bookshelf

		CABIN FEVER by Casey Bush In these troubled times it is no wonder that city folks are heading for the hills. Getting out of Dodge is a common impulse, whether it is motivated by a desire to avoid mankind or to commune with nature. Over the past year, I have read a number books about living in the woods, with each author off on a different vision quest.
		Now Go Home: Wilderness, Belonging, and the Crosscut Saw by Anna Marie Spagna Oregon State University Press 2004 $17.95 When Ana Maria Spagna stopped by the Bear Deluxe booth at the first annual Wordstock Festival of the Book, I was struck by her firm and calloused handshake, as well as her petite and powerful physique, all the result of fifteen years of clearing hiking trails for the U.S. Forest Service. Her series of essays chronicle a life that began in the surf and bikinis of Southern California and migrated to the muddy slopes and rubber boots of the north Cascades. For most of that time, she has lived in the small town of Stehekin with a hundred souls on the west end of Washington’s Lake Chelan, 55 miles by boat from the nearest town. The book’s title is a bumper sticker from the isolationist Tom McCall era: “Welcome to Oregon – Now Go Home.” She is appropriately troubled by the encroachment of civilization upon the wilderness and her own role in that process, but that doesn’t stop her from Californicating the Pacific Northwest, building a cabin in the forest and bringing satellite telephone service to the end of the trail. The author is still an apprentice sharpening her pencil while revealing the artist within whose irrepressible honesty is as refreshing as cold spring water. Spagna’s work ponders the place of human beings in the natural world while celebrating the rewards of physical labor and the wonderful difficulties of living simply.
		Zoro’s Field: My Life in the Appalachian Woods by Thomas Rain Crowe University of Georgia Press 2005 $27.95 In the late 1970s, Thomas Rain Crowe abandoned his life as a “baby Beat” and left Gary Snyder’s Grass Valley neighborhood to return to the North Carolina mountains of his youth in search of a self-sufficient life. Over the course of four years, he got by through his own invention, hard work and the help of a small group of neighbors. The reader accompanies Crowe as he digs a root cellar, tends his mountain garden, makes beer and relates local history. Crowe is the author of ten books, poet and editor, translator of the sufi poet Hafiz, and a recording artist with the band Boatrockers. While possessing a pleasant, engaging writing style, one wonders why Crowe would finish this book twenty years after the fact. Crowe brags about his childhood roots in Southern Mountain Speech, but he doesn’t demonstrate his fluency outside of a few down-home phrases and a triple negative. Zoro’s Field suffers from a distinct lack of enthusiasm as well as a tendency to quote a legion of writers such as Emerson, Thoreau, John Muir and Walt Whitman. His most exciting memory is listening to a black snake eating a squirrel in the cabin’s attic. The author attempted to do Synder’s “real work” and become a “new native,” but he gave it up once neighbor friend Zoro died and developers moved into the neighborhood. Upon finishing “Zoro’s Field,” I had the distinct impression that Snyder actively encouraged Crowe to return to his Appalachian roots just to get him out of California.
		Rogue River Journal: A Winter Alone by John Daniel Shoemaker & Hoard 2005 $26 Shortly after the 2000 presidential election, but before the result was decided, John Daniel settled into a carefully stocked writer’s retreat overlooking Oregon’s Rogue River. Purposefully snowed in, he avoided any communication with the outside world while chasing his own mental demons. As he casts a line in the winter Rogue for steelhead, Daniel tells the story of his father’s tumultuous career as a labor organizer. While examining his father’s decline into alcoholism, Daniel probes deeply into his own use of marijuana, heroin and cocaine. Friend and understudy of Western literary legends Wallace Stegner and William Stafford, Daniel is a poet and two-time winner of the Oregon Book Award for Literary Non-Fiction. Halfway through the journal, I expected some type of social isolation psychosis to kick in. Daniel does relate experiencing a series of audio hallucinations, patriotic and nationalist songs that marched through his head like a mild mannered migraine; but that’s it. Daniel’s solitude is broken as spring comes to the Rogue and his book is complete. He dutifully returns to a life of conversation, television and driving down the road. His painfully honest writing is a striking testament to the art of contemplation
		Clearcut by Nina Shengold Anchor Books 2005 $13 Set in the denuded mountains just outside the Olympic National Park, Nina Shengold has written an ambitious but ultimately flawed novel that throbs with sexuality in the midst of a devastated landscape. The loggers have moved on and just the stumps remain along with a legion of idealistic college dropout Hoedads and a couple of asocial working-class Shake-rats. The Hoedads replant the forest while the Shake-rats shave the stumps for the valuable wood waste left behind by the timber company. Shengold’s well-informed realism is betrayed by the graphic portrayal of a love triangle that gets lost amid too many crowing cocks and mountain beavers. I cannot recommend this book but shamelessly read every word of it. The reader is disappointed to discover that when there are no more trees to hug, then all we’ve got left is each other.

		Casey Bush is a senior editor at The Bear Deluxe Magazine. Reviews for possible web publication can be mailed to him at BshCas@aol.com.


		The Battle over Hetch Hetchy: America’s Most Controversial Dam and the Birth of Modern Environmentalism by Robert W. Righter Oxford University Press 2005 $30 The Hetch Hetchy Reservoir sits high atop the Sierra Nevadas in the middle of Yosemite National Park and was constructed to serve as the major water source and electricity producer for San Francisco several hundred miles to the west. Built prior to Hoover or Grand Coolee Dams, Hetch Hetchy was the largest structure of its kind and generated a nationwide land use debate still in play today. Robert Righter chronicles the trials and tribulations of the dam’s creation. He juggles a huge cast including John Muir and Gifford Pinchot, poet Harriet Monroe, landscape architect Frederic Law Olmsted, publisher William Randolph Hearst, presidents Taft, Wilson, Coolidge and both Roosevelts. The “loquacious and pugnacious” Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes is featured as well. The City of San Francisco used the tragedy of the 1906 earthquake to help realize its quest for a water source straight from the mountains. By using their influence at the federal level, city officials overcame the opposition of local municipalities and the fledgling Sierra Club to carve out a bit of Yosemite Park for San Francisco’s exclusive use. The faucets didn’t open until 1934 and the desecration of a National Park came at a high price as the City found itself beholden to an established water and power infrastructure in cahoots with growing and thirsty irrigation districts. Despite the passing of time, the dynamic of those opposing but cooperating economic interests remains the same. Unfortunately, the story is not over and, as Righter points out, 85% of the dams in America will have reached their expected lifespan by 2020. So in just two decades, the next chapter of Hetch Hetchy will unfold with many serious social and ecological consequences to be considered while safely dismantling those monolithic testaments to human ingenuity.
		The Portland Edge: Challenges and Successes in Growing Communities Edited by Connie Ozawa Island Press 2004 $29.00 Written by a group of urban-planning experts who have tried to distill what makes their city work, Portland Edge includes wide-ranging essays covering the city parks system, neighborhood associations, KBOO community radio, the homeless population and the evolution of the regional governmental body known as Metro. I visited with the editor, Dr. Ozawa, at Portland State University, where she is a professor in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning. She’s lived in Oregon for over a decade and identifies her academic interests as “mediation and collaborative planning.” I asked her about a group of PSU colleagues who at that time were holding a weekly support group/brown-bag series to explore life after Measure 37, the successful ballot initiative that has thrown a monkey wrench into land use planning across the state. She politely explained that they were economists while she focuses on environmental issues. Ozawa believes in civic action and points out that government doesn’t always provide leadership but instead must follow its citizens and not necessarily the authors of initiatives. She provided examples including the Burnside Skateboard Park, which arose entirely unsubsidized, turning a junkie’s lair into a nose-grinder’s paradise. She also noted the Johnson Creek watershed restoration, where concerned citizens inspired inter-governmental cooperation to coax salmon back into the city. Her naive faith in human nature was infectious. After the interview I walked to the light-rail stop and came across a long-lost friend who was living on the streets. I asked him if there was anything I could do for him and he declined all offers of assistance, assuring me that he was well fed in a nearby shelter where they didn’t make him talk about God and the showers were warm. Of course, I felt guilty, as though I alone had let him down. On the other hand, he seemed well cared for. Riding home I stared out the train’s window at the Skidmore Fountain and recalled the C.E.S. Wood inscription adorning its base: “Good citizens are the riches of a city.” Such good citizens were certainly looking after my friend. So despite the fact that our misguided electorate continues to favor the palpable aspects of property over such ephemeral qualities as so-called “livability,” I am seduced by visionary optimists like Wood and Ozawa. Portland remains a place worth living simply for the people who live here.
		Tiger Bone & Rhino Horn: The Destruction of Wildlife for Traditional Chinese Medicine by Richard Ellis Island Press 2005 $26.95 Richard Ellis has written 16 books including some about rare and endangered aquatic species. His titles include The Search for the Giant Squid, The Empty Ocean and Great White Shark. Now his encyclopedic eye has turned to terrestrial creatures such as tigers and rhinos and bears. “Oh my!” Ellis believes that while Asian medical traditions have used exotic animal parts in healing for centuries, current demand is leading to the extinction of certain species. In addition to those listed in the title, he chronicles the medicinal thirst for the musk deer’s dewy gland, the Steller’s Sea Lion’s testicle and penis, and the armor-like scales of the Chinese pangolin, a giant ant eater. He documents the worldwide fate of bears whose gall bladders are milked on an industrial scale in China while tens of thousands are killed legally in the United States, with many of their body parts entering the black market. Ellis is at his best portraying the history of both Eastern and Western medicine (finding many more similarities than is generally acknowledged), but the author preaches to a choir that probably doesn’t need so much detail. In addition, he sometimes betrays his theme by revealing that other pressures besides the insatiable appetite of Traditional Chinese Medicine are whittling away at these precarious populations. For instance, he documents the widespread slaughter of the Bengal tiger accomplished in the 19th century by British colonial sportsmen. Similarly, he informs the reader that black rhinos are most endangered by production of the Yemeni jambiya, a dagger featuring an elaborately carved rhino horn handle that can range in value from thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars. Ellis reveals himself to be an optimistic nut in professing that Viagra will take the pressure off some endangered species whose body parts are prized for their effect on sexual potency. Despite such flaws, this book does contain some fun tidbits: things you might not want to know such as the fact that George Schultz, Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of State, has a tiger tattooed on his ass in honor of Princeton University, his alma mater; and facts you need to know such as that there are more captive tigers in the state of Texas than wild tigers in India.