Natural State: A Literary Anthology of California Nature Writing

In his foreword, David Brower writes: "The 2 million Californians here when I arrived have already become 32 million. California wildness deserves a chance to recover, and `Natural State' lets us know why." Well said, but with California's population now at 36 million, and increasing over a half-million annually, a staggering growth rate now totally attributable to post-1970 mass immigration and descendants, the bigger question on recovery is HOW? While "Natural State" is no downer, packed with 40 eclectic selections, among them John Steinbeck's "Flight" into the unforgiving chaparral, Robert Louis Stevenson's mesmerizing "The Sea Fogs," Jack London's liberating "On Sonoma Mountain," it is impossible to read this book without feeling frequent pangs of loss. Such loss is sometimes explicit, such as in Wallace Stegner's melancholy "Remnants." At other times the reader knows what's to come. In "Into the [Salinas] Valley," 1860, William Brewer writes about the now extinct California grizzly: "A man stands a slight chance if he wounds a bear, but not mortally, and a shot must be well directed to kill. The universal advice by everybody is to let them alone if we see them, unless we are well prepared for battle and have experienced hunters along." In "Ramblings in Yosemite," approaching the High Sierra in the 1870s, Joseph LeConte is struck by "the great massiveness and grandeur of the clouds and the extreme blueness of the sky," Mark Twain's "Lake Tahoe" is "not MERELY transparent, but dazzlingly, brilliantly so." Recurrent is the desire to escape the multitudes. In "Climbing Matterhorn Peak," Jack Kerouac's character, Japhy Ryder, "modeled on the poet Gary Snyder," is determined to camp far enough along so that he and his buddies won't "wake up tomorrow morning and find three dozen school teachers on horseback frying bacon in our backyard." Ann Zwinger, "Trumpets of Light," writes: "More than 706,000 acres, over 94 percent of [Yosemite], is managed as wilderness and can never be developed. A permit system applies to hikers and groups on horseback who plan to remain overnight, thus guaranteeing that hikers are not falling over one another or overusing one area." Three cheers for good management, but how rarely it is mentioned in such otherwise enlightened accounts that ever growing future populations will mean, by iron laws of mathematics, ever shrinking nature rations for any given individual. California does seem to have a few natural features even beyond the ability of man's numbers to overwhelm, such as the Tule fog in the Great Central Valley. David Mas Masumoto writes, "The fog continues to roll in. Where it's heading I do not know. It passes in front of the porch like a shifting cloud. If I stare at it long enough it seems that I start to move instead. I imagine our farmhouse cutting through the gray mist like a lost ship, my porch transformed into the bridge." Very nice. However, while the fog is still rolling in, unfort

This is a landscape experience in which the real, observed landscape leads to an internally experienced landscape that is far richer and more personal. The focus of this work is the heart and mind's eye and it truely is an erotic and vicarious festival for the senses.NATURAL STATE, by Steven Gilbar and David Brower, describes the landscape of California, picturesque and natural, infinite and primal-- the most geographically diverse in the world. This is a much called for collection of popular as well as academic writing, from geologic and metaphysical creation, to realism and fantasy, and modes of destruction. The chapters by the Cahto Indians, John Steinbeck, Mary Austin, Henry Miller and Joan Didion are poetic essays; those by Barry Lopez, Ann Zwinger, Wallace Stegner, Jane Hollister Wheelwright and Gary Paul Nabhan are in the professional scholarly mode. Another 30 stories stretch between thos! e two poles. I cannot wait to see the movie. Bravo!