Wilderness and Razor Wire (review)

Wilderness and Razor Wire: A Naturalist's Observations from Prison by Ken Lamberton. Foreword by Richard Shelton. San Francisco: Mercury House, 2000. 218 pages, paper $14.95.

By the time you read this, Ken Lamberton should be a free man. After twelve years in Arizona prisons, inmate 61728 should be back with his family. Given his love of southwestern deserts, he may well be stretching his legs right now, hiking through the Santa Catalina Mountains or down a gully in the Sonoran Desert with his wife and three daughters, who have been waiting for him, with remarkable faith and patience, all these years. Strange as it may seem, however, a leisurely stroll among the cholla and saguaros may not take him any closer to nature than he was when he lived behind bars. Stranger still, in at least one seemingly small but important way, he may find himself feeling not much more free. In this beautifully written prison chronicle graced by dozens of his own drawings, Lamberton admits to some fretting about this. And I think his drawings and his often microscopically detailed prose perhaps unconsciously suggest an even deeper level of concern about his future. I admire Ken Lamberton for his many talents, his strength, his unusual and edgy personality. But I also worry about him.

Lamberton had an uncommon resume for someone doing serious jail time: no grinding poverty, no drugs or violence. He grew up in Arizona as an avid collector of wild things, a self-taught naturalist, "a child of the desert, nursed, weaned, and raised with heat and thirst, thorn, and wound." He earned a bachelor's degree in biology, married Karen, a fellow lover of the wild, had kids, and decided to share his passions for science and nature in the public schools. In 1986 he was named Teacher of the Year in Mesa, Arizona. By the end of that school year, Karen--"my closest, most precious companion"--was pregnant with their third child, and he had shared one too many passions. He became infatuated with a student and, incredibly, ran off with her to Colorado. Soon someone from Mesa recognized them in Aspen and called the police. "The girl went back to school and I went to prison," Lamberton says simply. "I was twenty-seven years old; she was fourteen."

Few writers have such oceans of time to brood over their mistakes and what they will say about them: more than 4,000 days and nights. Perhaps to spare his wife further humiliation and pain, Lamberton has decided not to belabor his motive for his one act of insanity. He talks vaguely of immaturity, but that's about it. Overwhelmingly, he focuses on his daily survival in prison: the survival of his spirit. He is helped immensely in this by Karen, who not only stuck by him but fought endlessly for his early release and transfer to less violent prisons. Her story alone would make a book I'd love to read.

But in the prison of his days (to paraphrase W. H. Auden), Lamberton is helped perhaps even more by nature, by the winds and dust and sweet-smelling raindrops that blow down from the nearby mountains, which he sees framed in barbed wire. This is a nature unbound, not just out there beyond the walls but slipping in through the bars, swirling around his cell, penetrating even his skin. The yips of coyotes come to him on the breeze. Often he sits under the only mesquite tree in the prison yard, whose roots, he learns, may dig to a depth of one hundred fifty feet to find water: "my kind of tree: obstinate, rebellious, short-tempered. . . . It stands for everything that takes advantage of difficult circumstances."

He observes barn swallows swooping under an eave to raise their young. They migrate, then return to raise new young in their mud-packed homes, lending solace--and spice--to the impossibly slow turning of seasons. Sometimes he looks at...