Brooks Range Passage by David J. Cooper (review)

258 Western American Literature Brooks Range Passage. By David J. Cooper. (Seattle, Wash.: The Moun­ taineers, 1982. 208 pages, $14.95.) Brooks Range Passage is the journal of a man who spent 36 days alone in northern Alaska, first hiking 120 miles through the Brooks Range and then floating 160 miles down the Alatna River. David Cooper w7 ent into the wilderness with the stated purpose of experiencing wildness in the land and in himself, experiencing the world and his place in it as they are without civilization. He undertook his quest for wilderness experience in a way that favored its success. He committed and exposed himself to the wilderness, letting the vast and mostly intact wild ecosystem take him as its own. He left behind many of the trappings of civilization, bringing simple whole foods, a primitive shelter, bow and arrows and fishing gear, and no firearms. He ventured onto a big Alaskan river on a log raft, with minimal whitewater experience. And he traveled alone. Cooper is a plant ecologist, and his scientific knowledge and approach to experience enhanced his intimacy with the land. He learned the native plants and survived in great part on wild plants and fish. He was aware of aspects of weather, geology, ecological succession, and plant and animal history that an untrained observer simply would not see. His knowledge of the workings of the ecosystem and of lives of the plants and animals around him heightened his sense of belonging and comradeship. And his observations — of the land and himself — had a scientific clarity and honesty that may have catalyzed his initiation into nature. Cooper undertook his trip in an uninsulated style, but the very fact that it was such an explicit quest for experience may have detracted from itssuccess. There are some hints of perceived separation between self and nature through­ out the book. In passages advocating wilderness preservation he seems to imply that the value of wilderness lies in the experience of wildness it can give humans. At one point, though, he realized that his suffering and frustra­ tion were due to his wanting something other than the natural here and now. But these are small detractions. The greater sense communicated is that Cooper has truly dipped into wildness. His eyes were wide open to beauty — not just scenic beauty, but the total beauty of living nature. He learned to fit into the landscape and to make his way through it in a harmonious fashion. He came to experience things “the way they really are.” MAX LYON, Logan, Utah Now That the Buffalo’s Gone. By Alvin M. Josephy, Jr. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982. 300 pages, $15.95.) At a recent meeting of the Western History Association in Phoenix, Ari­ zona, a historian complained to a colleague that Indian claims to land, water, ...