Mountain Time: A Field Guide to Astonishment

by Renata Golden

Mountain A Field Guide to Astonishment is an essay collection that explores the inner and outer natures of remarkable human and nonhuman beings. It is a book about paying attention—with the mind and with the heart. The essays confront the ethical and personal challenges Renata Golden faced in a harsh and isolated environment and examine the power of nature to influence her understanding of the human spirit. The lessons she learned on the borders of Arizona, New Mexico, and Mexico jolted her out of her customary way of seeing the world—which is the transformative power of a thin place, where the borders between the sublime and the profane melt away. The essays call attention to the animals that are often shunned—pack rats, rattlesnakes, ants, prairie dogs, and other desert dwellers that some consider better dead than alive. Manyof the animals in these essays are at risk of extinction. The essays honor these animals for the role they play in the wild world and for their unique abilities, such as cooperative societies and complex language skills. By recognizing the animals’ value, Golden gives readers reasons to be moved to save them, if it’s not too late.

Genres: Essays

196 pages, Paperback

Published March 15, 2024

Reviews

[Terry Lawhead · Rating 5 out of 5]

This sentence, “Mountains speak when they’re listened to,” early on in Renata Golden’s new book of essays, “Mountain Time: A Field Guide to Astonishment” grabbed me, held on tight and has led me into more awareness of vital experiences and reflections. The essays in this collection span the vast rich continent of Golden’s life and include her studies of the cultural history of her beloved Chiricahua Mountains and personal encounters with the beauty of nature and, always, honoring the mortality of all life. She is sensitive to premonitions of the future while witnessing and appreciating—with astonishment! Such a sweet emotion to feel--her landscapes and their inhabitants and expresses the vulnerability that is increasingly common to thoughtful members of our species. And yet also eloquently articulating a resilient reasoning inner being that despite everything will allow a person to endure and help others to do so. Golden places memories and references into her writing that have made me repeatedly put the book down to explore my own places and feelings. One story describes her effort to give supplies of life saving food and water to the migrants passing through her countryside and imagining the torturous desert journey they have undertaken. It brought home for me yet another heart breaking understanding and indignation of the circumstances faced by people attempting such impossible travels and of those attempting to help. Another recalls events in “The Little Prince” that remind the reader that what is essential is invisible but, like the prince, one must be ready when things change: Yes, we could all disappear, so much life is disappearing, the ephemeral is fragile, when do we choose to do what is important here and now for our generous sturdy world. Golden is not providing recipes on surviving these times, an apparently large and certainly necessary genre of writing these days but she is revealing for the reader to take to heart her lyrical perceptions of being attentive to the past and potential futures as well as her kin—including mountains— in her days and nights.

[Don Lago · Rating 5 out of 5]

Even for people who live in the desert southwest, there are many unknown landscapes, some without roads or even trails. For readers, Edward Abbey and Terry Tempest Williams and Tony Hillerman and Willa Cather are good chapters, but far from the whole story. In this book Renata Golden takes us to her home in Arizona's Chiricahua Mountains, which has hiding places Geronimo knew well but that still hide plenty of secrets today. Golden has a keen, appreciative eye for natural history and introduces us to some of the wildlife that manages to make the desert a home, some of them unloved, like ants and rattlesnakes and packrats, some you've never heard of. She sees changing eras and ecologies. She has adventures, not to impress anyone with daring-do but to get to know her homeland. She meets some interesting characters along the way, from biologists to ranchers. She puts the landscape in historical perspectives. She has a compassionate heart and confronts honestly some of the dilemmas nature imposes, including her mixed feelings at killing an invasive species to save a native species. Two of these chapters were published in leading literary reviews, Creative Nonfiction and River Teeth, so that tells you she is a fine wordsmith. My favorite line in the book is "Chiricahua night skies, where the heavens are perforated with history disguised as starlight."

[Eduardo Santiago · Rating 5 out of 5]

Exquisite. Holy Posole with Mole and Guacamole, what an astonishing collection. How can someone write about heartbreaking loss, so many forms of it, while leaving the reader feeling cocooned in warmth and love and hope? I think Golden gets it; understands the Big Questions and their pesky Answers that lie just at the edge of our vision. (See Gegenschein in the Glossary and Notes).

Read this book. Read it as soon as you can. Give yourself time and patience, because the first two essays are (sorry) not her best: awkward and clashy, informative but at a cost. Worth reading anyway. After those two, she really gets in stride and WOW. What a heart. What a talent for depicting the natural world, and human foibles. What an ability to show just how easy it would be to do the right thing, and how tragic it is that over and over we choose not to.

Read it. Read the Glossary (Seriously. Consider it required reading). Read the Notes (not quite as required reading). Give some thought to the questions she raises. Then give your copy (or a copy) to someone you love.

[Ellen Morris · Rating 5 out of 5]

A gorgeous set of essays that weave personal history with deeply observed thoughts about the environment.

[Laura Pritchett · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a beautiful collection of essays that deepened my knowledge of the Chiricahuas and life generally!

[Zoë · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting essays yet a little uneven in voice and construction.

[Marianne Jackson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not sure of rating - I want to know if the author digs up an Invasive Plant or if she Kills an Invasive
Animal BEFORE buying the book. Can anyone help? Thank you.