A slight memoir celebrating the natural wonders of the Vermont
mountains. Elder (Following the Brush, 1993), a professor of
English and environmental studies at Middlebury College, has
clearly read the approved canon of nature literature, and much of
this book reads like a heavily annotated syllabus. When he
describes a place at first hand, he more often than not relates
what another writer - especially Robert Frost, the dean of writers
in those parts - has had to say about it, too. His glosses on those
writers, Frost included, are seldom helpful ("In Frost's landscape,
things are always changing, but the change is never random"); and
his bookish leanings often obscure what is meant to be his subject,
the "hirsute" landscapes (the metaphor derives from Dante) of
northern New England, which, Elder points out, is "far wilder today
than it was a century and a half ago." Elder traces this renascent
wildness to a combination of factors; whereas, he notes, Vermont
was the fastest-growing American state up to the War of 1812, it
fell victim to economic stagnation, farm failures, and industrial
collapse, leaving it a hard-pressed and hard-bitten place - one
that is now being yuppified, he writes, thanks to the
telecommunications revolution, which "turns quiet little worlds
like this into targets for settlement, and for exploitation."
Elder's immediate observations on both that land and its crusty
Yankee occupants are often perceptive and well made. Would that his
book had been given over to such direct reportage, and not to
lit-crit and green pablum, such as "Wilderness . . . offers a realm
for human activity that does not seek to take possession and that
leaves no traces; it provides a baseline for strenuous experience
of our own creaturehood." Frost would have cringed. (Kirkus
Reviews)
Small farms once occupied the heights that John Elder calls
home, but now only a few cellar holes and tumbled stone walls
remain among the dense stands of maple, beech, and hemlocks on
these Vermont hills. "Reading the Mountains of Home"is a journey
into these verdant reaches where in the last century humans tried
their hand and where bear and moose now find shelter. As John Elder
is our guide, so Robert Frost is Elder's companion, his great poem
"Directive" seeing us through a landscape in which nature and
literature, loss and recovery, are inextricably joined.
Over the course of a year, Elder takes us on his hikes through
the forested uplands between South Mountain and North Mountain,
reflecting on the forces of nature, from the descent of the
glaciers to the rush of the New Haven River, that shaped a plateau
for his village of Bristol; and on the human will that denuded and
farmed and abandoned the mountains so many years ago. His forays
wind through the flinty relics of nineteenth-century homesteads and
Abenaki settlements, leading to meditations on both human failure
and the possibility for deeper communion with the land and
others.
An exploration of the body and soul of a place, an interpretive
map of its natural and literary life, "Reading the Mountains of
Home" strikes a moving balance between the pressures of
civilization and the attraction of wilderness. It is a beautiful
work of nature writing in which human nature finds its place, where
the reader is invited to follow the last line of Frost's
"Directive," to "Drink and be whole again beyond confusion."
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