Hopes writes of having learned a few hard lessons on his travels into the wild. One alternately humorous and sobering essay, for instance, describes his encounter on a mountain trail with a grumpy mother bear, who left him with an eight-inch-long laceration as a souvenir. ("She had meant nothing by it," Hopes writes, forgivingly. "She used my leg to steady herself as she would have the limb of a tree, and with the same consequence.") He also ponders the play of improbability and self-discovery that nature seems to delight in, writing of an encounter along the Gulf of Mexico with the exceedingly rare, possibly extinct Eskimo curlew, a bird that wasn't supposed to be there at that time of year. His sighting may have been mistaken, Hopes suggests. But, he writes, he may also have seen a ghost, a creature that had "pulled a vanishing act so complete and so subtle we cannot yet process the reality of it."
Quiet and humane, Hopes's essays speak to the pleasures and occasional pains of a life spent in nature, bearing witness along with the world. --Gregory McNamee