Night Country

Loren Eisley has strung together his adventures, but Loren isn't any ordinary adventurer. Follow him through storm drains on moonless nights, encounters with rats and underground passages and things that go bump in the night. If someone else's nightmares sound like fun to you, Loren Eisley is your friend. Dark and twisting, thoughtful and well written and often inspiring. Not what I expected.

Until recently, I had never heard of Loren Eiseley. I was turned on to this book by someone's blog, where they had mentioned digging it up in a bookstore somewhere and taking a chance on it. The blogger had been thoroughly impressed and as he himself was an author that I liked, I decided that the book would be worth checking out for myself. After even the first chapter, it was easy to see that Eiseley was an incredible author and that he wrote with a style that differed markedly from anyone else I'd read before. I was glued to this book from cover to cover and it was a wonderful, mysterious and thought provoking experience from beginning to end. You never know exactly where the book will take you as you read through it, but you're never disappointed by where you end up at each chapter's end. I can't really compare this book to most others that I've read, as those aren't quite the same type of writing, but to give some sense I would say that if you like Carl Sagan, Eiseley would definitely appeal to you. It's definitely different subject matter from Sagan's work, to be sure, but in the same way that Sagan does, Eiseley provokes your thoughts and challenges you to re-evaluate your beliefs about life, nature and the human condition. Like Sagan, Eiseley will take you on a journey that you won't soon forget. I'm definitely looking for some more work by Eisely and I would highly recommend this book to others.

Eiseley was an anthropology professor in Philadelphia [U. of Penn.] who wrote more about the human condition than about anthropology, alone. This somewhat rambling series of thought-provoking essays recounts experiences of the author during anthropological explorations. He tells, for example, of the reasons why he is "the man who didn't find the skull." That is, he thinks he never became a more famous anthropologist because of three missed opportunities: the cave of spiders, the owl's egg, and the old man out of the Golden Age. Near Carlsbad, NM, he was hunting for evidence of an ice age man when he found a cave that had more recent traces of man . . . and a crevice that might lead to more ancient findings. As he crawled into the passage, Eiseley encountered a low-roofed chamber that had a velvet-like ceiling. Millions of daddy long legs! When the light hit them, they dropped off the ceiling. "All I know is that up out of the instinctive well of my being flowed some ancient, primal fear of the crawler, the walker by night." He retreated. The second chance was a cave at the top of a rugged canyon. As he entered the opening, an owl flew out, leaving an egg unattended. Beneath the egg and nest, all sorts of treasures might exist, but Eiseley couldn't disturb it because he knew the owl species was endangered. "Under it might be a treasure that would make me famed in the capitals of science, but suppose there was nothing under the nest after all and I destroyed it?" [He left it alone.] "The old man of the Golden Age" was someone who brought Eiseley a human jaw which he claimed was from 20 million years ago. It was embedded in stalactite drippings that could represent considerable age. But the man would not show the cave location unless Eiseley would publish a story saying that the Golden Age (Miocene period) was true . . . that a great civilization existed then. The man was mad or crazy; Eiseley could make no such statement. His pride prevented it, and so he lost the jaw and the possibility of future finds that the man could have shown him. In this book, Eiseley displays a richness of vocabulary and observations that proved his sensitivity to the world around him. He was willing to examine what he considered to be his own weaknesses and shortcomings. He came from a childhood with a mother who was deaf and a father who worked long hours as a laborer. He worried about the profound impact of teachers on students because he remembered how influential some were on his life--both positively and negatively. He marvels that we are made up of elements some of which are dead, yet we live. He challenges our absolutes and certainties and lays bare the raw uncertainty of man's efforts to understand himself and his world.

This is only one among many collections of Loren Eisley's thoughtful works, and I would willingly recommend all those I have read. THE NIGHT COUNTRY, however, remains my favorite. Eisley's vision overlays the human and non-human worlds and examines both over the span of ages rather than years. He will show you tiny snippets of life in a parking lot, shadows on cave walls, deserts, pigeons and childhood memories that will linger in your thinking like dinosaur footprints impressed in mud and baked to permanence by hot volcanic ash. You may choose not to follow that trail again, but I assure you it will remain vivid. Consider the return of an old man to a boyhood home after more than a half century, eager to see the cottonwood tree he and his father planted together. It was the tree his father had promised would provide Eisley with shade in his old age, where he might sit and remember his Dad; a tree that had grown and blossomed and flourished year after year in Eisley's thoughts and dreams; a tree under whose branches Eisley figuratively lived his entire life. Gone. For, who knows, fifty years? And yet, what tree could have been more real, more alive? Like a field mouse displaced by developers, pigeons abandoned with an archaic train station, a bum dying in a depot, or a wasp fading into the chill of autumn, Eisley knows that the shadow he casts on a hotel wall will be that of another man tomorrow, and all shadows fade together into the night.

I first was introduced to Loren Eisley by a roommate in graduate school who read aloud to me the final essay in this book. It is entitled, "The Brown Wasps," and if you've never read anything by Eisley, you might want to start there. Among many things, this particular essay is about memory, home, and the place of death in life - themes that run throughout the book whose essays are intimate narratives that intermingle meditations on science and personal history. Having now written these words I feel they miss the mark in recommending this book becuase the themes of Eisley's work seem more experiential than concrete to me, which is the case for many truths about life - truths that can be captured more by the feelings evoked by a time and a place than by mere words alone. And yet, his words do a remarkable job of evoking past times and places, locating them in your present life and providing a context for understanding their meaning. If you read this book, perhaps you'll want to share it with a friend, as my friend did with me, and I have with many good friends since. Eisley communicates the happy/sad, excited/melancholic, naive/wise tensions of nostalgia like no one else I've read.

Theodosius Dobzhansky described Eiseley as "...a Proust miraculously turned into an evolutionary anthropologist," and his works are greatly admired by Ray Bradbury. This was the second book I read of his after "The Immense Journey" and it was no let down at all! It too is haunting, beautiful, disturbing, hopeful, fearful, and immensely imaginative.Here's a taste, from the chapter The Places Below: "If you cannot bear the silence and the darkness, do not go there; if you dislike black night and yawning chasms, never make them your profession. If you fear the sound of water hurrying through crevices toward unknown and mysterious destinations, do not consider it. Seek out the sunshine. It is a simpler prescription. Avoid the darkness."