Friday, December 30, 2005
A good read can help plant a seed
Libba Wolfe
Libba Wolfe's column appears twice monthly in Extra.
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Jan. 1 begins a season of indulgence for me. Not sugar and butter; I just ended the season for that. Now is the time for unlimited reading. New books, old favorites. A stack in the den, one by the bed.
Since I learned to read, I can't remember a single day I haven't enjoyed the delicious pleasure of sinking into a good book for at least a little while. But families and jobs, not to mention yard work and house work, can cut into book time.
Winter is when I reverse the ratio and settle into reading. As Mama says, "Don't bother with Libba. She has her nose in a book."
The authors of my favorite garden and nature books may not be trained botanists (although some are), but they all seem to be born observers. They all pick a spot as small as a back yard or as big as the Sierra Mountains and they pay attention. I love to read about what they see and what they learn. And their pleasure at being still and looking.
Last winter I read "A Sand County Almanac." Aldo Leopold wrote it in 1948. Leopold was with the U.S. Forest Service and a respected game management scientist with the University of Wisconsin. He is one of the leaders of wildlife conservation in our country. Are you bored yet? Don't be.
"A Sand County Almanac" is a series of monthly sketches from his farm in Wisconsin. He says, "There are two spiritual dangers in not owning a farm. One is the danger of supposing that breakfast comes from the grocery and the other that heat comes from the furnace."
Chopping down a dead oak tree and splitting the logs is a way to tell us the natural history of his land. I can't read by a fire these days without thinking that the story witnessed by the burning logs beats anything in my book.
He explains the cycles of soil, the value of native plants and animals, and the absolute imperative for untouched wilderness in clear and beautiful language.
Have you read Henry Beston's "The Outermost House"? Beston spent 1926-27 alone in a two-room cottage on Cape Cod. His stated purpose was "to celebrate, to reveal the mystery, the beauty and the rites of Nature, of the visible World."
Fish, birds, sand dunes, stormy nights, clear days -- Beston paid attention. I always think of this book when I hear the sound of the surf. Beston helped me hear much more than just a monotonous roar. It is a lovely book about how he learned to be alone and how surprisingly full his days were.
When I went to Yosemite Park, I arrived after dark. None of the pictures I had ever seen prepared me for the majesty of the next morning. And that was a Yosemite full of people and cars. To subtract the campers and "modern improvements" (and myself) I read "My First Summer in the Sierras" by John Muir. Muir is almost drunk with the beauty of his 1869 walk through what he calls "The Range of Light." From the tiniest flower in the alpine meadows to the mysteries of the endless boulder fields, this is a lyrical journal of joy.
Speaking of boulders, what about John McPhee's "The Annals of the Former World"? I have more erudite friends who think McPhee should have had a stricter editor but I don't agree. At nearly 700 pages, it is stuffed with facts. If you're interested in rocks, get this book.
McPhee starts on the East Coast and moves across our country telling the story of the geology and the geologists who can read a road-cut like tea leaves. It's not a textbook. It's a historical novel with no fiction.
The last time we drove around Wyoming, I lugged my dog-eared underlined copy of "Annals." My husband patiently made detours to the brand new rocks in Thermopolis and let me stand awestruck at the Precambrian formations in the Wind River Basin. He got lots of good photos, and I got tons of rocks.
On a less encyclopedic scale, in 1942 Elizabeth Lawrence wrote about her small Raleigh back yard in "A Southern Garden." It is full of practical advice on gardening in a growing zone very similar to ours. It is also a yearlong journal of the surprises and delights right outside your door. I dip into it regularly for new planting ideas.
Sometimes I have a cryptic message on my voice mail. It will be my friend Dotsy saying, "This week, page 98." Decoded, that means "On page 98 of this week's New Yorker there is a poem we can understand." We like to think that the poetry in the New Yorker is unusually dense, but we suspect it is we who are unusually dense. We try, but we don't get it.
When we do get it, the poem is often by Mary Oliver. In "New and Selected Poems," Oliver describes her long, careful looks at the natural world. Her poems are full of reverence and wonder. They are a reminder to me to "see." In "The Summer Day," she says, "... I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down/ into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,/ how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,/ which is what I have been doing all day./ Tell me, what else should I have done?/ Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?/ Tell me, what is it you plan to do/ with your one wild and precious life?"
Well, keep on reading good books, for one thing.
