Surrender: The Call of the American West by Joanna Pocock (review)

Londoner Joanna Pocock’s journalistic memoir joins an increasingly rich genre of trans-Atlantic interpretations of whatever the American West is becoming in the early twenty-first century. Pocock announces straightaway, “The mid-life crisis package I was handed came in a box marked with one simple word: Montana” (2). Pocock, her husband Jason, and young daughter Eve quit the city and spent two years (2014–16) residing in Missoula. She confesses to nomadism though she’s called London home for a quarter century, and during this period (as well as at least one subsequent trip), she ranges into central Oregon and Washington backcountry, following a series of “rewilders.”

Her love and longing for Big Sky Country feels as palpable as her growing disillusionment with London. Pocock’s voice joins an old international chorus, entranced by the monumentality of western American landscapes: “The vastness, the inscrutability of so much space, performs an act of initiation. It does things to you that cannot be undone” (364).

Hers is a Missoula-centric version of Montana, and her version of the American West tracks both familiar and obscure topics. She and her family witness wolves in Yellowstone’s Lamar Valley, and she spends time with the Buffalo Field Campaign (and “Buffalo Bridge Collective”) outside Gardner, Montana. The annual bison culling and annual conflict between the stockgrower-led state forces and the federal agencies is old news. She reviews the Tintina Corporation’s proposed copper mine (the “Black Butte Project”) near Montana’s beloved Smith River as well as restoration efforts by Trout Unlimited upstream and downstream from Missoula. Oddly, Pocock doesn’t cover the removal of the Milltown Union Dam (2008) and subsequent Clark Fork River restoration projects. Farther afield, she glances at North Dakota’s Standing Rock protests (342–26) and the notorious Rajneesh community near Antelope, Oregon, in the early 1980s (309–11). Pocock unduly focuses upon certain fringe groups who might be lumped under the umbrella notion of survivalists. But most of her survivalists are not white supremacist groups whose loud online noise masks their tiny numbers: the sort of fringes tracked by organizations such as the Montana Human Rights Network. The 3 Percenters, or “Threepers,” fall under this category, and her closing scene of the Boundary County (Idaho) Fair highlights the booths of the NRA, tragically mainstream, as well as the “Oath Keepers” (359–62).

It’s no surprise that Pocock surveys the annual Rainbow Gathering. She’s much more intrigued by a few rewilders who have adopted, in sundry ways, a hunter-gatherer ethos and not only live off the grid but forage for their “Paleo diet.” She profiles, for example, Peter Michael Brown, part of “Rewild Portland,” who leads a basket weaving workshop, and spends much more time with Finisia Medrano, a sixty-one-year-old rewilder who, over years and decades, lives “on the hoop.” It’s hard to see Medrano, a caustic, transgendered stoner specializing in digging biscuit root and planting seeds of edible wild plants, as the positive role model she becomes for Pocock. Despite Pocock’s admiring reference to John Lanchester’s article about hunter gatherers (The New Yorker, 18 Sept. 2017), Medrano and her ilk lack the personal appeal let alone the audience Euell Gibbons commanded two generations ago. Lanchester’s claim— “‘It turns out that hunting and gathering is a good way to live. . . . The lives of most of our progenitors were better than we think’”— seems dubious at best. Pocock overstates the case when she claims, “So many of these fringe outliers are now having their cries taken up by academics and writers.” Here’s the issue, as she concedes: “We can’t all live as hunter-gatherers” (295). No kidding. Nor would most folks willingly adopt the tribal style “fringe outliers” and “hunter-gatherers” depend upon. That said, there is much to admire about widely disseminated knowledge of edible plants— what...