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Summary
Summary
In this profoundly moving hymn to the wild places of our land, reflected in the Boundary Waters of Minnesota and Ontario, the author of Grass Roots and The Necessity of Empty Places offers an ecstatic contemplation of nature and one's place in it.
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
The spirit of human nature, demonstrates farmer/writer Gruchow in this fine little book, is connected to the natural world in a way that demands our respect. Four essays comprise the book. Two are new, two are revised from previous publication. Each is devoted to a different season and filled with Gruchow's observations of the boundary waters, the interconnected lakes and forests running between northern Minnesota and Ontario. As he navigates these waters by canoe and boat, and crosses the land by foot and ski, sometimes alone, sometimes with a companion, Gruchow finds, and elucidates, numerous moments that feed his "capacity for delight and wonder: The water tumbling from one lake into the next, the laughter of loons, the howling of wolves...." Such natural acts and occurrences may be simple, yet they are spectacular and, Gruchow argues, can provide human beings a feeling of renewal. Slices of natural history and stories of early pioneers keep Gruchow's pacing and story lines on a spacious winding path. (Aug.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
Meandering essays, some in journal form, on the author's experiences hiking, canoeing, and camping--alone and with friends and students--in the five-million-acre Minnesota-Ontario border ecosystem called the Boundary Waters. Gruchow describes the region, parts of which are federally protected, as a ``land of dense forests and thick bogs, of rocky ridges and deep, clear lakes.'' Though he is disdainful of those who can't ``connect,'' (e.g., who carry alarm clocks into the wilderness), Gruchow is no macho outdoorsman. He admits that he is powerless in the face of nature; that he doesn't entirely command his life; this he understands as a condition of ``maturity.'' In the wild, he says, we confront evidence of powers greater than our own; in this humility is the beginning of spirituality. Gruchow has a gift not only for aphorism but for description: The moose, for all its impressiveness, looks ``like the discarded early draft of an idea for an animal.'' Gruchow is a passive observer, there to discover, as he says in one essay, the reds in the fall trees. This gives the book a certain calm but also, in its weaker stretches, a flatness. The best section is a long essay in which the author describes reading Walden over a period of weeks one winter with three college students. When one of them proposed they try Thoreau's experiment, the group determined to spend a time at a wilderness base camp, Seagull Lake, were they read widely and wrote every day. Gruchow succeeds in making new many of the Waldenite's observations, though he realizes the limitations of Thoreau's experiment, assured that ``the perfectly Thoreauvian life,'' lived as it is away from society, would not be worth living. Should find an enthusiastic audience among naturalists with an interest in wild places, whether they've already explored the Boundary Waters or are simply content to accept Gruchow's version of it.
Booklist Review
Set astraddle the Minnesota-Ontario border, these four essays meander around the idea of wilderness. The paradox, as Gruchow often observes, is that the wildness of the region, a canoer's and hiker's paradise, is tamed by the access infrastructure of roads, trails, campsites, and harbors. Gruchow eventually concludes that wildness is as much a state of mind as of natural condition, and so emulates Thoreau's tenet of "wakefullness" to absorb and internalize his surroundings. One essay purposely reenacts Thoreauvianism: it meditates on a winter's week in a north woods cabin, spent listening, watching, and talking about the scenery and its significance. Come spring (a season imbues each essay), Gruchow embarks for Isle Royale, reputedly the most pristine national park, but one whose wildness is still tempered by the human presence. Quiet, contemplative, but alert to what nature reveals, Gruchow writes lucidly when sunlight slants off snow, mistily when morning fog rises off lakes, and exemplarily for perambulators who write after their hikes. --Gilbert Taylor
