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Reviews
The Klamath Knot
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By David Rains Wallace
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University of California Press, Berkeley, 2003. Illustrations, maps, bibliography. 173 pages. $16.95 paper.
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Reviewed by William Kittredge
Missoula, Montana
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| In the early 1980s, I missed The Klamath Knot. David Rains Wallace was writing about a territory a couple of hundred miles from where I grew up in southern Oregon, and I was working to understand the evolution of processes and places. It was an unexplainable error. My loss. |
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This fresh edition, with a new epilogue by the author, now seems to me like an unearned gift. An anecdotal narrative, it is rigorously scientific while spiritually speculative and elegantly written. |
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David Rains Wallace first walked off into the Klamath Mountains in 1969, where he was "walled into the Klamath River gorge by steep, brushy slopes, piles of logging slash, and my own ignorance." Ten years later he returned, scientifically informed and eager to understand the wildness that had both frightened and inspired him as a youth, entering "one of the richest botanical areas in the West." |
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He found thickets of blossoming azaleas and "more orchids than I'd ever seen before," amid California lady's slippers and Port Orford and incense cedar and ponderosa pine and Jeffrey pine and sugar pine and western white pine and knobcone pine, Douglas fir and silver fir and noble fir and madrona and western yew and tan oak. In a "community of trees at least forty million years old" he found both plenitude and the processes of co-evolution working in ways complex unto mystery. As in the poems of Whitman, such listing incites in us a sense of complex unity and wholeness that constitutes a major solace for much of humankind. Perhaps the world is not entirely ruined and could even heal itself. |
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Wallace notes that around the world, from animism to Christianity and Buddhism, most "major structures of belief have arisen at least in part from experiences in wildness." Old myths still operate in us as "psychic fossils," but evolution, he tells us, is "the great myth of modern times," the organizing story we inhabit and live by, also a product of wilderness experience, and while not a moral story, it is one that as we understand it tells us, "There are other ways for life to evolve besides competition." Wallace's invaluable point is spiritual. We are creatures that co-evolved with nature. Our sanity is connected to continual contact with nature, its evolving processes, wholeness, and complexities. In the epilogue, Wallace advocates a national park for the area, and that is of course a splendid idea. Multiple uses be damned, we must preserve the glories we've been given. |
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The Klamath Knot deserves a place on a very short but high shelf with the recent flood of first-rate books about nature and natural history by such as Annie Dillard, Richard Nelson, David Quammen, Barry Lopez, E.O. Wilson, and David Abrams. Informed and deeply meant, personal to the point of being occasionally quixotic, it's a fine beauty. |
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