Fans of John McPhee won’t blink at taking on his 400-page volume on life in Alaska in the 1970s, but if you’re new to McPhee I’d recommend starting with Basin and Range or In Suspect Terrain.

More solid, focused and compact, both give readers some instant author flavor (Basin and Range, particularly) without the more drawn-out, multi-topical structure of Coming into the Country. That said, if you’re moving through McPhee’s work and ready for it, Country provides some meaty narrative on the contrasts and conflicts between mid-century environmentalism and the disappearing, self-sufficient lives of Alaska’s interior settlers. Despite its age, this is a timeless subject, and gives readers a glance back and where we’ve been – in conservation, sustainable living and the fringes of human-wild interaction – lest we make the mistake of thinking we’re thought pioneers just because the term “green” has suddenly punctured the mainstream in our generation.

Equal parts truth-seeker and soul-seeker, McPhee does right by people like me in Country, passionately supportive of environmental protections and moving steadily toward sustainable, self-sufficient living – but conflicted in the nuanced issues that surround those things. He asks the right questions of himself and the folks he spends these months following, and ultimately comes out on the side of self-sufficiency and independence, which, despite popular assumption, don’t always jive with the goals of environmentalists.

An excerpt:

Through the night, the rain becomes heavier – a long, unremitting spring rain – and in the morning it is a downpour. Michael and I and Minicup make no effort to get up – just lie half asleep under the big dripping spruce as if there were no today. In an important sense, there isn’t, because Michael, coming up the river to fell trees for his new log cabin, discovered that while he brought a chain saw he forgot gasoline. The temperature is less than ten degrees above freezing. The brothers have only one sleeping bag and a lighweight blanket. Michael has spent the night in the blanket. Toward noon, the rain has somewhat diminished. Michael gets up and builds a fire. His first gesture of the day is to make a cup of Sanka and carry it to Minicup, who is awake but has remained in the sleeping bag. “Nights out in a wall tent at sixty below, you just get up in the morning, throw everything into the sled, and move,” Michael remarks. “In two hours, you will be warm.”

For north country lovers, Country is full of McPhee’s well-known brand of geographic storytelling. The Yukon River is the thread with which most of the book is written, and its often complicated story plays out through foggy canoe trips, drives into mine-ravaged country, frigid winter camps, dogsled trips over bone-rearranging tussocks, spectacular wildness and other fixtures of life in the northeast Alaskan bush.

If you’ve already read Coming into the Country and are hungry for more (more north, more history, more geology, more adventure), I’d recommend checking out Murie’s Two in the Far North.

See the rest of the reading list here.

Posted by tee in books, reviews
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Tags: alaska, authors, books, conservation, john mcphee, reading, reviews, travel

I have friends who might be moving to Wyoming, and I want to move there so we can ride bikes through the Wind River range together. I have friends near the Ozarks and I want to move there so we can have hot chocolate around evening campfires together. I have friends in Alaska and I want to move there so we can go on wildlife photo expeditions together. I have friends in Florida and I want to move there so we can have wild family dinners and late-night beach excursions together. I have friends near Chicago and I want to move there so we can collaborate on ideas and have coffee every week downtown together. I have friends in Pennsylvania and I want to move there so we can sit outside all day painting and writing together. I have friends in New England and I want to move there so we can explore all my old haunts and reminisce about the old days together. I have friends in Oklahoma and I want to move there so we can walk and talk for hours and hours together. I have friends in California and I want to move there so we can drive ribbony roads with the windows open and the radio on together. I have friends in Arizona and I want to move there so we can stand on top of table rock and take photographs of sunsets and geek about geology together. I have friends in Oregon and I want to move there so we can enjoy smoky, jazzy music into the wee hours of morning together. I have friends in Washington and I want to move there so we can putter around in boats through the San Juan islands and go on midnight swims together. I have friends in New Mexico and I want to move there so we can enjoy feasts and rain dances and magic together. I have friends in Colorado and I want to move there so we can go climbing and hiking and read great books together. I have friends in New York and I want to move there so we can wander in the throbbing cacophony and pick up our market finds together. I have friends in Georgia and I want to move there so we can walk cobblestone streets and have great conversation together. I have friends in Ohio and I want to move there so we can debate politics over fine wine and talk art and humanities together. I have friends in Texas and I want to move there so we can ride horses across rolling, dusty hills and get muddy in the river together. I have friends in Nevada and I want to stay here so we can commiserate about our kids and stuff ourselves with antipasti and go skiing together.

I could keep going. I was realizing today in a recon exercise of my “haves” that there’s not a state in the US where I don’t have at least one friend I wish I had in my daily life. And while originally frustrated by that, I got it pretty fast how ridiculous that was. As problems go, I’ll take that one.

Posted by tee in de la vida
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Posted by tee in verse, video
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Tags: ben folds, luckiest, music, video

The honeymoon is over. From the skybox of business and innovation, watching Jeff Bezos and his clan build the Amazon empire was pretty fascinating. From the hip (i.e., my wallet), despite that indie booksellers are more fun, more worthy of support, I was hooked. Hey, I’m human. And what’s more, I’m a freelancing human. Feast and famine are my personal revenue cycles. Enough said.

But that relationship has been going sour for more than a year while Amazon has been acting like too much of an ass, with too much hubris and too little sense. Decency issues aside, free market defenses aside, it shows that in a community economy they just don’t get it. They’ve rendered themselves a lumbering, butt-clenching dinosaur. It’s time to cut ties.

I’ve removed all Amazon links from the reading list, which now links only to Powell’s, but even Powell’s is getting big and becoming enough of a clichéd phenomena that it’s getting less interesting. So I’m on the lookout for some great, solid indie book stores that also sell online. If you’ve got any favorites, plant them in comments and let me know why you love them.

In the meantime, I’ll hope that by the time my fiction manuscript is finished (more on that another time), Amazon will have been put in its place, had a change of heart, caught a whiff of itself and decided it better make some changes. Surely my future New York Times Bestseller will need that market share to self-actualize.

Posted by tee in books
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Tags: amazon, book stores, books, booksellers, independent

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Tags: brandi carlile, family, love, music

The world could use more Sidney Fifes.

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The sun in solar maximum is a distorted, twisting ball of violent, disruptive energy, wreaking havoc with its own biorhythm as it pushes directional changes upon itself: magnetic pole reversal. Sunspots appear and often cluster, now – darker, colder, angry places in an otherwise warm, life-giving body. The raw power of a changing sun in solar max is so fierce that it can’t be contained, and for months it pummels its surroundings with blasts of solar winds, solar flares and coronal mass ejections (explosions of plasma and radiation), hurling them out into space. Many directed at Earth.

Those blasts are responsible for some of the most transformative, enigmatic moments of beauty (aurora borealis/australis) and some of the most widespread communications damage (wiping out radio signals across a continent) known to human beings.

And yet that these would occur together makes perfect sense. Evolution occurs when life absorbs impact and interruption in close succession. Think about it.

The sun goes through this cycle every 11 years. Me? Every two or three.

Posted by tee in de la vida
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Tags: astronomy, geomagnetic, philosophy, solar weather