Blue Mountains Far Away: Journeys into the American Wilderness

To live in the vast American Southwest is to understand, writes Gregory McNamee, who lives near Tucson, that "you cannot find a landscape that is not bordered, somewhere, by a blue fringe of mountains." Hence the title of this superb collection of 13 essays that wander the landscape those mountains define. These are meditations on exploration inward and out that revel in nature, honor the environment, touch the land, ponder science and art, contemplate religion, and, with an almost alchemical touch, make big moments small and understandable and small moments big and awesome. The essay "Walking," for instance, is a pointed antidote to the hurly-burly on the surface most of us inhabit:

"Solvitur ambulando," Saint Jerome was fond of saying. To solve a problem, walk around. Walk until your shoe leather falls off, until no moleskin patch can save the tattered remnants of your heels--only walk, walk as only a human can until the mysteries of the ages unravel before you.

There is a lot of walking in these pages--up mountain trails, beside rivers, over deserts, along paths. Indeed, walking is a continuous thread. "To live in the desert requires a certain kind of madness," McNamee writes, "that is epidemic out this way. To wander off into that desert, alone or in company, is to test the very limits of one's endurance and to tempt the end of one's tenure on this otherwise green planet." The point? "Such ventures make us human.... We were made to wander afoot.... and we were made to keep moving. When we settle down, it seems, we tend as a species to become nastier rather than more civilized." For McNamee, these walks within the perimeter of the blue mountains keep him at least civilized if not wholly sane. His evocations are meant to lead us down paths toward blue mountains of our own. --Jeff Silverman