Journal of a Sabbatical

March 2, 1999

these deer have nothing to do with today's entry

These deer have nothing to do with today's entry. They're just deer photographed on (I think) February 19. One of them walked in front of my car so I had to stop to let it cross. By the time I got the camera out, they were both on their way across the field. White-tailed deer. They attract Ixodes damini - that's deer ticks - who give us Lyme disease.

I finished reading Summer at Little Lava by Charles Fergus. On balance I liked it despite its unevenness. It's a memoir about the author's season in a small isolated house in a salt marsh on the Iceland coast and about dealing with his grief over his mother's murder. He'd set out to write sort of an Iceland version of The Outermost House by Henry Beston, but his mother's tragic death changed the focus of his retreat.

The best parts are his observations of the birds in the area - it's nesting season - and the other fauna and flora. I thought the parts about his inner life were a little forced and didn't flow the way the nature bits did. His retellings of Icelandic folk tales and stories from travelers of the past add to the atmosphere of his book but most of them were already familiar to me. Basically, the parts of this book that are good are very very good and the parts that aren't aren't.

The "retreat to cabin in remote place to get in touch with self" genre suffers a bit from the fact that everybody is trying consciously or unconsciously to write Walden. Even The Outermost House isn't Walden, but it is definitely a classic of the genre. The one author in this genre who I think succeeds consistently is the one most aware that he's on Thoreau's turf. That's John Hanson Mitchell who's gotten a slew of books out of a very small patch of ground in Littleton, Massachusetts. Geologically and biologically, Littleton or for that matter Walden, is a lot less interesting than Little Lava, but where I would reread Ceremonial Time or Walking Toward Walden multiple times, I don't think I would do that with Summer at Little Lava.

I don't remember enough about The Outermost House to do a good comparison, so I guess I'll have to reread it to assess how well Charles Fergus did at being the Icelandic Henry Beston. Stay tuned for such a comparison at some point in the ongoing growth of this journal.