Personal Canon: Mathiessen & Dillard

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Outside Magazine January 2003

The Outside Adventure Canon
Personal Canon: Mathiessen & Dillard

DUSTING OFF THE TIGERS
By Peter Matthiessen
DERSU THE TRAPPER is one of the great travel classics and a book that astounds everyone who reads it. Starting in 1902, the Russian explorer V.K. Arseniev traveled throughout the Far East, mapping an untouched corner of Siberia between Manchuria and the Sea of Japan. This is remarkably rugged yet beautiful country, where wolves, leopards, tigers, and bears are all in one place. It was here that Arseniev met and was befriended by Dersu, an indigenous hunter-trapper of the Tungus-Manchu tribes. I know the area well, having worked there while researching my book Tigers in the Snow. In a way, Dersu the Trapper was an inspiration for me. Filmmakers had approached me to write a script based on Dersu, but it was during the Cold War, and because the area they hoped to film in was close to Vladivostok, the permit was denied. When I finally received a permit, years later, I went to track the Amur tigers.

Arseniev wrote in Russian, and the first American edition did not appear until 1941. It is beautifully written, full of evocative material, and has wonderful illustrations drawn by Arseniev himself. As it turns out, there's a museum dedicated to Arseniev in Vladivostok. It's a little bit of the old Soviet Union, though. The tigers could use a dusting.

PETER MATTHIESSEN IS THE AUTHOR, MOST RECENTLY, OF BIRDS OF HEAVEN

THE NATURE WRITER'S NATURE WRITER
By Annie Dillard
RICHARD K. NELSON IS A VERY GREAT, if not the greatest, nature writer we have. Other nature writers agree on his magnificence, which THE ISLAND WITHIN established in 1989—what a book.

Nelson is sort of in the position Cormac McCarthy occupied 15 or 20 years ago. Other writers read his stuff—Blood Meridian above all, and Suttree for people southern enough to see how funny it is—but general readers were ignorant until All the Pretty Horses came out and his loyal publishers decided to make a fuss.

I'd not heard a word about The Island Within; it's not the sort of thing I read, and the opening made me cringe: A guy and his dog go to an island off the Alaskan coast for the purpose of—oh, no!—self-discovery. How awful that this concept was a pandemic now affecting men. Why did I keep reading?

Well into the book, I found an episode that was so sublime—I won't wreck it for you—a story told so intelligently, and so powerful as imagery, I thought, "He can't keep this up. He should have saved it for last." The next chapter topped it. The following chapter topped THAT. And so on! He had achieved escape velocity and was winging it out in the old empyrean with only the very great ones for company. All this, mind you, right on the surface, relating incidents on the island, like a bald eagle's swimming in the sea. He bore us out to the pillars where stars condense. Anyone can see stuff and learn facts; it's what you make of it. His rhetorical pitch was as wild as Thoreau's on Katahdin, transporting as Shakespeare pushing art into the realms that ennoble the reader. I finished The Island Within out of breath.

Then I checked the jacket copy (read it last or not at all). Turns out I had read Richard K. Nelson before. He was a true cultural anthropologist of the sort that sociobiology had tried to gun down. He had written Hunters of the Northern Ice, about Inuit, which I loved. How did he get a readable dissertation past his committee?

And it was Nelson who wrote Make Prayers to the Raven (1983), which I had avoided for a stupid reason: Its title reminded me of I Heard the Owl Call My Name, a moving little book I found only OK. But after reading The Island Within, I got Make Prayers to the Raven, knowing I wanted to read everything Nelson wrote.

Its subtitle is A Koyukon View of the Northern Forest. The Koyukon Athapaskans are still living intimately with their vast lands in interior northwest Alaska—right now—and if it bothers you that they use snowmobiles, motorboats, and rifles, too bad—they aren't a theme park. Their knowledge and thinking differ from ours more than a spear differs from a rifle. Nelson lived with Koyukons and learned their ways, their animating beliefs, and their biology. They live in a mesh of taboos, which Nelson respects. The animals have religious taboos, too. A woman told him that "gestating female beavers will not eat bark from the fork of a branch, because it is apparently tabooed for them." She was not putting Nelson on; she learned this from her grandfather. Did it never strike reasonable people that a beaver can't fit its head in a narrow fork? Maybe taboo started out meaning "stupid," as in, "It is stupid to get your sister pregnant."

These are three wonderful books, and there are more. The Island Within is a masterpiece. Ask any nature writer. Like everyone else, we hate being typed. (Peter Matthiessen's a great novelist.) You almost have to hold a gun at my head to make me read "nature writing," but I'll crawl over broken glass for Richard K. Nelson.

ANNIE DILLARD IS THE AUTHOR OF PILGRIM AT TINKER CREEK