Life sucks

A memoir of changes in the land and people

I will get to the bad part eventually. I sometimes think my life could be described as a series of love affairs with various kinds of plants and gardens, and definitely I am a serial killer of books: I find a writer I like (not an easy thing any more) and I quietly munch through their oeuvre. I did this in the past few years with Patrick Leigh Fermor and Bruce Chatwin. Some authors are so voluminous that I space them out over decades: John Updike, Robert Graves, Philip Roth, Nadine Gordimer and many more--I read a book or two, and then move on. A few months ago my colleague Mike Kintgen found Grass by Joe Truett on remainder at the Tattered Cover and gave me a copy. By the time I finished the first few chapters I knew I'd found a contemporary classic: Only Robert Michael Pyle among contemporary naturalist/scientists wields  such a wonderful pen. I'll get to the Grass in a bit. Tonight I finally finished Circling Back: I don't think I have ever read anything that cut more quickly or deeply or decisively to the bone of our modern dilemma: Joe combines a history of his family's ancestral land in East Texas, and weaves into it his own very rich life story--and overarching the whole thing is our dilemma as Americans, as modern humans: he maps out a dozen ways the enormous cost of technology on the American landscape: a fabulously rich corner of America has essentially been turned into a botanical slum of wall-to-wall Loblolly pine plantation, and the rich tapestry of human habitation that goes back to the Pleistocene has been eliminated, leaving a mere residue of Duck Dynasty level ex-urbanites who by and large have only the most tenuous connections to the land. It is a terrifying and graphically described horror story: written with such charm and nostalgia that you almost forget that it's a tale that's been repeated in every corner of America. It is a tale we need to read, internalize and act on. It has the heft and import of Silent Spring or Ominivore's Dilemma in that it limns the ecological disaster we are all party to--although he does put out the slimmest glimmers of hope as well. Assuming you're not a complete literary light-weight (i.e. if you don't move your lips while you read)--and no one who reads my blog would do that--this book would be your cup of tea.

A serues if essays about grassland: great science and cadenced poetry all in one

I shan't belabor the grass book--it's very different--a whole series of essays that encapsulates Truett's lifelong work as an ecologist on the American prairies. Once again he shows the ways we have damaged and compromised biodiversity at every hand--but I hasten to say, this book gives hope: as lead biologist for Ted Turner's endangered species initiative, Truett had enormous sway and success in reintroducing prairie dogs to former habitat, and helping the success of black footed ferret reintroductions. He devotes several chapters to prairie dogs--and I have come to realize their enormous importance to America's prairies thanks to him...now I must get the rest of his books right away!

Reading two awesome books by a contemporary (just five or six years older than me), you can hardly blame me for wanting to talk to Joe, to contact him and let him know how much appreciated his work his prose. I was hatching a secret plan to see if we couldn't invite him to speak, perhaps at a lecture series. I was savoring the possibility that we might walk together around Denver Botanic Gardens, or on Mt. Goliath: For me, books are a kind of tangible friendship--alas! Most of my favorite authors are classics whom I shall not meet in this life. But Joe lives only down the road in New Mexico! Heck, maybe I could drop in on him this summer?

Google search makes everything so much faster than it used to be: I punched in his name and the town he lived in and Google provided a long list of valuable information about Joe: there are several publications by Joe you can download off of various websites (just click on that link to see them)...and there was (here's the sucky part) his obituary and a wonderful tribute to him by the Wildlife Society.

In Circling back, Joe describes the pathway that took him back to his roots, and the appreciation of traditional American agrarian life practiced by his parents and grandparents. It is sobering when people more or less contemporary with you pass away like this, all the more so since I felt I had not only found an author I admired intensely, but someone who could be a friend.