On the Wild Edge
In Search of a Natural Life
-
-
4.5 • 2 Ratings
-
-
- $11.99
-
- $11.99
Publisher Description
"Opinionated and iconoclastic, Petersen writes with humor and a well-honed craft that will delight fans of Edward Abbey." -Library Journal (starred review)
Twenty-five years ago David Petersen and his wife, Caroline, pulled up stakes, trading Laguna Beach, California, for a snug hand-built cabin in the wilderness. Today he knows that mountain land as intimately as anyone can know his home.
Petersen conflates a quarter century into the adventures of four high-country seasons, tracking the rigors of survival from the snowmelt that announces the arrival of spring to the decline and death of autumn and winter that will establish the fertile ground needed for next year's rebirth.
In the past we listened to Henry David Thoreau or Aldo Leopold; today it is Petersen's turn. His observations are lyrical, scientific, and from the heart. He reinforces Thoreau's dictum: "in wildness is the preservation of the earth." In prose rich with mystery and soul, his words are a plea for the survival of the remnant wilderness.
"Many of us would like to live a life of greater intention and simplicity, but few can and even fewer do. David Petersen is one of those rare human beings among us who lives a wild life with a cultured mind . . . [He] has created a map all of us can follow."-Terry Tempest Williams, author of The Open Space of Democracy
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
By eschewing such "distractions" as jobs, money and children, Petersen (Among the Elk; The Nearby Faraway; etc.) and his wife embraced a simple life on the edge of the wilderness in the Colorado Rockies, where the enduring rhythms of nature shape each day. In this extended meditation on that life, Petersen's prose can be overwrought ("Still hoping for a glimpse of the hawk,... I... lifted my face skyward in desperate faith, like some crippled, crawling pilgrim") and cranky ("What was once a middle-class paradise... has been reduced to just another rich person's playground of choppity-chop subdivisions and fenced-in ranchettes littered with a nauseating profundity of tacky trailer houses at one extreme, ostentatious and obscenely wasteful trophy homes at the other"). But he also writes movingly of the things he loves: his wife and dogs, the mountains, the grizzlies he camps among every summer and the elk he hunts for food ("the humane killing of a fairly and honorably outwitted prey is precisely the opposite of slaughter.... Does the wolf not love the caribou? And does she not, even so, undertake her daily hunts with enthusiasm and joy?"). While this book will not bump classics like Walden, A Sand County Almanac or Silent Spring off the environmental bookshelf, its mix of strong opinions and vibrant personality give it unique appeal.
