The nature of Barton, and the world beyond

Hoagland on Nature — Essays by Edward Hoagland; published by The Lyons Press, Guilford, Connecticut, 2003; 498 pages; hardcover; $27.95

Reviewed by Joseph Gresser

Michel de Montaigne is widely credited with the invention of the essay. The form takes its name from essai, an Old French word meaning to judge or try, as in a courtroom.

Montaigne used the essay as a kind of lens through which he examined human behavior.  His observations ranged across history — he had an exceptional knowledge of classical antiquity — and geography. 

At its core, though, Montaigne’s instrument was best suited for self-scrutiny.  This he acknowledged in an opening note to the reader.

“Here, drawn from life, you will read of my defects and my native form so far as respect for social convention allows:  for had I found myself among those peoples who are said still to live under the sweet liberty of Nature’s primal laws, I can assure you that I would most willingly have portrayed myself whole, and wholly naked.”

Over the succeeding centuries the form pioneered by Montaigne has become one of the staples, at times one of the clichés, of western literature. Writers with less courage than their great progenitor often have used the outward aspect of the essay without risking the personal revelation that is its true purpose.

The world Edward Hoagland inhabits is far from being sweetly ruled by Nature’s laws, but it does permit the kind of self exposure barred to Montaigne but embraced by Mr. Hoagland.

The present volume, Hoagland on Nature, is a retrospective of essays written over 35 years.  In Mr. Hoagland’s eyes nature emphatically includes human beings.  When Mr. Hoagland investigates bears, for example, he runs with hunters over parts of Glover now lost to the Interstate highway. He glories in the company of a astonishingly skillful trapper who tracks and hopes to save the vanishing red wolves of Texas. 

Mr. Hoagland is passionate about the natural world, and has spent much time out of doors, but after encountering woodsmen with skills that would have been notable at any time in human history he is very willing to acknowledge his limitations.

The animals that seem to interest Mr. Hoagland most are high-order predators:  lions, tigers, wolves, and bears.  These creatures, though, are so dependent on their environment that a discussion of one is an examination of all.

Mr. Hoagland is a champion of abundance.  Almost every essay has a celebratory passage such as this one, from “Lament the Red Wolf”:

“Here in littoral Texas the pioneers found an old-growth forest of large sweet gums, elms, loblolly and longleaf pines, hackberry trees and beech and oak.  Wild violets and blackberries grew where the trees gave out, and then the prairie extended toward the sea: bluestem bunch grasses, Indian grass, gama grass and switch grass, with bluebells and milkweed spreading blue and white during the spring and buttercups and Indian pinks under these, the terrain broken by occasional sand knolls covered with yaupon and myrtle brush where the wolves denned and hid out.  Next came a marsh of spunkweed, cattails, cutgrass and the same spartina that the colonists on the Atlantic shore had fed their livestock.  A bayshore ridge fronted the Gulf, beyond which the wolves and pioneers and Indians crabbed and beachcombed, collecting stunned redfish by the wagonload after a storm.  Wagonloads of oysters, too; and in the bayous mullet seethed among gar, catfish and bullheads.”

In “Behold Now Behemoth” Mr.  Hoagland implies the origin of part of his style when he quotes extended passages from the King James Bible, many of which celebrate the variety of creation in a similar manner.

His delight in the world is perfectly mirrored in his delight in language. “Wolf pups make a frothy ribbon of sound like fat bubbling,” he writes, “a shiny, witchy, fluttery yapping, while the adults siren less excitably, without those tremulous, flexible yips, although they sometimes do break pitch into a yodel.”

Mr. Hoagland recognizes that the variety of creation has been hugely reduced, and that in great part during his lifetime.  In many of the pieces he contemplates that inescapable tragedy from many aspects.

On a visit to India he considers a society that accepts the presence of leopards, tigers and elephants knowing that the price of their presence will be paid in human lives.  Trips to the Okefenokee Swamp and the back country of Wyoming suggest that wilderness cannot exist unless people are willing to accept that visits to these regions must be restricted and monitored.

Only in one of the latest pieces, a tribute to his late friend Edward Abbey, does Mr. Hoagland hint at the rage he feels at his species’ destructive dominion over the Earth and its other inhabitants.

Mr. Hoagland has traveled throughout the globe, but his center, and the center of this book, is here in Barton. 

More time is spent considering the local pleasures of his summer house near Wheeler Mountain than any of the more glorious destinations he has seen, courtesy of generous magazine editors.

Here he notices the small changes that have taken place over his three and a half decades of residence —  the return of moose, turkeys and peregrine falcons — the changing human population.

In his writing about nature, Mr. Hoagland generously reveals himself as part of the larger world.  In his writing about the intimacies of domestic life in a small Vermont town, he comes close to realizing Montaigne’s vision of the essayist offering himself to the world naked and entire.