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New Wilderness Voices: Collected Essays from the Waterman Fund Contest
Guy and Laura Waterman spent a lifetime reflecting on and writing about the mountains of the Northeast. The Waterman Fund seeks to further their legacy of stewardship through an annual essay contest that celebrates and explores issues of wilderness, wildness, and humanity. Since 2008, the Waterman Fund has partnered with the journal Appalachia in seeking out new and emerging voices on these subjects, and in publishing the winning essay in the journal. Part of the contest’s mission is to find and support such emerging writers, and a number of them have gone on to publish other work in Appalachia or their own books. The contest has succeeded admirably in fulfilling its mission: new writers have brought fresh perspectives to these timeless issues of wilderness and wildness. In New Wilderness Voices these winning essays are collected for the first time, along with the best runners-up. Together, they make up an important and celebratory addition to the growing body of environmental literature, and shed new light on our wild spaces.
- GenresNonfictionEssaysNature
219 pages, Kindle Edition
Published July 4, 2017
16 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
February 14, 2019
This collection of essays describes the many reasons individuals go to the mountains: seeking respite or change, love of the outdoors and exercise, adventure, testing one's limits, and even utilitarian reasons like building or maintaining trails, upkeep of huts and outhouses, guiding newbies, etc.
There is a sameness in reading 21 essays on the same topic. But a few especially appealed to me:
Kemeza's account of being sick , alone and freezing in a hut, wondering why he got himself into this situation. Wildness, he says, "has a way of attacking our ideas about wildness--about its healing powers, about its place as a locus of easily accessible meaning. And this may be the final and greatest gift of mountain peaks. They remind us that the story isn't about us." Mountains ..."make tangible to us the immense forces which ground and surround all creation. Including us and remind us that the world will be what it will be---not what we want it to be...it must be taken as it is--darkness, cold, loneliness, and all. It was, and is sufficient. More than sufficient.. . I learned that winter to be comfortable with that darkness: the wilderness that surpasses human understanding, and which defies our aspirations for control."
And Loeb's thoughts on wildness and danger--the attraction of testing limits. "America's understanding of wilderness is largely a history of how we have valued and symbolized wild places but, in the recent evolution of extreme sports and high adventures, it serves increasingly as a foil for seeing ourselves. . . .Self-imposed challenge uses danger as a tool...without danger we would have nothing to lose, and therefore nothing to gain."
"Our ancestors feared the dangerous wilderness and extolled civilization.. . now we fear domestication. Danger becomes a tool for removing our acquired mental constructs. Paradoxically, it is at crowded places like Tuckerman's Ravine that experts and idiots alike find a suitable degree fo danger to reveal their inner wildness."
And third, Piccirillo's account of getting lost in a familiar part of the woods near his Connecticut home. "I came to realize that my idea of the forest blocked my experience of the forest. And it took getting lost to come to this realization. The wild places near my home no longer fit into the same categories I once placed them in, and they do not exist for my personal well-being, aesthetic tastes, or spiritual aspirations. Now I relate to them not on my terms or on their terms, but somewhere in the middle. Sometimes, the path wanders on to me, and the phenomena burrow into my thoughts and actions. And they remind me of something important I have forgotten."
I like that essays reveal the writer, not just the situation she is in.
One of the pluses for me in this collection is that it put me on to Laura Waterman's book, "Losing the Garden", her account of homesteading in VTwhich was a development of their love of climbing in the Adirondacks, and in the White Mts. The Waterman Fund sponsors the annual essay contest that sponsored the publication of these essays.
There is a sameness in reading 21 essays on the same topic. But a few especially appealed to me:
Kemeza's account of being sick , alone and freezing in a hut, wondering why he got himself into this situation. Wildness, he says, "has a way of attacking our ideas about wildness--about its healing powers, about its place as a locus of easily accessible meaning. And this may be the final and greatest gift of mountain peaks. They remind us that the story isn't about us." Mountains ..."make tangible to us the immense forces which ground and surround all creation. Including us and remind us that the world will be what it will be---not what we want it to be...it must be taken as it is--darkness, cold, loneliness, and all. It was, and is sufficient. More than sufficient.. . I learned that winter to be comfortable with that darkness: the wilderness that surpasses human understanding, and which defies our aspirations for control."
And Loeb's thoughts on wildness and danger--the attraction of testing limits. "America's understanding of wilderness is largely a history of how we have valued and symbolized wild places but, in the recent evolution of extreme sports and high adventures, it serves increasingly as a foil for seeing ourselves. . . .Self-imposed challenge uses danger as a tool...without danger we would have nothing to lose, and therefore nothing to gain."
"Our ancestors feared the dangerous wilderness and extolled civilization.. . now we fear domestication. Danger becomes a tool for removing our acquired mental constructs. Paradoxically, it is at crowded places like Tuckerman's Ravine that experts and idiots alike find a suitable degree fo danger to reveal their inner wildness."
And third, Piccirillo's account of getting lost in a familiar part of the woods near his Connecticut home. "I came to realize that my idea of the forest blocked my experience of the forest. And it took getting lost to come to this realization. The wild places near my home no longer fit into the same categories I once placed them in, and they do not exist for my personal well-being, aesthetic tastes, or spiritual aspirations. Now I relate to them not on my terms or on their terms, but somewhere in the middle. Sometimes, the path wanders on to me, and the phenomena burrow into my thoughts and actions. And they remind me of something important I have forgotten."
I like that essays reveal the writer, not just the situation she is in.
One of the pluses for me in this collection is that it put me on to Laura Waterman's book, "Losing the Garden", her account of homesteading in VTwhich was a development of their love of climbing in the Adirondacks, and in the White Mts. The Waterman Fund sponsors the annual essay contest that sponsored the publication of these essays.
February 13, 2018
The writing here isn't groomed for an audience, it is of the heart and so true unadulterated expression of how wilderness or wildness affects someone.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews