North to Katahdin Book

This is a difficult book to describe. From the title I expected it to be about climbing Maine's Mt. Katahdin, but it's not really about that. From the jacket blurb, I expected it to be about the Appalachian Trail, which has its northern terminus on Katahdin's summit. But even though both the moutain and the trail are mentioned throughout the book, Pinder is really writing about the human relationship with wilderness and nature. This book asks the philosophical question: "Why do we want to climb mountains or hike through forests?"

I really enjoyed this book, for a number of reasons. First, I agree with Pinder's stance on just about everything, and I think he expresses a healthy dose of realism regarding our relationship with nature. "Wilderness is too often defined as an absence of humanity. A farm is not a wilderness because its land is tamed by the farmer...Wilderness has become a fetish for people dissatisfied with the smog of cities...We belong to the wilderness, they say, not the other way round."

That quote reminded me of a hiker I encountered in Sequoia National Park. On this particular trail, it seemed like I saw deer at the corner of every switchback. On the way down, I looked up at a clearing to see two deer grazing. They briefly raised their heads to look at me, before returning to the grasses. As I watched them, I was startled by a sound on the trail behind me (I thought I had maybe wandered between a buck and his females). I spun around to see a hiker, decked out in pink and blue spandex, pounding two big sticks on the ground as she walked. I said "Sorry, I didn't know if it was you or the deer that I was hearing." She replied loudly "Oh, can you see deer here?" Then she spotted the deer as they bounded through the woods at the sound of her voice. I thought it more than a bit sad that she had driven all the way up into the mountains, probably spending the night, just to march up and down a dusty trail, not looking in any direction.

Pinder may have an explanation for this kind of behavior: "Our guilt in harming the environment makes us try to exclude ourselves from it. This is a mistake. If we define wilderness as the complete absence of people, then there is no wilderness left in the contiguous United States."

My favorite part of the book is when Pinder describes what it is like to be an outsider living in the north woods, something my family experienced first hand when we moved to central New Hampshire. "I feel alien in northern Maine. I don't belong to this clan, cannot belong, even though I come from an equally rural - perhaps more rural - region not far away." Where is he from? Labrador? Newfoundland maybe? No, New York State! Barely a couple of hundred miles away, and identical in almost every aspect! Yet people still treat him like an "alien."

"Even the children from far away...are still considered strangers, no matter if they were born in Maine and never once set foot outside. They bear the burden of their parent's blood. Another native chimes in: "If a cat has kittens in an oven, do you call them biscuits?"" Reading this was therapeutic for me, as it confirms a suspicion I have had since leaving New Hampshire (and particularly since leaving New England) that those years spent in miserable loneliness in New Hampshire wasn't about me - it was about them.

"Visitor is just a kinder word for stranger...Ordinarily, people are visitors while they pay and strangers once the door closes behind them." As they say in NH, thank you for visiting, now go home.

Pinder never really provides a straight-on answer to the question of why we hike, but his book is a wonderful journey through all the experiences and thoughts that are linked to that question. If you've ever asked it yourself - read this book.