The Carry Home

September 29, 2014
Ever-evocative nature writer Ferguson (Shouting at the Sky) pens a memoir that doubles as an intensely personal, sweet, and melancholy love song to his lost beloved and to the wild places of America. Though there is grief in this remarkable tribute, the net effect is more joy than sadness. Ferguson shares the story of his journey to five locations where his wife, Jane, a park ranger and wilderness guide, wanted her ashes spread after her death in a river canoeing accident. He intersperses this narrative with stories from their 25 years of a “life brilliantly off-balance” together, culling from both of their travel journals and offering the anecdotes long-term couples share over dinner with new friends. In the background, observations of both the timelessness of nature and of the moods
of a whole generation of itinerant nature lovers—in this case frustrated by the politics of wolf management and logging concerns—give a quiet universality to Ferguson’s private thoughts. As in the best nature writing, the human experience becomes infinitesimally small and yet paramount, the “mythical shining through the mundane.” Ferguson has lovingly invested Jane’s memory with “unspeakable tenderness,” both the aspects of a goddess and of a leaf fallen gently to the ground.

September 15, 2014
A eulogy to the too-early passing of the author's mate and a chronicle of the "[f]ive treks to five unshackled landscapes" to scatter her ashes. Ferguson (Rainier Writing Workshop/Pacific Lutheran Univ.; Opening Doors: Carole Noon and Her Dream to Save the Chimps, 2014, etc.) has had a fruitful career as a natural history writer, and he has always been fascinated by the outdoors: "Foremost on our minds in those years was the hope that the last of America's big, unfettered landscapes might help us sustain the open-heartedness of youth," he writes. Here, the author twines this talent for alert, panoptical movement through spaces and places with an encomium for his wife, Jane, who died in 2005 in a canoeing accident on the Kopka River in Ontario. The story wanders from the past to the present, from emotions to observations, the trigger of memory pulled by a Hudson Bay blanket, a loon call, a road atlas, prairie smoke and Apache bloom. Throughout, the author emphasizes and explores the couple's love of, and devotion to, the natural world, taking a cue from Kenneth Rexroth to "see life steadily, see it whole," experiencing that first shock of sage in a landscape where the wild light of the unvarnished outdoors pointed to something elemental and life-giving. Pearly sentences slide one to another as Ferguson travels "deeper into grief"-but he never fully gave in to despair, and that is to readers' benefit. The author's treks both scorched and gladdened him, as he traveled to places of enormous power, bringing into focus the anti-environmental ethos that governs a crippled economy, the "irritating...preciousness" of self-stamped environmentalists "with an embarrassing tendency to want to shut the door to development as soon as we moved in." A sprawling, lovely, nourishing tonic for all those who dip into it.

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October 1, 2014
In late 2005, after he lost his wife, Jane, in a tragic Northern Ontario canoeing accident, author and naturalist Ferguson (Decade of the Wolf, 2005) began to make good on an earlier promise to scatter her ashes in their five most cherished spots of remote wilderness. With the same exceptional skill and astute observations about our environmental heritage that he displayed in 22 previous nonfiction works on nature and science, Ferguson here recounts the journey he took through these unshackled landscapes while reminiscing about his 25-year marriage. Beginning with Idaho's Sawtooth Range, where the pair fell in love and married, Ferguson's trek took him through the canyon lands of Utah to a cabin in Wyoming, as well as two spots in greater Yellowstone. Along with the flood of poignant memories his trip provoked, Ferguson also reflects back on a career living close to wildlife and how this kept him grounded. Elegiac and deeply moving, Ferguson's memoir is both a heartfelt eulogy to his late, beloved wife and an introspective meditation on the healing power of nature over grief.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)