In Trace of TR: A Montana Hunter's Journey, and: Following Isabella: Travels in Colorado Then and Now (review)

Let me borrow a word from the title of Dan Aadland's new book, In Trace of TR: A Montana Hunter's Journey, and use it to characterize a popular contemporary genre. I'll label the practice a "tracing" genre, where an author travels or traces the paths taken by a writer from an earlier generation. Aadland's memoir and a recent publication by Robert Root, Following Isabella: Travels in Colorado Then and Now, fall into this special generic niche, and they also show how to define the craft's parameters. Together, they illustrate the breadth, the depth, and sometimes the constrictions of what I would call "tracing" literature.

Literary tracing is not literary tracking. Just as no one can talk directly to a deceased friend, so no one can physically walk in the exact footsteps of an authorial predecessor. Instead, a trace follows an author's words, simultaneously imagining the writer in the past and imaging the self in the present. That's a key element of tracing—drawing the details of one's own persona while picturing the actions of another. Aadland uses the words of Theodore Roosevelt; Root uses those of Isabella Bird; both write as much or more about themselves as they do about the historic guides they are shadowing. Roosevelt and Bird serve primarily as narrative frames that allow Aadland and Root to reveal their own twenty-first-century attitudes and opinions. Sometimes the titular names—TR and Isabella—actually disappear for many pages at a time. Other authors appear, too. Roosevelt several times gives way to William Faulkner, and Bird steps back for most of a chapter that centers on William Allen White. Thus, Aadland and Root add other voices plus literary and geographical dimensions to their books.

The similarities between these two tracings, however, are not as striking as their differences. Using distinctive points of view and contrasting narrative distances, they display two essential shapes of memoirs devoted to stalking the spoor of another writer. I write those particular words because Aadland's book is as much about hunting game as about hunting Theodore Roosevelt. In Trace of TR is written by an insider, a man who knows the high plains and Montana mountain landscape more intimately even than the writer he traces. Aadland describes fresh fallen snow, a meadowlark's song, the idiosyncrasies of horses, a herd of pronghorn wheeling together, the joy of dropping an elk with a single shot. His pen brings the animals, the seasons, and the land itself to life. I could smell the woodsmoke, touch the earth, taste the fresh roasted game.

Following Isabella, on the other hand, is a memoir more removed from the Colorado environs it replicates. Root is an outsider, new to the Centennial State and eager to learn about the terrain. He has no intention of emulating Bird's travels but instead uses her words to draw a map he follows from Greeley to Estes Park to Colorado Springs to Georgetown. Much of his journey takes place in a car—though he often takes short hikes and actually climbs Long's Peak one day. He spends two weeks in an Estes Park cabin, too, so he's not totally isolated from the land. But he doesn't pretend to know it well. Rather, he's getting to know the Colorado Front Range, and, as he clearly states, he's taking his readers along for the ride.

So these are the two extremes—one man relishing a familiar landscape he knows like the back of his hand, another exploring a place he doesn't know at all. Different readers will appreciate one approach more enthusiastically than the other, so I'll confess my own prejudices. Because I once lived in Colorado, I grew impatient...