The Mountains Next Door by Janice Emily Bowers (review)

244 Western American Literature The Mountains Next Door. ByJanice Emily Bowers. (Tucson, Arizona: University of Arizona Press, 1991. 127 pages, $21.95.) Bowers’ essays examine, she says, “what it means to be a natural scientist,” and they ask the unanswerable question, “What is the meaning of nature?” Eventually, and more to the point perhaps, she raises the question, “Does nature mean anything at all?”And she answers it, across the “false dichotomy”of philosophy and science: “The scientist says no, the poet says yes, and the writer of natural history, balancing between the two on a rope of words, hopes to bridge the gap.”To anyone who reads much nature writing, this is a well-worn path. What the rest of the book does is better: it takes us through new territory with a chatty, well-read botanist as our guide. Thoreau comes along with us, and there are glimpses of poets and scientists at the side of the trail—Edna St. Vincent Millay, Wordsworth, Whitman, Dillard, Krutch, Linnaeus, Forrest Shreve. Bowers has published a scientific flora from her study of Saguaro National Monument, a sixty-three-thousand-acre preserve in the Rincon Moun­ tains east of Tucson, Arizona, but these seven essays include the thinking, meditating personality behind the study. “[M]y field notebooks inextricably tangle the personal and the public. . . . Sometimes I even use my notebooks as a diary, and, unorthodox as this is, it seems the best way to avoid the schizo­ phrenic split that scientists often impose upon themselves, a schism between the work and the person as if it were possible to separate the two.” We learn about herbariums, about compiling a flora, famous botanists of the West, plant taxonomy, the impact of elevation on plant diversity, the flowering of cactus. For instance, in one essay, Bowers delineates the oak woodland that floats above the desert floor, halfway up these mountains. But here is also the ambivalence of a botanist who knows that “we collect in order to possess . . . to prolong the present . . . to partake of something larger than ourselves.” Meditations on nature writing have long since identified the para­ dox of the self-embracing, self-effacing human in nature, the paradox of the novelty of the closely exam ined fam iliar, n atu re’s display of our interconnectedness to that which we can’t keep close enough. It is in the particular that the paradoxes are still engaging, and here are a thousand details of a certain place to keep us fascinated. ZITA INGHAM Arkansas State University ...