bottomland forests and not see a soul all day. Most people in the southern New Hampshire region have no idea this kind of experience is readily available within a few minutes' drive of where they live."
"Northeastern Wilds" is a you-are-there expression of the simple elegance of canoeing, snowshoeing, skiing, hiking, and lakeside camping throughout the Northeast. Gorman takes us through Acadia National Park, up Mount Washington, down Tuckerman Ravine and along the Northern Forest Canoe Trail-sort of an aquatic counterpart to the Appalachian Trail-as well as to lesser-known spots.

His photographs have a lifelike quality not found in shopping-mall "Nature" prints.

"I am not out to 'capture' pretty scenes for later consumption," he said. "Instead I want to place the viewer right in the picture and in the action. My goal is to make the viewer feel what it is like to be there, experiencing what I am experiencing. I see myself... as an active participant in the landscape, not a passive observer."

Gorman is clear that corporate forestry is not necessarily the wild's biggest enemy (not to say it's a friend); strip malls and subdivision mania are worse. Perhaps most provocative is Gorman's argument that hunters are not an enemy at all, at least not as a class, despite the attitude of many environmentalists. Hunters-of whom Gorman is one on occasion-are invested in nature as much as, or more than, anyone.

Lisa Parsons can be reached at hippo@hippopress.com