El Dorado

The term “nature writing” does writing a disservice, as do such terms as “women’s fiction,” “black literature” and “gay monologues.” It reeks of back-of-the bus sections of bookstores and seminars that peddle a single component of existence--skin color, sexual persuasion, choice of topic--as a foundation for art.

Imagine John Muir responding to a note trolling for participants for a writing workshop. “If you love nature and want to write,” said a leaflet posted to the giant sequoia that would one day become General Sherman, “please come to our open-mike meeting tonight.” The soon-to-be-celebrated wilderness scribe learned to write eloquently about the land and, years later, inspired a special section devoted to nature in that peculiar literary eruption of the late 20th century, the chain bookstore.

Of course, that’s not what happened. Muir did not set out to be a nature writer any more than John Steinbeck set out to write “regional fiction.” Nature writing is good if the writing is good, which means that it is well-crafted and comes from the heart. It is not surprising, then, that the best writing in “Natural State” is by writers who are known simply as writers: Steinbeck, Robert Louis Stevenson, M.F.K. Fisher, Barry Lopez, Edward Abbey, Joan Didion, Wallace Stegner, John McPhee, Mark Twain, Jack London, Mary Austin and Kem Nunn. (It is to the book’s credit that it includes an excerpt from Nunn’s first novel, “Tapping the Source,” which is set in the world of surfing--alas, another back-of-the-bus literary concern--although there is an irony here in that Nunn is now officially elevated a notch or two from “surf novels” to “nature writing.”)

Since all that may be left of nature one day is writing about nature, the work of these fine observers is to be savored and heeded right now, rather than later, lest their pieces become a curious valentine to a lost world. The most powerful selections in this collection are save-the-wilderness broadsides in elegant and artistic camouflage. More than anyone running for office or canvassing door to door, they make an excellent case for abolishing the two-party system, voting Green and banishing those citizens who deride “tree hugging” to a place without trees, without birds, without seasons and without the right to sport inane bumper stickers, such as “I shoot spotted owls.”

For instance, here is Barry Lopez in the magnificent “A Reflection on White Geese”: “I have spent enough time with large predators to know the human predilection to overlook authority and mystery in the lives of small, gregarious animals like the goose, but its qualities are finally as subtle, its way of making a living as admirable and attractive, as the grizzly bear’s.” Wallace Stegner also writes of the inextricable link of creature to creature and of creature to land. In his essay called “Remnants,” he states, “Many local species, including some that the coyote was evolved to prey on, are already fading as my breath fades on our windowpane. In the thirty-two years we have lived in this house in these Coast Range foothills we have watched it happen. Helped it happen.” Echoing this lament is David Darlington, whose essay, “In Condor Country,” is included. “[T]he condor doesn’t strike me as a symbol of extinction so much as a totem for North America itself. It’s because of the coloring, somehow--red, white and black is a morbid heraldry for a once-promising continent,” he writes, “a land that’s been dying since 1492, a place that harbors the exotics of the earth and in doing so drives its native inhabitants into oblivion.”

In her lovely piece about Yosemite, “Trumpets of Light,” Ann Zwinger movingly describes the death of a snowfield, which “goes out with neither a bang nor a whimper--just a tiny liquid tinkling, it requires the soprano of a mosquito.” A delightful treat, as always, is M.F.K. Fisher with her celebration of the unexpected in “Spirits of the Valley”: “There are many pockets of comfort and healing on this planet, and I have touched a few of them, but only once have I been able to stay as long and learn and be told as much as there on the southeast edge of Hemet Valley.” And watching the atmospherics in Napa Valley is Robert Louis Stevenson in “The Sea Fogs”: “Even in its gentlest moods the salt sea travails, moaning among the weeds or lisping on the sand: but that vast fog ocean lay in a trance of silence, nor did the sweet air of the morning tremble with a sound.”

This anthology is studded with passages of equal delight that reflect what is both grand and overwhelming about California: The state is an embarrassment of riches. The sea, the mountains, the desert, the hills and valleys--it’s all here in one epic sweep of real estate and, pondered in the same thought, the picture is overwhelming. One goes from the heights to the depths very quickly, then surfaces, only to perceive another breathtaking vista and then, drowsy with scenery, take a nap.

Just as a traveler can visit many forms of terrain in a relatively brief period of time, so too can the reader of this collection; it is divided into sections devoted to each particular form of landscape. This approach is easy enough. Want to hang out in the desert? Turn to the appropriate page. How about the elements? Turn to the section, “Earth, Wind, Rain and Fire.”

But any state in the union can weigh in with a similar anthology, specific to its characteristics. For Ohio, one imagines a parallel collection divided into sections such as lake, river and forest. For Rhode Island perhaps a rather short although no less heartfelt assortment, much of it having to do with coastline. For Florida, let’s see . . . how about swamp, beach and archipelago? California needs a more sweeping approach, a road map that is beyond the obvious, if the writing that it has spawned is to be memorialized in this fashion.

After all this El Dorado, this land of gold in many forms, land of space and light and last resort, has shaped both individual and national character; it is much more than a buffet of ecosystems and land elevations. Some of the best writing in “Natural State” explores, is rooted in and makes allusion to California as a sum that is even greater than its great big parts. (Again, see Stegner, Steinbeck, Twain, Muir and Austin. Or look at lesser-known scribes such as Hildegarde Flanner, whose 1950 essay, “A Vanishing Land,” about the Altadena foothills, stands as a testament to the California dream, and Joseph LeConte, whose High Sierra chronicle of the 1870s is filled with strangely compelling meat reveries, evoking a time when each man not only hunted but also roasted his own mutton along the trail.) If this material had been linked by an underlying theme, some subterranean thread, the journey through California’s natural wonders would have been more satisfying and made more sense.

But no matter: The good thing about “Natural State” is rediscovering the eloquence of California by way of writers who have risen to the challenge. California rules, and here’s why. As Mark Twain explains in “Roughing It”: “Three months of camp life on Lake Tahoe would restore an Egyptian mummy to his pristine vigor and give him an appetite like an alligator. I do not mean the oldest and driest mummies, of course, but the freshest ones.”