The Klamath Knot: Explorations of Myth and Evolution, Twentieth Anniversary Edition (Paperback)

by David Rains Wallace (Author) "I FIRST WENT to the Klamath Mountains in 1969, with a fifteen-dollar sleeping bag, a canvas Boy Scout knapsack, some canned goods, and a peculiarly..." (more)
Key Phrases: cobra plant, tailed frog, primal ooze, Klamath Mountains, North America, Dinosaur Age (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Review
"Wallace is among the very best of our nature writers, one whose work is marked by grace, feeling and a deep desire to know the natural world in all its moods."--Harry Middleton, Philadelphia Inquirer -- Review

Product Description
Winner of the John Burroughs Medal for Nature Writing, the Commonwealth Club Silver Medal for Literature 1984, and named one of the twentieth century's best nonfiction books by the San Francisco Chronicle, The Klamath Knot, originally published by Sierra Club Books in 1983, is a personal vision of wilderness in the Klamath Mountains of northwest California and southwest Oregon, seen through the lens of "evolutionary mythology." David Rains Wallace uses his explorations of the diverse ecosystems in this region to ponder the role of evolution and myth in our culture. The author's new epilogue makes a case for the creation of a new park to safeguard this exceptionally rich storehouse of relict species and evolutionary stories, which has largely been bypassed by conservationists since John Muir.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 167 pages
• Publisher: University of California Press; 1 edition (April 24, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0520236599
• ISBN-13: 978-0520236592
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 5.9 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.5 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #612,839 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Overlooked gem of natural philosophy, March 30, 2004

By	E. M. Dale (USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Nature writing always carries something of the romantic with it, and this is its greatest strength and greatest curse. As a strength, it provides a window into the sublime limit which nature opens for her human observers. Such romanticism is a weakness, however, if it devolves into a reified hymn to an imagined nature which is as unreal as the imagined un-nature from which one hopes to fly. Nature is not a paradigm, is not a given. One has to meet it, encounter it, realize one's place in it, hear what it has to say, say something back to it, wonder about it, and allow it to remain mystery. The best nature writing has does this -- think of Walden, and how Thoreau allows the pond to retain its power and dignity while plumbing its depths, measuring its boundaries, cataloging its flora and fauna, and descibing his own very human comings and goings around its then mostly deforested banks. In the end, we know a lot about the pond, and even more about Thoreau, but Walden remains Walden, the myth, the legend. Having been lucky enough to have lived close to Walden for several years, I can tell you that no amount of reading about Walden, even at Walden, can capture the life of the pond. Thoreau's book takes the measure of the pond, and makes it real in a way that the real Walden always has been, yet never quite is.

Wallace's book accomplishes this for the Klamath mountains of northern California, home of great trees, deep lakes, and sasquatch. His book never holds the Klamath at arm's length, as the romantic impulse al too often wants to do, but rather gives an account of the terrain, measures it out, proposes a history and a taxonomy of the land and the fields and the rivers which captures so much about the place, but never pretends to total knowledge. He writes (as did Aristotle about his fish, and Thoreau about his flowers) as a scientist with the soul of a poet, or perhaps a poet with a scientist's eye. Of course, Wallace is neither a scientist nor a poet (neither were Aristotle or Thoreau), and so what we see is Wallace's experience of the Kalamath, not Klamath poetry and Klamath science. And of course, that is all we can see, just as all we can see in Walden the book is Thoreau's experience of Walden the pond. Such places cannot be captured by a single perspective, but will not be seen at all unless a single perspective widens the vision for the rest of us. There are many small ponds around Concord, Mass, but Thoreau went to live at Walden. And there are many wild knots of mountains and rivers still scattered around this nation, and the world. Each one needs a Thoreau, or a Wallace, or an Ed Abbey, or Aldo Leopold, or Muir, or Whitman, to bring it to our vision in a way we may have never seen it before. I daresay the lumbermen who cut the trees on Walden's shores saw the same water and sky as Thoreau -- but it was Thoreau's way of seeing it that lasted. Wallace's view is the one that needs to last, to stick in the mind, concerning the Klamath region.

Wallace's theme in the book is an "evolutionary myth," one that tells a story about the land which provides a key to meaning. He writes, "Moses forced his society to accept a unifying law; Jesus forced his to accept the unity of all of humanity; Darwin forced his to accept the unity of all of life" (8). He acknowledges that placing Darwin in league with Moses and Jesus will strike some as odd, but Wallace is a man with a vision. He points out that "both religion and science are mythologies, in the sense that each provides the individual with an account of the origins and meanings of life. It seems to me irrelevant, in this mythological sense, whether such accounts are facts or fictions. They need only to provide their believers with a workable key to life, an invisible world of origins and meanings to help them make sense of an often confusing, sometimes frightening, physical world" (8). Following this idea, he presents his explorations of the Klamath as a playing-out of an evolutionary mythology, a story about how the land came to be, what it might mean, and how the story fits in with the rest of life. It is a powerful and original story he tells, and bound to last. More than a memoir of a love-affair with a place, and more than a naturalist's account of a fragile and vanishing ecosystem, Wallace's book is a testament to the power of a place to transform one's very understanding of the world, and what it means to be human in that world after the knot has been unraveled, and then re-tied. It is a powerful and meaningful vision of lost wild places which avoids romanticism and doomsaying, and which holds as much hope as horror about the loss and preservation of the American wilderness.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars See for yourself, December 19, 2005

By	Amazonbombshell (Milwaukie, OR, USA) - See all my reviews

This is an essay -- for lack of a better term -- that combines natural science, mythology, philosophy, even some anthropology, in a moving discourse centered around the Pacific Northwest's Klamath Mountains.

It's deeply (though not overtly) spiritual, discussing life with a sense of wonder we often leave behind. It's also as intelligent, and as important, as any good academic work on ecology, but unlike most of those, it'll draw you in, pulling so subtly you won't even feel its power until suddenly you've finished a chapter and realized your perceptions have changed.

Until you've picked it up, you won't know what I mean, but it won't take long to see that THE KLAMATH KNOT can make the Mystery that is life more accessible to all of us. For this reason, it isn't just a philosophical toy you'll be able to discard; instead, you'll find it informs the way you live in the world.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Crawling out of the Ooze in Nor Carl, January 16, 2007

By	Philip Carl "EcoAngler" (Half Moon Bay, CA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

From one special corner of the biosphere, David Wallace explores the evolution of life on earth. Before you say, "not another treatise on evolution," The Klamath Knot is a different animal.

Even though Wallace's knowledge of the Klamath ecosystems and the dynamics of evolution are fundamentally sound, he's grasping for much more in this book. As the smaller print under the title states, it's an "exploration of myth and evolution." The Klamath Knot represents the rare blend of hard science of the world we can observe and measure with that of the world we can only imagine or dream. That's quite a subject-matter-bridge to cross, but Wallace puts it off. Once I got a couple of chapters into the book, the distinction between science and myth began to blur (i.e., Do giants really exist? Not sure).

Wallace doles out each chapter as the creator planned it. He introduces us to rock, primal ooze, water, and ultimately life. And the backdrop for each major step of life evolving on this planet is the Klamath Mountains. A truly magical and diverse region along the California and Oregon border that stretches from the Rogue River south to the Eel River. A place that is home to old growth forests, runs of salmon and steelhead, and high deserts. Wallace takes us into some of the more remote places of the Klamath and masterfully focuses on the biological importance of each ecosystem.

The book goes well beyond the physical world and ponders some interesting questions. Like where is life on our planet headed? Is it possible to know where it's headed? What can we learn from evolution? Does life evolve from cooperation or competition or both? What is the role of myth? Does Big-Foot really exist? Could he exist? Is this creature another branch along life's tree?

I admire the author for both his skill and courage in addressing such diverse subject matter. Reading the Klamath Know will leave you with a renewed sense of wonder about the natural world.