My Heart Belongs to Nature: A Memoir in Photographs and Prose by John Nichols (review)

An old acquaintance surfaces. Something of a friend has circled back around—here, in this reviewing assignment. The friendship has been on my side. I've not met John Nichols. But I have taught his Milagro Beanfield War (1974). And now, for the life of me, I can't say why I haven't kept on teaching it. It's a good war, a good read. We could righteously make more war on those terms. Care for the Earth with a southwestern tinge. Hasta la victoria siempre!

My acquaintance with Nichols once ran deeper. Charlotte Wright, who did editorial work for Western American Literature, had tapped me to write the Nichols entry for WAL's fat and handsome compendium, Updating the Literary West (1997). (That was a project the likes of which somebody ought to attempt again, as a new generation comes on). I had Nichols's sixteen books all laid out in categories. All academic like—I had squared him against his antecedents and progeny and colleagues. I had charted his influences and guessed at their magnitudes. I had between times permitted myself one or two envious remarks about the life Nichols had going in Taos, writing all kinds of things and fly-fishing the wild, north–south run of the Rio Grande.

So now, after this considerable while, comes in the mail Nichols's splendid photo-essay, My Heart Belongs to Nature. You can bet I will hustle it off this desk and onto my coffee table. As company happens by, I will nudge their interests. Or I may just pick the thing up and hand it over.

Its several photos of New Mexico's highest and wildest hardly need anyone's recommendation. They stand by themselves. Look to your heart's content. Resolve, then, to stay lean and fit for the peak-bagging that might yet lie ahead. That's the highest value I attach to shots that look down on alpine basins, whose fingers of snow give way to flowers. Nichols has been some photographer!

Hold on—could I have just favored the less worthy half? There are essays in this photo-essay—not to be neglected. On average, every 9″ × 12″ page is half picture, half prose. And the writing is as deliberate in its invocations as is that old two-o'clock, ten-o'clock pattern of fly-casting. Just so, Nichols has loved the world, and he will surrender none of it without protest.

Take the photo "of a peaceful section of the Rio Grande." Caballo Trail gave access from the high mesa rim. "It was great fishing because nobody ever went there." Nichols's meticulous paragraph celebrates the place in many of its particulars, including his pointed comment: "Caballo Trail is inaccessible now, blocked off by a PRIVATE PROPERTY fence" (97).

Or take the photo through Nichols's kitchen window out to his "half-acre front field." The shot is perfectly pastoral. Locusts rim the scene. Two dozen grackles punctuate the foreground. His nostalgic essay rambles enough to include the pipe from the kitchen sink that ran the family "gray water" onto the field. His pointed comment: gray water had once been conservation "in the old days before building codes and county ordinances. . . ." (51).

Or take the nearby photo of the Pacheco Ditch that irrigated the same field on which Nichols would run that gray water. This essay extends to Nichols having been "a commissioner on the ditch." Names of neighbors then flow across two lines. His pointed comment: ditches had once defined neighborhoods. That "watercourse was a lifeline that melded me together with the entire community of Upper Ranchitos" (53).

Or take, finally, the photo of "an old sheep trailer" that Nichols had gotten as a birthday present. He put it on a "quarter section" he had had all to himself. Nights out there were sacred times. What's more, that rolling...