Customer Reviews

The Road Washes Out in Spring: A Poet's Memoir of Living Off the Grid

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I thought this was a very hard read, author kept veering off the subject matter and writing page after page about something else i.e. poetry, trees, etc. I was hoping to read about everyday life in the backwoods of Maine and the hardships as well as the rewards of doing so. The title info was sparce and rare throughout the book. Too many long complicated unfamiliar words, Very disapointing.

In the old and idiosyncratic genre of wilderness literature, our American masterpiece is Thoreau's Walden: Or, Life in the Woods.

As with many perennially great books, when people overcome its daunting aura of "edifice" to actually read Walden, they often find the experience fabulously enjoyable. Thoreau combined exceptional poetic resourcefulness with astute political convictions and a seasoned gift for precise ecological detail. His writing also pulses with wit and resonant metaphor.

Contemporary Maine poet Baron Wormser has now published a book that re-approaches the concerns of Walden not in a scholarly fashion but first-hand, testing and weighing the immediate and practical utility of a life in the woods and addressing Thoreau not as a lofty intellectual forebear but as mentor and even peer.

While not a "memoir" really, as the term is mostly used today, Wormser's book is also not a how-to manual. The Road Washes Out in Spring is a marvelously sensual evocation of the motives and means of one family who took Thoreau's challenge to heart and spent a couple of decades living at the end of the road, foregoing conveniences such as electricity and harvesting much of their own food and fuel from the land right at hand.

Like the ancient Chinese sages Li Po and Wang Wei in intentional exile from the metropolis, Thoreau turned away from "normal" career and family expectations to perch at the margin of his society, from there turning back to scrutinize, contemplate, and speculate. Not "retreating" but shifting vantage points, the poet-exile seeks to see worldly reality and possibility with a fresh acuity impossible amid the mercantile hubbub and courtly intrigues of the city.

Wormser's book has three themes, entwined -- the nature of homesteading, in an era of commodity housing and "real" estate; the nature of poetry, at a time when a poet's age-old vocation as chronicling bard and shaman seems effaced by self-help frenzies and obsession with celebrities; and the nature of spiritual discipline, where the other two themes are combined, and where the joys and challenges of disciplined meditation are explored as manifestations of home-making and poetic artistry.

Characteristically, Wormser torques the "back-to-the-land" cliché -- and the perplexity of urban or suburban relations and friends -- by describing his family's Maine home not as in the middle of nowhere but "in the middle of Elsewhere." This is surely a poet's book. His vocabulary can be delightfully erudite and still entirely natural-sounding, and his prose is muscular yet always conversational, loping in gait while assiduously probing. He writes with special alacrity of neighbors, woodstoves, splitting mauls, outhouses, and the vagaries of weather across the day and night sky.

On the original title page of Walden the author declaimed, "I do not propose to write an ode to dejection, but to brag as lustily as chanticleer in the morning, standing on his roost, if only to wake my neighbors up."

In tone and tempo, Wormser is more akin to owl than rooster. With less bravado and ferocity than Thoreau, but with comparable subtlety and ardor, Baron Wormser has written a beautiful and eloquent reprise to Walden, entirely contemporary and likely to powerfully beguile readers who live in the north woods but also those who decidedly do not, like a friend of mine -- a poet and professional exterminator from Jersey City -- who told me that The Road Washes Out in Spring is the best book he's read in years.

This is a great book. Not a how to at all (better than any how-to book on the subject I have read though, a motivating account of how-did), but a thoughtful collection of reflections about family life, rural off the grid living, poetry, country neighbors and the nearby small rural town's life. A litle 70's and 80's era stemming from back-to-the-land out of the sixties style versus "modern" cob/strawbale, solar, energy efficiency, etc sustainability, but shows how simple it can be, how enjoyable too and really just encourages you to go do it. The refelctions on their local nature and our modern culture are timeless and pertinent. The topics cover city hippies getting helped out building the house, the virtues of an outhouse and no electricity, rural small town economy, stoic resourceful rural neighbors, national politics, wells/water supply, and of course their exciting driveway. A really fabulous book, I highly recommend it.

I hope everyone reads this book. It is charmingly written and a worthwhile read from the recent former poet laureate of Maine. His story motivates us all with its straighforward nature. Thank you, Baron Wormser and book seller.

Wonderfully crafted language. A polished gem. Resonance.
Few books, in recent years, have made me cry.
This one did.

Wormser is a sage, playful, exacting, pure writer, and this book is an absolute treat. The structure is wonderfully unconventional--his thoughts glide from one focused argument or narrative to the next like a bird moving from branch to branch in the woods. Looking forward to reading more prose (and poetry) from this author.