DISCOVERIES

The Way Out

A True Story of Survival

Craig Childs

Little, Brown: 288 pp., $23.95

Here, then, are my New Year’s presents to you: two books about redemption and the triumph of humankind’s good nature.

“Some of us remain in our places,” writes Craig Childs, who has been wandering the Colorado Plateau (sometimes eight months at a stretch) and sending back reports for several decades “while others flee. I am one who remained.” Many of these journeys -- looking for water holes in the desert, looking for the remains of ancient cultures, looking for good reasons to stay alive -- have been taken with friends, who weave in and out of Childs’ magical books. On this trip, into Utah canyons he had never explored, Childs was accompanied by his best friend, Dirk, an ex-cop from Denver. Whereas Childs has always tried to melt seamlessly into the landscape, Dirk has a predator’s instincts. Both are self-confessed adrenaline junkies, men with a “need for an accelerated heart.” Childs’ late father, an alcoholic-mystic-pyromaniac who taught him much of what he knows about this part of the world, is both an object of love and a source of deep anxiety for the writer. Memories of bloody brawls with his father, and Dirk’s stories of his own brutal life on the Denver streets, flow (rush) between sections on navigating this particularly difficult, enigmatic terrain of boulders, sheer cliffs, needles and ledges.

Both men are experienced backpackers; both are pushed to their limits. “Traveling with Dirk,” Childs writes, “is like standing in a public restroom, glancing up and being stung by a curt and grossly relevant comment scrawled on the wall.” They save each other’s lives several times over. (“If it were not for Dirk, I imagine nothing would be left of me but a cautionary tale.”) Dirk reads the landscape for new routes as if he were “playing chess.” They get lost; they find a way out.

“All night I wonder what part of me has blown away,” thinks Childs (in contrast to his friend’s obsession with “order like the timed collision of vehicles”). “Will I wake to find even my soul gone?” Childs’ mind wanders back repeatedly to the old Navajo man, a practitioner of the Protectionway ritual, who gave them permission to walk in these canyons. “If you slip beyond the guard of roads and trails,” he thinks of the ritual’s teachings, “so far past ordinary layers of living that you imagine yourself hopelessly lost, there you will find a way.”

*

The Serpent

of Stars

A Novel

Jean Giono, translated from the

French by Jody Gladding

Achipelago Books:

126 pp., $14 paper

This is the first English translation of a novel that Jean Giono wrote in 1933, when he was 38. It is one of 50 books he wrote (few are available to us; the most famous is “The Man Who Planted Trees”), and it is exquisite, full of the healthy, vital writing he is known for. Full of colors, textures and sounds: “bleeding clay,” “yellow mud,” “black leaves,” “sighing earth,” the “slow pulse of granite.” The novel opens in May, during the mistral, which “shook the sky like sheet metal.... [T]his wind of perdition tore words from the lips and carried them off into other worlds.”

The narrator goes to the fair and meets the potter Cesare Escoffier, who invites him to visit his family. “We made a meal of grass and night,” he writes of that unforgettable evening with Cesare, his wife, his beautiful children and a visiting shepherd. “We were drunk from the triple power of the sky, the earth, and truth.” The shepherd plays his lyre and tells the narrator about the Shepherd’s Play, performed each summer solstice when the herds of sheep travel to the Mallefougasse Plateau.

The narrator must see that for himself, and two years later he witnesses the play and hears the music played by the shepherds: “The harps make the sound of the earth which rolls along over the routes of the sky ... the sound of men, words and steps, and the sound of beating hearts ... the sound of the beasts who are born, make love, bellow, and die. All that as if, all of a sudden, you had the ears of a god.” The play that follows is a sort of creation story, but much more: It is a vision of the future, the story of our evolution (so slow at times!) toward peace.