Philip Connors: A Song for the River

A Song for the River – Philip Connors – 978-1-941026-90-8 – Cinco Puntos Press – Hardcover – 256 pages – $22.95 – September 18, 2018 – ebook versions available at lower prices.

“The river that runs through the wilderness opens his heart: the mountains burn, friends die, and green shoots sprout from the ashes.”

Philip Connors, like some other fine writers of the desert southwest, notably Gary Snyder, Jack Kerouac and Norman Maclean, has been a long time fire lookout. Phil has spent many years in the Gila Wilderness in New Mexico. He began working as a fire lookout in 2002, and wrote about his experience in an earlier book, Fire Season: Field Notes From a Wilderness Lookout.

As it happens, I visited the Gila Wilderness for the first time in 2018, and was completely smitten by its beauty and the magnitude of the mountains, the vistas, and the Gila River. I’m sure I had read about the Gila at some point; it is famous for being the first wilderness area established anywhere in the world (in 1924), principally through the efforts of the great naturalist Aldo Leopold. Leopold was himself one of our best writers about nature; the Forest Service transferred him to Wisconsin, perhaps fortunately for the rest of us, as his Sand County Almanac has inspired so many to a better understanding of the natural world.

The Gila area is not only beautiful, but it is historically important as well. When we were there, we visited the famous Mogollon cliff dwellings, which are simply extraordinary. After that culture disappeared, the Gila was subsequently home to the Apache, and then the American pioneers, outlaws, and miners who displaced them. It’s an area which Connors knows intimately, and this powerful and emotionally gripping book reflects the depth of his knowledge of places and people, of the natural landscape and the depth of both human despair and our equally transcendent spirit.

There is a great deal of pain and sorrow in this book, but the spiritual and emotional power of Connors’ writing and his ability to transform experience into something resonant is important for himself and for his readers. The power of the writing is palpable and strong. It’s a beautiful book that I hope will be read by many.

Wilderness is where the heart grows stronger, or breaks, or both. No matter, we need these places and the writers who, like Connors, bring forth meaning out of pain, beauty out of loss.

Philip Connors was raised on a farm in Minnesota, went to the University of Montana for college, and spent a number of years working as a journalist. But he became disillusioned and made his way west, which clearly has become his true home and emotional center. His first book, Fire Season: Field Notes From a Wilderness Lookout won the National Outdoor Book Award, the Sigurd Olson Nature Writing Award, the Reading the West Award for nonfiction, and the Grand Prize from the Banff Mountain Book Competition. His second book, All the Wrong Places, a memoir of life after his brother’s suicide, was published in 2015.

Talking to Philip after reading this beautifully written, moving narrative of nature and loss was a great experience for me.

“Everything that is absent in the current political crises of this nation is abundantly present in Philip Connors’ A Song for the River: humility, quietude, forgiveness, and gratitude. His writing is pure, exact, compassionate, and often elegaic…I loved this book.”
—Benjamin Alire Sáenz, winner of the PEN/Faulkner for Everything Begins and Ends at the Kentucky Club

Visit Philip Connors’ own website here and his outstanding, El Paso based publisher, Cinco Puntos Press, here.

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David Gessner: My Green Manifesto: Down the Charles River in Pursuit of a New Environmentalism

978-1-571313-24-9 – Milkweed Editions – paperback – $15 (ebook editions available)

David Gessner is a sort of post-modernist environmentalist.  He’s written a number of books that celebrate the natural world and the wild, and he is a terrific writer capable of transcendent prose and has the keen observer’s eye that anyone writing about nature must have.  But he understands the difficulties and contradictions that suffuse contemporary civilization.  And he has a sense of humor and irony (which environmentalists are not always known for).

In My Green Manifesto, he addresses a major issue that affects so many of us who feel strongly about the arc of modern civilization, that its inertia is overwhelming, the problems so great, the solutions so elusive, and the efforts of individuals so ineffectual as to make us lose all hope of being able to make meaningful change.

The book takes us through Gessner’s journey from the headwaters of the Charles River to its end in Boston’s urban harbor.  His trip is made for the most part in company with a true environmental hero, Dan Driscoll, who almost single-handedly spurred the suburban and urban communities along the once highly polluted river to make significant changes to both restore and protect the river and riverside ecology.  They travel in a leaky canoe, drink beer, sleep in tents, and enjoy the pleasures of a “limited-wild” experience.

Gessner takes heart from the work Driscoll has done, and shows us how important his practical efforts have been.  “This new picture is that of a man or woman who knows how to get things done, who understands the value of momentum, of focus on a particular project. Not a shrill or dry or particularly flowery environmentalism … Someone willing to get in [a] fight and ‘Sue the bastards.’ Someone willing to stick their nose in there and feel what it’s like to get bruised. And someone willing to stay locked in that fight for years, even if it costs them emotional as well as actual capital.’’

Gessner writes with great humor and joy about the pleasures of being in nature, wherever one lives, and that is the core of his manifesto.  His ideas will resonate for many who are not willing, able or equipped to spend significant time in distant wildernesses. And as a “manifesto” this book will be easy for most readers to digest and accept.  Gessner’s message is positive and powerful because it is realistic and not preachy and because so many of us can relate to his experiences of the joy of being in nature and at the same time despair over the sheer extent of modern society’s environmental unconsciousness.

Gessner reminds us that it is possible to hold two seemingly contradictory ideas in our minds at the same time, that complexity and contradiction are almost facts of life, but cannot defeat us from taking action to make change.  “The first idea was acceptance, the acceptance, totally without rancor, of life as it is, and men as they are … But this did not mean that one could be complacent, for the second idea was of equal power: that one must never, in one’s own life, accept these injustices as commonplace but must fight them with all one’s strength.’’

Author website here (you can find a list of all his many fine books there)  Gessner’s latest book is one I am interested in reading as well.  The Tarball Chronicles: A Journey Beyond the Oiled Pelican and Into the Heart of the Gulf Oil Spill chronicles his visit to the Gulf after it had passed out of the news.  Not an uplifting story, I fear.

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