Nature Writing

[Sancho]

There’s some great writing about the natural world out there. Danik and I got to talking about it over on another thread, but I think nature writing deserves a thread of its own. So here it is. A place to chat about the works that cover the beasts of the field, the birds in the sky, and the fishes in the sea; as well as the crawling and slimy things, the bumbling and buzzy things, the giant sequoia and the grassy mountain meadow, from the tiniest microorganism right on up to Gaia herself, and beyond - the nature of the universe is open game as well (after all Danik and I started this discussion over on a thread about Mars)

So anyways this is a place to share thoughts about the scribblings of the natural world. Who’s your favorite nature writer? I’ve found that nature writing sneaks up on me when least expect it. It’s often part of a larger work. A couple of years ago I read The History Of Wolves, a first novel by Emily Fridlund. There were a bunch of well-tuned literary devices in the book - you know, writer’s workshop type stuff, but what I remember most were her descriptions of wild Minnesota. Totally freaking awesome. Made me want to go there…in the winter…brrrr.

Alrighty then, prose or verse, fiction or nonfiction, even a particularly artful paragraph in a biology textbook qualifies for this thread. And of course I think we’d all like to read something you’re particularly proud of that you wrote yourself.

[stlukesguild]

Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian contrasted passages of great beauty describing the American west with passages of absolute horror and violence.

[Sancho]

St Luke! Long time, no see (or read as the case may be). I miss all those pics you used to post back in the day. Art, as a visual medium, is something I’ve never quite tuned in to. I sense there’s something there that people are getting that I’m missing. So I enjoyed the stuff you posted and the accompanying explanations. Then at some point, I think, the administrators here put the kibosh on the big visual files and as a consequence those discussions of the visual arts sort of dried up. The thumbnails couldn’t quite cut it.

So anyway, Cormack McCarthy seems to be a writer whose name keeps popping up over here in the “General Literature” section. Blood Meridian is the first book by him I read. I couldn’t put it down. When I finished it I just sat there for a while, stunned. - Holy Sh*t. - Then I had to go back and read Lonesome Dove again. In another of his books, The Crossing, McCarthy’s description of a wolf pack on a snowy New Mexico mountain meadow is amazing. It was unsentimental yet just detailed enough to really get at the nature of the wolf. It also kicked off the whole story. I finished the Border Trilogy not long ago, so it’s still fresh in my mind.

So here’s one from the book I just finished, Waterlog by Roger Deakin. The writer has taken on the task of swimming in just about every open body of water he can find in Great Britain.


At the end of my first two chilly lengths, a frog leapt off the bank almost straight into my face, and others watched me from the water. That they are far outnumbered now by toads is due, I think, to predation of their tadpoles by newts, which much prefer the young of frogs to those of toads. There is no native creature quite so exotic or splendid as the male great crested newt, or eft, as the country people called them, in full display. They are the jesters of the moat, with their bright orange, spotted bellies and outrageous zigzag crests, like something out of a Vivienne Westwood show. I hung submerged in the mask and snorkel, and watched these pond-dragons coming up for air, then slowly sinking back into the deep water, crests waving like seaweed. They are so well adapted to the underwater life, I have to remind myself that they only come to the moat for six or seven months from February to July or August, to reproduce. Then they return to land, where you may not notice them unless you’re a gardener. You dig them up with the potatoes. They hide like bookmarks between old, vertically stacked rooftiles, or entomb themselves in dusty crevices in the brick-pile. Sometimes they even turn up mysteriously in the kitchen in autumn. They look a lot happier in the water.

[Sancho]

A seed knows how to wait. Most seeds wait at least a year before starting to grow; a cherry seed can wait a hundred years no problem. What exactly each seed is waiting for is known only to that seed. Some unique trigger-combination of temperature-moisture-light and many other things is required to convince a seed to jump off the deep end and take its chance—to take its one and only chance to grow.

Hope Jahren, Lab Girl

[Danik 2016]

Hi, Sancho!
Enjoyed the citation.

[Sancho]

Thanks, Danik

That quote reminded me of the Mojave desert, where I used to live. The Mojave is referred to as the “high desert” by the locals because, altitude wise, it’s up there. The Mojave is roughly the area between San Bernardino, California and Las Vegas, Nevada. Anyway every so often it would hit that magic “trigger-combination” and flower seeds that had lain dormant for who knows how long would spring into action and overnight the desert would turn purple, or red, or yellow, or some other color. It was awesome. Locals would say, “yup, hasn’t done that in a while.”

Speaking of the arid desert, here’s Ed Abbey in Desert Solitaire on the subject of the lack of water in the desert southwest:


Water, water, water....There is no shortage of water in the desert but exactly the right amount , a perfect ratio of water to rock, water to sand, insuring that wide free open, generous spacing among plants and animals, homes and towns and cities, which makes the arid West so different from any other part of the nation. There is no lack of water here unless you try to establish a city where no city should be.

[Danik 2016]

A desert, that suddenly gets covered with flowers must be unique!Thanks for the details of the location I never heard about it.

Just finished a book about a very different kind of nature. The blue Fox takes place in a location in Iceland, the name Ill have to look up so as to write it correctly. Same with the author. It is epic in its description of one person's fight against the ice. It also shows the most brutal and the most tender sides of the people in a very poetic prose. A good read specially in the summer when one just shivers at the word ice.

[Sancho]

I’ve heard the arctic is somewhat of a desert. This I think is based on the low level of annual precipitation. It doesn’t seem like a desert because of all the ice, but I guess at arctic temperatures when you get a little snow, it sticks around.

Here’s a quote about the path of the sun in the arctic, at latitude N90:


To grasp the movement of the sun in the Arctic is no simple task. Imagine standing precisely at the North Pole on June 21, the summer solstice. Your feet rest on a crust of snow and windblown ice. If you chip the snow away you find the sea ice, grayish white and opaque. Six or seven feet underneath is the Arctic Ocean, dark, about 29°F and about 13,000 feet deep. You are standing 440 miles from the nearest piece of land, the tiny island of Oodaaq off the coast of northern Greenland. You stand in each of the world’s twenty-four time zones and north of every point on earth. On this day the sun is making a flat 360° orbit exactly 23½° above the horizon.

Barry Lòpez, Arctic Dreams

[Danik 2016]

Impressive!

Yes I think you are right, it is a dessert, a cold dessert covered with ice instead of sans. ONe of the impressive scenes of The Blue Fox by Sjón is when one of the protagonists gets encased by the ice and it works as a sort of sleeping bag, protecting him from the cold. As you know I live in a country where the rare snow that appears in a few places is a luxury for tourist.

[Danik 2016]

No editing possible.

Here is the quote that should complete the answer above:



The rim of daylight was fading.

In the halls of heaven it was now dark enough for the Aurora Borealis sisters to begin their lively dance of the veils. With an enchanting play of colours they flitted light and quick about the great stage of the heavens, in fluttering golden dresses, their tumbling pearl necklaces scattering here and there in their wild caperings. This spectacle is at its brightest shortly after sunset.

Then the curtain falls; night takes over.
Sjón, The Blue Fox

[Sancho]

I must say, that’s a lyrical and whimsical depiction of the aurora borealis. I lived near Fairbanks, Alaska in the 80s and on certain winter nights we’d get spectacular auroras, huge curtains that would cover half the sky. My wife and I (both from places that don't have such a night sky) would stare at it for hours. The northern lights are a difficult thing to put into words, but it seems to me your quote gets at it well.

So in keeping with the north-country theme, and since Manichaean and I were chatting about Canada and Canadians over on his story-sharing thread, here’s a quote from a book I’m reading now about the misty fog in Pacific Northwest forests:


I was alone in grizzly country, freezing in the June snow. Twenty years old and green, I was working a seasonal job for a logging company in the rugged Lillooet Mountain Range of western Canada.

The forest was shadowed and deathly quiet. And from where I stood, full of ghosts. One was floating straight toward me. I opened my mouth to scream, but no sound emerged. My heart lodged in my throat as I tried to summon my rationality—and then I just laughed.

The ghost was just fog rolling through, its tendrils encircling the tree trunks. No apparitions, only the solid Timbers of my industry. The trees were just trees. And yet Canadian forests always felt haunted to me, especially by my ancestors, the ones who’d defended the land or conquered it, who came to cut, burn, and farm the trees.

It seems the forest always remembers.

Even when we’d like to forget our transgressions.

Suzanne Simard, Finding The Mother Tree, Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest

[Sancho]

She italicized “just trees” in the quote above, but since the program italicizes the whole quote anyway, it didn’t show up. Anyhow, it seems important to her idea.

[Danik 2016]

THat´s an lovely take quote. Semms you have got round much in the world.

I travelled twice to Canada, but their were very urban trips: Toronto, Vancouver, Ottawa, Quebec and on the second trip Victoria, on the other side.

Was impressed by the subterranean rather ugly malls and potatoes for breakfast. Enjoyed mostly Quebec. People grinned at my bad French......

[Sancho]

Ha. Montreal has a whole city underground. You don’t even need a sweater there in the winter.

So I got hooked on Tana French’s detective novels a few years ago. And although that particular genre is not known for nature writing, in her latest book she has a running thread about rooks. She uses them as a literary device, but also I think she gets at their character fairly well. We don’t have rooks in North America, but we do have crows and ravens, which are in the same family — splendidly smart birds, also highly social.

This is from the end of the book:


In their tree the rooks are peaceful, tossing scraps of conversation back and forth, occasionally soaring across to a neighboring nest to pay a visit. One skinny young one is hanging upside down from a branch to see what the world looks like that way. Trey mixes stain colors on the plate, paints a neat square of each mixture onto a stray piece of two-by-four and labels it with a pencil, in some code of her own. Cal coaxes splinters of wood into place and clamps them there. After a while he opens the cake, and they break off a chunk each and sit in the grass to eat it, listening to the rooks exchange views and watching the shadows of clouds drift across the mountainsides.

As you probably figured out the case got turned “upside down.”

[Danik 2016]

That´s so true, Sancho! But the underground city I remember is rather ugly and bare.

That´s wonderful citation about rooks you put up there. Right now my observations of nature are limited to the doves and dogs I can spot from my drawing room window. Maybe you know/remember the region around Praça Roosevelt at the heart of the historic downtown of São Paulo. Just now I watched a fat and lustrous doverick doing his mating dance, while the lady of his heart gently turned her back on him.
Well, that is to tell you that, having finished the fox book, I am reading "Petersburg" by Andrej Bieli. I am reading the book slowly because the author delighted more in descriptions than in breathtaking action, but the descriptions of Petersburg are
really stunning, from very early 20th Century. Here a description of the Nesvkii Prospect. I´ve never been to St. Petersburg, but it seems to be one of it´s main avenues.:"

In the evening the Prospect is flooded by a pall of fire. The spheres of electric light in the middle hang evenly on high. At the sides the shifting gleam of signboards plays; here, here and here a flash of ruby lights; over there—a flash of emeralds. One moment—and the ruby lights are over there; and the emeralds are here, here and here.
In the evening the Nevskii is flooded by a pall of fire. And the walls of many buildings burn with gemstone light: words composed of diamonds sparkle brilliantly: ‘Coffee House’, ‘Farce’, ‘Tate Diamonds’, ‘Omega Watches’. A shop window, in daytime greenish, now resplendent, opens wide its fiery maw on to the Nevskii; everywhere are tens, hundreds of hellish fiery maws; these maws disgorge their bright white light tormentingly on to the pavement; they spew out a turbid fluid in fiery rust And the Prospect is chewed to shreds by fire. A white gleam falls on bowler hats, on top hats, plumes; the white gleam surges further, to the middle of the Prospect, shoving the evening darkness off the pavement: and above the Nevskii the evening fluid evaporates as it glistens, to form a dull yellow and blood-red murk mixed from blood and dirt. Thus from the Finnish marshes the city will show you the place of its demented settlement with a red, red spot: and that spot is to be seen in silence from afar against the sombre night. As you wander the length of our far-flung land, you will see from afar a spot of red blood, that stands out against the sombre night; and in consternation you will say: “Is that not the location of the fires of Gehenna?” And having said it—you will trudge off into the distance: you will try to circumvent Gehenna."

[Sancho]

I liked the descriptions of St Petersburg. I’ve never been there either. When I read a particularly artful description, I find myself slowing down and enjoying the view, much like hiking to the top of a rise and taking in a beautiful sunset. Ya just gotta stop and take it in, smell the roses so to speak. I suppose the style of writing matches the style of reading. I’ll zip through an action scene to see what happens, and I’ll race through a journalistic article to get the information, but I’ve gotta slow down to absorb a bella vista.

I’m currently reading two books that have nature-writing possibilities: the first one is a collection of essays by Susan Orleans - On Animals, the second one is a sometimes funny sometimes tragic book by Mary Roach - Fuzz, When Nature Breaks The Law.

This is from the Mary Roach book. She’s with a Colorado Wildlife Official visiting an Aspen house that’s just been broken into by a bear:


This bear reminds Breck of one that was breaking into Aspen homes back when his study was underway here. They called him Fat Albert. “He was just kinda a laid-back. He’d gently open a door of a cabin, go in, eat some food, and leave. People would go, ‘Wow, he didn’t destroy my place at all.’” That’s why he was fat, and that’s why he was alive. There’s more tolerance for a bear like that.

Sounds like the lady-dove in Praça Roosevelt is doing the right thing - playing hard to get. Don’t get too eager, sister. Make him work for it. I have been down to that neighborhood. I remember walking around there early in the morning and enjoying the feel of the place. Theater district, right? We stayed at a hotel on Ave Paulista, so it was a short walk over there, and I like to walk. I also like to run, so in general I’d go the other direction and take jog on the paths around The Ibirapuera Park.

As for underground Montreal, I agree, not very scenic, but warm. They used to have a Swedish restaurant down there called Mövenpick. It was a lot of fun. You’d check in and they’d give you a card and then you could go around to a bunch of different food stations and pick out you wanted, and they’d stamp your card. Then you’d pay when you left. The locals called the Mövenpick the “Move and Pick”. Anyway, my kind of place, you don’t have to sit around and wait for a waiter. They used to have one in Boston too.

[Sancho]

Ack!

It’s Susan Orlean not Susan Orleans.

Swine spell checker!

Been reading her stuff in The New Yorker for years.

[Danik 2016]

Slowing down is just what I´m doing presently. Petersburg is a gem of a book and I think it shows the transition between the 19C and the 20 C novel. People were still discovering the multiple uses and effects of electric light. But I'm reading its about 800 pages slowly. Each section of chapter seems to contain scenes more than a narrative and some of these scenes are very powerful.

Petersburg is, of course, an urban novel. It seems to be( I am to much in the beginning) about a young man, who haunts people running around in a red domino costume and who is probably getting involved with a political group that goes at the establishment of a bureaucratic Russia which is represented by the domino youth´s own father. All this is built up very slowly.
So there is not much nature writing in the novel. But here is a passage that fits our theme (although nature here seems to have a more symbolic use):

"Those were strange, misty days: across the north of Russia venomous October was passing with its freezing tread; and across the south it draped dank mists. Venomous October fanned the forest’s golden whisper, and the forest’s golden whisper submissively lay down upon the ground—and the rustling purple of the aspens submissively lay down upon the ground, to wind and chase at the feet of a passing pedestrian, and to murmur as it wove from leaves a red-and-yellow web of words. That sweet chirruping of blue tits that in September bathes in waves of foliage had long since ceased to bathe in foliage: and the blue tit herself was now hopping forlornly in the black network of boughs, which all autumn long, like the mumble of a toothless dotard, sends its whistle from the forests, leafless groves, the gardens and the parks.

Those were strange, misty days; an icy hurricane was making its approach in tattered clouds, leaden and blue; but everyone believed in spring: the newspapers wrote about spring, officials of the fourth class discussed spring; a minister who was popular at the time pointed to spring; and the effusions of a Petersburg girl-student carried the scent of nothing less than violets in early May."

Lol! I fully agree about your comment on the smart lady-dove. In earlier times, when it wasn´t forbidden, I used to feed some doves on my window sill. There was a doverick I named Macho-Man after the son. Well nourished and with shining feathers, when he chose to execute his dance an d he chose it often, there wasn´t any room left for anybody else.

Ibirapuera is still beautiful an Pça. Roosevelt is still a Theater District. The building where I live is, in fact, very near of the Teatro Cultura Artística which you might have known. The theater burnt down parcially in 2008. Efforts have been made since then to rebuild it, but the money seems to have run out in the middle of it, and the half done building stands abandoned.

Pandemic closed a lot of restaurants here in my region. But there are still some good self services left, where one can pic and chose the dishes and they are not so expensive. I visited a Mövenpick with my father the one time I went to Switzerland, but there you ordered the food from the menu.

[bounty]

im certainly off from the intricacies of the ongoing discussion but hopefully not too far out of the ballpark in general...

it seems like every western ive read takes the time to talk about the land.

a sand county almanac by leopold comes to mind.

and there is an author named Patrick McManus who used to write for outdoor/hunting magazines who has also written a large handful of books about his time outdoors. his books aren't a homage to nature so to speak, but the locations are there and his writing is hysterical.

[Sancho]

Back in the 80s I got a subscription to Outdoor Life just so I could read Patrick McManus’s back-page stories. I remember one where he discussed strategies for getting a new hunting rifle into the house and past his wife, Bun. One method was - he’d put a lamp shade on the barrel of the gun and show it to Bun and gush about the wonderful new floor lamp he’d found and how fine it’d look in the living room. Bun of course would demand that he immediately take the hunting-rifle floor-lamp abomination down to his area in the basement.

Anyway it was something like that.

Ya know, just like in Westerns, nature writing pops up in just about every genre. There were some gorgeous passages about the nature of Mars in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Sci-Fi classic Red Mars.

And here’s one from the horror genre. Stephen King’s The Body (the movie Stand By Me was based on it) I just happen to be reading it now. If you remember it’s set in the fictional town of Castlerock, Maine in 1960. 4 twelve-year-old boys (Gordy, Chris, Teddy, and Vern) go on a 2-day trek to see the body of a boy (Ray Brower) who’d been hit by a train. Ray was from the next town over and he’d been missing for about a week, but the boys had some pretty good information about what had happened to him and where his body was.

Anyway they’re settling in for the night in their camp in the woods on the first night. They’re about halfway to the body:


We didn’t talk about Ray Brower as the dark drew down, but I was thinking about him. There’s something horrible and fascinating about the way dark comes to the woods, its coming unsoftened by headlights or streetlights or houselights or neon. It comes with no mothers’ voices, calling for their kids to leave off and come on in now, to herald it. If you’re used to the town, the coming of dark in the woods seems more like a natural disaster than a natural phenomenon; it rises like the Castle River rises in the spring.

[bounty]

hi (again I think?) Sancho,

I have ten of mcmanus' books. I vaguely remember that story. I think the first book of his I got is called "the night the bear ate goombaw." he's a kid out camping with a friends family and since he doesn't have a sleeping bag he's wrapped up in an old bear skin fur cut. in the middle of the night he has to urinate and when he gets up, through the distortion and shadows of the campfire, people think there is a bear in camp. someone yells "bear!" and he doesn't know its him. the father of the family starts running and Patrick, thinking the safest place to be is with the adult male of the bunch starts running after him, which makes the father think the bears chasing him. im laughing all over again thinking about it.

sometimes I watch "family guy" and I recently re-watched the episode where they did their own take on three Stephen king stories. the stand by me story was one of them.

I read "dandelion wine" by ray Bradbury this past year and I have a recollection of the marrying of the wine to the gloriousness of the summer.

i'll have to keep my eyes peeled for nature snippets in books not essentially about nature...

[Sancho]

Hey bounty, I think it’s “again”. I seem to remember us chatting about nautical tales a while back. Pretty sure. Donno. Maybe. Anyway it’s one of the reasons I like this website so much - we have these running conversations that sometimes go on for years. And of course we have Danik to hold the whole thing together.

Pat McManus, it seems to me, was one of those guys from a few of generations ago who just preferred to be outdoors. My grandfather was one of those guys. He could wander for hours, even days, in the north woods and know exactly where he was. But drop him off in a big city and he’d be lost inside of two blocks. (For him Duluth was a big city) He sent me a copy of They Shoot Canoes, Don’t They? I’ve still got it somewhere. The picture on the cover tells the story. There’s a broken-down nag of a canoe, beached, and a man sort of turned away and pointing a pistol at his trusty old ride, intent on putting it out of its misery. It’s the same idea as a famous Bill Maudlin cartoon of Willie or Joe (not sure which) covering his eyes and holding his .45 to the hood of his broken-down Jeep.

Come to think of it, all those guys - Willie, Joe, Maudlin, McManus, my Pop’s Pop, were roughly from the same generation.

I’m going to have to read the Bradbury story. Right now I’m reading Agatha Christie’s Death On The Nile. I’ve yet to find any nature writing in this murder mystery.

[bounty]

ive never seen it in print but supposedly one of the fathers of modern sociology (marx, weber or Durkheim) said "mankinds greatest problem is his distance from nature."

I just started reading pushkin (prose not poetry) and "the girl who played with fire." I don't think they'll be much nature writing in those either. im also in a ted Williams biography and although hunting and fishing were huge pastimes of his, the author doesn't really include Williams' reflections on being out in nature. now that I say that though, there might have been a comment on his liking the solitude.

parts of "dandelion wine" were exquisitely written and very touching. its construction is interesting too. its not written from a continuous story perspective. its almost like a collection of short stories that are related to each other by virtue of time, location and recurring characters.

if you end up liking "death on the nile" Sancho, let me recommend "murder on the orient express" to you, and then go watch both recent movies with Kenneth Branagh playing Poirot. I think he does an excellent job and the movies are really good.

I love Poirot. for years ive been trying to locate a manuscript called "the Belgian at baker street; did hercule Poirot meet sherlock holmes?" by rafe McGregor.

[bounty]

accidently posted twice...

hmmm, how to delete a post?

[Danik 2016]

Hey, guys!
Just chiming in for a Christmas greeting! Welcome back Sancho and thanks for your friendly reference. Reading currently two very urban books, "The return of the Caravels" by Portuguese author António Lobo Antunes and "Tomb of Sand" by Geetanjaly Shree. I´m keeping the eyes skinned for interesting nature passages!

[Sancho]

Indeed, Christmas greetings all around! We’ve got a cold snap rolling through western Washington right now so for the next couple of days we’ve actually got some Christmas-like weather here. Makes me a little envious of somebody living south of the equator, Danik.

I’ll check out the movies, Bounty. I like to see how the movie makers interpret a good novel. What they decide to emphasize is almost never what I found compelling in the book, but it makes me look at the book in a different way. That said, Stand By Me was a very close rendering of The Body, I thought.

So here’s a nature-writing snippet from a recent book that was also made into a movie. Michael Punke’s The Revenant. What could be more natural-worldy than an impending grizzly bear attack?


He saw the cubs before he saw the sow. There was a pair, and they tumbled toward him, bawling like playful dogs. The cubs had been dropped in the spring, and at five months weighed a hundred pounds each. They nipped at each other as they bore down on Glass, and for the briefest of instants the scene had a near comic quality. Transfixed by the whirling motion of the cubs, Glass had not raised his glance to the far end of the clearing, fifty yards away. Nor had he yet to calculate the certain implication of their presence.

Suddenly he knew. A hollowness seized his stomach half an instant before the first rumbling growl crossed the clearing. The cubs skidded to an immediate stop, not ten feet in front of Glass. Ignoring the cubs now, Glass peered toward the brush line across the clearing.

He heard her size before he saw it. Not just the crack of the thick underbrush that the sow moved aside like short grass, but the growl itself, a sound deep like thunder or a falling tree, a bass that could emanate only through connection with some great mass.

The growl crescendoed as she stepped into the clearing, black eyes staring at Glass, head low to the ground as she as she processed the foreign scent, a scent now mingling with that of her cubs. She faced him head-on, her body coiled and taut like the heavy spring on a buckboard. Glass marveled at the animal’s utter muscularity, thick stumps of her forelegs folding into massive shoulders, and above all the silvery hump that identified her as a grizzly.

I gotta tell ya, and I know it’s unnatural, but when I read a scene like this, I’m almost always pulling for the animal — give him hell mama bear! Of course if mama bear would’ve eaten Hugh Glass on page 23 there wouldn’t have been much else to talk about for the next 200 pages or so.

[Danik 2016]

Well, it seems that Hugh Glass escaped from Mama Bear, I hope Mama Bear also escaped from Hugh Glass.

A Happy Christmas for you and yours, Sancho and Bounty. Here in S Paulo we are having a lovely "winter" day, 19º now. Brazilians are asking what happened to summer this year. It`s scheduled for February it seems.

[Sancho]

19 degrees sounds pretty nice, Danik. We hit 19 degrees here too, only it was on the Fahrenheit scale, which isn’t really all that cold for someone in Minneapolis but we don’t see it all that often here.

The thing about an impending grizzly attack in literature is that it usually leads to an actual grizzly attack:


The grizzly dropped to all fours and was on him. Glass rolled into a ball, desperate to protect his face and chest. She bit into the back of his neck and lifted him off the ground, shaking him so hard that Glass wondered if his spine might snap. He felt the crunch of her teeth striking the bone of his shoulder blade. Claws raked repeatedly through the flesh of his back and scalp. He screamed in agony. She dropped him, then sank her teeth deep into his thigh and shook him again, lifting him and throwing him to the ground with such force that he lay stunned—conscious, but unable to resist any further.

From Michael Punke’s The Revenant

Go mama bear go! — (El Sancho’s unnecessary comment.) Of course I’m saying that from the perspective of someone living at time when humans have killed almost all the wild animals in the mountain west. The book is set in 1823-24, a time when our species and the grizzly bear were on a more equal footing for survival.

Anyway I liked the writer’s choice of pronouns - mama bear is a “she” not an “it”.

The bear attack scene at the beginning of The Revenant reminded me of newspaper stories I’d read about bear attacks. Back in the 80s I lived in Fairbanks Alaska and about once a year we’d get a good bear attack story in the local paper, The Daily New-Miner. The story was usually accompanied by a photo of the survivor (if there was a survivor). He be sitting in his hospital bed with his head shaved and a bunch of sutures on his face and scalp, an eye and some teeth missing, and a great big smile on his face because, you know, he was alive. One descriptor almost all the bear-attack survivors used was — LOUD. Evidently a bear attack is noisy. Not just the growling but the sound of the bear’s teeth/claws raking across the victim’s scalp/skull is evidently quite noisy.

A note about my use of pronouns: the person in the bear-attack stories in The Daily News-Miner was almost always a “he”. Women have more sense than to put themselves in that situation. And that reminds me of a few years later when I was living in North Georgia. One year we had a rash Copperhead bites in my area. A copperhead is a mildly venomous snake. The local hospital reported that most women tended to get bitten on their feet or ankles while most men tended to get bitten on their hands or face. Makes sense. “Hey, Bubba, hold my beer and watch this…”

[bounty]

thank you danik, and to you.

its been so long since ive read either of those two books Sancho that I couldn't make a book to movie comparison. they are by far Christie's most famous stories and I think each of them has been made into movies at least 2-3 times. just yesterday "who is hercule Poirot" was an answer on jeopardy and the reference was to someone who played him back in a 1978 version. ken Jennings, the host, remarked on what a great job he had done and what a good adaptation it was.

if you watch the movies id enjoy hearing your reaction. i thought Murder on the Orient Express was the slightly better of the two. although some of that might have come from my having a hard time seeing Gal Gadot as anything other than Wonder Woman.

the current "bomb cyclone" we're facing here in the states and this category is reminding me of jack London's To Build a Fire. the temperatures were more extreme in the story than what's going on but nevertheless...

i am a big fan of survival literature. with the notable exception of zombies, which can occur anywhere, a lot of survival stories occur in natural settings---man alone in the wilderness, man lost at sea, man against the elements on a mountain, etc.

[Sancho]

If you haven’t read it already, bounty, you might like Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales. I’ll try not to butcher this too badly because it’s been a while since I read it, but it’s one of those books l think about a lot. It’s not a single survival tale but bunch of, more or less, case studies. The full title is Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why. In the book Gonzales tries to figure out what it is about the 10 percent or so of people who manage to stay alive when thrown into a survival situation - lost in the woods, car slides into a deep ravine, falls to the bottom of a crevasse, plane crashes in the Andes, stuff like that. Anyway aside from needing a lot of luck, it seems the survivors share a few personality traits and more importantly have the rare ability to see the situation for what it is rather than to try to shape the situation into something they’re familiar with.

A couple of other takeaways I remember are: when lost in the woods, little kids statistically have a better chance of survival than adolescents. A 4 or 5 year-old will tend to hunker down and conserve energy and warmth while an adolescent will tend to travel and usually get into more trouble. If you’re looking for a little kid who’s lost in the forest, check the hollowed out tree stumps. Farm kids and city kids do better than suburban kids in survival situations, farm kids because they have certain knowledge about how the natural world works, and city kids because they are imbued with a sense of wariness from a young age. Suburban kids were toast - too sheltered.

It seems Gonzales has had a fascination with survival skills from a young age. He grew up in awe of his father. In the book he tells the story of how his father survived being shot down over Germany during WWII. The senior Gonzales was a B-17 pilot in the 8th Air Force and was leading a mission over Nazi Germany when his wing was shot off by a German 88. He commanded “Bail Out” to the crew but then lost consciousness as the plane spun in. He woke up in the wreckage with massive injuries and a not-too-pleased German farmer pointing a pistol at his head. His dad is a member of a very small club of World War Two Aviators who fell to the earth without a parachute and survived. At any rate his father’s story is well worth the price of the book.

[bounty]

I appreciate that recommendation Sancho, thank you. I belong to an online book swap club and just entered it into my wishlist. id also like to take a trip this summer up to buffalo to a huge used book sale there and i'll keep my eyes peeled for it.

what you've written makes it a variant to viktor frankl trying to figure out why some concentration camp prisoners survived and why some died. in the end he seemed to rely a lot on a sentiment he must have gotten from Nietzsche, "he who has a reason why can bear any how." and I embarrassingly left off "holocaust literature" from my previous survival post.

plane crash in the andes---that's Alive by piers paul read! compelling story with lots of moral controversy similar to the donner party one. they had to eat their dead comrades in order to survive. good movie version of the story too. I think that's called Survive.

now im reminded of the true story that inspired Moby Dick (which sucks and is one of the worst all time books ever!), In the Heart of the Sea: the Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex, by Stanley Philbrick, that's a great read also.

by the way---are you a football and/or seattle seahawks fan?

[Sancho]

Football is a sport I could never warm up to. You see, I went to The Univ of Texas, and at that time their gridiron strategy was - run to the left, run to the right, run up the middle, punt. So I decided to not waste any more time on football. It gives me more time to read. Baseball by contrast … now there’s a kingly sport. I like the pace of the game. You can read a book at a baseball game (although maybe not if you’re sitting down the third-case line). I like the ethos, the pathos, the logos of Baseball. I like the mythos. I like that it’s played in the right season. Baseball is played by gentlemen as well as by little kids, played in ball parks as well as on sandlots (“you’re killing me, Smalls”). I’m a fan of the game but not so much a fan of any particular team. That said The M’s had a pretty good year. During the division playoffs I thought the perfect Series matchup would’ve been the The Mariners and The Padres.

The book fair in Buffalo sounds awesome. That’s my kind of event - a bunch of book lovers stumbling around, digging through piles of used books, bumping into each other, finding hidden gems. I can spend hours in Powell’s in Portland, or for that matter Strand Books in Manhattan, or John R King’s in Detroit, or Ken Sander’s in Salt Lake City. Pretty much any town I visit will have a good used book store. I found a first edition copy of The Monkey Wrench Gang at a no-name book store in Billings Montana.

You know, I think I’ve read all those books you mentioned. I really like Nathaniel Philbrick’s style. I can burn through his books. One by him I enjoyed was The Last Stand. It was all about Custer, Sitting Bull, and the battle at The Little Bighorn. I read it in parallel with S.C. Gwynne’s Empire Of The Summer Moon. Philbrick’s book was about the north plains Indians and Gwynne’s book was about the south plains Indians, the Lakota Sioux and the Comanches.

[bounty]

I don't think there is a time when The Sandlot is on tv that I don't watch it. it's one of my all time favorites.

apart from how wonderfully, nostalgically moving the whole of the movie is, I think the scene where squints kisses wendy peffercorn is one of the funniest scenes ever.

"I've been coming here every summer of my adult life, and every summer there she is oiling and lotioning, lotioning and oiling. I can't take it anymore!"

there was a credit card commercial some years ago (mastercard or visa, I forget which) that featured frank Sinatra's Summer Wind, it seemed to capture the scene and the sport perfectly. I love baseball history and ive read at least one of the biographies of most of the biggies. im slowly enjoying ted Williams right now.

there is a lot of good baseball writing out there, both fiction and non-fiction (and movies too!). have you read some? doris kearns Goodwin's Wait til' Next Year, while not strictly about her relationship with her father and the Brooklyn dodgers, its a lot about that, and its one of the best written books ive read.

have you ever heard the comedy bit by George carlin where he compares baseball and football?

have attached a photo for you.

the sale in buffalo is by the AAUW. its a scholarship organization for women at the college level. book sales seem to be one of their primary methods of fund raising. they have sales all around the country. ive only been to two, one at penn state that had about 250,000 books and another in ann arbor that had about 75,000. the one in buffalo advertises itself as having 125,000. they usually have bag sales on the last day.

I have that custer book by Philbrick. maybe i'll pick it up after im through with ted Williams...

[Sancho]

Ha! I do remember that Carlin bit. In fact I may have been channeling it when I did my comparison.

Hmmm, baseball books. I’ve gotten some good recommendations from folks on this website. Aunt Shecky is a baseball fan. She pointed me towards a collection of articles by Roger Angell She also recommended the other Roger (Kahn) and his book - The Boys Of Summer. That is a book I enjoyed immensely. It’s all about the Dodgers, Brooklyn and L.A., but mostly Brooklyn. It’s a lot better than I made it sound. Somebody, I forget who, turned me on to Leonard Koppett’s A Thinking Fan’s Guide to Baseball. Koppett does a deep dive into the technical aspects of the game.

Here’s two more-recent books I’ve read: The Soul Of Baseball, by Joe Posnanski, and Ty Cobb, A Terrible Beauty, by Charles Leerhsen. The Soul Of Baseball is all about Buck O’Neil, who played for the Kansas City Monarchs and then scouted and managed at various MLB teams well into his 70s. The Ty Cobb book tries to go back and undo the hatchet job Al Stump did on Cobb towards the end of Cobb’s life. These two books intersect in a weird sort of way. Deserved or not Cobb had a reputation as a racist and as a bit of an A-hole. He was from the South and he did occasionally slide into the base with spikes up, but hey, it was a different time. Cobb was also someone who openly acknowledged the talent of black players. Cobb even played exhibition games with players from the Negro leagues. A true racist wouldn’t have done neither. Leerhsen goes into all this in his book. In the Soul of Baseball book, O’Neil at one point goes to the funeral for Ted “Double Duty” Radcliffe and delivers the eulogy. Radcliffe had played in the Negro leagues as a catcher and a pitcher, hence the nickname “Double Duty”. In the eulogy Buck O’Neil tells the story of one of those exhibition games. Cobb was trying to steal a base and Radcliffe, as catcher, threw him out. Things were looking tense until, as Cobb recalled, he saw that Radcliffe had written on his chest protector — “Thou Shalt Not Steal.”

Okay, one more. Catcher In The Wry, by Bob Uecker. It’s kind of a sleeper in the canon of baseball literature, but Christ did I laugh while reading this book. Never a dull moment in the dugout with Uke, eh?

By the way, bounty, I also laughed out loud at the Abbot and Costello pic.

[bounty]

holy cow Sancho, that was me ~6 yrs ago that recommended koppett. I just went back and hunted up the old post.

i loved uecker's book! and i thought he was great in Major League. on that note, another good baseball movie, especially if you like Jessica biel, Summer Catch.

i appreciate those recommendations. i'll add them to my wishlist on the swap club im in. i can suggest a few more to you, one especially if you like reading about ty cobb. Ty and the Babe by tom Stanton. their careers overlapped a bit but this book is more about their intertwined lives after baseball, most notably in a charity (if i remember rightly) best of three golf match. you might also like For love of the game by Michael shaara. and George will has a couple worth mentioning, bunts! and men at work.

ive got a large handful of stuff i haven't read yet. one of the most compelling title wise is fathers playing catch with their sons. is there any other way that Field of Dreams could have ended? its interesting to note too in Guardians of the Galaxy 2 when peter quill meets his father, and he starts to learn how to exercise his new found powers, he makes a ball and they play catch with each other.

haven't read the natural yet, and i have some old zane grey baseball stories that i should give a shot to also.

if you liked the boys of summer i would say wait till next year is a must read for you.

yes, that photo still makes me laugh out loud too.

[Sancho]

That Koppett book is a good one. I still refer to it when I’m trying to suss out why a team or a player made a certain decision and it’s not immediately obvious what they were thinking. And you were right, it wasn’t all that easy to find. I got a well-worn copy of it Powell’s. I’ll be keeping my eyes peeled for the Doris Kearns Goodwin book. I think I saw her not so long ago on Meet the Press. She always sounds like the adult in the room when the politicos get to banging heads.

The Natural is a fine read. I wished I’d’a read it before watching the movie. Other than a basic outline, the book and the movie bear little resemblance. The Roy Hobbs character is totally different. I went through the first part of the book picturing Robert Redford as Roy Hobbs, but then once I got a clue I started picturing John Rocker instead.

[bounty]

another one just popped into my head Sancho, Praying for Gil Hodges by Oliphant. the title genesis is the author was a boy in catholic school in brooklyn, the dodgers were in the world series against the yankees and there was news that hodges was sick. an announcement came over the school speakers during asking for prayer.

tell you what---it might be awhile because The girl who played with fire is pretty long, but when im through with that, i'll give the natural a read.

meanwhile, I feel bad for distracting you and danik from the intent of the thread and the conversation you were having...

[Sancho]

No worries, bounty, in my humble opinion straying off topic is what life’s all about. Besides I don’t think we really went too far afield. I mean the thread is about nature writing and we were chatting about a book entitled — The Natural. Am I right? At any rate it got me thinking — there’s some great sports writing out there. I ought to start a new thread…

[Danik 2016]

Bounty, my conversation above with Sancho happened many months ago. In fact I was trying to comment books I hadn´t read and this limits somewhat a conversation about books. I think it great that you have so many books in common.

[Sancho]

This one is about the joys of sleeping out in the open. It’s from Cheryl Strayed’s book about solo hiking the Pacific Crest Trail, Wild. The day before this scene she’d hiked over twenty miles on the hot dry Modoc Plateau in Northern California. The water tank she’d planned to use as a resupply was dry, but she’d managed to find a boggy reservoir to rehydrate. Then she’d fallen asleep, exhausted:



I awoke two hours later with the vaguely pleasant sensation that tiny cool hands were gently patting me. They were on my bare legs and arms and face and in my hair, on my feet and throat and hands. I could feel their cool weight through my T-shirt on my chest and belly. “Hmm,” I moaned turning slightly before I opened my eyes and a series of facts came to me in slow motion.

There was the fact fact of the moon and the fact that I was sleeping out in the open on my tarp.

There was the fact that I had woken because it seemed like small cool hands were gently patting me and the fact that small cool hands were gently patting me.

And then there was the final fact of all, which which was a fact more monumental than the moon: the fact that those small cool hands were not hands , but hundreds of small cool black frogs.

Small cool slimy black frogs jumping all over me.

Each one the size of a potato chip. They were an amphibious army, a damp smooth-skinned militia, a great web-footed migration, and I was in their path as they hopped, scrambled, leapt, and hurled their tiny, pudgy, bent-legged bodies from the reservoir and onto the scrim of dirt that they no doubt considered their private beach.

[Sancho]

There’s a pretty good article in The New Yorker this weekend about nature writing.

The Problem Of Nature Writing, by Jonathan Franzen:

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-weekend-essay/the-problem-of-nature-writing

If you’ve read his stuff before (I have), you know he’s a bird lover and birds pop up in his writing frequently. In the article he makes a comparison of nature writing to religious writing, specifically The Bible. He says he’s not religious and when he tried to read The Bible as a young man he bogged down in the Psalms. He found Psalms repetitive. Only later, when he became a bird lover, did he realize the joy and nuance a true believer finds in Psalms is somewhat akin to the joy he finds in bird watching. He then reasons that if an evangelical wants to make the Bible interesting to a nonbeliever, it’d be best to stick to the stories and steer clear of Psalms. Similarly for a lover of nature to write something compelling for a casual observer of nature, it’d be better to make it a story than to go into an intricate description.

I just scratched the surface of what he explores in the article, so I put a link to it above. At any rate, he might be onto something — most of the examples of nature writing we’ve quoted in this thread are part of a larger story.

[Danik 2016]

Enjoyed the article, Sancho, specially its humor. It want to make people more conscious of nature particularly birds destruction.

"Almost all nature writing tells some kind of story. A writer ventures out to a lovely local wetland or to a pristine forest, experiences the beauty of it, perceives a difference in the way time passes, feels connected to a deeper history or a larger web of life, continues down the trail, sees an eagle, hears a loon: this is, technically, a narrative. If the writer then breaks a leg or is menaced by a grizzly bear with cubs, it may even turn into an interesting story. More typically, though, the narrative remains little more than a formality, an opportunity for reflection and description. A writer who’s moved to joy by nature, and who hopes to spread the joy to others, understandably wishes to convey the particulars of what incited it."

[tailor STATELY]

Agree with the premise of the article... Lol, Psalms !

Ta ! (short for tarradiddle),
tailor

[Sancho]

He’s got a point, eh guys?

I read Michael Punke’s The Revenant a while back and in it there were some glorious descriptions of the Rockies, but what I remember is the Grizzly Bear attack on Hugh Glass. Actually even more than the bear attack I remember the maggots eating the dead and putrefied skin around the wounds on Hugh’s back a few weeks after the bear attack.

Then there’s the movie of the same name, starring Leo DiCaprio. I saw the movie before I read the book. And I gotta say, I didn’t even pay attention to the story in the movie. I was just wowed by the cinematography. The nature photography in that film was jaw dropping.

And that sort of gets back to Franzen’s article. He points out that one of the problems of Nature writing is: why read about it when you can go out and enjoy it. Maybe cinema acts a bridge between reading about nature and actually going out into it. Of course you’ll never get the full sensory experience of The Rockies from a film, or from reading, but the upside is there’s very little chance of being eaten by a bear while sitting in a BarcaLounger watching a movie or reading a book.

[tailor STATELY]

re: "maggots eating the dead" reminded me of the movie depiction of "The Northwest Passage"... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northwest_Passage_(film) where a maggoty head spurs madness.

I watched the movie "The Big Year"... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Big_Year#:~:text=The%20Big%20Year%20is%20a,Fow l%20Obsession%20by%20Mark%20Obmascik. some time ago that, though tongue in cheek, opened my eyes to birding beyond my 30-minute perusal of a Roger Tory Peterson book. Did "The Big Year" spur further interest in nature or did the subplots overcome the narrative ? Prolly yes and yes :)

Ta ! (short for tarradiddle),
tailor

[Sancho]

Maggots get a bad rap. I mean, what would we do without them? They are necessary little critters.

Birders seem to lean a tad OCD, eh? But in a good way. I’m going to look for that movie, Tailor.

Speaking of birds, here’s an artful couple of sentences from the the book I’m presently reading (Something Wicked This Way Comes, by Ray Bradbury) Jim and Will are two adventurous boys out on a lark in the middle of the night. They are sneaking over to spy on a traveling carnival.


Jim skimmed like a dark owl after a mouse. Will loped like a weaponless hunter after the owl. They sailed their shadows over October lawns.

It’s a simple but effective simile that gets at both boy’s personalities well and describes the action perfectly.

IMHO owls have got to be some of the coolest creatures on the planet. And we’ve got a bunch of them here in Western Washington, from the Great Gray Owl with its huge noggin and 5 foot wingspan to the Saw Whet Owl that’ll fit in a tea cup. The other night around dusk I heard a couple of Barred Owls calling back and forth to each other. (Hoo-Hoo-HaHoo, Hoo-Hoo-HaHooo.) They have a distinctive Hoot; they’re known as the “Who-cooks-for-you Owl. (Who cooks for you, Who cooks the food.) Anyway I hear these two hooting back and forth and I call the wife out to listen. She digs owls too. So we’re standing there, listening to them, when one of them swoops down our driveway and perches about ten feet above us on the limb of a fir tree. And then gives us a stare-down for about a minute. Freaking awesome. We couldn’t stop talking about it all night. The wife even had to call her mother to tell her about it.

[Danik 2016]

Now that's a cute story, Sancho. The owl probably wanted to make you feel that you were intruding on owl territory.

[Sancho]

Hah. Probably so, Danik, or he was just curious, but not at all threatened by us. When he launched off the tree limb he flew through a very dense forest of fir and cedar trees, also impressive. I mean there’s no straight path through the trees. He was pitching and yawing and banking through the forest with incredible speed and precision. (I say “he”, but I don’t know. Might have been a lady owl.) meanwhile our cat was keeping a low profile.

[bounty]

I just finished a river runs through it by Norman maclean, and thought the ending was worth sharing here:



"then he asked 'after you have finished your true stories sometime, why don't you make up a story and the people to go with it? only then will you understand what happened and why. it is those we live with and love and should know who elude us.'

"now, nearly all those I love and did not understand when I was young are dead, but I still reach out to them...

"in the arctic half-light of the canyon, all existence fades to a being with my soul and memories and the sounds of the big blackfoot river and a four-count rhythm and the hope that a fish will rise.

"eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. the river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. on some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs.

"I am haunted by waters."

[Sancho]

Nice.

I read his book about The Mann Gulch Fire, which was a fast-moving fire near Helena, Montana back in the 40s: Young Men And Fire. It was a bad (deadly) fire but a good read. Along those same lines, last year I read The Big Burn by Timothy Egan, which is about a huge fire in the northwest in 1910. I can also recommend this book.

[Danik 2016]

I just finished a river runs through it by Norman maclean, and thought the ending was worth sharing here:



"then he asked 'after you have finished your true stories sometime, why don't you make up a story and the people to go with it? only then will you understand what happened and why. it is those we live with and love and should know who elude us.'

"now, nearly all those I love and did not understand when I was young are dead, but I still reach out to them...

"in the arctic half-light of the canyon, all existence fades to a being with my soul and memories and the sounds of the big blackfoot river and a four-count rhythm and the hope that a fish will rise.

"eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. the river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. on some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs.

"I am haunted by waters."

Don't know the author but what a beautiful poetical ending, bounty!

[bounty]

i have two editions of the book, which is actually pretty short, and each edition has a few different subsequent short stories that make up the rest of the book. mayyyyyyybe i'll read some more...

[Sancho]

Here’s one from Ridgeline by Michael Punke. Crazy Horse, one of the main characters and also a real historical figure, has been tracking a small herd of buffalo in the Powder River Valley. He watches wolves working together to separate young or weak buffalo from the herd and then he notices a fox close by:



Suddenly Crazy Horse saw the fox’s quarry. Fifty feet from the fox, a female running bird ran into open ground. Her coloring was unmistakable, streaks of rusty brown like war paint on a white body, and she propelled herself with sporadic, furious bursts on long, skinny legs. Crazy Horse knew that the running bird nested on the ground, and he suspected that the fox would prefer the contents of the nest—it must be nearby—to a bird that might take flight at any moment.

Then he noticed that the bird held one wing in an unnatural position, dragging it clumsily behind her as she ran. The fox seemed to realize the opportunity. It ducked low and began to pursue, hugging the ground and moving serpentine through the brush.

For a distance of almost a hundred yards the running bird attempted to flee, dragging her broken wing as she scurried through the brush, the fox closer and closer until it was only a few yards away, closing in for the kill—when abruptly the bird took flight.

The fox actually took a step back as if startled, resting on its haunches as it watched the running bird fly away. Crazy Horse tracked the bird as it flew a wide circle, ultimately returning almost exactly to her starting point, no doubt nearby to where her nest lay.

Far away now, the fox took a look around and then set off in a new direction, leaving the running bird and her nest behind.

Crazy Horse smiled.

Have you guys ever seen a bird feign injury? Also I don’t want to ruin the story but I think Crazy Horse is having an epiphany about how he should fight the army.

[Danik 2016]

Wonderfull!

[bounty]

i have never seen that, but I have heard of it before.

[Sancho]

Okay one more from Demon Copperhead then I’ll move on. Towards the end of the book Demon has hiked up a trail to spot where a number of significant events happened. He’s in a reflective mood and his senses seem to be heightened. In his words:


I sat and watched little jenny wrens hopping along the water’s edge pecking up bugs, ticking their heads side to side like wind-up toys. I heard a tom turkey up in the woods doing that bad-boy gobble thing the hens cannot resist. I saw a hoot owl. It was hiding, all the same colors as tree bark, but outed by a mob of loud crows that had their grudge against it. Probably something to do with eating their babies.

[Danik 2016]

Nature writing to be sure. A predatory world, probably not so different from the human one.

[Sancho]

Exactly, Danik. I think that’s the point. Life can be brutal for the young in nature as well as in an enlightened society.

[Danik 2016]

I can only agree, with small children being shot by mistake.

[Sancho]

This is from Black Cherry Blues, by John Lee Burke. I thought this was an artful paragraph. It could’ve gone in the sports thread, but I already put one there today, so I’m putting it here. Dave is fly fishing for rainbows in a cold Montana stream. It made me want to go back and reread Norman McClean A River Runs Through It.


I false-cast in a figure eight above my head, laid out the line upstream on the riffle, and watched the fly swirl through the eddies and around the boulders toward me. I picked it up, false-cast again, drying it in the air with a whistling sound inches from my ear, and dropped it just beyond a barkless, sun-bleached cottonwood that beavers had toppled into the stream. The riffle made a lip of dirty foam around the end of the log, and just as my leader swung around it and coursed across the top of a deep pool, I saw a rainbow rise from the bottom like an iridescent bubble released from the pebble-and-silt bed and snap my renegade down in a spray of silvery light.

[hellsapoppin]

Quote Originally Posted by Sancho
... In the Soul of Baseball book, O’Neil at one point goes to the funeral for Ted “Double Duty” Radcliffe and delivers the eulogy. Radcliffe had played in the Negro leagues as a catcher and a pitcher, hence the nickname “Double Duty”. In the eulogy Buck O’Neil tells the story of one of those exhibition games. Cobb was trying to steal a base and Radcliffe, as catcher, threw him out. Things were looking tense until, as Cobb recalled, he saw that Radcliffe had written on his chest protector — “Thou Shalt Not Steal.”

Okay, one more. Catcher In The Wry, by Bob Uecker. It’s kind of a sleeper in the canon of baseball literature, but Christ did I laugh while reading this book. Never a dull moment in the dugout with Uke, eh?

By the way, bounty, I also laughed out loud at the Abbot and Costello pic.



"Double Duty" Radcliffe ~ I have two autographs of him. Met him twice (once in Chicago's Comiskey Park & another time in St Paul's MLK Center) and what a genuine nice guy he was!

Bob Uecker ~ I used to have his baseball card. He sure made baseball radio broadcasts into much fun.

Abbott & Costello ~ Who's on first? One of my all time fave comedy skits.