Books that change your life

 Many of the books that have influenced me are not on anyone’s list of great books in the Western canon.

I read The Whole Earth Catalog, in its many editions. It’s closer kin to the Sears Roebuck & Company catalog than to Plato’s Dialogues. My knowledge of the Whole Earth Catalog was never rewarded in the classroom. I don’t quote from it, but the ethos of learning to use tools so that you can do things for yourself made an impression on me. It influenced my life.

A lot of my life has been spent tramping around in wild areas. The writer who got me moving was not John Muir, whose books are routinely taught in classrooms, but Colin Fletcher, whose The Complete Walker, is not.

The idea of a canon makes sense to me. I’m probably more enthusiastic about the Great Books programs at places like St. John’s College than the average college professor. 

But someone raised the distinction between great books and the books that change your life. I had to admit that a lot of the books that had influenced me weren’t in the canon, weren’t even in the neighborhood.

Piedmont National Wildlife Refuge

 The Piedmont National Wildlife Refuge is a symbol of hope for me, so we finally made a road trip to see it.

It’s only 50 miles southeast, but we are meandering folks, rather than efficient ones, and so we went by way of Indian Springs State Park. I wanted to see the rolling, shallow falls and the stone buildings constructed by the Civilian Conservation Corps during the Depression. Parks built in that era have a certain look that reminds me of my Texas grandparents, who were in their 30s in the ’30s.

The water from the springs is loaded with minerals. The Native Americans thought it was healing, and the idea hasn’t died out. The CCC built a wellhouse to let the public fill up jugs. People were in line.

The wildlife refuge is about 20 miles to the southeast. We went through Juliette, Ga., and stopped at the Whistle Stop Café. If you are a film buff, you might remember the place from Fried Green Tomatoes. The café in the movie had been an old general store. After the film was shot, the owner thought the old building really should be a café. The place serves fried green tomatoes every day it’s open. If you are a cornbread-eating country boy like me … well, I digress.

The wildlife refuge is about 55 square miles of forest, and what makes it interesting to me is that there was nothing special about it. Many of the Europeans who settled the 13 original colonies were horrible stewards of the land. They exhausted, rather than conserved, it. When their land was used up, farm families moved west, in search of arable land. The end of the line for many Southerners was Texas.

A hundred years ago, the land was typical of much of the South. The forests had been cut. The topsoil had been lost. The refuge was established in 1939. The government bought the land and asked scientists to see what they could do with it.

If you are horrified by the environmental damage we have done, seeing something like the Piedmont refuge might do you good. It’s not hopeless. We have some intriguing models for better behavior.

I’m telling you this story, hoping that you’ll look at a map and see if there’s a wildlife refuge or national forest near you.

Our trip on Thursday was a scouting mission to see what was there and how to best get into it. I’ll tell you what I learned so you might apply it to the public land near you:

• The best way to learn the Piedmont refuge is to drive its roads, looking for things that interest you. The roads in the refuge are gravel. The stream crossings have gravel bottoms. I can cross creeks safely in my truck.

• I’m interested in the plants of the Piedmont. When I see promising places, I’ll just find a wide spot in the road to park and start walking. It’s public land.

• If you’re going to walk in the woods, you need to defend against ticks and chiggers. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife folks use Deep Woods Off on their skin and spray something with permethrin on their clothes the night before they go into the woods.

Many people like to hike on established trails, and if you’re one of those people, stick with it. This is different. In my younger days, I enjoyed going cross country through the forests of East Texas, especially the wilderness areas. I liked sleeping under the stars.

I learned some things along the way. One of the first lessons was that if you plan to get far from the road, you’d better carry a map and a compass.

Uncle Gordon talks of Georgia

 Barry Lopez, who appears often in these notes, had a connection to my new home state. His name was Uncle Gordon, a man careful in his habits and attentive to his library.

Gordon was interested in the ancient peoples of Georgia, the Cherokee and the Creeks, and the peoples who came before them.

Gordon spoke of the difficulty we have today of looking at shards of pottery and other artifacts and trying to imagine a way of life — the way people thought about the world and each other. He imagined archeologists in the future thinking about what we were like.

 

And then in another time they will talk about us, about what we did, or what we might have believed. We make sense of ourselves as a people through history. That is why we should make no modifications in records of the past, you see, but only speculate.

 

I’ve been working on a piece of fiction, trying to understand the racism and religious and ethnic prejudices of earlier days. I’d like to say those attitudes and beliefs were prehistoric, but they were features of a way of life that I grew up with.

Even with good records and vivid memories, these beliefs and attitudes are hard to understand and thus hard to convey, much less explain.

It’s difficult to understand the people who lived in Georgia 1,000 years ago, and I shouldn’t be surprised. It’s difficult to understand a lot of the people I grew up with.

• Source: Barry Lopez, About This Life; New York: Vintage Books, 1998. The story about Uncle Gordon is in the essay “Theft,” pp. 262-70. The quotation is on p. 268.

Yellow River, after the storm

 After Hurricane Helene, the underbrush in the Yellow River bottom appeared to have a new paint job.

The foliage above the high-water mark was still bright green. Beneath it, the shrubs and bushes were light brown, almost yellow. The river runs through lenses of yellow sand and banks of red clay. It looked like a thick coat of paint, 8 feet high in places.

The floods had receded by the time we investigated, but the river was still high and noisy. The Rockbridge was gone — replaced temporarily by a rock pier. The current was above the boulders that make up the east side of the bridge. The taller boulders on the west side of the river looked like a pier.

I’d never noticed the difference in the height of the rock formation. It’s always astonishing to me how little I see. (At some point, you’d think I’d at least get over the astonishment at my own limitations as an observer.)

The flood hadn’t touched the tall stand of ironweeds, beggar ticks and dogfennel. But as we approached, I saw that the feathery branches of dogfennel were drooping. I thought the storm had lashed them, but they were so full of seeds they were bending over, stooped by the weight.

Learning a new word

 Robert Macfarlane taught me the word “nele,” which comes from the Salish language of the Pacific Northwest and Columbia Plateau. It means: 

a heavy mist falling as a gentle rain, a “grandmother” rain, healing to a deep degree: also the word for “love.”

 

I like the word because, since moving to the Georgia Piedmont, I’ve seen rain fall more gently than I thought imaginable. It seemed healing in a strange way that was good for my spirit. But it was good for the plants in the garden too.

I also like the word because my grandmother and I used to sit on the front porch of the farm in Texas and drink coffee. The conversation was like that rainfall — so light and effortless you could barely sense it. Oct. 2 was her birthday.

• Robert Macfarlane, Landmarks; London: Penguin Books, 2016, pp. 341.

Stories I’d like to read

 A friend read a review of a novel and asked if I’d seen it. I hadn’t, but I found it at the library and read the first chapter.

The writer knew what he was doing. He created a world — in another country and another era — that I could picture. The characters were interesting. I was engaged.

I’d invested an hour in that chapter and wondered how long it would take to read the book: 19 hours.

That’s the length of the audiobook, the time I’d spend having the book read to me.

I returned the book to the library and went on to other things.

I find some of the published information about the length of books to be misleading, which is why I’ve learned to check the audiobook. People who read professionally — broadcasters, for example — tend to read about 150 words a minute, while some sites that estimate reading time assume you’ll read twice that fast.

People listen to audiobooks and podcasts at faster than recorded time. Some people use the old technique of speed reading, and others use the even older techniques of skipping, skimming and browsing.

I think the evidence suggests that a lot of people besides me find length a problem.

If someone invited you to the movies and mentioned that the running time of the exciting new film was 19 hours, would you go?

Or, if someone told you about an interesting new book, and said that it could be read in two hours, rather than 19, would you be more likely to give it a try?

I would. Using 150 words a minute as the pace, that works out to 18,000 words.

To test the idea, I have been playing around with a story to see whether I could fit it into that length. 

The exercise was interesting. You can keep learning as a writer if you follow your whims.

As to the piece of writing itself: the jury is still out. I wish I could talk a real fiction writer into trying this experiment. 

• Note: This is not a new theme. For an earlier stab at this topic, see “Was the movie better than the book?” March 13, 2022, which might serve as an introduction to one-night reads.