The Trail Home: Essays by John Daniel (review)

66 'WesternAmerican Literature pointment in the West, mainly because of the failure to recognize and adapt to the region’s environmental limitations. But Stegner nonetheless concludes his introductory comments and the book itself by pointing out the “surge of inextinguishable western hope” he feels when he considers the many fine writers working in the West today. For him, the contemporary literature of the West is what gives us reason to hope that our society “will work out some sort of compromise between what must be done to earn a living and what must be done to restore health to the earth, air, and water.” The personal essays in the first section of the book offer revealing accounts of Stegner’s childhood migrations throughout the Northwest and the Great Basin. But in light of the essays on place and placedness later in the collection, all three of the personal narratives become archetypal renderings of the west­ ern American experience, the transience and desolation as well as “the bigness, sparseness, space, clarity, and hopefulness.”The “Habitat”essays, informed by the writer’s thorough understanding of the history of western land use, effec­ tively complement Stegner’s personal and literary ruminations, creating a book of immense value for all students of the region “beyond the 98th meridian.” Literary scholars may already be familiar with some of the eight essays in the book’s concluding section, including the survey of western literature in “Com­ ing of Age: The End of the Beginning” and the wonderful piece called “Haunted by Waters: Norman Maclean,” but now the studies are readily avail­ able for the first time. This is a great book. SCOTT SLOVIC Southwest Texas State University The Trail Home: Essays. ByJohn Daniel. (New York: Pantheon, 1992. 223 pages, $21.00.) With the publication of The TrailHome,John Daniel has emerged as a major new figure in American nature writing. Readers of Wilderness, TheNorthAmerican Review, Orion, and other periodicals will recognize some of the pieces in this book from their earlier incarnations, but this first collection of Daniel’s nonfic­ tion shows his attentiveness to a broad range of environmental issues and experiences. The collection begins and ends with essays focusing on Daniel’s own life in the West, mainly Oregon and the mid-San Francisco Peninsula. In the opening essay, “The Garden and the Field,”Daniel recounts his efforts to grow tomatoes while living in a cottage on Wallace Stegner’s land during his stint as a Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University in the early 1980s. “I am sick of the banalities spoken in supermarkets,”writes Daniel with mock exasperation. “I write poems and I want poems to eat, rich red suns of August.”There is gentle Reviews 67 humor and self-critique throughout this book of meditations on encounters with the natural world, indoors and out. The earlier essays contemplate growth and wandering, while the final essays in the volume emphasize mortality and the process of finding/making a “home.” In “Some Mortal Speculations,” Daniel uses several observations of death in nature as springboards toward explaining his own “discontent with mortality.” Catching himself turning death into an abstraction, he notes: “My mind, like my hands, is best suited to the grasping of smaller things, things that happen close in front ofme, things I can see and turn slowly in memory and see again, in imagination’s second light”—this devotion to observed and re-imagined particulars is Daniel’s guiding method in these essays. The book’s concluding piece, “The Trail Home,” strongly reflects the worldviews of the author’s friends and mentors, Wallace Stegner and Wendell Berry. Like many important contemporary nature writers, Daniel is deeply concerned with the psychology of awareness: “We began to realize our home around us,”he recalls, “we are realizing it now, bywhat we learn to be aware of, what we learn to see and listen for and come to know as part of our lives.” Whether discussing tomato-planting or the phenomenon of death, ‘The Impoverishment of Sightseeing”or the relationship between humans and ani­ mals (“Among Animals”), the essays in this volume display not only sparkling language but clear, passionate thinking. One of the...