At Eden's End
By Dick DorworthTravels in the Greater Yellowstone, by Jack Turner (Published by Thomas Dunne Books St. Martin’s Press, 2008. 270 pages, hardbound. $25.95 ISBN-13: 978-0-312-26672-1)
Jack Turner is a treasure of the American West, American nature writing and to those who believe in, as Ed Abbey puts it, the “moral duty” of being “…a critic of his own community, his own country, his own government, his own culture.” That Turner is a largely hidden treasure, not nearly as well-known or rewarded as his work warrants, is both a loss to and a reflection of our country and our culture. Travels in the Greater Yellowstone, Turner’s latest book, is a series of twelve delightful as well as deeply disturbing romps and uniquely Turneresque rants through the greater Yellowstone. We need more Turners in this world and, since there are no others, we need all the Jack Turner writing we can get.
Like his previous books, The Abstract Wild and Teewinot: A Year in the Teton Range, Travels in the Greater Yellowstone reveals, among other things, Turner’s unrivaled skills as an observer of the place he lives, the land he loves most and understands best, the life forms that bind it and of the transformations that have occurred and are occurring at the hapless and heedless hand of man. That place, the greater Yellowstone, is in reality many places, all of them tightly interconnected to each other and to the larger society and culture in which we all live — as well as the human values, lifestyles and morality that govern them. As Turner and various companions (including this reviewer) travel through different parts of his home, Turner ruminates and reminds us of the changes in flora, fauna, landscape and the larger community of life comprising the greater Yellowstone.
In the introduction Turner writes, “I first came into this country forty-seven years ago. At first I came and went as a tourist. Forty years ago I began to work here as a mountain climbing guide. Thirty years ago I began to live here full time. It is, in the deepest sense of the word, my home. I really don’t like being any place else. I’ve climbed, hiked, skied, canoed, kayaked, fished, hunted and explored it in all seasons, always with pleasure. Like anyone who lives here and has a baseline of memories extending over nearly half a century, I’ve watched it change in ways that casual visitors would not notice, change in ways that will profoundly affect its future. The ice climbs I did as a young man are gone, and many of my favorite fishing holes have been closed by NO TRESPASSING signs; the mountains and rivers are often unpleasantly crowded, lands that were once open space are now gutted with houses. Bugs have arrived from Egypt, pollution from China. Even the seasons have changed: summer is longer, winter is warmer, and spring is earlier.
“With recognition of those changes came a desire to understand the place where I live , what made it what it is, what made it different and unique, and what made it the object of such intense love. What is this place? What is its essence, its identity? The more I’ve understood the answers to these questions, the more dismayed I’ve become — and angry.”
In pursuit of those answers, the reader will roam with Turner and his wife Dana and dog Rio and other companions through several parts of the whole ecosystem of his home, enjoying extended hikes through the Deep Winds, Grizzly Bear Heaven and Wyoming Range, canoe trips and fishing and Christmas at Old Faithful, and a visceral connection to place that Turner describes like no other writer I know. The reader will be informed by Turner’s insights and observations of his neighbors — wolves, moose, elk, hawks, bears, swans, pelicans, pronghorn, deer, brook trout, Mackinaw, bison — and several others, including oil drillers, snowmobilers, park rangers, guides, sheriffs and tourists. His baseline of memories allows him to note changes that others might miss, but, more, his acute perceptions, intellectual power and fierce love for his subject have contributed to a book in the tradition of and as good as the best of Thoreau, Abbey, Muir and Turner’s friend, Terry Tempest Williams.
Turner, like Yellowstone, is composed of many parts — writer, intellectual, philosopher, mountain guide, fly fisherman, hunter, Buddhist who has been known to pack heat (a Glock), skier, trekker, husband, lecturer extraordinaire, thrower of the Frisbee, practitioner of the rant, scholar and gourmand — including his share of the built-in contradictions of being a human being on earth in the 21st Century. He writes, “It has been my experience that people who love machines do not like to walk, and people who love to walk do not like machines. The gulf separating them is deep.” Yea, but everybody walks, and everybody uses machines. The gulf is deep, but it seems to me that it isn’t as wide as it looks, and part of the attraction of Travels in the Greater Yellowstone for me is that it both explores the depth and offers a bridge across the gulf. After all, everything really is connected, including the people on either side of that gulf.
Like the author, the reader of Travels will become dismayed and angry at the answers to the questions Turner poses and answers. What informed, caring and sensitive person is not dismayed and angry with the state of the world’s environment, the obliviousness of most of its citizens, the ineptness of its governments, the sacrifice of ecosystems to its greed? But Turner is not just angry and dismayed at the state of the greater Yellowstone, and, by extension, the earth; he is inspired, nourished and encouraged by the landscape and the creatures that inhabit it, and so will be the reader.
I read this book in pieces in manuscript form long before it became a book and was informed, impressed and enriched by each part. But re-reading Travels in the Greater Yellowstone as a whole piece reinforces my opinion that Turner is a master of nature writing and the keenest intellect of our time of any possible comprehension of what we might mean by the word “wild.”
