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Big Thicket People
Larry Jene Fisher's Photographs of the Last Southern Frontier
By Thad Sitton and C.E. Hunt
University of Texas Press, 2008

Living off the land—hunting, fishing, and farming, along with a range of specialized crafts that provided barter or cash income—was a way of life that persisted well into the twentieth century in the Big Thicket of southeast Texas. Before this way of life ended with World War II, professional photographer Larry Jene Fisher spent a decade between the 1930s and 1940s photographing Big Thicket people living and working in the old ways. His photographs, the only known collection on this subject, constitute an irreplaceable record of lifeways that first took root in the southeastern woodlands of the colonial United States and eventually spread all across the Southern frontier.

Big Thicket People presents Fisher's photographs in suites that document a wide slice of Big Thicket life-people, dogs, camps, deer hunts, farming, syrup mills, rooter hogs and stock raising, railroad tie making, barrel stave making, chimney building, peckerwood sawmills, logging, turpentining, town life, church services and picnics, funerals and golden weddings, and dances and other amusements. Accompanying each suite of images is a cultural essay by Thad Sitton, who also introduces the book with a historical overview of life in the Big Thicket. C. E. Hunt provides an informative biography of Larry Jene Fisher.

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Big Wonderful
Notes from Wyoming
Kevin Holdsworth
University Press of Colorado, 2006
In this unconventional memoir, Kevin Holdsworth vividly portrays life in remote, unpredictable country and ruminates on the guts - or foolishness - it takes to put down roots and raise a family in a merciless environment.

Growing up in Utah, Holdsworth couldn't wait to move away. Once ensconced on the East Coast, however, he found himself writing westerns and dreaming of the mountains he'd skied and climbed. Fed up with city life, he moved to a small Wyoming town.

In Big Wonderful, he writes of a mountaineering companion's death, the difficult birth of his son, and his father's terminal illness - encounters with mortality that sharpened his ideas about risk, care, and commitment. He puts a new spin on mountaineering literature, telling wild tales from his reunion with the mountains but also relating the surprising willpower it took to turn back from risks he would have taken before he became a father. He found he needed courage to protect and engage deeply with his family, his community, and the wild places he loves.

Holdsworth's essays and poems are rich with anecdotes, characters, and vivid images. Readers will feel as if they themselves watched a bear destroy an entire expedition's food, walked with his great-great-grandmother along the icy Mormon Trail, and tried to plant a garden in Wyoming's infamous wind.

Readers who love the outdoors will enjoy this funny and touching take on settling down and adventuring in the West's most isolated country.
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Exploring Wild Alabama
A Guide to the State's Publicly Accessible Natural Areas
Kenneth M. Wills and L. J. Davenport
University of Alabama Press, 2016
Exploring Wild Alabama is an exceptionally detailed guide to the most beautiful natural destinations in the state. From the rocky outcrops of the Appalachian plateaus to the sugar-white beaches of the Gulf Coast’s Orange Beach and Dauphin Island, Alabama offers a wealth of remarkable sites to explore by car or canoe, bicycle or motorcycle, or on foot.
 
Intrepid explorers Kenneth M. Wills and L. J. Davenport divide Alabama into eleven geographic regions that feature state parks and preserves, national monuments and forests, wildlife management areas, Nature Conservancy and Forever Wild properties, botanical gardens and arboreta, as well as falls, caverns, and rock cliffs. Exploring Wild Alabama provides detailed site entries to one hundred and fifty destinations. Each section is beautifully illustrated with color photographs and area maps.
 
Exploring Wild Alabama includes a large state map and numerous local topographic maps to help readers locate each site. Individual site entries include
·         written directions to each site and GPS coordinates;
·         engaging notes about the ecology, landscape features, and local species of plants and animals of the sites; and
·         international recreation symbols for hiking, fishing, boating, camping, hunting, and other fun outdoor activities.
 
Wills and Davenport guide travelers to Alabama jewels such as Sand Mountain’s Chitwood Barrens, which harbors the rare Green Pitcher Plant and other exotic botanical species; Blowing Springs Cave in Lauderdale County, named for the cool air and the clear spring flowing out of the cave opening; Jackson Prairies in the Lime Hills region; and Booker’s Mill in Conecuh County, offering diverse habitats and historic structures.
 
Long a favorite destination for outdoor sports enthusiasts, Alabama is fast becoming a major “ecotourism” destination, with thousands of travelers discovering the state’s unsung natural treasures. Exploring Wild Alabama will be used and trusted by anyone who loves the outdoors—birders, botanists, cave explorers, cyclists, hunters, fishermen, rock climbers, canoeists, teachers, and other outdoor enthusiasts.
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Gentleman in the Outdoors
Sessions S Wheeler
University of Nevada Press, 1985

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Gone to the Swamp
Raw Materials for the Good Life in the Mobile-Tensaw Delta
Robert Leslie Smith
University of Alabama Press, 2008

To make a living here, one had to be capable, confident, clever and inventive, know a lot about survival, be able to fashion and repair tools, navigate a boat, fell a tree, treat a snakebite, make a meal from whatever was handy without asking too many questions about it, and get along with folks.

This fascinating and instructive book is the careful and unpretentious account of a man who was artful in all the skills needed to survive and raise a family in an area where most people would be lost or helpless. Smith’s story is an important record of a way of life beginning to disappear, a loss not fully yet realized. We are lucky to have a work that is both instructive and warm-hearted and that preserves so much hard-won knowledge.

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Gordon MacQuarrie
The Story of an Old Duck Hunter
Keith Crowley
Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2003
Although his typewriter has been silent for nearly fifty years, Gordon MacQuarrie’s words continue to inspire generations of hunting and fishing enthusiasts. Through his “Stories of the Old Duck Hunters,” most of which are still in print, MacQuarrie captured the intangible, emotional qualities of the outdoor life in a way that made him unique among his peers. As a result, his audience and his legend continue to grow. Gordon MacQuarrie: The Story of an Old Duck Hunter is the first full-length biography of this literary legend. It explores the relationships he nurtured and treasured; records his coming of age during Theodore Roosevelt’s Conservation Movement; documents his rise to national prominence as the first full-time, professional outdoor writer in America; and follows his life as journalist, storyteller, husband, father, outdoorsman, and conservationist. Complete with rarely seen photographs and a comprehensive timeline of his writings, this book is a fitting companion to MacQuarrie’s own Stories of the Old Duck Hunters anthologies.
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Gunflint
Reflections on the Trail
Justine Kerfoot
University of Minnesota Press, 1991

“The best way to get to know Justine Kerfoot would be to explore a northern forest with her. The next best way to know ‘Just’ is on these pages. Here Justine is at her best, sharing with us her romantic and colorful, and sometimes a tad dangerous, life.” —Les Blacklock

Step off the Gunflint Trail, stride to a high point, and savor the view. Only the dark, cool waters and the rugged granite shores interrupt the panorama of the sweeping forest. In this engaging memoir, local pioneer Justine Kerfoot chronicled a year’s worth of experiences and insights while living on the legendary Gunflint Trail. The unique month-by-month chapters of Gunflint and Kerfoot’s rich memories provide a year-round view of a wilderness life that most of us glimpse only in all-too-short weekend interludes.

Justine Kerfoot (1906–2001) lived on Minnesota’s remote Gunflint Trail for more than six decades. She wrote of her adventures and travel in a weekly column for the Cook County News-Herald for forty-five years and is the author of Woman of the Boundary Waters (Minnesota, 1994).

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On the Run
Finding the Trail Home
Catherine Doucette
Oregon State University Press, 2021
Catherine Doucette is a backcountry skier, horseback rider, and mountaineer—roles that have resulted in adventures where she is often the only woman in a group of men. Starting from a young age, she pushed through the wilderness with her brothers, friends, and partners, gaining the skill and judgement to tackle progressively bigger goals until she became an accomplished outdoorswoman.

For over a decade, Doucette chased winter around the world to ski, from the White Mountains of her native New Hampshire to the slopes of Alaska, British Columbia, California, Argentina, Switzerland, and beyond. But she always kept one eye toward living a more settled life and putting her heart on the line if someone would just ask her to. Like other women who choose or yearn to be in the wilderness, she wrestled to reconcile her outdoor ambitions with society’s expectations of women.

The personal essays collected in On the Run touch on the author’s origins in New Hampshire while focusing on the lure of big mountains in the West. They celebrate the comfort, challenge, and community found in expanses of wilderness while confronting the limitations and sacrifices that come with a transient, outdoor lifestyle. In a voice both searching and deeply grounded, Doucette contends with avalanches and whitewater along with the less dramatic but equally important questions of belonging. Anyone who has searched to define home, who has been called by mountains, or by movement, will feel at home in these pages.
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Out Home
John Madson
University of Iowa Press, 1979
Long out of print, Out Home is the first published collection of naturalist and conservationist John Madson’s essays. Written between 1961 and 1977 for such venues as Outdoor Life, Sports Afield, Audubon, and Guns and Ammo, the twenty-one essays and one poem in this classic volume focus on game and nongame animals and the people who love them and their outdoor world. Madson writes of hunting and wildlife management, the tricks of whitetail and cottontail, the bewildering interactions of pheasants with their harsh winter world, the cliff-nesting geese of the Missouri River, biscuits and gravy and stories shared around campfires with friends and family, and the great seasonal migrations of geese and cranes.
     Writing always with the knowledge that he was witnessing the end of the wilderness, of the outdoor home that nourished him, Madson brings a brilliant energy to these tough, unsentimental tales. “A strong place puts a mark on all that lives there, and the mark may outlast the place itself. Prairie people are like their western meadowlarks, seeming to be the same as their eastern relatives, but with a different song.” In his song about the “play of wind on tallgrasses, with the land running beneath a towering sky,” we hear the voice that went on to give us the magic of Where the Sky Began.
     Editor Michael McIntosh, one of the nation’s foremost experts on shotguns, has written a short introduction to this first paperback edition of these ageless wilderness tales.
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Pathfinder
Blazing a New Wilderness Trail in Modern America
Ron Strickland
Oregon State University Press, 2011

Ron Strickland has spent a good deal of time walking. He hiked the 1200 miles of the Pacific Northwest Trail in 1983. In 2004, he completed the Pacific Crest Trail, with a 1500-mile hike from the Mojave Desert to the Columbia River. In 2009, he hiked the length of the New England Trail.

He has also held a longtime dream of showcasing the best hiking of the Rockies, Purcells, Okanogan, Cascades, Olympics, and Wilderness Coast. He spent years raising funds, recruiting volunteers, cutting brush, digging dirt, and lobbying landowners, officials, and politicians—and in 2009, the Pacific Northwest Trail, which runs from the Continental Divide to the Pacific Ocean, traversing three National Parks and seven National Forests, was finally declared a National Scenic Trail.

In this adventurous and moving memoir, Strickland—known in the backcountry as “Pathfinder”—shares his insider view of the joys and adventures of long-distance hiking. He intersperses colorful portraits of memorable trail characters and lush descriptions of hikes he knows firsthand. He also describes the experience of conceiving and establishing the Pacific Northwest Trail, detailing the setbacks and triumphs along the way.

Pathfinder offers the rich insights and experiences of a longtime hiker, inspiring readers to the wonder of hiking and the outdoors.

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Prairie City, Iowa
Three Seasons at Home
Douglas Bauer
University of Iowa Press, 1979
Weary from the journalistic treadmill of "going from one assignment to the next, like an itinerant fieldworker moving to his harvests" and healing from a divorce, Douglas Bauer decided it was time to return to his hometown. Back in Prairie City, he helped on his father's farm, scooped grains at the Co-op, and tended bar at the Cardinal. The resultant memoir is a classic picture of an adult experiencing one's childhood roots as a grown-up and testing whether one can ever truly go home again.
    Bauer grew up "awkward with soil and with machines" in a small town east of Des Moines,  As a teenager, he left the farm for college life twenty miles away and, after graduation, took a job with Better Homes and Gardens in Des Moines, writing in the junk-mail fictional persona of "Barbara Joyce,"asking millions of people to subscribe. After a few years he  moved to Chicago to work as an editor and writer for Playboy and eventually as a freelance journalist. In the summer of 1975, he returned home to attend his grandmother's funeral and by autumn he moved back to Prairie City, where he stayed for the next three seasons.
    Bauer's book is neither a wistful nostalgia about returning to a simpler time and place nor a patronizing look at those who never leave the town in which they were born. What emerges is an unsentimental yet loving account of life in the Midwest. Not just a portrait of Prairie City, Iowa, but of everyone's small town, everywhere.
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Remote
Finding Home in the Bitterroots
DJ Lee
Oregon State University Press, 2020

When DJ Lee’s dear friend vanishes in the vast Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness of Idaho and Montana, she travels there to seek answers. The journey unexpectedly brings to an end her fifteen-year quest to uncover the buried history of her family in this remote place. Although Lee doesn’t find all the answers, she comes away with a penetrating memoir that weaves her present-day story with past excursions into the region, wilderness history, and family secrets.

As she grapples with wild animal stand-offs, bush plane flights in dense fog, raging forest fires, and strange characters who have come to the wilderness to seek or hide, Lee learns how she can survive emotionally and how the wilderness survives as an ecosystem. Her growing knowledge of the life cycles of salmon and wolverine, the regenerative role of fire, and Nimíipuu land practices helps her find intimacy in this remote landscape.

Skillfully intertwining history, outdoor adventure, and mystery, Lee’s memoir is an engaging contribution to the growing body of literature on women and wilderness and a lyrical tribute to the spiritual connection between people and the natural world.

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Stories From Under The Sky
John Madson
University of Iowa Press, 2006
In Stories from under the Sky, John Madson salutes the outdoor life. These thirty-six essays display his healthy respect for the forces of nature, without diminishing his wry awareness of the foibles of beast, bird, fish, and human.
In sections on mammals, the river, and birds, Madson acquaints readers with some real characters—not all of them four-footed! Some are old favorites: the raccoon, the otter, the fawn, and the badger. Others are less familiar—the demonic shrew, the indomitable dogfish, and the exotic blue heron. Even the “unloved” come in for their share of attention: toads, waterbugs, wasps, and turkey buzzards. Madson has a yarn to spin about each one. Where else would you find an essay on “Snake Liars”?

Whatever the topic, Madson’s love of nature shines through, be it coon hunting or an explanation of the incredible bird machine. His obvious affection is tempered with the recognition that not everything “natural” is a pretty sight. All of which leaves readers with a better understanding of life under the sky. 

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Wild New Jersey
Nature Adventures in the Garden State
David Wheeler
Rutgers University Press, 2011
The fastest animal on earth dive-bombs him from the skies. A young black bear bounds up a mountain trail a few yards away. Poisonous snakes swirl at his feet. A thousand bats careen past his head in a pitch-black roost. Pods of dolphins swim right past him by the scores. Who? Experienced naturalist David Wheeler. Where? In Wild New Jersey, of course. 

Wild New Jersey invites readers along Wheeler’s whirlwind year-long tour of the most ecologically diverse state for its size in America. Along with the expert guidance of charismatic wildlife biologists and local conservationists, he explores mountains, valleys, beaches, pine barrens, caves, rivers, marshlands, and more—breathtaking landscapes and the state’s Noah’s Ark of fascinating creatures.

This isn’t your ordinary ride on the Jersey Turnpike. Fasten your seatbelts and join Wheeler as he . . .

  • Kayaks through the Meadowlands under the watchful eye of the Empire State Building,
  • Pans for cretaceous fossils in a hidden brook once home to mastodons and giant sloths,
  • Rides a fishing boat in the frigid snows of winter on a high-seas quest for Atlantic puffins,
  • Trudges through the eerie darkness of a bog on a mysterious night hike,
  • Dogsleds across the windswept alpine slopes in the haunts of the porcupine and bobcat. 

With Wheeler’s compelling narrative, in-depth background details, and eye for revealing the offbeat, you can count this as the first nature book to paint the extraordinary picture of New Jersey’s unlikely wilderness in all its glory. Come along for all the adventure and insight in Wild New Jersey!

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