The Other Book

This book reminded me of what it was like to be out in wilderness all those years with the boys I grew up with. Remote, scrabbling around in the underbrush wondering where the hell we were exactly, reading topo maps, reveling in the small ecstasies of just a bite of food, made so much more special by the fact that we had toted it on our backs for miles, and know there will be nothing else until we tramp back out again.

It also reminded me of the passions of a misanthropic and dissatisfied youth. Hours on end of stoned diatribes, railing against the confines of Western Civilization, picking apart the philosophical underpinnings of our upbringings, extolling the virtues of tuning in, turning on, dropping out. We had friends who went to live in trees, or teepees, or wandered around the woods in the Sierras for months at a time. Until snows came and drove them indoors.

A few of us died out there, at the dicey edge of things. Slick roads, avalanche, a stray rock. most of us survived, and settled into sedate lives by comparison. Children, or not; careers, or not; happy, or not.

This story turns in it's hands expertly those elements, and others: madness, history, friendship, love, survival, chance. It is quiet like the forests of the Hoh River, where it is mostly set. It travels to the core, like the damp there. It is folded back upon itself, with care and precision, like the folding of an origami crane. Watching his hands work you don't know what beauty will emerge, but are not entirely surprised when, later, it lifts it's wings suddenly and flies.