The Canoeist (Nonfiction)

John Manuel

ISBN 0-97189-747-6

I remember rolling under the canoe; the way the water muffled the roar of the rapid and softened the sun’s glare.  All around me were bubbles, millions and millions of them, rushing along at the same speed.   We are like this – souls traveling through space.  We are born in the tumult of the river, carried along by forces we cannot control.  And we’re also beautiful in the way we hold the light, murmuring to one another on this journey toward the surface, our short spiraling lives.

I stayed under for a long time, safe from the waves crashing overhead. The water ran warm and deep. There was no need to panic, but my air was running out. I kicked out of the thigh straps and burst into daylight. –Page 208

The quotation from page 208 is but one example of the excellence of the narrative prose which fills John Manuel’s book from beginning to end.  The river in this passage was Tennessee’s Ocoee, portrayed as an ultimate challenge for canoeists, a river generally reserved for Kayaks and White Water Rafts.

The author’s trip down the Ocoee is the climax to a journey that begins on the peaceful waters of the Chagrin River near his parent’s home in Cleveland, Ohio.  Along the way he canoed such well known waterways as the Allagash (Maine), the Nantahala (North Carolina), and the Chattooga (Georgia).  This last was the whitewater backdrop for the movie Deliverance based on James Dickey’s novel of the same title.

The Canoeist is neither a how to manual for boaters nor a simple recounting of whitewater adventures, though many adventures appear among the stories.  Manuel skillfully weaves in the story of his family and his career along the way.  Within the pages he recounts emotional distance from his father, a hard nosed businessman who taught him canoeing skills but never understood his career path as a conservationist working for nonprofit organizations, or his later decision to become a writer.

Manuel also recounts the friendships he gained along the way and the courtship of his wife Cathy, a strong canoeist in her own right.  He tells the reader about his son and daughter, and his determination to maintain a healthy relationship with them and not repeat the separation between him and his father.

Manuel’s ability to weave these many stories into a unified whole reveal his skill as a gifted writer. The canoeist is an enjoyable read.

Meditating with Annie Dillard by Ray Zimmerman

This profile appeared as the installment of my Nature’s Bookshelf column in Volume 8 Issue 6 of Hellbender Press (November/December, 2006), Knoxville, Tennessee. The publication was named for a large species of salamander (The Hellbender), native to the American southeast, and has since ceased publication.

Henry David Thoreau went to the woods to live deliberately and was largely ignored as an author by his own generation. Unlike Thoreau, Annie Dillard lived in a cabin on Tinker Creek and emerged a Pulitzer Prize winning author. Although Dillard has been compared to Thoreau and the other New England Transcendentalists, many reviewers see her as more similar to Melville.

Many natural history writers concern themselves with the how – the great question of all science. Dillard is concerned with why, a question more at home in theology than in science. She comments in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek that some people extol the thriftiness of nature where the leaves of trees are recycled into soil to grow more plants. She then asks if it would be more efficient to keep the leaves on the trees in the first place.

Dillard is horrified at the wastefulness of nature. She notes that many insects lay thousands of eggs, only to have most of them eaten, sometimes by the parent. She compares this scheme to a railroad company building thousands of locomotives and turning them loose on a section of track that can accommodate only three. At the end of their experiment, the company would learn that only three locomotives were necessary. She imagines a board of directors chastising their managers for running the company in such a wasteful way. She then states that nature is wasteful in exactly such a manner.

Although this line of thought seems to put Dillard outside the mainstream of nature writers, she is in fact a keen observer of the natural world. Early in the pages of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek she sees a frog skin shrivel in the grasp of a diving beetle. She observes a shed snake skin with a knot in it, a creek overflowing its banks and flooding the neighborhood, and a praying mantis laying eggs. She augments these observations with remembrances of her childhood experiences. She recalls viewing pond life through a microscope, and watching a moth hatch inside a glass jar.

In Holy the Firm Dillard continues her metaphysical probing. She asks what the relationship is between the temporal and the eternal. In the first chapter, she seems to be echoing the statements of Saint Francis of Assisi, who said “Praised be You our Lord through mother earth who governs and sustains us.” In the second chapter a child is badly burned in an airplane accident, and Dillard wrestles with the eternal question as to why the innocent suffer. She seems to receive the very answer received by the Old Testament character, Job. The answer is that suffering is part of the world and that we are too small and insignificant in view of the beauty and vastness of the universe to question its nature.

After publishing one book each in the genres of literary criticism, poetry, fiction, and memoir, Dillard returns to the narrative nonfiction style in her 1999 book, For the Time Being. Here she records travels in China and Israel. She observes Chinese peasants working in a field and a crab digging for water near a Kibbutz. She describes clouds and a tsunami off the coast of Bangladesh. She describes the extraordinary lives of the Jesuit paleontologist Pierre Tielhard de Chardin and the Ukrainian Hasidic Rabbi Baal Shem Tov.  She continues to ask why suffering is part of the human condition, and why evil exists.

Aside from her many books, Dillard has published several poems and short works of fiction and nonfiction in periodicals. These are listed on her official web site, http://www.anniedillard.com. The site also includes a list of derivative works: paintings, music, and one act plays carried out by others but inspired by her work. Most of these are derived from Holy the Firm.

Dillard’s writing style is perhaps best illustrated by a selection from the first chapter of Holy the Firm. She had been reading by candle light one night when a moth, drawn to the light, got caught in the wax at the top of her candle. It was gone before she could respond. The following passage is a hallmark of observation and narrative:

“And then this moth-essence, this spectacular skeleton, began to act as a wick. She kept burning. The wax rose in the moth’s body from her soaking abdomen to her thorax to the jagged hole where her head should be, and widened into flame, a saffron-yellow flame that robed her to the ground like any immolating monk. That candle had two wicks, two flames of identical height, side by side. The month’s head was fire. She burned for two hours until I blew her out.

She burned for two hours without changing, without bending or leaning – only glowing within, like a building glimpsed through silhouetted walls, like a hollow saint, like a flame-faced virgin gone to God, while I read by her light, kindled, while Rimbaud in Paris burnt out his brains in a thousand poems, while night pooled wetly at my feet.”

Sidebar – Dillard’s Published Works

Tickets for a Prayer Wheel - Poems

University of Missouri Press, 1974

Several poems have titles indicating natural history, but are actually metaphysical. The title poem is an invitation for the eternal to break into the temporal.

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek – Nonfiction Narrative

Harpers Magazine Press, 1974

Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction

This book received mixed reviews when it was released. Eudora Welty, the great Southern writer, said that she was uncertain of Dillard’s intent and that the writing left something to be desired. A portion of her review, and segments from other reviews, are available in Contemporary Authors, New Revision Series, Volume 3 (Gale Research Company, Detroit, Michigan).

Holy the Firm – Meditations

Harper and Row 1977

In this work she asked what relationship the temporal has to the eternal. She then asks why the innocent must suffer.

Living by Fiction – Literary Criticism

Harper and Row, 1982

This book is a technical work primarily useful to graduate students in university literature programs.

Teaching a Stone to Talk – A Collection of Essays

Harper and Row 1982

This book includes essays on natural history and metaphysics. The essay on the Galapagos Islands is an excellent investigation into creation and evolution.

Encounters with Chinese Writers – Journalism

Wesleyan University Press, 1984

The author identifies this work as jolly journalism.

An American Childhood – Memoir

Harper and Row, 1987

The author tells her own story.

The Writing Life – Narrative Nonfiction

Harper and Row 1989

This book includes some practical tips for writers. The author advises writers to edit ruthlessly and to throw out unnecessary prose, even if it is that on which they worked hardest. Several chapters appeared previously as essays in periodicals.

The Living – A Novel

Harper Collins, 1992

This fictional work is set on Bellingham Bay in Washington State.

The Annie Dillard Reader – Selected Reprints

Harper Collins, 1994

Mornings Like This – Found Poems

Harper Collins, 1995

Dillard mined old books on natural history, theology, and navigation for these lines. They are rearranged into poems. The meaning of the poems is far different from that of the original text.

For the Time Being –Narrative

Knopf, 1999

After working in several other genres, Dillard returned to the nonfiction narrative for this book. The author weaves several themes together into a unified whole. The book includes narratives on birth, death, the nature of evil and current events. She includes stories of the Jesuit Palentoligist Teilhard de Chardin and the Hasidic Rabbi Baal Shem Tov who expressed religious fervor by dancing.

Down the River

This review is a found item. I wrote it several years ago on a computer which has since crashed. I recently found it while searching for other items on the file backup from that computer. I do not believe it was ever published.

 

Down The River

Edward Abbey

ISBN 0-525-4767-8

E. P. Dutton, Inc.

 

            Henry David Thoreau once said “Time is but the stream I go a fishing in.” This statement aptly describes the opening chapter of Down the River, a chapter dedicated to journal entries and ruminations on the writings of Thoreau. Abbey reread Thoreau while traveling down the Green River, a tributary of the Colorado, with a group of friends. The journal entries are dated sequentially, making the time element especially apropos.

            For a writer like Edward Abbey though, the river is a metaphor much more complex and varied than what one chapter can illustrate. The title “Down the River,” also harkens back to a chapter of the same title included in his classic work Desert Solitaire. In this chapter he traveled down the Glen Canyon portion of the Colorado with his friend Ralph Newsome. That trip was just before completion of the Glen Canyon Dam, nemesis of all that Abbey held sacred in nature, and the creation of Lake Powell, which he called a sewage lagoon.

            The view of the Glen Canyon dam as symbol of the wilderness despoiled introduces yet another meaning of the title. Specifically the meaning is, “Sold down the River.” This phrase sums up what Abbey thinks of mechanized tourism and most construction projects. He sees nature and man falling before the progress of what he calls the “military-industrial state,” and encourages his readers with the thought that this state, in both capitalist and communist forms, is on the verge of collapse. These thoughts are essential to understanding Abbey’s writings as equally condemning liberal and conservative thoughts from an anarchist perspective.

            The book Down the River is divided into four sections, each of which includes a journal of a river trip as well as assorted essays on nature, pollution, rural lifestyles, natural areas, and people. Although Abbey’s detractors have labeled him a misanthrope, his essays in this book show him not as hating mankind so much as industrial society. His essays value the simple life of the wilderness and condemn technology, especially the Rocky Flats nuclear fuel plant, the MX missile system, and dams on the remaining free flowing rivers.

            The rivers described in the book’s four sections include the Green, the Tatshenshini (in the Yukon), the San Juan, and the Rio Doloris. The sections on running the rivers include some of Abbey’s best natural history writing. The other portions are equally good, but I have difficulty grasping the book as a unified whole. The river metaphors are powerful. They speak of time, lost values, and unblemished nature, but they don’t quite hold the book together. Although Down the River lacks a single thread of continuity, it emerges as a tapestry of landscape, friendships, protest, and difficulties overcome. It is well worth the read.

                                                            - Reviewed by Ray Zimmerman

Cranes Return - As published in the December, 2014 Issue of the Chattanooga Chat 

The 2015 Sandhill Crane festival will take place January 17 and 18 at Hiwassee Wildlife Refuge. Early reports of Sandhill Cranes in Meigs County appear elsewhere in this issue of The Chat.

On December 21 of last year I joined the Tennessee Wild Meetup for Sandhill Crane viewing at the refuge. Fog shrouded the landscape and enfolded us. It cut visibility of distant parts of the refuge, but we saw cranes on both the near and far side of a small bay. Sounds enveloped us as they can on foggy days. The rattling call of cranes greeted our ears as flock upon flock flew across our field of vision. Many circled and landed as we watched.  An immature Bald Eagle flew over as well.

We saw one Whooping Crane, cloud white against the gray Sandhill Cranes, and representing a species back from the edge of that abyss called extinction.

The rare Whooping Cranes called to mind a rarer species I once viewed on Cape Cod. I boarded a whale watch boat in hopes of viewing the antics of Humpback Whales. That hope was not realized, but I was lucky to see three Northern Right Whales. A pair of adults swam side by side, as a calf acrobatically rose out of the water and energetically waved its tail flukes and flippers.

With only three hundred Northern Right Whales remaining, the three I saw comprised one percent of the world wide population. They became rare because they were easily hunted and easily retrieved. Whalers called them “the right whale to kill.”

Overhunting may have contributed to the demise of the Whooping Crane as well. Despite their rarity and protected status, Whooping Cranes were shot in Georgia and Texas the previous year.

The Sandhill Cranes we witnessed this day were once considered a rarity as well. Sandhill Cranes were rare enough in Aldo Leopold’s day that he was certain they would soon be extinct. His essay, “Marshland Elegy,” was his farewell to the cranes. Only careful management brought them back to the large and growing population that graces our wetlands and skies today. I hope we can see such success with the Whooping Crane and the Northern Right Whale.

Little Owl Music and Arts Festival

Contact: Chattanooga Audubon Society, (423) 899-1499 littleowlfestival@chattaudubon.org

            The Chattanooga Audubon Society invites you to enjoy the fourth annual Little Owl Music and Arts Festival, Saturday, April 18, 2015 at their Audubon Acres sanctuary. Hear music, storytelling and local authors. Join us as we announce the winners of a student poster contest. View all entries in that contest at our clothesline art show. See craft exhibits and shop for unique items created by our arts and crafts vendors. Vendors from area restaurants will have food available for purchase.

Audubon Acres is Chattanooga’s oldest nature sanctuary. This 130 acre Wildlife Sanctuary is maintained so that visitors can enjoy and experience wildlife in its natural setting. There are over five miles of walking and hiking trails running on both sides of South Chickamauga Creek. 

I don't normally post events here, but this is an exception.

Celebrate the Winter Solstice with Music, Stories, Poetry and Dance

Sunday: December 21

6 PM to 9 PM

Grace Episcopal Church - 20 Belvoir Avenue

Admission Free: But donations are appreciated

Sponsored by the Joseph Campbell Mythological Roundtable of Chattanooga -Look for us on Facebook

Christmas and the New Year are just days away. Join us to celebrate the dark winter nights and the return of light. From this day on, each succeeding day will have two more minutes of light.  

Solstice Performers and Schedule

Ray Zimmerman will serve as Master of Ceremonies.

Robin Burk will share traditional music which heals and inspires.

Finn Bille presents a traditional Inuit story, “The Eagle’s Gift.”

Marcus Ellsworth performance poems.

Angela Sweet and Derek Williams will present story with interpretive dance.

Break with refreshments 

Ray Zimmerman will perform his poem "Departure"

Andrew Kelsay is a local educator and also the creator/ coordinator of Charles and Myrtles Coffeehouse.He was Poet Laureate of George Peabody College (1978-1979).

Diana Peterson will share a story about a bringer of the light.

Jim Pfitzer will tell a story from a brand new work still in progress and tentatively titled "Moon Shining Over Chestnut Ridge."

The Secret History of Wonder Woman

The Secret History of Wonder Woman

Jill Lapore

Wonder Woman’s unique characteristics include a mythical Amazon origin on Paradise Island, superior physical strength, and feminine beauty. These traits combine to make her an icon for young Americans, even today. With Batman and Superman, she forms a triumvirate of American comic book heroes. These three have had the longest running popularity of any comic characters, and have long standing magazines solely devoted to their own adventures.

Like Batman and Superman, Wonder Woman has a secret identity. Unlike them, she also has a secret history. This is the story Jill Lapore reveals in her book. As a staff writer for The New Yorker and professor of American History at Harvard, Lapore knows what the word research means.

Lapore’s story begins with the birth of William Moulton Marston, first author of Wonder Woman. He was a paradox. Marston was profoundly influenced by suffragists and early feminists such as Emmeline Pankhurst and birth control advocate Margaret Sanger. He was also a secret polygamist. He married his childhood sweetheart Sadie Elisabeth Holloway and later took Olive Byrne as his mistress.

Wonder Woman herself was a paradox, inspired by suffragists, early feminists, and the pinup art of the war time 1940’s.  Later, particularly after Marston’s death due to polio, she was authored by more conservative authors who saw her through the censorship of the 1950’s. In the 1970’s she reappeared as a feminist icon on the cover of the first regular issue of Ms. Magazine.

This nonfiction book is a masterpiece, solidly researched yet written with style that interests and entertains.