Reading the Mountains of Home

Amazon.com Price: $39.97 (as of 12/04/2019 10:01 PST- Details)

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Description

Small farms once occupied the heights that John Elder calls home, but now only some cellar holes and tumbled stone walls remain a few of the dense stands of maple, beech, and hemlocks on these Vermont hills. Reading the Mountains of Homeis 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 such a lot of 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. This can be 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.”

Late in life, the American novelist and conservationist Wallace Stegner left California, where he had lived for half a century, to move to Vermont. The reason, he said, was once simple: there is more wilderness to be found in the pine forests of western New England than in the Far West. John Elder supports Stegner’s claim, writing in Reading the Mountains of Home that the abandoned farmsteads of such a lot of of Robert Frost’s Vermont poems have now reverted to wild lands, dense with fallen logs and snags, full of bird and animal life.

A longtime resident of the state, Elder uses Frost’s great but little-known poem “Directive” as a touchstone by which to guide his discussion of how modern humans can really inhabit a landscape–in this case, a landscape that had been developed for generations and then all but forgotten. In such places, Elder writes, the issue isn’t one of wilderness as opposed to civilization, that old trope, but the wildness that endures at the edges of settled places, wildness that may be accessible to people all over the world. His celebration of returning greenness, of the forest’s seasons, and of his own life in the woods makes for engaging reading indeed. –Gregory McNamee

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