Masters of Prose Cast Light on California’s Nature

NATURAL STATE, A Literary Anthology of California Nature Writing edited by Steven Gilbar (University of California Press, $45 hardcover, $15.95 paper).

Does nature writing count as travel? Dunno. But if this compilation doesn’t make you long to hike Mt. Tamalpais, watch the wild geese at Tule Lake or absorb the mood stirred by a Pacific fog rolling over the Napa Valley, then your idea of travel literature is awfully citified.

This volume’s introduction and afterward by eco-activist David Brower and poet Gary Snyder hint at the quality of the writing they bookend. Among the contributors: John Steinbeck, M.F.K. Fisher, Barry Lopez, Jack London, Gretel Ehrlich, Edward Abbey, Henry Miller, Mary Austin, John McPhee, Wallace Stegner, Mark Twain and Kem Nunn. In fiction and essay, these masters shriek, whoop, weep and whisper about the big agonies and little thrills of exploration. Collectively, they capture the wonder of the state.

Here’s a taste of groove dude Jack Kerouac’s infectious Whitmanesque riff on hiking in Yosemite: “. . . from meadow rocks and lupine posies, to sudden revisits with the roaring stream with its splashed snag bridges and undersea greennesses, there was something inexpressibly broken in my heart as though I’d lived before and walked this trail, under similar circumstances with a fellow Bodhisattva, but maybe on a more important journey.”

Here’s author Hildegarde Flanner’s appreciation of such an unrestrained approach to life: “Western sensitivities, like Western mockingbirds, are sometimes given to intoxicated utterance.”

Disappointment: Big Sur’s Robinson Jeffers is missing.

Treat: Daniel Duane’s Half Dome climbing yarn is exquisite--right down to his description of how, 1,000 feet off Yosemite Valley’s floor, he savored the congealed fat in a can of dinosaur-shaped pasta he found in a crack.

Highlight: John Muir’s “A Wind Storm in the Forest,” in which the great naturalist scrambles to the top of a tall Douglas spruce and rides out a Sierra Nevada blow. “Never before did I enjoy so noble an exhilaration of motion. The slender tops fairly flapped and swished in the passionate torrent, bending and swirling backward and forward, round and round, tracing indescribable combinations of vertical and horizontal curves, while I clung with muscles firm braced, like a bobolink on a reed.”

JUST US, Adventures and Travels of a Mother and Daughter by Melissa Balmain, (Faber and Faber, $24.95, hardcover). Many people, Balmain acknowledges, “can’t imagine a greater hell than traveling with a parent.” I can. A book about a woman traveling with her mother. But Balmain’s breezy style and unflinching honesty make this potentially tedious exercise funny and exhilarating. The mother-and-daughter adventures start with a phone call in which each admits to feeling mildly depressed. Travel is their antidote. Over the next several years, they share dog-sledding and a two-seater outhouse. They struggle to paddle a kayak in harmony; they play midwife at a calving; they explore Anasazi ruins; they sail together, llama trek together and even spa-go together. Along the way, they squabble and pout. And without ever getting smarmy or cloying, Balmain reveals that they also learn a lot about each other and themselves along the way.

Quick trips

MOUNTAINEERING MEDICINE AND BACKCOUNTRY MEDICAL GUIDE (14th edition) by Fred T. Darvill Jr., MD (Wilderness Press, $5.95, paper).

This wilderness bible tells you how to fix everything from a bison wound to a boil. Anglers, backpackers and cross-country skiers need it. But it will also prove useful to all travelers who might find themselves in a place where there’s no doctor handy to remove an engorged tick or snap a dislocated shoulder back in place.

ON THE ROAD WITH YOUR PET, More Than 4,000 Mobil-Rated Lodgings in North America for Travelers with Dogs, Cats and Other Pets (Fodor’s, $12, paper).

Steinbeck might never have brought along Charlie if he’d seen the daunting preparations this volume advises. Much of the information is useful, though, from packing lists to travel “petiquette” tips, to flying your pet as baggage or cargo and taking Bowser abroad.

TAHITI TATTOOS, photographs by Gian Paolo Barbieri, essays by Michel Tournier and Raymond Graffe (Taschen, $29.99, hardcover). This book offers all the images associated with Polynesia--shells, clear waters, glistening fish--but only as they frame the prime subject: tattoos. The black-and-white photos of intricately decorated Tahitians are stunning, and somehow say more about the place than a more traditional book of travel photos might.

Books to Go appears the second and fourth week of every month.