NONFICTION - May 12, 1996

TALKING TO ANGELS: A Life Spent in High Latitudes by Robert Perkins (Beacon: $18; 106 pp.). In the spring of his 19th year, 1968, Perkins had (although he does not name it or explain the reasons for it) an old-fashioned nervous breakdown. He was admitted to McLean Hospital in Boston, a place where Robert Lowell did time and Anne Sexton once taught a poetry class. He was a bewildered young man, getting lost inside paintings, floundering against the backdrop of the Vietnam War and the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King and men walking on the moon tethered to the Apollo 11 by the finest of threads. Life felt precarious. It takes a reader only a few paragraphs, in the first section of his memoir, to realize Perkins’ true sweetness and his straightforward writing from behind the veil conveys the feeling of a trapped soul.

In the next section, Perkins remembers two months he spent alone in the wilderness of the Canadian Northwest Territories, working for the Water Survey, a department of Environment Canada. Here his waiting, watching instincts are put to good and appropriate use, and he much resembles the wolves he observes so closely. “I had given my full attention,” he says of this time, and the reader is left feeling that he found there an environment in which his curiosity, attentiveness and empathy made him strong instead of vulnerable, as they might have in an urban setting.

In the final section, that strength is sorely tested, when Perkins’ beloved wife of one year, Rene, dies of cancer. It is as though a door were slammed in his face. This, the author’s fourth book, is an honest snapshot (perhaps something like the wilderness documentaries Perkins makes for PBS) of what it looks like to live side by side with fear and uncertainty.