Winter Settling Moon II
My reading goes in spurts of enthusiasm. Right now I’m reading non-fiction, not my normal choice. Ever since the Weekly Reader tests in elementary school, I’ve tended to prefer fiction. In late High School, during and just after college, the books I chose chained together as I would read one author, say Herman Hesse, and wonder about influences on them. Hesse led me to Romain Rolland. Kafka to Borge. Thomas Mann to Goethe.
Last week though, as I unearthed books from their cardboard sleep, Rick Bass’s the Lost Grizzlies of Colorado showed up in my hand. Bought a long time ago I’d never gotten around to reading it, but, hey, I’m living in Colorado. Bass is a wonderful writer, clear prose, intimate, knowledgeable and in love with the natural world. In this book he recounts a several trips he took with Doug Peacock, a friend of Edward Abbey’s, in the San Juan Mountains Wilderness in southern Colorado.
Peacock is a noted grizzly expert and believed there was a remnant tribe of grizzlies in the San Juans who had survived all attempts to wipe them out. The trips into the San Juans, the planning and their results make for exciting reading if you’re a wilderness or nature lover. A direct outgrowth of those trips was the Round River Conservation Project, named after a river in Aldo Leopold’s classic, A Sand County Almanac.
Ever since the Woolly meeting where Mario Odegard rhapsodized about podcasts I’ve taken to listening to them as I set up my loft. (which still has a long way to go) Listening to Science Friday a short teaser for the Science Friday Book Club came on. They were promoting the next book, to be shared on February 6th, The Lost City of Z. That one I had, too. Like Grizzlies I’d bought it a while back and passed it up, probably in favor of some new detective novel.
So, I dug around on my Kindle and found it. Took me two days to read. The Lost City of Z tells the story of Lt. Colonel Percival Harrison Fawcett, probably the most famous Victorian explorer you’ve never heard of, and a contemporary expedition to solve the mystery of his disappearance in the Amazon in 1925. The book is being made into a movie to be released this year.
The story beneath the story is one of academic hubris, the limits of human perseverance and the unlimited power of obsession. The academic hubris occurs in a narrative about the Amazon’s inability to support complex human civilizations, only now being challenged in a way that Fawcett clearly foresaw through his own amateur research in the 1920’s. Fawcett’s legendary ability to find his way through the “green hell” of the Amazon and accomplish complicated surveying and natural observation tasks set for him underscores the mystery of his disappearance with his 21 year old son, Jack, on the last expedition. Obsession applies not only to Fawcett and the many who got caught up in the excitement of Z and tried to find Fawcett, but to the author of this book, David Grann, and his attempt to get closure on Fawcett’s story.
It’s non-fiction right now, then. After finishing the Lost City of Z I’ve started Moon, by Bernd Brunner.
