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Coming Out of the Woods:
The Solitary Life of a Maverick Naturalist
By Wallace Kaufman ’61. Perseus Publishing, 2000. 336 pages.
$26. |
 If
you know the author of a memoir you’re about to read, you probably
hope that the work will capture something of the familiar: histories
you hold in common, faces from the past. If the author is someone
at a personal distance, someone who has proved puzzling over time,
you might hope that mysteries will be revealed, and that you will
understand the author far better than before.
In Coming Out of the Woods, Wallace Kaufman addresses some of these
hopes, but mostly he captures other items of his “solitary life.”
In vivid and engrossing narrative, he shows us the people who passed
through and comprised more than three decades, during which time he
seems to have changed in almost stunning ways. More than that, he
brings to us in bright light the plants, animals, waters, and rocks
of the Carolina Piedmont landscape that surrounded his home in the
woods; and he gives his own peculiar version of their changes.
Kaufman obviously chose his work’s subtitle with immense precision.
He selected his noun of identity—“naturalist”—with
reference to many years of an expert amateur’s enthusiasm at
finding mushrooms to eat without threat, at interpreting the geology
and ecology of where he awoke every day. Looking at his previous books,
you can assume he was a naturalist before he applied the adjective
“maverick” to highlight his profound dissent (some might
say alienation) from his colleagues in the environmental community.
Writing with Duke geologist Orrin Pilkey more than a quarter-century
ago, Kaufman co-authored a ground-breaking—and convincing—popular
text, The Beaches Are Moving. This was a powerful volley over the
bow of that slow-to-turn battleship, the Army Corps of Engineers.
The authors made the case to the general public for the first time
that the government was squandering our tax monies to “harden”
shorelines that Nature never intended to stand still.
Two decades later, it appeared that Kaufman had become a lone sniper
among his colleagues in the environmental movement when he published
No Turning Back: Dismantling the Fantasies of Environmental Thinking.
One reviewer at the time described it as an examination ofhow “conservationism,”
which em-phasizes resource management, has been overtaken by “environmentalism,”
which Kaufman sees as an emphasis on “litigious vengeance.”
With that work, Kaufman succeeded in solidifying his maverick status.
But a whole set of actions for years before that time—some detailed
in this book before us, some entirely absent—ensured that he
would carve out as controversial a reputation as anyone in the world
of North Carolina environmental activists.
It’s this history that surely explains his conclusion for the
book’s long and affectionate list of acknowledgments: “All
of the places, events, and people in this book are real and recorded
as accurately as possible from my records, from public records and
other documents, and from the best of my memory and the memories of
others. In a few cases I have changed the names and other details
about certain people to protect their privacy or simply out of the
sense that they might want to avoid the embarrassment of associating
with other people and events in this book or with the author.”
Only a few pages later, Kaufman gives a clear summary of what he has
set out to do. At the end of Chapter One, he asserts: “I have
lived in the woods ten times longer than Thoreau lived at Walden Pond.
I am a slower writer than Thoreau, maybe a slower learner, but now
I am coming out to give you my report. I tell you the story of how
my life here has led to the opposite conclusion from Thoreau’s,
to the conclusion that the preservation of wildness is in civilization.”
If all Kaufman did were to report to the world, the work itself would
be nearly perfect. Some will find it spoiled by his insistence on
regular reiteration of almost every theme from No Turning Back, consistently
inserted at the end of chapters otherwise full of his keen, erudite,
and affectionate observations of human and wild nature.
For a reader who revels in the reporting, there are any number of
delicious moments. For me, the first was the sensorial and psychological
description of his first encounter with the place, Morgan Branch,
that is the subject of his book. On the kind of muggy yet thirsty
summer afternoon that is the limiting factor on growing things in
the Carolina Piedmont, he took his first stroll there, alone, thinking
his maverick thoughts, looking hard at nature: “I took off my
clothes and eased myself into the water.... Minnows nibbled at the
air bubbles clinging to the hair on my calves…the summer sultriness
washed out of me like silt from gravel.” Then: “For a moment,
I thought that I was wasting time.... I felt like a soldier who had
gone AWOL.” Another delightful passage is the splendid depiction
of an encounter with a flying squirrel—so well performed that
it almost recommends the book in itself. The episode shows that the
author has humility to spare, and it certainly could serve to instruct
all of us in the virtues of that humility.
What readers of this magazine might like to see are more reminders
of the Duke education we experienced, but the few that Kaufman includes
are masterfully conveyed. My favorite episode opens the second of
the book’s three parts, “Settling In”: “In the
first week of my freshman year at Duke…history professor Harold
Parker began our seminar by asking us to put a penny on the table….
Parker’s thin mouth always smiled slightly and kindly when he
asked us to think about something whose significance only he knew.”
For someone like this writer for whom Dr. Parker’s teaching (along
with that of Wallace Fowlie and Reynolds Price) was a pinnacle of
the undergraduate classroom experience, it was sheer delight when
Kaufman suddenly placed him in front of me again.
On balance, I would not treat this as a manual for living in the woods
of Piedmont North Carolina, although it gives a full picture of that.
Nor should it be seen as a “gloss” on or counterpoint to
Thoreau’s Walden, although it can serve to do as that as well.
This book does best when it reports what the naturalist has seen in
his years there—again, both human and wild nature—in the
elegant manner of which Wallace Kaufman the writer is clearly capable.
—Edward C. Harrison
Harrison ’72, M.E.M. ’76 is a past officer of the North
Carolina chapter of the Sierra Club and the Conservation Council of
North Carolina. He is as an environmental planning consultant based
in Durham County. |
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