Back to Earth: A Backpacker's Journey into Self and Soul [Paperback]

Kerry Temple (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 26, 2005

Back to Earth is the powerful, personal journey of a man in his middle years who senses that he has drifted away from the ideals of his youth and who must now search for coherence, belief, and a renewed spirituality following the breakup of his marriage and family. Living alone in a cabin in the woods, Temple searches his past and tells tales of experiences backpacking in Colorado, Dakota, New Mexico and Alaska. His reflections focus on the spiritual and redemptive qualities of nature, the American character, and the dilemmas of the split between matter and spirit, body and soul, God and creation. As an "earnest pilgrim with a short attention span", Temple's story chronicles his journey from an intimacy with the earth to an alienation from it, and the need of all humans to find a redemptive reunion. The book is a kind of pilgrimage as the author tries to get back home, to find God, to learn what our species once knew, and to rediscover the heart and soul of creation.

Editorial Reviews

Review

This book is about the missing things in our lives--which aren't necessarily the things we'd imagine. Instead of draining away, Kerry Temple's life was filling up. Quietly,subtly, but truly. (McKibben, Bill )

In his middle years, Kerry Temple wandered lost, cut off from wife and sons, from house and friends, but unlike many wayward travelers, who keep on going in the wrong direction, he found his way back, if not to that broken home, then to the sources of meaning and happiness. This eloquent book is the story of that return, a braiding together of remembered journeys and new ones, from the Arctic to the desert Southwest, from the Big Horns of Wyoming to the woods of Indiana, always in search of the unnamable power that flows through every breath. (Scott Russell Sanders )

An endearing summation. (Edward Hoagland )

Kerry Temple’s Back to Earth is a beautiful meditation on nature, religion, relationships and time --on life itself. Temple’s writing is pure poetry. (Alex Kotlowitz )

Kerry Temple’s Back to Earth is a beautiful meditation on nature, religion, relationships and time --on life itself. Temple’s writing is pure poetry. (Alex Kotlowitz )

Read Temple’s testament to the healing power of nature, then go out and experience it for yourself. (Audubon Magazine )

About the Author

Kerry Temple is editor of Notre Dame Magazine. His essays have appeared in Audobon and Backpaker magazine. He has been included in a volume of Best American Essays.

Kerry Temple is editor of Notre Dame Magazine. His essays have appeared in Audobon and Backpaker magazine. He has been included in a volume of Best American Essays.

Product Details

• Paperback: 208 pages
• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers (April 26, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0742543943
• ISBN-13: 978-0742543942
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,840,078 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Explorations of the soul, May 26, 2005

By 

Another 'Packer "travel light" (South Bend, IN, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Back to Earth: A Backpacker's Journey into Self and Soul (Paperback)

The author of this intensely personal collection of essays has backpacked into many of the country's wildest and most remote wildernesses. His stories of those trips make engrossing reading, but the book is as much about interior journeys as exterior ones, as the subtitle telegraphs. Temple writes elegant and thoughtful prose that has echoes of Loren Eiseley, Edward Abbey, Colin Fletcher and William Least Heat Moon. It is a journey into the soul that lies at the heart of this book.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Moving Meditation on Life and Nature, February 10, 2009

By 

James Seidler (Chicago, IL) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Back to Earth: A Backpacker's Journey into Self and Soul (Paperback)

"Many years ago I was taught by stones, stones collected from south Texas and rocky Colorado, Michigan's Upper Peninsula and the sun-blazed cathedrals of Zion National Park, Wyoming's Big Horns and the plain-dressed woods of rural Indiana. A shaman's stone from South Dakota. Leopold's wilderness prophecies and a fall while climbing that taught me to sit still."

That is how Kerry Temple sums up his lessons in "Back to Earth: A Backpacker's Journey into Self and Soul." The book is a lyrical meditation on knowledge gained from nature, the solace Temple has found in long hikes and backwoods journeys. As the book begins, he's at a loss; his marriage his ended, and his path has become misdirected, diverted by the tiny, cumulative compromises of everyday life. In an effort to re-focus, Temple moves to an isolated cabin in South Bend, Indiana, one without radio or television or even a clock. There he contemplates, recollecting old journeys and talismans he has collected along the way, rocks that evoke scenery, beauty and lessons learned and forgotten.

The book is a seeker's tale, recounting a lifetime of hikes and, through time spent in nature, efforts to reconnect with a unifying purpose, a God seemingly stripped of his dogma. Temple steps steadily through old memories on the trail, moving patiently toward the transcendent experiences he seeks there. His hikes are varied--they take him to Wyoming and the Rockies, Lake Superior and the frozen Arctic. These are places where he walks in company, shivers in the hubris of youth.

As he looks back, Temple wonders how he led himself astray, how his sense of purpose eroded under obligation and ease. He explores his new surroundings, venturing into the stream bordering his cabin, listening to the shifts of the seasons. The book is open to the big ideas of natural philosophers--Leopold, Muir, Emerson--but remains grounded in their exploration. Temple faults our society for its emphasis on the immediate, but he faults himself as well, avoiding the tediousness of the scold.

"Our species has come a long way since timekeeping meant monitoring celestial migrations and contemplating the universe in all its twinkling wonder. Yet we seem less attuned and more bewildered. Perhaps, in asking how best to spend our time, we have forgotten how to ask, "Is this how I was to spend my life?" Progress is not absolute."

At times, the book can seem overly nostalgic for a preferred past. In lauding the connection people once shared with nature, Temple can glide over over famine and disease, natural disaster and tribalism. At one point, he states, "It is significant, I think, that the deterioration of our species' psychological and spiritual health has coincided with its gradual separation from and exploitation of the earth." I would quibble with that assumption of deterioration.

But "Back to Earth" is a rewarding read, humble and wise, full of stories that inspire longing for rucksacks and trails. Nature does hold something essential for us all; the book is persuasive there. We just need the time and space and solitude to discover that meaning for ourselves.

Other Quotes:

"What I remember, too, is Mac picking us up that first Sunday when we'd grown weary of too-short rides and paved highways. I remember his last name was McGowan and he said to call him Mac and he said do not worship nature for it is only the face of God, not God itself. And he took us for a drive and pointed us north, and in the meantime took us fishing and touring around, higher and higher, deeper and deeper into the woodsy mountains."

"'I wouldn't call the Indian way "religion," said Father Bill Callahan, a Jesuit priest I had met the day before at Red Cloud School in Pine Ridge. 'There is no dogma, no structure, no mimeograph machine.'
'It is spirituality. They believe in the sacredness of the created world and the spiritual idea of personal and family holiness.'"

"There are other places on the earth, many similar constructions, stones of various sizes, pyramids and etchings, altars and carved rock tablets linking the human species to the celestial machinations, indicating a need to discern, to correlate, to map somehow the mysterious and awesome power of creation, looking for a higher power's hand in it all, believing in the spirited intelligence that beckons from just beyond the horizon. We come and leave our offerings upon the landscape too--our own prayer feathers, medicine bundles and humble pouches of tobacco."

"It has also occurred to me that these truths and hopes and good intentions are of little power if hey do not last, if they are not incorporated into the affairs of human interaction, if they are not brought along and shared, integrated into the lives of those around us. It is one thing to revel in the beauty and order of creation; it is another to find it here among the people, the many nations with whom I live."

5.0 out of 5 stars For any naturalist, outdoorsman, or storyteller, December 30, 2010

By 

B. Hansen "Hercules Thorr" (Coeur d'Alene, ID) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Back to Earth: A Backpacker's Journey into Self and Soul (Paperback)

This book is wonderful! I bought it about 2 years ago and have read it twice. That's impressive considering the never-ending literary list that sits atop my shelves!
It is a story about traveling, mostly on foot, and entirely in America. Backpacking in Big Bend, Rocky Mountain Park, Royal Isle, Zion, Indiana, and the Bighorn Mtns, the locations are near home for many Americans. The reader journeys along with the author as he grows up, learns lessons, and pieces together the puzzle that is life. His skills as a story teller are great - along the lines of Jon Krakuer, Lynn Schooler, and maybe even Jack Keruac. Kerry Temple also quotes many writers in his stories and lends a sense of community from folks such as William Pitt Root and David Attenborough. Diving into family, regret, and loss, this is also a story about life at its most honest.
This book is heartfelt!