Meeting the Tree of Life: A Teacher’s Path by John Tallmadge (review)

Reviews 409 Voices in the Wilderness: American Nature Writing and Environmental Politics. By Daniel G. Payne. (Hanover, New Hampshire: University Press of New England, 1996. 181 pages, $22.95.) Focusing on its rhetorical aspects, Voices in the W ilderness adroitly traces how the work of nine major nature writers developed a reading audience for nature writing and a political base for environmentalism. John Muir, John Burroughs, Aldo Leopold, and Rachel Carson emerge as particularly effective in building these twin constituencies, as skilled polem icists careful “not to frame their arguments in strictly moral terms, but to employ a full range of rationales for reform.” How did they hone their rhetorical skills? Author Daniel Payne sug­ gests that Muir learned how to “sway a seem ingly intractable opponent” during his many arguments with his tyrannical father, while Leopold developed the same ability in his workaday encounters with hunters, ranchers, and profession­ al conservationists. Both writers thus became “adept at presenting new or unfa­ miliar concepts wrapped in comforting and familiar religious imagery.” (Payne does not consider whether such an approach might have compromised the con­ cepts being presented.) Payne is ambivalent about the political efficacy of the work of Edward Abbey. He concedes that The Monkey Wrench Gang “attracted m illions of enthu­ siastic readers” and prompted “the direct action strategies of groups such as Earth First! and Greenpeace,” but he nonetheless feels that the com plexities “that help to make [A bbey’s] work so rich in a literary sense often serve to diminish its effectiveness as environmental rhetoric.” Payne concludes that while Abbey’s work fails to provide a workable “blueprint” for environmental reform, it retains “considerable power” as a jeremiad. Can nature writing continue to play a significant political role in an age of mass media and direct mail campaigning? At the very least, Payne concludes, nature writers can “help frame the terms of the political debate over the envi­ ronment,” performing a function “as vital today as it was in the days of John Muir.” They can only do so, however, by heeding the lessons of their rhetorical­ ly gifted forebears. / D a v id M a z e l U n iv e r s it y o f W e s t A l a b a m a M eeting the Tree o f Life: A Teacher’ s Path. By John Tallmadge. (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1997. 220 pages, $44.95/$18.95.) Students of American nature writing w ill recognize John Tallmadge as the author of scholarly articles on Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, Edward Abbey, Barry Lopez, Richard N elson, and Annie Dillard; however, he is also a practic­ ing nature writer whose work has appeared in Orion, North Dakota Q uarterly, 410 Western American Literature and Witness. In his debut collection o f nonfiction essays, Meeting the Tree of Life, Tallmadge creates a com pelling story of his own personal and professional developm ent by carefully braiding three narrative strands: tales of ennobling wilderness adventures, ruminations on the wisdom offered by nature writers, and accounts of difficult and inspiring experiences in college teaching. If Meeting the Tree of Life is a crafted logbook that records the author’s per­ sonal journey toward authenticity as a hiker, scholar, and teacher, it is also a deep map suggesting the ways the landscapes of earth and those of desire conflict with and complement one another. The book is structured around places —including the Muir Trail in Yosemite, Mt. Katahdin in M aine, the Arches and the Deep Creek Mountains in Utah, the Wind River Range in W yoming, and the Quetico and Boundary Waters canoe country of M innesota and Ontario —and is largely an account of how the author learns both to love and to leave the places that edu­ cate and inspire him, even as he seeks to educate and inspire the college litera­ ture students he takes to these places. The book succeeds as a rich chronicle of personal relationships to place, in part because Tallmadge is so unusually honest about how often we wish (and how rarely we find) that places w ill effortlessly accommodate our extravagant...