Outward Bound, but Looking Inward

“I have the biases of a literary journalist,” writes David Quammen in this, his eighth book, “working in that great gray zone between newspaper reporting and fiction, engaged every day in trying to make facts not just talk but yodel.”

Readers familiar with Quammen’s “The Song of the Dodo,” a stimulating 1996 study of island biogeography, know that he can make facts yodel. He does again, much of the time, in “Wild Thoughts From Wild Places,” a collection of pieces taken mostly from Outside magazine.

Quammen reveals himself as a patient, inquiring naturalist with a strong respect for history and a streak of the contemporary wilderness jock.

In “Vortex,” the reader finds him in a kayak on the Gallatin River in Montana, where he lives. The river is in flood and moving fast. In the swirling water he hits a “hole” caused by a submerged rock and flips over, gasping to fill his lungs as he goes.

“That, to the best of my recollection, is when I began wondering seriously about the subject of fluid dynamics,” he writes.

So (with the reader left with him in the hole, which refers to the vortex of a whirlpool) Quammen takes us into the worlds of kayaking, hydrodynamics and the Renaissance of Leonardo da Vinci, who studied the movement of water and drew his astoundingly energetic pictures of moving, swirling and engulfing bodies of water. After five pages of disquisition about water dynamics, Quammen returns to his predicament:

“I knew that somewhere, below the surface,” he writes, “this vortex had angular momentum that could nudge me downstream just enough to escape the recirculation.

“Yes. Yes, eventually after an eternal-seeming stretch of seconds, I felt the turbulence subside, as my boat broke free. Out. Floating downstream. A seed on the current. I rolled, rising back into daylight. I breathed.” “Reaction Wood,” a charming piece about the black walnut tree in the backyard of his boyhood home in suburban Cincinnati, moves likewise from the particular to a more general speculation.

Quammen’s tree, he says, became “almost personified to me, a valued companion and mentor. . . . It showed me the possibility of a deep fondness for an individual living creature beyond the usual channels of sentiment.”

From the tree he learns, too, about the destruction of the woods behind his house to make room for a development of more houses.

“Who’s to say that this or that forest,” he asks, “shouldn’t be cleared for a solid, pragmatic purpose suiting one group of people or another? That this or that river shouldn’t be dammed or dewatered or channelized? That this or that species of butterfly or lizard shouldn’t be consigned to extinction?

“We all need to be willing and able to bend. Don’t we?”

But at some point, Quammen says, a person, like a tree creating new cells of wood to stiffen certain branches that a growing boy has trod upon too much, may stiffen too and say, “Enough, I bend this far, no farther.”

That’s what is really at the heart of this collection of essays: how far Homo sapiens should go, dare go, in imposing their will on the natural world.

Should we in suburban America have costly green lawns? Should the Cincinnati Zoo continue to breed its rare and money-making white tigers? Can we preserve the wilderness of a place like Montana if everyone builds cabins there?

And, though it may be hard to think about, is Homo sapiens an “outbreak species,” like lemmings, brown tree snakes and Western tent caterpillars, whose population explodes only to suffer a bust after the boom?

Not all of the essays in “Wild Thoughts From Wild Places” are as cosmic as these questions might make Quammen sound. He gives us a couple about goofy telemark skiing competitions. There is a warm tribute to his friend and mentor in the naturalist and writing business, the late Edward Abbey, and also a fine meditation on stir-fried mountain lion.