Reading A Sand County Almanac

 

A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There by Aldo Leopold
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Reading Aldo Leopold makes me miss my husband. He was a man misplaced in time-- a range scientist in the tropics, a high desert island boy. He packed his bow and his orange vest and hunted grouse in Utah sage brush and Aspen stands, and his knife and dogs and mule to hunt boar and goat in Hawaiian jungle.
He loved the way civilization-- well, maybe "civilization" is giving us too much credit-- the way humans and our funny way of doing things-- shaped landscape. As Simon Schama waxes syntactical, there is no such thing as a true wilderness. At this point in time, every place in nature is being shaped and reshaped by human impact.
Aldo Leopold understands contradictions: he loves to hunt and he mourns the wolf he killed as a young man. He is a careful and hard working farmer on a shitty piece of land, and he is an evolutionary biologist who can describe the way agricultural management is washing away the fertile soil and snuffing out the apex predators that keep the whole system in balance. He is an biologist and a poet.
He is homesick. He makes me homesick. He echoes the homesickness of my husband, the cowboy rangeland city boy. He writes about the past and the future in ways that are sad and frightening, respectively.
He is a speaker for the dead.
We can't mourn for a natural world that we don't know, that we don't see or understand. His meticulous and quiet observations make us SEE it. And then, looking around us at the dammed waterways, the filthy highways, the obliterated night sky-- we feel sick with the loss of it.
The chord Leopold sounds so beautifully and precisely is love. He loves the natural world; he loves it by observing it, describing it, living actively within it, as a hunter and fisherman and conservator and farmer.
It's breaking my heart to read this book, and to miss my husband who would have turned to Leopold like a sunflower to sun, as he did to the ranchers and professors and hunters and farmers who were his mentors: outdoor men, past their wild days, secure in the shoales of the outgoing tides of their 6 or 7 decades of life.
I want to turn to this book again and again, like a sacred text.

Wonderful Quotes
Page 20: On Geese: "If I could understand the thunderous debates that precede and follow these daily excursions to corn, I might soon learn the reason for the prarie-bias. But I cannot, and I am well content that it should remain a mystery. What a dull world if we knew all about geese!"

Page 24: "the enthusiasm of carp is obvious and unmistakeable. No sooner has the rising flood wetted the grass roots than here they come, rooting and wallowing with the prodigious zest of pigs turned out to pasture, flashing red tails and yellow bellies, cruising the wagon tracks and cow-paths, and shaking the reeds and bushes in their haste to explore what to them is an expanding universe." I witnessed and was baffled by this phenomenon in the spring of 2017 at Bear Lake Utah, when unusual rain had flooded huge swaths of pastureland. Carp frantically roiled themselves over every culvert, onto every flooded strip of asphalt.

page 52: "And if you have come quietly and humbly, as you should to any spot that can be beautiful only once, you may surprise a fox-red deer, standing knee-high in the garden of his delight. Do not return for a second view of the green pasture, for there is none."

page 55: "There are two times to hunt in Adams: ordinary times, and when the tamaracks are smoky gold. This is written for the luckless ones who have never stood, gun empty and mouth agape, to watch the golden needles come sifting down, while the feathery rocket that knocked them sails unscathed into the jackpines."

page 81: "God passed on his handiwork as early as the seventh day, but I notice He has since been rather noncommittal about its merits. I gather that He spoke too soon, or that trees stand more looking upon than do fig leaves and firmaments."

page 100: "Peat beds dried, shrank, caught fire. Sun-energy out of the Pleistocene shrouded the countryside in acrid smoke. No man raised his voice against the waste, only his nose against the smell."

Page 132: "The cowman who cleans his range of wolves that he is taking over the wolf's job of trimming the herd to fit the range. He has not learned to think like a mountain. Hence we have dustbowls, and rivers washing the future into the sea."





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