"I live on land that has not surrendered the last of its wildness. It keeps secrets, and those secrets prompt us to pay attention, to look for more. This is how we first engaged with the world, and we still do it. We are hungry to know. Wild land and wild animals taught us about themselves, but they also helped make us who we are: resourceful, persistent, with a knack for imaging what we have not seen. Most of the time we catch mere glimpses, and from them we surmise a whole."
Books by Robert Michael Pyle, Rick Bass, Terry Tempest Williams and Jack Turner, are among my favorites. Small volumes that describe a place, involving all the senses so that you know the author understands that environment and loves it.
In Settled in the Wild, naturalist Susan Shetterly looks at how animals, humans and plants share the land in her rural Maine neighborhood.
She tells tales of the locals--humans, yes, but also snowshoe hares, raccoons, bobcats, turtles, salmon, ravens, hummingbirds, cormorants, sandpipers, and spring peepers. She expertly shows us how they all make their way in an ever-changing habitat.
What made Shetterly's book stand out to me was its physical size, a small book to hold easily in your hands as you survey the landscape.
After reading the book, I realized two things about myself. First, no mater whether we live in cities, suburbs or villages, we are encroaching on nature and it still perseveres. Secondly I could identify with her experiences, the ways she came to see the world around her, and enforced again my gratitude for where I live.
At an early age Shetterly's family moved to a large colonial house in Connecticut that was surrounded by natural beauty. In these open environs, the young naturalist explored the wilderness:
"…there is something to be said for the benign neglect in which I was raised in Connecticut : it gave me freedom. No one seemed to be worried about my getting hurt or lost or kidnapped. I just wandered away and wandered back again. The land around the house offered the space and privacy to act out the stories I loved."
I too had freedom in my early home in rural Pennsylvania. We roamed the fields and quarry behind the house, streaked down the large hill on our sleds (ending at the main road through town) and rode our bicycles for miles to the nearest swimming pool. Years later, my own sons explored the hills, ponds and backroads of Missoula --some adventures only now coming to light. Youth gives us invincible courage but also wonderful experiences.
"What will happen to us when our children have no connection with what is wild in the land, its depth, danger, generosity? What will life be like for children who do not grow up paying close attention to it and testing themselves against it? And what will happen to those children who ache for it, as I did, but cannot find it anywhere?"
In 1971, the author moved with her husband to a small cabin on a 60-acre lot in southeast Maine and started a family.
"The winter after my daughter was born, I would set her in her carrier, put it on my back, and take her in the afternoons, before dusk, into the woods. I believed that even if she fell asleep, which she always did, the trees, the tracks of wild animals in the snow, the dead leaves rattling in the branches, the hoot of an owl, a grouse feeding on birch catkins---everything---would pass into her life and make it good…One of the best things I could think to give my child was this: the woods first, then to emerge from their whisper and shadow onto the smooth clean of Ida’s field... These are gifts that last. Small, as easy as breathing in and out, as plain as bread, they sink beneath what we think we remember, what we think we know, but they remain."
The marriage didn't last, but what endured was Shetterly's passion for this rural area and its inhabitants: moose, hares, hummingbirds, snapping turtles, bobcats, turkeys, deer, loons, seals, cormorants, coyotes and a smattering of rugged humans.
Many essays in the second part of the book talk of trees, ice, silence, hunting, trapping, development and conservation.
"In this time of transformation, I learned what is worth saving. Beauty is worth saving. An impractical, beautiful dirt road with a shading canopy can nourish a person’s mind and spirit, and people who are fed by the lovely aspects around them enrich the life of any town."
Not all lessons were easy but the author's sense of humor, personal strength and the other humans around her made the journey possible.
"When you live in a small town, you meet people at school, at the general store, the man who sells lobsters and clams in the summer down at the dock on Newbury Neck, the woman who sells flowers out of a tiny, pretty building that was once the town post office, the couple who have started an organic farm on top of the hill above the bay. We are joined in time and place. Sometimes we attend town functions and someone tells a story of the people who came before us and made community here. We listen and hope that our little group may provoke a story or two, and that our stories will linger, imparting a moment of tragedy or courage, humor or grief or joy, or even a spate of passing foolishness. Our stories say we were here. We made a difference to each other. We cared.
And this is how we carry what we know of the past into the future."
Shetterly gives us so many wise words in one place. Read "Settled in the Wild" to be inspired. Read it to appreciate where you are in the world.
Barbara Theroux is the manager of Fact & Fiction, now part of the Bookstore at the University of Montana.
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