Top critical review
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2.0 out of 5 starsA good story, poorly written
ByEnglishMajoron September 2, 2013
Author Eric Blehm clearly cares about the American wilderness and the people, like Randy Morgenson, who take responsibility for and at times succumb to its harsh beauty, but he's not very good at telling the reader about any of that. At one point, he quotes Wallace Stegner, who provided a harsh (but honest) critique to Morgenson himself, when Morgenson tried his own hand at writing, saying, "It's all about your feelings and sensations, and those don't communicate well to a reader. He half feels you indulging a sort of yeasty nature mysticism...." That's Blehm. The young Morgenson is a "dashing young ranger," "with ... expressive, gentle eyes that held a hint of something she couldn't put her finger on. Mystery, perhaps." Duh. Typical of Blehm's narrative is a "description" of an incident when Morgenson and a fellow ranger were called upon to handle a plane crash in the back country. The anecdote should be rich with detail. Instead, all we get is, "A plane had crashed, it was windy, snow squalls were settling in over the higher peaks, and ... the helicopter took off with their packs still inside. ...They had no survival gear. Fortunately, the helicopter was able to make it back through the clouds to pick them up after the operation." And that's it. No specifics. No details. We get the occasional quote from Morgenson's logs (e.g., "I yearned to know the plants, geology, glaciology, weather, and the effects of these things on each other") but unlike Morgenson, who supposedly gave "two pages" in his logbooks to "the song of the hermit thrush," Blehm offers only generalities. After wading through several hundred pages of Blehm's starry-eyed blather, I came away thoroughly disgusted with the late Mr. Morgenson. He appears to have been a selfish aging hippie who, having cheated on his wife and been served with divorce papers, walked off into the mountains, leaving his colleagues with the job of a heartbreaking and ultimately fruitless search-and-rescue mission. (His remains were found by a California Conservation Corps trailbuilding group about five years after his disappearance, near a gorge "where grasses and mountain flowers made a living in patches of silt and rocky soil." Again, no details.) Blehm could have used a few classes in botany, geology, glaciology, weather, and the effects of these things on each other and on the human beings who love and work in the American wilderness. It's a pity he preferred to indulge himself in yeasty nature mysticism, instead.
