The Inner Outback

By R.Z. Sheppard

WALKING THE DEAD DIAMOND RIVER

by EDWARD HOAGLAND

340 pages. Random House. $7.95.

Henry David Thoreau went into the woods to confront what he grandly called "the essential facts of life." Spartan-like, he observed flowers blooming, raindrops falling, seasons changing. Of course, the essential facts of Thoreau's life included Emerson's loan of the cabin site at Walden Pond and such genteel activities as frequent walks into Concord for civilized conversation and home cooking. H.D.T. had it both ways, which is more than can be said for the nature he wrote about. The shadow of the surveyor and his Damoclean plumb bob had already fallen across the land. The future held a ring of bright beer cans.

But as the actual wilderness disappears, the fascination with wildness seems to grow stronger. The dream of a crew-cut lawn has now grown into a yearning for shaggy acres and a pileated woodpecker of one's own. People may even be having hallucinations about the wilds. In his latest collection of essays, Edward Hoagland, a Harvard graduate who has spent a lot of time in some of the remotest, greenest places in North America, writes that men still claim to have sightings of the mountain lion, or puma, a species just this side of extinction. Hoagland thinks he saw one in the Alberta Rockies. Whether he did or not, the truth is that the puma is still something a lot of people have to believe in.

Hoagland, a 40-year-old New Yorker with 100 unposted acres in Vermont and one of the finest prose styles in any state, thinks that people have rights to untrammeled nature in the same way they have to religious freedom. Enjoyment means some trammeling, however, and at times Hoagland seems almost apologetic that his body must accompany his senses into the wilderness. He is a "nonconsumptive" user of the forest, a man with exceptional powers of observation, reflection and appreciation. He neither hunts nor fishes but takes long solitary hikes and prefers conversing with old farmers, trappers and woodsmen "rather than those my own age, saddled with mortgages and emphatic politics." In 1969, the method resulted in the beautiful and melancholy pastoral Notes from the Century Before, a journal of his travels in the British Columbian bush.

Because he stutters badly, Hoagland does most of the listening. He greatly admires self-reliance and know-how: the man who minces lead pipe to make his own buckshot and carries bottle caps filled with wax to kindle his fire on wet nights, the man who keeps his canoe upright in the rapids and knows which ferns to eat for breakfast. No historical fact or weathered detail seems insignificant in Hoagland's descriptions of worlds that are fading fast. Moose hearts as big as cannon balls and bears that love to eat the Day-Glo paint off trail markers resonate quietly with his own personal references to past loves and his statistics about man's efforts to manage the wilderness.

There is also an urban Hoagland who writes about haunting a restaurant in New York's meat-cutting district that offers go-go girls with hamburgers at 11 a.m. Still another Hoagland worries about the fascist potential in hiring private armed guards to patrol his dangerous neighborhood and muses about political assassination and his own unlikely killer instinct. Hoagland the literary man, the author of three novels that few people bothered to buy, turns a puritan eye on literary politics and celebrity. "The clean handling of fame is what's asked for," he says with his jealousies tightly reined. "Not too much clowning with Eugene McCarthy, a low profile, a civilized private life well enclaved within the mysteries of the craft" is his preference--an ideal as hunted out as the mountain lion in a landscape of public egos.

At a time when the masculine hero is joining other endangered species, Hoagland looks to the circus, "the last place left where somebody can teeter on the brink of death and the crowd won't yell 'Jump!'" He finds his hero in Gunther Gebel-Williams, an animal trainer with an instinctive ability to orchestrate big cats into tawny fugues. To Hoagland, Gebel-Williams seems "to live in a state of direct gaiety." Unlike Clyde Beatty, for example, he does not conquer his animals crudely but controls them with a lover's touch.

Somewhere between Gebel-Williams' caged and sensuous art and the author's own ritual purifications in the woods lies the real wild--that state of constant tension between freedom and control. It is the bewilderness, an inexhaustible human resource that Hoagland exploits while scarcely leaving a track on the forest floor. . R.Z. Sheppard

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