Dreaming of the Arctic and Africa

On Fridays My Reading Road Map will go outdoors.  We will visit far away places or nearby gardens. We will investigate the natural world.  I found two books in the stacks Wednesday that shout "faraway places" so I want to give them a mention today.

Arctic Dreams

The first book is "Arctic Dreams:  Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape" by Barry Lopez, a philosophical nature writer who lives nearby in the Cascade foothills of western Oregon.  Lopez won the 1986 National Book Award for Nonfiction for this book.

My copy is a well-used 1986 Scribner's large paperback, and a whopping 464 pages.  I am on page 313, so on the home stretch to the finish.  I have started this book and put it down several times over the years.  For some reason it was never the right time.  Now I know to read it is a privilege and this is why.

Barry Lopez writes about Arctic land and seascapes, the creatures who populate them, and the history of Western exploration and exploitation of them with a quiet contemplative voice. Maybe I needed to be quiet to read it.

Here is a small sample from the preface.  Lopez is writing about a summer evening walk through the tundra in the western Brooks Range of Alaska.

“…it was on that evening that I went on a walk for the first time among the tundra birds.  They all build their nests on the ground, so their vulnerability is extreme.  I gazed down at a single horned lark no bigger than my fist.  She stared back resolute as iron.  As I approached, golden plovers abandoned their nests in hysterical ploys, artfully feigning a broken wing to distract me from the woven grass cups that couched their pale, darkly speckled eggs.  Their eggs glowed with a soft, pure light, like the window light in a Vermeer painting…I took to bowing on these evening walks.  I would bow slightly with my hands in my pockets, toward the birds and the evidence of life in their nests—because of their fecundity, unexpected in this remote region, and because of the serene arctic light that came down over the land like breath, like breathing.”

He "took to bowing" to the birds.  The profoundness of this has stayed with me throughout this book.  I will never forget the quiet reverence of those words.

Soon we will return to the Arctic.  We will talk about musk oxen and polar bears, narwhals and ring seals.  We will discuss ice and northern lights, the Thule people and ancient willow and birch forests so short one can walk over the top of them.  We will also think about this artwork by Frederic Edwin Church.

Finally, the chapter I am reading now is titled "The Intent of Monks".  Quietness indeed.

Mountains of the Moon

The second book from Wednesday's stacks is "Mountains of the Moon:  An Expedition to the Equatorial Mountains of Africa." by Patrick M. Synge.  Another book I have had for decades, in this case still unread.

As you see in the picture, this book came from Fermin Lasuen High School library in San Pedro, California.  It is one of my original 3,000 volume library and is considered an "ex-library" book to collectors.  These are looked down upon as much as Book Club editions in that world.  Mine is a third edition, printed in London in 1938.  It is badly damaged but contains two beautiful "coloured plates" one of which you can see in the picture, "The Lake of Death", Seventh Nyamgasani Lake.  There are 91 "collotype plate" illustrations and two maps, one a pull-out folding map.

Right now all I know about this book is the physical description I have shared with you.  From a book review on Goodreads:

“In 1934, Patrick Synge travelled on an expedition sponsored by the British Museum of Natural History to the Ruwenzori range in East Africa, purported to be the "mountains of the moon" spoken of by Herodotus.  Synge, a botanist, was immediately enchanted by the place. His book is, in large part, an enthusiastic and good-natured account of the things that most impressed him. Being a botanist, his most vivid writing concerns plants, but I must say that seldom have I read more captivating descriptions of local scenery, flora, and fauna.”

We will return to the "Mountains of the Moon" again, I promise.