War to the Death - Raymond Rudorff

War to the Death is concerned primarily with the sieges of the Spanish city of Saragossa during the Napoleonic Wars. Rudorff starts with the state of Spain in the early 1800s, which is to say, a former world power that was now not even second-rate. Declining populations in the cities, along with dozens of villages simply abandoned or deserted (though he doesn't get into the why of decline. Immigration? Disease?) Largely culturally stagnant, with a strong religious presence that, at the higher levels of power, pushed back against science and the ideas of the Enlightenment as dangerous. Ruled by an ineffectual dullard of a king, whose wife was sleeping with his chief advisor.

Actually, in addition to repeatedly commenting how physically ugly Charles IV and his wife, Queen Maria Luisa, were, Rudorff keeps coming back to how Charles has no clue the guy he trusts so implicitly, Manuel Godoy, is schtupping his wife. Rudorff almost seems to take it personally, like it's an insult to the grand tradition of European royalty that these people rule a country. The book was published in 1974, and there's a petty part of me hoping subsequent scholarship revealed Charles knew all about the affair and was completely fine with it. Maybe that was even his thing.

Anyway, once Napoleon, who seemed to regard Spain largely as some place that needed securing so he could to get to Portugal, had the royal family ousted to put his brother in charge (over Joseph's objections, since he wanted to stay in Naples), the people of Spain, the working classes, got a little fired up. They didn't love their king by any stretch, and maybe they didn't understand how largely useless his son, Ferdinand VII, was, but he was at least Spanish. "They're idiots, but they're our idiots," that kind of thing. The French are invaders, usurpers, trampling upon the sovereignty of their land.

Saragossa is not the only city that supported Ferdinand as true ruler of Spain and refused to acknowledge Joseph Bonaparte. They might have been the most successful at resisting Napoleon's armies, even if they ultimately were forced to capitulate. They didn't lose easily. Rudorff discusses the civilian and military authorities that form, not just in Saragossa but elsewhere. How they try to decide on a course of action, or who gets to make which decisions. He gets into the rise of Jose Palafox, the closest thing to a supreme commander Saragossa had, even if he did flee the city early in the first siege. Which was kind of funny, Rudorff spent all these pages building Palafox up as an inspirational figure, and then he bails, only to return when the city proves more resistant than expected.

The thing about Saragossa, and to an extent the Spanish campaign in general, is how much it presages a type of warfare that would become more common in the next century. The siege is not a battle on open ground between two armies; it's a force of organized, highly trained soldiers against an entire city. Everyone in Saragossa is resisting. Children are delivering food and ammunition to gunnery crews. Women and monks make wadding for muskets and help erect barricades, when they aren't fighting the French army themselves.

When the French can actually get inside the city walls, they suffer, for the era, serious losses just trying to take one street. The Spanish turn every single house into a fortress the French either have to take or destroy if they want to advance. To take it, they have to clear every floor, because the defenders will retreat to an upper level and fire through holes they made in the floor. Or they'll cross the rooftops to get behind French lines and launch surprise attacks. If the French destroy the building, they still have to take the next one, with no cover from the attacks coming from every window on the street.

All those stories you read or hear about Stalingrad, the fighting from street to street, building to building? Dead stacked up everywhere because there's no time to dispose of bodies? Saragossa might just be the OG when it comes to that warfare. Based on the excerpts from memoirs and diaries of French soldiers Rudorff quotes - he notes that, at least when this was written, there didn't seem to be much scholarship or excerpts on the siege from Spain's perspective, even in the city itself - this kind of fighting wasn't something any of them were accustomed to.

This is something new, and no one is entirely ready for it or the toll it takes. The French aren't fighting a distinct army, but an entire country. No one will help them, their attempts to requisition or demand food or water are ignored. Their messengers are captured once they're out of sight of the main force. Rudorff mentions at one point soldiers couldn't risk getting 100 yards from their unit, or they'd likely be ambushed and killed. And it would likely be a brutal ugly death. Which in turn, made the French vengeful whenever they got the chance.

That said, I think Rudorff overplays the novelty of the fury French soldiers exert on Spanish towns when they take them. The pillaging, burning and raping. I don't think that was as unique an experience, historically, as he makes it seem. Also, it's odd to see him describe the as French officers horrified at the soldiers' actions, then three paragraphs later discuss the officers extorting churches or families for gold and jewels. Yeah, they were horrified. . .horrified they didn't get first dibs on some of that booty!

Rudorff covers each siege, one in the summer of 1808, the other the winter of 1808-1809, separately. He does his best to describe Saragossa's layout. Different bridges, gates, monasteries - there are a lot of monasteries - the relative position of the Ebro and Huerva Rivers and their importance for transport or restricting movement. As far as the siege, he tends to discuss in chronological order, focusing on a few days' of fighting in one area, typically until progress in either direction stalls, then switch to a different area. I didn't feel like flipping back to look at the handful of maps of the city he provided, so I couldn't necessarily tell you where the Trinitarian monastery was, relative to Calle Pabostre. That said, the writing makes clear which direction things are trending, as well as how rough the fighting is, which are the more important parts.

Rudorff also describes the quantities of men and material on both sides, the efforts the Spanish went to maintaining gunpowder supplies. Some of the notable figures on both sides, local commanders or civilians who showed great bravery at some critical moment. One thing that becomes crucial in the fighting I hadn't considered was tunneling. Trenches I expected, but especially as the French start simply destroying buildings, or even entire rows of buildings, tunneling underneath them to set mines or gunpowder is a major factor.

He doesn't necessarily go into detail about the experience, maybe because many of the people who took part didn't survive, but there's enough to grasp the dangers of digging and not knowing if you'll burst into someone else's tunnel and have to fight, pickax to shovel. Or finding an opposing tunnel group heard you coming and rigged an explosive in your path.

Early in the second siege, as the French are still getting things in place, Rudorff criticizes Palafox for not staging a massive attack of the city's forces against the French lines. Palafox did try a few attacks, but never more than 300 men in any particular group. Rudorff is sure, if Palafox had sent out thousands, be they soldiers or civilians, the Spanish could have overrun the French.

I don't know that I agree. For one, he mentions a page or two earlier how, with all the people who flooded into the city to help with its defense, soldiers were sleeping on the streets, in the winter, for lack of available space indoors. As a result, combined with the crowding, disease was running rampant. Maybe that's all the more reason to see if they can break the French forces. Set them running, get some breathing space. But a frontal assault seems like the sort of thing you want healthy people for.

More critically, Rudorff spends a fair amount of pages detailing how almost every time Spanish forces met French on open ground, the Spanish got their asses routed. Including a few times with Palafox or his brother in command. While I don't doubt Rudorff is right there would have been no shortage of civilian volunteers, I'm pretty sure it's a different thing to charge across open ground, with little likelihood you can withdraw to safety if things go bad, versus fighting when some invader busts his way through your living room wall. Again, militias of peasants had tried to defend villages against the French on open ground. A lot of those peasants ended up on the tip of a lancer's spear.

The city does fall, eventually, though I have to question if Napoleon wouldn't have been better off just leaving it be. Strategically, I'm not sure it netted him anything close to what it cost. I don't know how War to the Death is regarded among people more knowledgeable about Saragossa, but I found it very informative, and not too technical or difficult to follow. 

'In the Plaza, the squadron lost direction. Horsemen galloped wildly around the great square while the inhabitants poured out of their houses and rushed at them with knives, sticks and hatchets. Rider after rider was pulled down by screaming women and youths, hacked, stabbed and bludgeoned to death as their fellow-soldiers had been in Madrid's Puerto del Sol six weeks previously.' 

Outposts of Eden - Page Stegner

This is a collection of pieces Stegner wrote about the American West for various outlets in the 1980s. They're grouped into three broad sections: desert, rivers, and trying to support oneself off what the land provides.

It's similar, in some regards, to Edward Abbey's work. There's even a pull-quote from Abbey on the back, though the quote is more about how much Abbey dislikes most other nature writers for being, variously, equivocating, insipid, low-bellied, and rhapsodical, among other insults. The only thing he ostensibly says about this is it's a, 'real book written by a real writer.'

I cannot confirm Page Stegner is a real person, let alone a real writer - the picture on the inside flap of the back cover might be of anyone! - but I guess this is a real book, in the sense there are words, arranged into legible sentences on paper pages that you can hold and read.

Stegner's writing certainly has the cantankerous air of much of Abbey's writing, but is lacking when it comes to conveying what it is Stegner finds particularly appealing or beautiful about the places he's writing about. Because he's too busy griping about how everyone, save him and a couple of his buddies, are not appreciating the wilderness properly.

Guys on dirt bikes tearing around the desert? Scum. Environmental studies majors who get outraged about pollution from mining, but show little interest in the actual scenery? Dolts. People who regard the desert as an inhospitable expanse of greasewood to be hurried through at maximum speed to reach Vegas? Pitiable. Government agencies ostensibly tasked with protecting the land? Foot-draggers who are so incompetent or corrupt the wilderness would be best served by them doing nothing. People who go camping, but used wood fires instead of propane? Monsters who take it as an excuse to burn all their other trash while they're at it.

In a piece about a logging company town falling apart after the company was bought out by a bigger firm not operating on any notion of sustainable harvest or community, Stegner mentions the son of a friend is part of an Earth First! group that had set themselves up in redwoods to try and prevent their being cut down. The friend, knowing Stegner was headed that way, asked him to pass a message along. Stegner shows no interest in doing so and makes no attempt to find the kid. Another friend who came along is constantly miming they should leave and go fly-fishing. They both seem to think the best thing would be if the tree got cut down with the kid in it and he died.

Basically Stegner sneers at everyone who isn't him, until the final part of the book, which reveals Stegner as an incompetent dumbass. To be clear, this is a deliberate choice by Stegner, a series of descriptions of schemes to 'live off the fat of the land,' and failing utterly. Let's buy a couple of beef steers at auction and raise them on our friend's land, so we have our own steaks! Wait, what's the difference between a heifer and a steer? What do you mean, feed additives and inoculations cost money? There are wild boar on the friend's land, let's kill them and get cheap pork! Oops, the neighbor is a hog farm and we killed some of their sows. Let's get a boat and we'll fish! We don't know how to fix the engine, our anchor has no chain and the boat is too big for the trailer.

Reading those last 30 pages, I was left wondering who Stegner was to look down his nose at anyone else. He doesn't know anything. Not the geology, not the biology. Maybe a bit of history, in that he's clearly read Lewis and Clark's journals of their expedition (or at least the Cliff's Notes) but there's no sense he's an expert there, either. He gets lost enough to doubt he's got any idea where he's going, so it's nothing like an effective travelogue. And why would it be? If he described it in terms capturing the elements that appealed to him, the reader might want to go there. Then we might interact with it in some fashion he would consider unacceptable. Gasp! Horrors! 

It reminds me of some of Aldo Leopold's writing. That people should want to preserve nature and recognize its value, but, you know, from a distance. They shouldn't actually get close to it, or see it or anything. Just appreciate it as a theoretical thing they know exists, and that it's good it exists.

Except Leopold at least sometimes gushed over the beauty of his land when he did this. Stegner keeps talking about how so much of the West is owned by the government, and is therefore the People's Land. Shaking his head at the members of the public who don't recognize what they've got and consider it valueless. Yet he doesn't seem to want any of "The People" out there. Except him and his fishing buddies.

I can do "sneering condescension" in my sleep. I'm looking for an author to capture the mystique or appeal of lands that at first glance appear so uninviting. Which Stegner is either uninterested or incapable of doing.

'Three belligerent troglodytes in plastic goggles with plastic pots on their head. Spent a hard day out in the dunes churning up the burrows of kangaroo rats and kit foxes, no doubt. Observe the splayed feet for mashing brake and clutch pedals, the hairy forearms for strangling handlebars, the porcine, shock-absorbing buttocks, the opposable thumbs. Observe the havoc they wreak on the delicate soil, soil that in this climate takes a millennium to form. Good day to you, too, gentlemen. I hope that when you reach the interstate you may experience  what a famous outlaw biker once described as the ultimate in a two-cycle thrill - a high-torque, full-throttle, speedwobble across the highway divider into the oncoming grill of an eighteen-wheeler.'

Passing - Nella Larsen

On a visit back to her hometown of Chicago, Irene Redfield runs into an old acquaintance, Clare Bewell (nee Kendry.) Clare moved to a different part of town after her father's abrupt death, and while the rumors were thick, no one was certain what had happened. Or, well, lots of people were certain they knew, but it was all based on speculation, gossip, and conjecture. The best kind of sure to be.

After a particularly awkward afternoon tea between Irene, Clare, and a third old friend, Irene decides she'll have nothing else to do with Clare. And yet, Clare starts showing up in New York whenever her husband is away, and Irene keeps letting her in the front door. 

This was the second piece of fiction Larsen published. It's probably a novella, at right around 100 pages in this collected edition. According to McDowell, Larsen wrote a short story after this, but was accused of plagiarism. Though she managed to make a convincing case to some it was a coincidence, she never published anything again.

The title refers to the fact that Irene, Clare, as well as their third friend, Gertrude, are all of mixed race. I'm not sure if in each case it's their parents, or if it was in some cases earlier generations. Unlike Helga Crane in Quicksand, they are able pass for white, at least among white folk. Irene mentions, in conversation with some white author who wrote often about what he perceived as the problems with black people, that black people can always tell, after a while. That there's a certain something they pick up on whites either don't, or simply don't care to look for.

Irene, Clare, and Gertrude are each married, and each is in a different situation. Gertrude married a white man, but he knew her from long back, and knew of her heritage. Clare married a white man who has no idea of her background. A virulent racist no less, which is the reason the afternoon tea is so awkward. He shows up and promptly calls Clare by a nickname he gave her, "Nig." Because she seems to get darker all the time. Then he goes on, at length, about how much he hates black people. As you'd expect, that's not the term he uses, but I'm not looking to get this post yanked by Blogger's "standards" violations.

Irene, meanwhile, married a black man. I don't know if he knows about her background, and they have bigger issues with their marriage anyway. Maybe more than one, if Clare and the psychic toll she seems to take on Irene is to be counted. Maybe because Clare reminds Irene of herself in ways she would prefer not to think about. Irene accuses Clare of, essentially, being willing to do anything to get what she wants. Smile a little too provocatively at a waiter. Cry, if pity will get the response she wants. When Irene won't respond to her letters, Clare takes the direct approach and simply shows up at her house.

And yet, Irene seems equally determined to get, or rather keep, what she's got. Her husband appears to like to wander, and at one point, wanted to move to Brazil. Irene convinced him, somehow, to stay in Harlem. When she suspects he's growing dissatisfied with his medical practice and looking towards distant horizons again, she starts trying to find some way to nip it in the bud. She tries bringing up concerns about their sons as a segue into maybe having Brian take them to Europe for a few months, but it never gets off the ground. She never stops fretting about it, or trying to come up with another way to keep things the way she wants them. Late in the story, she acknowledges security is what she craves most. For the things she has to stay as they are. And Clare is an element she that threatens all that, in several ways.

Because Irene is certain that, as Clare has spent more time around, she and Brian have something going. Maybe Clare is more amenable to Brian's desire to roam. Or maybe Irene is projecting her own feelings onto Brian. He certainly seems quick to show concern for Irene's mental state at the very end of the story, more than I would expect if he was grief-stricken over his mistress' fate.

There is a sense Irene is attracted to Clare, but unwilling to acknowledge that. Irene spends a lot of time describing Clare's eyes, or her lips. How attractive they are. And Irene's inability to stick to her resolution to stay away from Clare seems like she's attracted but unaware. Clare shows up, and Irene feels overcome with emotion, thrown out sorts. But it's not anger, or even frustration. At first, before she perceives Clare as a threat, Irene is glad when Clare comes to visit. She doesn't object if Clare's lets herself into Irene's bedroom while she's changing. Clare kisses her on the bare shoulder at one point, although there's no particular attention drawn to that by anyone. Maybe that was a common greeting between women in the 1920s?

Yeah, I don't think so, either, but I'm trying not to project too much. Not without acknowledging I'm doing it, at least.

I think like Helga, Irene ultimately chooses stability, the sure thing, over the uncertainty of what she really wants. To pursue that was to take a step into a void, and neither of them could ultimately make that step. Irene drew back, or maybe flung the uncertainty away from her, to her husband with his sights on the horizon and their sons. Helga married a preacher, thinking matrimony was the safe way to explore what she wanted, and found herself stuck in what sounds like a horrible life she no longer had the strength to escape.

'The words came to Irene as she sat there on the Drayton roof, facing Clare Kendry. "A having way." Well, Irene acknowledged, judging from her appearance and manner, Clare seemed certainly to have succeeded in having a few of the things she wanted.'

Quicksand - Nella Larsen

Helga Crane is a teacher at a prestigious school for black children in the American South in the 1920s. But she isn't happy there, feels confined, constrained by a stuffy, limited way of thinking that she doesn't believe she could possibly change. So she leaves, first to Chicago, then New York, specifically Harlem, then Copenhagen. Back to Harlem, before finally ending up in Alabama.

Again and again, Helga arrives at a new place and feels certain that it's the place for her. Again and again, the novelty wears off and she finds herself feeling trapped. Disgusted with the people around her. Helga is of mixed race, a white mother, who fell for a black man who was an inveterate gambler that eventually abandoned mother and daughter both.

So Helga never feels at home, not for long. She grows frustrated with her friends in Harlem's constant focusing on race issues, on how her best friend there is adamantly opposed to the mixing of the races, unaware Helga is herself of mixed descent. She initially enjoys the attention she receives in Copenhagen, but quickly recognizes it's because she's considered a novelty, one her aunt and uncle are using in an attempt to social climb. The expectations eventually grow too much for her, and she finds she missing the culture of Harlem, which she previously grew to despise.

This was part of a collection of Larsen's two novels (I'll likely get to Passage next week.) There was an introduction by a Deborah McDowell that speaks about how much both books are about the struggle for black women to come to grips with their sexuality, or their feelings of desire. Like they are supposed to be desired, but not experience desire themselves? Like it was expected they'd want to sleep around with several men, to the extent some women were scorned for not doing so, but certain organizations of colored women considered that to be a big problem?

Seems like a damned if you do, damned it you don't, though I'm not sure Helga ever gets to the "do" part of the equation. Desire seems to be something she can't quite recognize or name or, perhaps, acknowledge in herself. She's engaged to another teacher at the school when the book begins, but she seems bored by him, and breaks things off easily. A painter in Copenhagen proposes, but Helga feels he initially made his intentions known in a disrespectful way, via an offhand comment he seemed to make more to the portrait of her he was painting. So she shoots him down, bluntly.

She eventually, desperate for a connection, falls for a southern preacher she meets in an wild church service in Harlem. that doesn't end well, as she's stuck pumping out child after child, growing steadily weaker. When she finally followed desire, she let it lead her into marriage, apparently the only acceptable expression, and has surrendered everything else she loved along the way. She vows to get out, but it seems a false hope. She's sunk too deep.

There is Mr. Anderson, who was the principal at the school. We first see them interact when she informs him she's decided to quit mid-semester and somehow, that interaction sticks with her. It's almost like kids on the playground, where Helga can't admit he stirs something in her, so she gets cross with him. She responds to his encouragements to stay and help make the school better with snippy remarks and later berates herself for not being more cutting. Yet they keep crossing paths, and her eyes keep being drawn to him. And when she thinks something is going to happen, and it doesn't, it crushes her. Throws her into the despair that leads her to the preacher and that particular disaster. I will admit I was never entirely clear what she saw in him that pulled at her like that, but given that she seems confused by the situation, that's appropriate.

Really, I felt like she was sometimes less interested in provoking desire in men than she was in simply provoking others. Contrary for the sake of it, which, as a contrary person myself, I can respect as a motivation. She liked dressing in brighter colors, those felt she felt set off well against her skin, at the school, against the headmistress' admonitions that darker colors were better. She likes at times dressing in outfits that could be considered a bit provocative for the setting in Harlem. But she gradually balks when her aunt and uncle encourage that same behavior in Copenhagen, buying her outfits and accessories - big bracelets and earrings - she finds too gaudy.

Probably because it feels like they're trying to play up that novelty by evoking the "jungle savage", and Helga often tries to reject that in herself. That was what drove her from Harlem the first time, disgust and shame at a part of her that responded to the music in the clubs like everyone else does. Maybe the provocation is because she never feels a part of any world. There is always some part of her that doesn't seem to fit, or that she can't reconcile herself to. She tries, at the end, to play the preacher's wife and mother. Tries to take the strength (solace?) the other women take, that God will provide them rest eventually, in the, 'by and by.' That doesn't last, and she comes to find the idea of black people taking comfort in White Christians' God laughable.

But it's not an idea she vocalizes to anyone, because there's no one she feels connected to. Always alone, always feeling that whatever others see in her, it's wrong. She's too flashy, she's too educated, she's too white, she's too sad, she's too picky. She feels alone, but she can't stop trying to not be alone, and it never works out. Until eventually she's got no more strength to try and find another place. It's not a happy ending, that's for certain. 

'Frankly the question came to this: what was the matter with her? Was there, without her knowing it, some peculiar lack in her? Absurd. But she began to have a feeling of discouragement and hopelessness. Why couldn't she be happy, content, somewhere? Other people managed, somehow, to be. To put it plainly, didn't she know how? Was she incapable of it?'

Mars on Earth - Mark Johanson

Johanson starts the book by discussing how NASA uses Chile's Atacama Desert as a testing ground for equipment they send to Mars, as the aridity, soil chemistry and the levels of ultraviolet radiation. But the book isn't really about that.

Johanson does spend a fair amount of time describing what traveling up and down, back and forth, through the Atacama does to him. The way it dries out his lips, the way his skin cracks from the wind and the sun, the way his eyes bulge and sinuses bleed as he travels into the high mountain regions of the desert. But the book isn't about how empty the Atacama is, but how much there is there, and how much a part of Chile's history it is.

In that regard, it was a fascinating read for someone that doesn't know a whole lot about Chile beyond what I picked up in the those books about the (U.S.-orchestrated) fall of the Allende government in the 1970s. Especially in regards to the various Indigenous peoples that lived there long before Europeans ever showed up. The oldest known examples of people mummifying the deceased are from the Chinchorro people in northern Chile, who were doing so at least 7000 years ago. The increased rains brought about by climate change are steadily unearthing new mummies. Some whose faces were preserved as is, others were painted with red clay or blue, while some are adorned with masks showing a variety of expressions.

(Also, the mummification seems to have started during a period when their was high infant mortality because the river they were living near and drinking from was extremely high in arsenic. Now, the people who still live there have an inherited tolerance for arsenic.)

Earlier in the book, and further south, he travels to the eastern border, to a town beneath a mountain called Licancabur, and meets with a married couple who are of the Likan Antai. One of the things they describe is that they have constellations made not just of the stars, but of the darkness between the stars. Like, negative space constellations, each meaning something different, and the intensity of the message depends on how well-defined they are.

There were a lot of passages and experiences he relates like that. Maybe they're old hat to those more versed in the history Latin America, but it was all new to me. And there's also more recent history, like the struggles of the workers of the European-owned mines to unionize in the early 20th Century, or a particular coastal town known for a brutal prison that future dictator Augusto Pinochet commanded earlier in his career, and which he'd later use to disappear dissidents once he rose to power.

Or, on a somewhat lighter note, how the British who came looking to mine nitrate (guano) passed along the concept of elevenses, except Chileans have turned it into a late afternoon meal called "once" (Spanish for thirteen), with regional variations in what sort of foods you have with the tea. The tea may also be spiked with something stronger, as that's apparently what the miners did on the sly back in the day.

The other part of the book, interwoven with Johanson learning about this vast desert in a country he's lived in for 7 years, is him trying to figure out what he's going to do. He settled here with the boyfriend he met in New Zealand, after years of a vagabond, traveling writer lifestyle. But is that what he really wants? Is he doing this desert expedition to better know his partner's home country (and the country Mark is descended from, though he was born in the U.S.), or is it a way to start breaking ties by putting distance between them?

I'm not sure that aspect of the book works as well. Maybe because it's such a personal thing for him, it feels like he struggles to describe what he's figuring out as he goes along. Or maybe it's me, as it doesn't really resonate. I'm a solitary sort, certainly more than Mark, and also not the type to just travel to a country with whatever money I've got and see how long I can stay there. The particular push-and-pull he's feeling doesn't necessarily strike a chord. I can't see how what he's seeing and experiencing in the Atacama is tipping the scales one way or the other for his decision.

Also, because he's trying to set the stage for that theme of the book, it takes a while before he actually gets into the desert. Initially, he's discussing mass protests in the capital where he and Felipe live, started by a student protest over increased metro fares, that help to oust an ineffectual, billionaire friendly president. The hopes of getting a new constitution, one voted on by the actual people of Chile, instead of one created by a handful of economists who thought neoliberalism was the cure-all, are impeded by the strain of enforced isolation and confinement, not to mention the economic pressure, brought on by COVID.

All that's important for establishing Johanson's state of mind. The fear, the stress, the uncertainty about his future, and why he takes the opportunity to flee into what appears from the outside (even within Chile) a forbidding and lifeless desert. A place where you can get out of the house, and not have to worry about social distancing, because there's hardly anyone around. A place well-distant from many of those concerns, because there are more immediate ones. Like if there's going to be water for your well if the aquifers keep getting drained to mine lithium.

But it did leave me wondering, initially, when he was going to start talking about the desert in his book about the desert. FYI, it's 57 pages in, about 20% of the way into the book.

'The horizon broadens as I veer slightly inland near Totoral, offering more sand and less rock, more shrubs and fewer cacti. Where it was once a study in the color brown, now everything is blazingly white. The aridity hits me at full force, and it becomes a stupefying drive. There are no dust balls rolling across the road, as in the American Southwest; rather, it's a raw rugged nothingness with only the sunlight to hold things together.'

The Things They Carried - Tim O'Brien

This is a collection of short stories O'Brien wrote about his time serving in Vietnam. Sort of. There is a young man named Tim O'Brien in the stories, but he's not necessarily the real Tim. He's Story-Tim. Story-Tim created problems for me. 

"Ambush" is about a man Tim killed when he was on night watch over a road in the jungle. This follows, "The Man I Killed," about another man in Tim's platoon trying to pull him away from staring at the body, while Tim's mind invents an entire life for this corpse. That he was sickly and studious growing up, that he went to college to study mathematics, but returned to his village to do his duty and fight as a Viet Cong, only to get blown apart by a grenade one night.

50 pages later, in "Good Form," O'Brien states he did not actually kill the man in the story. He did see a man die on that trail, and because he was present, he feels guilt. Then he says, 'But listen. Even that story is made up. I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story-truth is sometimes truer than happening-truth.'

He spends another 4 paragraphs talking about how what you feel can be a truer representation of what happened than what actually happened, and so he feels he can answer his daughter's question of whether he killed anyone with either "yes" or "no", and it'll be true either way.

Which, OK, fine. Granting I'm coming at this in a world 36 years after the collection was published, I'm not sure I'm up for arguing how what I feel the world is more accurately reflects it than the actual facts. Smacks of "alternative facts." It's not O'Brien's fault I'm making that connection, and this is ultimately fiction, so it doesn't have to be factually true.

But inserting himself - or a version of himself - in the stories, then dancing back and forth about whether it's really him, or a "vibes" version of him, doesn't do the work any favors. Now as I'm reading, I'm wondering if this is about him or someone else. If it happened, if it didn't happen. If it didn't, what point he's trying to make writing like it did. If it did happen, what point he's trying to make actually telling it. Or, if it happened, why, as in the events surrounding "Kiowa's" death described in "Speaking of Courage," he attributed it to another person entirely.

I'm stuck in some awkward, stuttering, meta-aware state where I can't simply read the story and then decide what I thought about it or took from it, because I'm hung up on his approach. I'm interacting with the style and not the text, which is usually a bad sign for me when it comes to books (Tristram Shandy being the prime example of a book that's entire approach just pissed me off to the point I couldn't take anything from the book except how much I hated it.) If he just doesn't use his own name in the stories, changes it like he did all the others, it's a non-issue.

It isn't as though he's trying to make himself look better, unless this is all performative self-disgust. "On the Rainy River" is about Story-Tim receiving his draft notice and briefly fleeing to Minnesota, right near the Canadian border. There he stalls out, for days, at this cluster of fishing cabins that are closed for the season, unable to decide which direction to go. Ultimately, he goes back, out of shame. Because he's too afraid of the scorn he'd face, from people he'd likely never see again, if he became a draft-dodger.

I imagine that informs the sense of collective guilt and responsibility he applies in "The Man I Killed", and "Ambush." He didn't want to go to this war. It wasn't his war, he didn't believe in it. But he didn't have strong enough convictions to run. He let the weight of opinion of people he barely knew make his decision for him. And so, for that cowardice, he is responsible for the dead man.

Now, just that dead man, or all the dead men (and women, and children) in the villages getting burned out or airstriked because one soldier got sniped? Not sure, though he tends to rather relate them calling in napalm or whatever the way you or I might describe watching the path of a mail truck. Guilt only goes so far, I suppose.

That said, O'Brien's a pretty good writer. The obsessive creation of a life in "The Man I Killed," the way he's conjured up this entire idea of who this man was. Especially in terms of the life he conjures, which seems like it mirrors his in certain ways. The studious, reluctant soldier. The killer, projecting himself onto the victim, seeing a possible future for himself.

The periodic lines from Kiowa, increasing in frequency, as he tries to get Tim to stop staring, and later tries to get him to talk about it. He doesn't offer any consolation, because there's nothing to say. The man is dead. That can't change now. Story-Tim threw the grenade, and all this stuff he's fabricating about the dead man doesn't really matter. Whether the man was like what Tim envisions or not, he's not that any longer. And Tim hears it, but it just rolls off him. They're short, discrete sentences that have no connection to what's running through his head.

O'Brien also captures the collective weight of opinion that drives people into doing things they'd rather not, and what that does to their psyche. "The Things They Carried," as a marker of what helped the soldiers cope with the situation they were in. That helped them feel safe, or at least feel like they had some control over a situation they largely did not control. Because they ceded that control to someone else when they, for whatever reason, enlisted or showed up when drafted. And they know it, and they know they may die for it.

So they hold on to whatever they can. Letters from a girl back home that will never love them, or stockings from a girl that loved them, then left them. Or mean-spirited pranks, or religion, or whatever. And sometimes the different approaches grind against each other, the guy who wants silence against the guy who can't stop talking. The guy demanding a moral from how someone died against the one who thinks that notion is ridiculous. 

'They did not submit to the obvious alternative, which was simply to close the eyes and fall. So easy, really. Go limp and tumble to the ground and let the muscles unwind and not speak and not budge until your buddies picked you up and lifted you into the chopper that would roar and dip its nose and carry you off to the world. A mere matter of falling, yet no one ever fell. It was not courage, exactly; the object was not valor. Rather, they were too frightened to be cowards.'

Escape From Kathmandu - Kim Stanley Robinson

This is 4 novellas, all taking place around Kathmandu and the Himalayan Mountains. They focus mainly on George Fergusson, and George "Freds" Fredericks, a couple of Americans living in Kathmandu, when they aren't making a living guiding people on treks up the mountains.

The two of them meet when George reads a letter addressed to Freds at the hotel where George is staying. A letter from an acquaintance of Freds, another American who fled academia to be a guide, but now needs help rescuing a yeti the research group he guided has captured. The rescue is somewhat complicated by the presence of Jimmy and Rosalyn Carter (and the accompanying horde of Secret Service agents), but they eventually pull it off.

George should serve as a cautionary tale for reading someone else's mail, because now that he's on Freds' radar, the subsequent stories all involve Freds dragging George into one mess or another. Help a reincarnated monk finally stop being considered a disciple by getting him up Everest. Help keep a road from being constructed too close to the valley which holds the fabled city of Shambhala. Keep a project to give Kathmandu an actual sewer system from taking place, because it'll reveal secret tunnels that an underground Nepali government is using to spy on the current Nepali government.

The Nepali government is presented as so massively corrupt, this book made me want to go back and re-read Forget Kathmandu to see how different the perspective of a local was on the government prior to the military coup. Although Robinson published this in 1989, so the situation could have changed quite a bit in the intervening decade.

There's usually some additional element Robinson throws in, though he switches around which is the Chekov's Gun. In the story about climbing, "Mother Goddess of the World," Freds mentions early on that his friend is the disciple to a really strict llama, who imposed a harsh condition to be met before a temple could be rebuilt and the disciple could stop being a disciple. But for much of the story, George and Freds are helping a group of British climbers, who want to stop an expedition searching for Edmund Hillary's remains from potentially finding him and returning his body to England. It's only late in the proceedings that Freds reveals the truth to George.

Which is one of the things I didn't like about the stories: Freds is constantly pulling a bait-and-switch on George. There's always some hidden catch to whatever he asks for help with, and that catch always ends up endangering George's life. "The True Nature of Shangri-La", it falls on George to try and stop this road from being built, and after he exhausts himself trying to navigate the labyrinthine and corrupt corridors of the Nepali government, he gets injured when they end up making the Chinese and Nepali guard outposts near a key pass think they were attacked by each other. And then he nearly dies of dysentery.

And the whole time, he's been catching grief from people for not getting enough done. That's the only one of the 4 stories Robinson writes from Freds' perspective rather than George's, and it doesn't do a lot for my opinion of Freds. He's sort of vaguely concerned for George's deteriorating mental and physical well-being, but in a vague, stoner-beach-bum way. "Oh, George is seeing how things really are in this country and running himself ragged to try and fix things. But he just doesn't get what's really important, maaaaaaaan." You dragged him into this, asshole. It's your problem, but he's the one actually trying to fix it, while you sit around and smoke dope.

It's a bit of a weird disconnect between tone and substance, when I think about it. Even though there is sometimes the threat of death in the stories, the plots are treated as sort of zany. Oops, we've got the Nepali President's personal guard chasing us because George was temporarily insane, let's escape on a mine cart that takes us all the way to a tiger-infested jungle! We helped a yeti escape by dressing him in a Dodgers' baseball cap and teaching him to say, "Namaste"! But, especially in the last two stories, it feels like we're watching George steadily self-destruct, like a jet being flown past its tolerances. Which is not really zany or funny. 

"Germ theory just ain't intuitive, George."

"Neither is religion."

"I'm not so sure of that."

"But why should there be a difference?"

"It may be that the reason for the existence of the universe is a more pressing question for most people than why they get the runs."

The Good Demon - Jimmy Cajoleas

Clare shared her body with a being that Clare calls Her. Emphasis on past tense there because, due to events we aren't privy to until two-thirds of the way into the book, She was recently exorcised by a local preacher and his son. Clare feels adrift without her closest - only, really - friend, until she finds a message with three clues She left behind. Certain the message will help bring the two of them back together again, Clare works to decipher it, and carry out its instructions, but learns some complicating factors along the way.

Cajoleas frequently flashes back to different point in Clare and Her's friendship, painting a picture of what their relationship was like. How She would sometimes whisk Clare away to a place in her mind to get away from the stress of an unhappy home life, or tell stories or play games together. But She would also sometimes take control of Clare's body and refuse to explain why after. It's a little odd and unsettling, because She often uses the sort of apologetic tone you hear about abuser's using to manipulate their victim afterward. Pleading forgiveness, claiming it was only to protect Clare, that Clare is special. Her Only.

And Clare tends to use that same language and rationalizations herself. That She was Clare's Only. The only one who understood, the only one on her side. Life seems lonely and pointless without Her. But we also see enough of her current life - and some past hardships - to make it clear Clare hasn't really had anyone else in her life she could count on. Her father was an addict, and died from it. Her stepdad is frustrated with how life is going, and Clare's odd behavior makes her an easy target. Her mother is too weak or too much of a mess to make more than a token effort to be there for her daughter. Clare remarks that her mother often seems more concerned with them appearing to be a happy family than anything, because she knows they can't really be one.

And Clare tends to repeat those behaviors. She befriends the preacher's son, but it's because he's part of what she needs to reunite with Her. Clare even grows to like Roy, but it's still a conditional affection. He says something hurtful and she turns away, then uses his guilt against him. Which leaves me feeling like the ending, where it appears Clare and her mother are going to have a stronger bond going forward, feels unearned. Her mother's shift appears largely off the page, and I don't know if we really see enough of a shift in Clare for me to buy that anything has really changed.

There's a bit of a mystery, as Clare steals a box for a strange old woman who may know more about what Clare's after than she lets on. This ends up tying into the history of the town, and some group of people using dark magic to prop themselves up. I think Hide did a much better job fleshing out the thinking of that kind of group out than The Good Demon does, but you could argue the thinking of the group was more of a critical part of that book. What motivates them to throw all these people into, essentially, a wood chipper?

Here, I think it's enough for them to function as a glimpse of a possible future for Clare, depending on what choices she makes. The Paradise Society are an example of what she could be, but they aren't a force or driver of the plot. They don't push at her or try to hinder her; they're only aware of her because she makes a brief attempt to speak with them and is scared enough not to try again. But the end result of that is they feel incidental enough that I'm not sure you really needed them in the story at all. I think there was enough cautionary tales with Miss Mathis, Clea and Kevin.

'I could tell you this was the story of the fourth time She took control over my body, but that would be a lie. I did this. Me and her did it together.'

False Flags - Stephen Robinson

Robinson's focused on Germany's "auxiliary cruisers," merchant ships or freighters that were re-fitted to be combat capable, then sent out under the colors and flags of other nations to prey on shipping. Robinson notes early in the book that, according to the Hague Convention, this was entirely aboveboard, so long as the ships raised the Kriegsmarine flag and removed all false insignia before they started firing. They could have the guns ready to fire before then, but as long as they didn't pull the trigger, it was totally cool.

There are four vessels Robinson focuses on: Orion, Pinguin, Komet (which reached the Pacific through Arctic Sea with help from a Soviet icebreaker) and the Kormoran. They operated in this role only through 1941, primarily in the Pacific and Indian Oceans, though some of the ships saw action in the South Atlantic and around the Antarctic. The Pinguin captured basically an entire fleet of Norwegian whaling vessels in the span of a couple of months. Great for the whales, probably not so great for Norway.

Although Robinson emphasizes that the goal of the raiders was not simply to sink or capture as many ships as possible. Rather, the point was to make it too hazardous for freighters and other merchant ships to travel alone, and to restrict the routes they could take. A convoy can only travel at the speed of its slowest member, so forcing more shipping into convoys, along more circuitous routes that hug friendly coastlines, reduces the amount of shipping that reaches Britain.

Which doesn't mean the raider ships don't want to do direct damage. Robinson tends to move chronologically, shifting between ships in each chapter. He uses remarks from the various captains' logs and memoirs, or articles and letters of the crews, as well as the comments of some of the prisoners from captured ships. Generally speaking, the raiders seem to have treated prisoners fairly well. Better than the blockade runners the prisoners were sometimes transferred to for transport back to Germany.

The comments also provide a sense of the captains' personalities and expectations. The captains of the Orion and Pinguin both clearly expected this to be like the raider activity in the First World War, where they could raise their flag and command a ship to stop engines and not transmit a warning, and everything would be orderly. Instead they find that a lot of these ships try to escape, broadcasting warnings about raiders and firing back (inaccurately) with whatever guns they were loaded with. (Norwegian and Greek ships seem to still, on the whole, surrender quietly, while British ships, unsurprisingly, do not.)

In contrast, Komet's Captain Eyssen didn't waste any time with that sort of "gentlemanly warfare." He raises his flag and fires some shots and tells the ship to surrender or it'll be sunk. If it doesn't surrender, it gets sunk. Period. Of course, Eyssen comes off as generally over-agressive and high on his own supply, usually at the wrong time. He gets it in his head to not only sink all the Dutch supply ships picking up phosphate at Nauru (OK), but, since the island has no defense, to shell the factory and the port as well, basically trashing the place. Except he disguised his ship as a Japanese vessel, and Japan got a lot of phosphate from Nauru, so he kind of pissed off one of Germany's allies. Later, he decided to sink some ships near the Galapagos Islands, which were within the "Pan-American Neutrality Zone", which pissed off the U.S. at a time when we were still not "officially" at war with Germany.

Robinson includes a lot of maps showing the route a given ship traveled over a certain period of time, with markers indicating places where they captured or sank a particular ship, or laid out a minefield. There are several times where ships lay mines, mostly around Australia or New Zealand, and while they don't sink many ships, once their presence is known, those countries' navies have devote some of their limited warships to dealing with that, rather than protecting convoys from U-boats and battleships. Which doesn't go so well for a couple of the raiders when they run into cruisers, but that's the risk of trying to draw your enemy's attention. Sometimes you get actually do get their attention.

'Wehyer had to first rendezvous with the Regensburg in the Marshall Islands to refueled before heading to the Carolines. After passing Santa Cruz, Wehyer decided to disguise the Orion as the Japanese freighter Maebasi Maru and the crew painted characters on the hull copied from a Kodak advertisement produced in Yokohama.'

If These Walls Could Talk - Stan McNeal

This is a collection of stories revolving around the 4 consecutive seasons the St. Louis Cardinals made it to at least the National League Championship Series in 2011 through 2014. Sort of. Because it also includes a section on the 2022 season, when Albert Pujols came back for his last year and became only the 4th player to reach 700 home runs.

It more or less ignores the all the seasons in-between, minus some of the sections that discuss Adam Wainwright, since he was on the team throughout. Granted, the Cardinals didn't experience a ton of postseason success in the 2015-2021 years, but they did win 100 games in 2015, and they did make it to the NLCS in 2019, and they won 17 games in a row during the 2021 season to make the playoffs. And it isn't like the 2022 team was in the postseason for long, either. They lost a best-of-three series to the Phillies, in two games.

It's an especially odd reading experience because I guess, this being a revised edition, McNeal put the most recent stuff at the beginning. So you get the section on 2022, and then you jump backwards most of a decade, and keep working back from there. Each year is broken up into shorter pieces focused on a specific player or coach.

So in 2011, you've got a few pages on Matt Holliday and his injury issues, another few pages on Albert Pujols coming back from a broken bone in his wrist in 17 days (I forgot just how fast that dude recovered from injuries), Colby Rasmus getting traded for pitching, Chris Carpenter carrying the pitching staff (and behaving like an asshole on the field), David Freese's postseason heroics, Allen Craig's less-heralded postseason heroics, Lance Berkman's comeback year, Tony LaRussa's last season before (briefly) retiring, and Pujols signing with the Angels in free agency.

(McNeal titles that last one, "Pujols Takes the Money and Runs", which is certainly one way to describe Pujols exercising his right as a free agent to sign the contract he believes pays him the full value he's worth, after years of playing on one that paid him far less than his production merited because the collective bargaining agreement grants the Cardinals all the leverage in negotiations for the first 6 years of his career.)

But even within that style, McNeal usually doesn't confine a piece to strictly what the player did that season. The parts where he dips into the past - Holliday failing to catch a fly ball in the 2009 NLDS, David Freese not playing baseball at all for a year after he graduated high school - make sense, as part of the journey to whatever McNeal's really driving at. But he also discusses the player's later seasons and career trajectory, like Freese's continued injury problems after 2011 and how he was eventually traded.

A lot of the stories are ones I already knew from following the team, although there are details in there I wasn't always aware of. Shelby Miller and Joe Kelly being the best man for each other's weddings, and having a bet over whether either could get a hit off the other the first time they faced off after Kelly was traded to Boston (Kelly won that bet.) I'd forgotten about Holliday having to leave a game because a moth flew in his ear and he couldn't dig it out with his finger (and apparently attempts to sit in dark room, with just a little light coming through a crack in the door failed to entice the moth, because its head was too far in to see the light.)

It feels like there's a narrow sweet spot for this. You have to care about the Cardinals to begin with, but not in such a way where you were consuming enough writing about them at the time these events were taking place. Otherwise you know most of what you're reading already. Unless the reader is looking for the nostalgia fix, which is an impulse I can understand. 

'Matt Holliday went for $100 in 2011 but had dropped to $75 by 2014. Michael Wacha, on the other hand, jumped from $5 in 2013 to $70 in the 2014 Winter Warm-Up, following his breakout October. David Freese had an even greater one-year increase, going from $5 to $75 following his dream postseason. Matt Carpenter cost $40 in 2014 just two years after being free. Jon Jay, meanwhile, had been a model of consistency. In 2014 his autograph was priced at $20 for the third straight year.'

Redshift - Al Sarrantonio (ed.)

A collection of 30 stories by various authors, placed under the heading of "speculative fiction." The lengths vary, a few only a couple of pages, others closer to 50. It seems like they're supposed to be science fiction - Sarrantonio apparently wanted something like a modern version of what Harlan Ellison pulled together in the '60s - but some don't have much sci-fi. Joe Haldermann's "Road Kill" feels like the outline of a script for a serial killer thriller, with a tiny bit of science fiction tacked on at the end.

Sarrantonio's own offering, "Billy the Fetus," is a bizarre piece about the child of Billy the Kid and the woman who apparently killed him and every other man that fucked her, and what the fetus learned about the world from the songs she sang while he was in her womb. Harry Turtledove's is set in Afghanistan during the 1980s, and involves a dragon. It's not a bad story, I'm just not sure how it's either science fiction or speculative fiction.

It was rough sledding at times, is what I'm getting at. Thomas Disch's "In Xanadu" was probably the first one I actually enjoyed, and that was over 100 pages in. Either that or James Patrick Kelly's "Unique Visitors." Both are brief and focused on unpleasant forms of immortality people tried to buy themselves. In contrast, David Morrell has an entry, "Resurrection," about people sacrificing their present and futures for a bit of the past they can't bring themselves to let go of.

The most noteworthy thing to me about Joyce Carol Oates' "Commencement," was the realization I've apparently been confusing Oates with some other writer. Which one I don't know, as I thought she was part of the Lost Generation, hanging around Paris with Gertrude Stein and Hemingway. As for the story itself, I figured out the basic arc two pages in, and the rest felt like killing time until the climax. I didn't even attend my own college graduation ceremony, why would I want to read about a fictional one?

There were some stretches where I got into the stories more. Paul Di Filippo's "Weeping Walls" was farcical in a way I enjoyed. Meaning it was cynical towards targets I don't mind seeing take the hits. I wouldn't have minded it if were a bit longer (it was ~15 pages.) That was followed by Gregory Benford's "Anomalies," which was kind of clever, with a nice twist at the end.

I think I preferred stories where the characters are human or close enough the writer doesn't spend a lot of effort describing some alien being or setting, utilizing made up terms I can't visualize from what's on the page well enough to connect with the story. Like, "Pockets" had weird bubbles people can visit other places through and time moves differently, but the people are still basically people. Recognizable in their follies and desires, even if the setting is somewhat different. Stephen Baxter's "In the Un-Black," I couldn't really wrap my head around what sort of society he was trying to describe. Not well enough to care about the characters caught in it, anyway.

'He went to the bubble and kicked it angrily. He couldn't feel anything but "stop," with his sneaker on. It wasn't like kicking an object, it was like something stopped you, turned you back towards your own time flow. Just "stopness." It was saying "no" with the stuff of forever itself. There was no way to look inside it. Once someone crawled through a pocket's navel, it sealed up all over.' - from "Pockets, by Rudy Rucker and John Shirley

A Sand County Almanac - Aldo Leopold

A Sand County Almanac was a collection of essays Leopold was drafting when he died in 1948. His son finished editing them and published the collection a year later. This particular edition, released in 1970, also includes 8 entries from a separate collection of Leopold's essays, released in the 1950s under the title Round River.

The first 12 essays, totaling about 100 pages in this collection, are a description of different features of a farm Leopold and his family purchased in the 1930s, in a section of Wisconsin known as the Sand Counties. Because the ground is extremely sandy, and generally wasn't considered high-value for agriculture. The essays take different angles and writing approaches. February's centers around the felling of a single aged oak, Leopold describing major events in conservation or biology that took place during the decade of tree growth the saw is currently cutting through.

Meanwhile, July's starts with an early morning walk by Leopold and his dog, and all the things they encounter along the way, then switches to discussing a little patch of Silphium that had survived in the corner of a roadside graveyard until the road department removed the fence and mowed everything, and from there into discussion of relative biotic diversity of his farm versus the campus where he taught and how humans are the only species that can be aware of extinction and maybe that's what elevates us above other creatures.

That train of thought, that Man has this awareness (or maybe capacity for this awareness), and therefore a responsibility to be more thoughtful in how he interacts with the world around them, comes up more further into the book. Usually in terms of how we aren't exercising that responsibility. That the land is seen strictly as something to provide economic value for us, and anything that's value can't be quantified in dollars and cents, is easily dismissed as irrelevant. That everything about how we operate is extractive, and what's more, extractive without understanding how the parts of the system are interrelated.

So we remove all the prairie plants that helped make the rich soil we grow stuff in, then wonder why soil productivity declines such that, even with advances in technology or fertilizers, total yield isn't improved. Especially considering all the soil, and therefore farmable acreage, lost via erosion. That the fledgling conservation agencies of that time keep trying to sell farmers on programs to preserve soil, or preserve plant diversity, but they let the farmers pick and choose which to use. So the farmers only adopt the practices they think will make them money, right now (and usually demand money in exchange for adopting them.) 

I can confirm this was still a pretty regular line of approach in wildlife management a decade ago. If you want the farmers to plant some of their field in native grasses, you've got to show them how that'll help their cattle gain weight in the summer, so they make more when they sell them. Of course, they're trying to pay their bills so they don't lose their land, so I'm not really surprised. Maybe you'd like them to think a bit longer term, but that's hardly a failing exclusive to farmers.

And there are definitely passages in the second half of the book where Leopold's tone comes off condescending towards everyone who doesn't see things like him. He's on a bus in Illinois, and he makes a comment that a farmer is more focused on the fertilizer bill in his pocket that the land around him, or that most of the people aren't paying any attention to the plants they're passing, and would probably dismiss those plants as weeds if they did notice, but these prairie plants are the reason why their farms are so good and so on.

Or that it's all well and good the government designated certain lands as parks or preserves, but they need to stop encouraging people to go there by adding roads (which also serve to break up habitat.) He remarks he doesn't need to be able to actually travel to the wilderness in Alaska to appreciate it, so people shouldn't need to go to these other parks, either.

He wants people to respect nature and understand how many different factors go into it and how often removing one thing - a plant, animal, soil - can have unexpected effects, and so we need to appreciate everything beyond what it can do to fatten our wallets. I agree, more education focusing on those interconnections is good, although maybe he's underestimating how complicated organisms and biotic factors can get, and how much a particular person may have to focus on a specific area to gain any understanding of it. As someone whose work was always more in the field side than the lab side, I'm certainly with Leopold on the value of getting out there and making observations. There are limits to what you can do with that, however. Certainly in terms of what you can quantify. 

I think it helps people to understand that if they can actually go out and see it. Certainly felt like it helped me, and getting to be outdoors was its own reward. Sometimes, depending on the weather and/or number of ticks. But not everyone owns their own land like Leopold did, where they can just go wander around wherever they like, whenever they like. And not everyone can get jobs that pay them to be outdoors, observing nature or carrying out experiments on timber harvest or tree planting strategies. And frankly, a lot of the jobs of that nature that do exist, don't pay enough or run long enough to be a career.

It seems like Leopold expects everyone who can't get their own bit of nature to explore, to simply take the value of it on faith, sight unseen, rather than risk tarnishing it with their noisy, automobile-fueled vacation.

'Land is the place where corn, gullies, and mortgages grow. Country is the personality of the land, the collective harmony of its soil, life, and weather. Country knows no mortgages, no alphabetical agencies, no tobacco road; it is calmly aloof to these petty exigencies of its alleged owners. That the previous owner of my farm was a bootlegger mattered not one whit to the grouse; they sailed as proudly over the thickets as if they were guests of the king.'

The Obstacle Course - J.F. Freedman

Set in the first six months of 1957, The Obstacle Course follows Roy Poole, ninth-grader in a little Maryland town. Roy's a smart-ass, a liar, a small-time hoodlum, a king in his own mind. In other words, a teenager. Roy plans to get accepted to the Naval Academy in Annapolis, and some day become an officer who commands a great warship.

To that end, he often sneaks away to run the obstacle course at the Academy on weekends, hitching rides there and back if he can. His parents don't know, neither do his friends. That's the way Roy keeps his life, compartmentalized. He builds model ships, and only his parents and the guy at the model shop know. He robs washing machines in an apartment complex to get the money for the models, and only his pals Burt and Joe know, because they play lookout. He makes friends with a retired admiral, and no one knows, and what the admiral thinks he knows about Roy, save his interest in the Navy, is lies. Surely, this intricate web of falsehoods can be sustained indefinitely.

This was the last book from the pile I grabbed at the book sale in March. I figured, at a glance from the back cover, that the obstacle course was metaphorical. That this was your typical thriller about a man who learned something he shouldn't, and must run through a gamut of foes and danger.

And in the sense that Roy thinks he's the slickest thing ever, that he can be all different things to different people, and everything will work out his way, it is. He doesn't try in junior high because that wouldn't be cool, but it's fine. He'll just start trying in high school to get his grades up enough to be accepted into the Naval Academy. The admiral thinks his grades are better than they are, and that Roy's dad has a good enough job he can afford to send Roy to a military school that would make it easier for Roy to get into Annapolis. Every day is him trying to only show a certain specific face to each individual person, always with the purpose of tricking them into giving him something or thinking he's something more than he is - smarter, tougher, richer, cooler.

Except he either can't see how he's working at cross-purposes to himself, or doesn't care. Roy won't talk about the academy with his parents, won't stop stealing, won't stop picking fights. He tries wheedling homework answers out of classmates, or breakfast out of midshipmen, but he won't stop needling or embarrassing the kids who help him, or insulting the midshipmen who won't.

Halfway through, the fact everything was going to collapse around him was obvious enough I lost interest, so I flipped to the back and starting reading from the last chapter forward. Got through another quarter of the book that way, right about the time things fell apart with the admiral and, in frustration over that, Roy starts being even more hardheaded, burning all his remaining bridges while insisting none of it matters, he's forging his own course.

Which, judging by the last chapter, may be accurate. Roy's played a particular role so long everyone has pigeonholed him as a certain way, and his attempts to step outside it isolated him to the extent there's no choice but to go it alone. I have no idea how that's going to work, because he still seems determined to get into the Academy, but that's how it ends. Roy, alone, sure that he can just keep pushing ahead and he'll get what he wants. I can't tell if Freedman expects me to be impressed, or pity the kid.

'They're my best friends, Burt and Joe, but I'm not going to tell them everything about me. I never once mentioned the admiral or any of that, that's a secret I'll take with me to the grave. What they don't know can't hurt them.

Can't hurt me.' 

The Thief - Clive Cussler and Justin Scott

Isaac Bell works for the Van Dorn Detective Agency. Traveling from Europe back to the U.S aboard the Mauretania, he comes across two people being abducted. He breaks it up but the leader of the kidnappers, an extremely agile guy, got away. The two targets, who claim to have figured out how to record visuals with sound that remains synchronized (in other words, talking pictures), are still in danger. Unless Bell can figure out who "the Acrobat" is and shut him down.

It's a Clive Cussler novel so, like all those Dirk Pitt books I read as a teenager, the plot doesn't really slow down. It's sort of a race, Bell trying different avenues to determine who he's up against and to protect the scientists, the Acrobat lurking in the shadows, trying to figure out who he's dealing with and pick his spots to strike. Cussler and Scott jump between characters on a regular basis, so there's always something going on. Either Bell is making some inquiry about the Acrobat or the mysterious "Artists Syndicate" that funds Imperial Films, or the Acrobat is intimidating or killing someone, or something's going on with another detective that's trying to help Bell.

Most of that last part is focused on Van Dorn's rep in Berlin, since the targets know they're being pursued by the German Army, and switches partway between the actual detective, and a precocious teenage girl that's decided being a detective is much better than hanging around her broken home. There's several chapters in the back half devoted to her trying to escape the country and report critical information she's learned. It felt like padding, but this is the 5th Isaac Bell book, so maybe Cussler and Scott were planning on her being a permanent part of the cast going forward, and wanted to establish her bonafides.

There's also a lot of what I assume is accurate historical detail about a variety of things. Thomas Edison's monopoly on cameras and film in the early 20th Century, the conditions in the boiler rooms of coal-powered ships, telegraphs and difficulties with filming in natural light or with recording sound. Apparently Edison's recording devices couldn't pick up a piano being played? Most of it isn't the kind of topics I'm wildly interested in, but it helps to make the world feel more three-dimensional.

One thing where the book differs from Cussler's Pitt novels is there isn't the Bond-esque string of romantic conquests for the lead. That stuff seemed cool to Teenage Calvin, but feels a little silly looking back now. Here, Bell actually gets married aboard the Mauretania to his apparently long-time film director girlfriend, Marion. I'm mildly curious if she typically plays a big role in the plots of these books, or if the size of her part here was due to the focus on movies and filming.

'Isaac Bell spun on his heel, dove under the life net that concealed the trapdoor, and vaulted himself feetfirst through the opening. As his foot grazed the top rungs of the ladder, he pulled his throwing knife from his boot and, without wasting a step of his swift descent, flung it overarm at Christian Semmler's throat.'

Wandering Star - Steven Yount

Set in the Texas Panhandle in 1910, Wandering Star shows us a town descending into lunacy over the approach of Halley's Comet, through the eyes of Tom Greer, a young boy in town.

The story actually starts with Tom going to meet Sam and Rebekah Adams, a young couple from Kansas who've come to High Plains (formerly Blind Mule) to re-open a weekly newspaper for a lawyer in town. Another passenger on the train is an emaciated, intense man named Nicholas, who jumps into the referendum on alcohol with both feet, but quickly pivots to proclaiming that the Comet will bring about the end of the world.

Sam tries to act as a voice of reason, but gets branded ungodly as more people decide they'd better hedge their bets. It's only a few weeks of being pious, in much the same way there are plenty of people in town who go to the church meetings about the evils of alcohol, who then turn around and vote against prohibition. Plus, Sam can't even keep his own house in order, as Rebekah grows increasingly depressed living in this rundown shithole of town, putting in long hours running a paper at a loss.

All of this is filtered through Tom's perspective, albeit when he's looking back from some point years down the line. Yount puts Tom at that age where he's both eager to learn, from just about anyone, but also steadfast in his certainty he knows what's what. Sam opens his eyes to new perspectives, especially on all the legends of the West that he's been taught in school. But then there's Tom's mother, prone to jumping onto any new organization or group with great intensity. Which, unfortunately, includes Brother Nicholas' hooey.

So Tom's caught between a man he respects and his mother, and I think Yount does a pretty good job describing the strain this puts on Tom, not aided by all the mental gymnastics Tom performs to both obey his mother's wishes, but not abandon his friend. It's fun watching Tom convince himself that if he talks about all this doomsday stuff with Sam, it could be construed as trying to convert the man, which Nicholas calls on them to do, and that means he's buying in like his mother wants, to try and save his soul.

There are other plot threads that don't really develop into much of anything. Sam's brief return to baseball, which might have been meant as another wedge between he and Rebekah, but I think there were enough wedges, or the Gem Scott murder. I think those are meant to a) provide a bit of additional detail to the world Tom inhabits, and b) to represent part of Tom's transition into adulthood (much like his crush on Rebekah) where things aren't always neatly resolved, and justice does not always prevail.

The book is quite funny at times. Tom's got a quick wit (and a quicker mouth), and the benefit of hindsight means he can get off some decent zingers at just about everyone. Beyond that, it's a matter of how amusing you find people contorting themselves into knots to justify their present actions or excuse their pasts.

"It is time to run these bloodsucking misery merchants out of this town using every means in our power, every weapon in our grasp." The preacher moved to the front edge of the stage and screamed the phrase that became his marching cry: "THE SALOONATICS MUST GO!"

Roberto to the Dark Tower Came - Tom Epperson

Roberto is a reporter in an unnamed Latin American country. He gets a phone call informing him that someone is displeased with his recent articles, and if he doesn't leave the country in 10 days, he will be killed. Roberto's received death threats before, but for some reason, this one strikes him as serious. So he decides to leave. He can join his attractive, wealthy girlfriend in St. Lucia.

But an acquaintance of his in the U.S. embassy passes along information that the military is busy carrying out massacres and atrocities against the people in a certain province, to remove any potential obstacles to extracting the hell out of some minerals. Roberto decides he'll pretend to leave, go to Tulcan instead, get evidence, and then write about the whole thing from St. Lucia.

Epperson breaks the book into specific days, each one starting with the title "{insert number} days until the day Roberto is to die." Starts at 10, works down to the day. The story follows Roberto, and only Roberto. We only see the people in his life - his father and (young) stepmother, his college friends, his work colleagues - when they're in his presence.

Epperson does usually dive into their backstories as well as their present situations, most of which revolve around some horrible act committed by one government of the country or another. His grandmother met his grandfather when she had to leave the country for her own safety. A colleague who was abducted by a rebel leader, and later survived a bombing at the newspaper's office. Roberto's photographer friend Daniel, who pretended to believe in Communism to score points with a girl he liked, and spent two weeks imprisoned and tortured by the military. A soldier who was maimed, and is struggling to find something he can do, as well as dealing with the guilt of the atrocities he took part in. 

And most of these people, to varying degrees, have abandoned whatever brought them into trouble initially. The reporter focuses more on fashion and gossip, Daniel now takes photos of celebrities and food. Each of them reached a point, for one reason or another, where they decided it wasn't worth the risk.

I don't know if the point is a shorthand way of explaining why Roberto decides to try and get this story, or highlighting the futility of the attempt. Everyone has been touched by the horrors committed in the country by governments, militias, wealthy landowners, drug cartels. Except perhaps, for Roberto. He's not been arrested and beaten, he's avoided being blown up. Even as the clock ticks towards his death and people all around him die, Roberto remains largely unscathed. So maybe the point was that those people needed someone to tell their stories.

Or maybe the point was it's useless. If all these people have these horrible experiences in their pasts, stretching back decades, if seemingly every piece of ground in the country had some massacre or expression of brutality stain its soil, what good has reporting on any of it actually done? What the military plans is apparently based on something the Sri Lankan government and military did. But people know that happened, the United Nations knows, the famed "international community" knows, and we're told there were no repercussions. No one was prosecuted, no one was made to account. Even if Roberto gets in, gets his story, and escapes to publish it, what good is it going to do?

Epperson dedicated the book to journalists who lost their lives pursuing the truth, so I don't think he was making an "it's pointless" argument, but it sure feels like it. I definitely thought Roberto was an idiot. Well-meaning, but an idiot nonetheless.

The book is tense, Epperson keeping you guessing whether Roberto really will die or not right up to the end. It's less the ticking clock the chapters mark and more because it's hard to tell which direction the threat will come from. There are enough stories in here of people being betrayed by comrades or long-trusted friends, of soldiers dressing up as paramilitary groups to divert suspicion, that it seemed like the danger could come from anywhere. The book does point strongly in one direction, but I kept myself keyed to the possibility that was another misdirection. Roberto is dealing with a lot of people where he only has their word they are who and what they claim to be. And since we're tagging along inside his mind, we don't know any more than he does.

'She's surrounded by religious bric-a-brac. His eye is caught as always by a porcelain figurine of Christ. It's a particularly macabre representation of the crucifixion, blood spilling down Jesus' face from his crown of thorns, his eyes bugging out and his mouth agape as if to say, "Hey, I don't care if I am the son of God, it's no fucking joke being crucified!"'

1222 - Anne Holt

A train crashes during a terrible winter storm in an isolated village in Norway. There's only one fatality - the man driving the train - and a hotel nearby offers shelter and food to everyone until the storm passes and they can be rescued.

Too bad people start dying. A well-known member of the clergy, then another member of the clergy who seemed to know something about what happened to his colleague. And there's a mysterious group that was traveling in a special carriage, who are sequestered with an entire floor to themselves. Nobody knows exactly who is up there, or what they're doing.

Trying to pull apart the puzzle is Hanne Wilhelmsen, a former cop, now in a wheelchair after getting shot a couple of times. Hanne really doesn't want any part of the mess, but figures they ought to at least attempt to gather some information for when the police can actually get there. She's aided by the person who runs the hotel, a lawyer who lives in the area, and a doctor that was on his way to a conference.

Hanne is an interesting choice for a protagonist. She's so reluctant, not just in her hesitance to get involved in the case, but about everything. She was traveling to meet with a specialist about certain quality of life issues she was dealing with, but doesn't seem like she really wanted to make the trip. She doesn't like to deal with people, explaining at one point that while they interest her, she prefers observing them through fiction. While her injury may have contributed to this attitude, the impression we get is she was already like that, and had been for a very long time.

She says she finds herself liking the doctor, but balks on the cusp of inviting him to dinner. He asks her to call him sometime, and she can come to dinner at his home. She says she will. Then she says she never did. I'm not sure someone's whose personality is so close to mine is really cut out for the lead role in a series of mysteries. It feels like Holt will really have to work to contrive circumstances for Hanne to get involved in mysteries if her instinctive reaction is, "Oh God, I have to be around people?"

It makes the fact she takes an interest in a teenage boy who seems to be traveling alone all the more inexplicable. Holt doesn't delve into Adrian's backstory, though if he's going to become a recurring character, I assume she will at some point. But I couldn't decipher why Hanne locked in on him to begin with, even before the murders started. He was pretty hostile towards both victims, but it never feels like the story is pointing to him as the killer.

(My money was on the doctor, especially once he made a comment that, as a dwarf, people weren't bothered by his condition because they didn't regard him as a threat. Plus, he's the one who suggests the second victim was stabbed with an icicle.)

Holt throws in several threads that end up being unrelated to the mystery, and I can't tell if these are things she's putting in place for future stories, people that Hanne will encounter again in other contexts, or if they were simply red herrings for the readers. There are also several references to earlier events in her life, like the President of the United States shooting an FBI agent in Hanne's living room, that I suspect would be expanded upon later. Maybe Holt was going to work backwards?

'If the perpetrator had actually been in the lobby when Cato Hammer's death was announced, we could only hope that he or she accepted the incorrect cause of death as a temporary declaration of peace from the hotel management.

People must be kept calm at all costs.

Including the perpetrator.' 

Tracking Gobi Grizzlies - Douglas Chadwick

There is a sub-species of the brown, or grizzly, bear that lives in the Gobi Desert of Mongolia. However, given that the confirmed population at the time this book was released (2017), was less than 3 dozen, they may not be around much longer.

Chadwick was the writer portion of a writer-photographer team sent to Mongolia for a piece about the Gobi grizzlies for National Geographic in 2011. Then he came back to help for another 4 field seasons. Similar to Imperial Dreams, the book spends a fair amount of pages describing the landscape and the culture of the area. That the Gobi is a desert, but it's a seasonally cold, almost constantly windswept region. In addition to getting very little rain - 4 inches is considered a normal annual precipitation, and there was a 15 year stretch prior from 1993 to 2007 where it averaged half that - this is not a desert of sand dunes, but of rock. Tough granite the wind gradually breaks into grit that gets into everything, including Chadwick's eye, as he gets eye infections two years running.

Still, Chadwick seems to love his time there, for how different it is from anything else he knows. He describes the size of it, the seemingly endless expanse, is almost disorienting at first, but he comes to feel more at home the more time he spends roaming in his down time.

Most of Chadwick's time is spent in a particular protected section of Mongolia, the Greater Gobi A Strictly Protected Area, as that's the only confirmed range the bears occupy. He discusses the lives of the local rangers and biologists, who protect and study the "GGSPA", the challenges they face in getting funding, the issues with demands to utilize the resources for other things.

This is not like a national park in the U.S., where people can drive in and gawk at the critters. Access is restricted, so it's not paying for itself in tourism dollars. Mongolia has a strong pastoral culture, so livestock herders are allowed to bring their animals into certain sections of the GGSPA in the winter months to graze. This at least keeps them from competing with the bears for food (the bears are hibernating), but it's probably more grazing pressure than the plant life can tolerate.

Also, the Gobi Desert is rich in minerals, and a lot of Mongolia's economy was based on mineral extraction. So there are companies trying to get the government to open the area up so they can tear it apart. And there are the "ninja miners", people who take advantage of the desert's size and isolation to sneak in and run covert, small-scale mining operations. If caught by the rangers, they might get a fine, and their equipment taken away. Even if they shoot the rangers, they may not face harsher penalties, if they know the right people. So Chadwick also discusses the push-and-pull of trying to get government officials on the side of protecting this place and its wildlife - apparently it also has the only population of wild Bactrian camels - and how quickly the level of support can shift with changes in the administration.

All that said, what this book has Imperial Dreams didn't is they actually find the bears. Not a ton of them; in an average field season maybe 2 bears get radio-collared after they end up in one of the feeder traps, though there are cameras set up around the feeders that capture images of many more. But enough Chadwick gets to see these animals up close, not just hear about them based on recollections of someone pulling up memories from half a century ago. They seem fascinating, if only for how different they are from what I picture when someone says "grizzly bear."

They're closer to the black bears we have in Missouri in size - the largest captured is slightly over 300 pounds, and there are a couple of young adult females that barely top 120 - and live mostly on plants. There's a stretch of a couple of pages where Chadwick describes trying to learn from one of the local biologists just what the heck these bears find to live on in this place, and since there's a language barrier, it comes to him pointing at various plants and miming like he's shoveling it into his mouth. (Apparently, one thing the bears eat in abundance is the tuber the local wild rhubarb have underground, but also the flowers of certain species.)

The nice thing with Chadwick coming back for several field seasons is you can see how the research group are trying to incorporate new ideas into their work, as they gain fresh information, and how well that does and doesn't work. The feeders are mostly grain pellets, but at one point, they try adding dog food to the mix to provide more protein, because the bears do eat flightless grasshoppers, gerbils, and small lizards. The bears ignore the dog food. Why? Unclear at that time, just like it's unclear why sometimes the bears will chew on a camel carcass (based on their poop), but other times they won't. However, adding additional feeders at the same oasis, but further away, so one bear can't monopolize the food source, seemed to give females with cubs more opportunities to get some extra calories they might not ordinarily have.

I also want to mention, this book has some outstanding photographs. Of the bears, and the people involved in the work, but also some double-page spreads of the actual terrain. I might not think so if I was actually wandering around out there, but it looks gorgeous, in a stark, austere kind of way. So maybe I would like it. I like open spaces; I'm the only person I know who likes traveling through western Kansas. 

'Trust me: semi-fresh grizzly shit full of partially fermented wild onion sprouts is definitely not a hoax.'

Gullible's Travels - Cash Peters

This is the story of Cash Peters' last six months as the guy a radio station sends to check out weird or quirky roadside attractions and theme parks. Like the Sound of Music theme park, in Salzburg, which Peters has been sent to on at least 5 occasions.

OK, actually it's his last 18 months as the guy a radio station sends to check out weird or quirky roadside attractions and theme parks. It was supposed to be six months, but he was either really bad about shifting to another career path, or not working at it very hard.

This doesn't really include the Sound of Music theme park, outside a brief description of it as one of his periodic dissertations on how his job is not nearly so fun and keen as you imagine. Well shit man, I knew that as soon as I saw there was part of a chapter spent on the Precious memories park in Carthage, Missouri. I have driven past that place more than once for work, I can guess what hell exists within its confines and there is no realistic amount of money you could pay me to visit.

Though if there was a realistic amount of money, and I went, the end result would probably be much like Peters, in terms of people sending me e-mails telling me what an evil, horrible person I was. The difference is, Peters actually seemed fairly charmed by the set-up, whereas I would be on the verge of running out screaming, clawing at my face and speaking in tongues.

For the most part, Peters is taking a humorous, exaggerated approach. He's pretty evenly split between places he's excited to visit (the Museum of Dirt) and places he's basically going under protest (the barbed wire museum.) And in those categories, he's fairly evenly split between places he ends up enjoying (the National Bird Dog Museum,) and those he ends up hating or being swiftly bored by (the Museum of Dirt, Graceland.)

Either way, there are certain recurring gags. His tendency to seize on any opportunity that's free; he calls almost every PR person he encounters "Lisa," because apparently all PR people are named that; his 10 rules of life, of which there are 32; his phobia of confrontation because he's British. I was not aware that was an issue. I thought the British did confrontation, but in a very faux-polite, backhand insult manner. Like, you aren't sure if they're actually pissed, but you know they're looking down their nose at you? Well, learn something new everyday.

I think the parts I enjoyed the most were often the effort he expended trying to reach some of these places. When no one could confirm a place existed, and he starts calling around or accosting random people on the street or harassing his producer for help finding the place. Or when he thought he was getting a tour of a particular farm in Minneapolis, only to learn he was getting a formal tour of Minneapolis. So disappointed. Whether he actually finds the place, or whether he actually enjoys it once he gets there, is beside the point. I'm not sure there was one place he visited in this book that I would want to visit myself. But getting a front-row seat to his Sisyphean task of finding this place or that place is entertaining.

'I snapped shut my notebook and swore by the seven golden fleeces of Sinbad to track down this Museum of Dirt that nobody would let me see. It might take me a few days, but I would find it, oh yes, and when I did I would fix up an appointment with the curator personally, and insist that he give me a guided tour. And Lisa - well, Lisa could go screw herself-f-f.'

Imperial Dreams - Tim Gallagher

Gallagher was part of a search in the mid-2000s to determine if the ivory-billed woodpecker still existed in a remote tract of swampy forest in Arkansas. They supposedly spotted some and later there was even a video taken, though that evidence is apparently disputed by many authorities and the broader consensus is seemingly the species is extinct.

This book, however, is about several trips Gallagher and a variety of other interested parties made to Mexico's Sierra Madre mountains in the early-2010s, searching for signs the imperial woodpecker, the ivory-billed's bigger relative, still existed. While there are scattered reports of sightings from the 1940s up to a few years before Gallagher's trips started, what real information we have on their habits, in terms of breeding, diet, social structure, habitat preferences, came mostly from a Norwegian named Carl Lumholz, who spent a couple of years in the 1890s riding a mule the length of the Sierra Madres, writing mostly about the people he encountered, but also the wildlife. So if we want to learn anything further about imperial woodpeckers, including whether there's a species to preserve, time was getting short.

SPOILER ALERT, Gallagher doesn't find any imperial woodpeckers. I imagine the book would have been somewhat different if he had. Probably more like what I was expecting. But if you can't find it, you can't find it, so the book focuses on the people and the place they inhabit. It's in some ways a history, as those mountains have long been isolated enough to be used as refuges for a variety of people. Pancho Villa hid out there from the American military for a time, some of the last holdouts of the Apaches in Mexico lived there. Gallagher travels through several villages he presents as not having changed in their ways of living in centuries. No electricity, no phones or anything like that. That isolation likely worked in the woodpeckers' favor, as basically all the evidence we have says they preferred old-growth pine forests at altitude.

Unfortunately, time marches on, and where there's old timber, there will be people trying to get to it and cut it down to sell. Which is what Gallagher thinks may have done the imperials in; the logging industry destroying a lot of their habitat. He speaks to a lot of people along the way, looking for any hints of places that might hold imperial woodpeckers. Which gives the reader a good sense of what a longshot this is, when the people he speaks with are in their 70s or older, talking about how they remember those birds vividly, but they haven't seen one since the 1960s or even further back.

The other thing that apparently moved into the region is drug cartels growing opium. Their looming threat hangs over the entire book. Gallagher often mentions people who advise him against going on this trip, or tell him he absolutely can't search beyond a particular mountain range, because that's Zetas cartel turf. There are more than a few encounters with men in SUVs or trucks, often with AK-47s, demanding to know what they're doing, or wanting to see identification. There are people he planned to speak with who are too grief-stricken because one of their relatives was abducted and murdered days earlier. To an extent, the book is Gallagher slowly coming to realize that risking his life to try and find this woodpecker might be a little crazy and/or stupid. 

'It's hard to say what motivated him to embark on such grueling and dangerous journeys. He had an excellent income from his dental practice, a nice home, and no children, so he and his wife could afford to indulge themselves. Instead, he chose to drive south with a few buddies and spend up to two months at a time roughing it in the outback of Durango, living on beans, booze, and tortillas.'