Customer Reviews

Mountains of the Great Blue Dream

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... so postulates Robert Leonard Reid, perhaps only partially tongue-in-cheek, in this under-appreciated collection of stories on the mountains, and what attracts us to them, sometimes even fatally. Reid grew up in Western Pennsylvania, in the "snow belt" near Lake Erie. He describes October, "electrifying October" as "our reference point, our flooding of the Nile," that distinctive season when the maples flamed out. Like others of us, including Edward Abby, he moved West, and noted that California had no such distinctive season. The "pheromones" pulled him to the mountains, a sport which he embraced, but managed to get out in time, unlike some of his colleagues. This book is a collection of seven stories, all concerning our relationship with the high country. Reid is reflective, mediates on the larger issues, and has a wonderful erudition that places his views in the perspective of others. He quotes from Dillard, Nabokov, Emerson, Santayana, St. Exupéry, and many others.

The first story is the most explicit in terms of the craft of mountain-climbing, and centers on the Grand Tetons. In his second story he "follows" the trail of Zenas Leonard, who found a way over the Sierra Nevada in 1833, and contrasts Leonard's travails with his own 150 years later. Reid comes down through the "backdoor" into Yosemite. The third story, "Fourfold Visions of the Gila," is what led me to purchase the book, since the Gila Wilderness remains one of my favorite places. Reid underscores how limited is our preservation even of this, noting that you have to exclude the animals that our hunted, the grasslands that are grazed, etc. He accomplished one of my new "life objectives," the 50 mile hike of the Middle Fork of the Gila. He can verge on "New Ageism" when a bear and a wolf share their secrets with him at the camp fire, but he does have a degree in math from Harvard, so I tend to go along for the ride, and appreciate the areas he is probably right - after all, he does know about the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principal, though he omits Planck's Constant. The fourth story, "Decrescendo," concerns the extermination of the last of the wild wolves, near Castle Peak, in Colorado. He goes "back East" for his fifth story, when he taught high school in Manhattan, and would take the students on trips into the Catskills, teaching them Socrates on the way. He was obviously a great mentor, and sadly, with liability insurance dominating our lives today, it is unlikely that such adventures could be repeated. The sixth story, and another motivator for purchase, is "Pilgrimage to Tsoodzil," more commonly referred to, still, by those of us who live in Albuquerque, as Mt. Taylor. By using the Navajo name, he merely changes inertial reference frames, and short-changes other Indian groups, such as the ones who live at Acoma, who call it by a different name also. On Tsoodzil he pushed the edge of the envelope, a solo climb in poor weather, but "drew his strength" from the mountain, as he was instructed. The last story is a mediation of place, which strongly resonated with me. He introduced the term, at least to me, of "topophilia," a love for the particular topography of place, and how we carry numerous ones in our heads. And like me, when I've seen my tent from a distance, he said: "There is home," as though he had always been there.

Reid has written a deeply thought provoking book, with much originality. Consider just a couple of his passages: "I know of no place where the contrast between nebulous nature and premium unleaded science is more vivid, or more consequential, than it is in New Mexico." "I looked up the slope and saw an overturned trainload of fog spilling down the mountain." I also found his discussion particularly illuminating on the reason why the Judeo-Christian religion encourages the "mastery" of nature, which is a concept missing in Indian religions. Finally, the cover is one of the best ever, and stands in sharp contrast to his "America, New Mexico." Reid has written a solid 5-star read, which deserves far greater circulation.