A WIDE WORLD
Essay collection explores nature as a challenging force and as a thing of beauty
If Robert Leonard Reid isn’t on your reading list of Western writers of nonfiction, you should place him on it. He’s that important.
Reid writes about nature in ways that are clear-eyed, incandescent and provocative. His most recent book is a collection of pieces bearing the title “Because It Is So Beautiful, Unraveling the Mystique of the American West.”
Its 19 essays explore the startling beauty of the natural world.
Beauty, however, is also the essays’ connective tissue to other equally vital issues.
One essay that quickly draws in the reader is “The Fire and the Rose.”
It opens with the author’s recollection of growing up and accepting that “a great darkness dwelt at the core of the human soul, and its name was Nature.”
That opinion was later confirmed to him, Reid wrote, in American literature, science, philosophy and other sources.
But Reid reveals a mystical encounter “under a starless sky amid the black precipitous forests of Yosemite National Park” that flipped his long-standing view of humanity 180 degrees from dark to light. The encounter was with a bear and her cub.
Another essay, “Intruders on a Lifeless Ridge,” is about man overcoming the forces of nature. The challenges are in the context of two ascents of Mount Logan, one in 1925 and the other in 1965, that were dangerous and memorable. Logan is Canada’s tallest peak and the second tallest in North America.
The 1925 ascent on Logan’s East Ridge was, Reid writes, “…in the annals of mountaineering… an astonishment of the first order.” The author also describes the initial ascent of Logan’s South Ridge in 1965, calling it a “luminous achievement in mountaineering history.”
Some essays remarkably employ nature as a vehicle to probe sociopolitical issues of our time and of our nation. The probes seem unlikely because they sometimes cover so much territory, yet Reid makes them work.
In three other essays New Mexico takes center stage, contrasting the attraction of its landscape with upsetting, sometimes violent, human events.
In one of those, set in Santa Fe, the word “shelter” means a homeless shelter, the sheltering effect of Christmas Eve in the City Different and at pueblos and “the only shelter we will ever know, this grand spinning planet we inhabit, one and all, our lifelong refuge from the storm…”
In another, the plight of the Diné in the streets of Gallup is linked to the painful remembrance of The Long Walk.
And in the third essay is an underlying hope in spite of the spread of nuclear weapons, viewed from the Manhattan Project research and the atomic bomb explosion on July 16, 1945 ,at White Sands. On the opposite shore, Reid writes, is the work over decades of war of organizations like the Albuquerque Center for Peace and Justice and “the fundamental peaceableness of New Mexico, its habit of addressing the deepest concerns of people through the language of mountains and deserts has not vanished; it has merely been overshadowed.”
These three essays first appeared in Reid’s 1998 collection “America, New Mexico.”
The author, a Pennsylvania native, is also a pianist, a composer, a former high school math teacher and a former mountaineer. Reid and his family lived in Albuquerque and Corrales between 1987 and 1995 before moving to Carson City, Nev., where he resides.