The Klamath Knot: Explorations of Myth and Evolution, Twentieth Anniversary Edition

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Summary: Overlooked gem of natural philosophy
Review: Nature writing always carries something of the romantic with it, and this is its greatest strength and greatest curse. As a strength, it provides a window into the sublime limit which nature opens for her human observers. Such romanticism is a weakness, however, if it devolves into a reified hymn to an imagined nature which is as unreal as the imagined un-nature from which one hopes to fly. Nature is not a paradigm, is not a given. One has to meet it, encounter it, realize one's place in it, hear what it has to say, say something back to it, wonder about it, and allow it to remain mystery. The best nature writing has does this -- think of Walden, and how Thoreau allows the pond to retain its power and dignity while plumbing its depths, measuring its boundaries, cataloging its flora and fauna, and descibing his own very human comings and goings around its then mostly deforested banks. In the end, we know a lot about the pond, and even more about Thoreau, but Walden remains Walden, the myth, the legend. Having been lucky enough to have lived close to Walden for several years, I can tell you that no amount of reading about Walden, even at Walden, can capture the life of the pond. Thoreau's book takes the measure of the pond, and makes it real in a way that the real Walden always has been, yet never quite is.

Wallace's book accomplishes this for the Klamath mountains of northern California, home of great trees, deep lakes, and sasquatch. His book never holds the Klamath at arm's length, as the romantic impulse al too often wants to do, but rather gives an account of the terrain, measures it out, proposes a history and a taxonomy of the land and the fields and the rivers which captures so much about the place, but never pretends to total knowledge. He writes (as did Aristotle about his fish, and Thoreau about his flowers) as a scientist with the soul of a poet, or perhaps a poet with a scientist's eye. Of course, Wallace is neither a scientist nor a poet (neither were Aristotle or Thoreau), and so what we see is Wallace's experience of the Kalamath, not Klamath poetry and Klamath science. And of course, that is all we can see, just as all we can see in Walden the book is Thoreau's experience of Walden the pond. Such places cannot be captured by a single perspective, but will not be seen at all unless a single perspective widens the vision for the rest of us. There are many small ponds around Concord, Mass, but Thoreau went to live at Walden. And there are many wild knots of mountains and rivers still scattered around this nation, and the world. Each one needs a Thoreau, or a Wallace, or an Ed Abbey, or Aldo Leopold, or Muir, or Whitman, to bring it to our vision in a way we may have never seen it before. I daresay the lumbermen who cut the trees on Walden's shores saw the same water and sky as Thoreau -- but it was Thoreau's way of seeing it that lasted. Wallace's view is the one that needs to last, to stick in the mind, concerning the Klamath region.

Wallace's theme in the book is an "evolutionary myth," one that tells a story about the land which provides a key to meaning. He writes, "Moses forced his society to accept a unifying law; Jesus forced his to accept the unity of all of humanity; Darwin forced his to accept the unity of all of life" (8). He acknowledges that placing Darwin in league with Moses and Jesus will strike some as odd, but Wallace is a man with a vision. He points out that "both religion and science are mythologies, in the sense that each provides the individual with an account of the origins and meanings of life. It seems to me irrelevant, in this mythological sense, whether such accounts are facts or fictions. They need only to provide their believers with a workable key to life, an invisible world of origins and meanings to help them make sense of an often confusing, sometimes frightening, physical world" (8). Following this idea, he presents his explorations of the Klamath as a playing-out of an evolutionary mythology, a story about how the land came to be, what it might mean, and how the story fits in with the rest of life. It is a powerful and original story he tells, and bound to last. More than a memoir of a love-affair with a place, and more than a naturalist's account of a fragile and vanishing ecosystem, Wallace's book is a testament to the power of a place to transform one's very understanding of the world, and what it means to be human in that world after the knot has been unraveled, and then re-tied. It is a powerful and meaningful vision of lost wild places which avoids romanticism and doomsaying, and which holds as much hope as horror about the loss and preservation of the American wilderness.