Notes from Port of Spain: The cost of living

Notes from Port of Spain: The cost of living

Back to Nature

Strange how one's reading moves in cycles. These days nature writers have taken over. It started with my recording of Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. I had reordered a copy since mine has grown old, the pages brown and brittle, in danger of coming apart. In that mood I called two old favorites to my night table: Leopold's Sand County Almanac and Edward Abbey's Desert Solitaire.

I see, by notes on the inner cover pages that I got Sand County in Lexington, in 1988 and Solitaire 10 years later. Solitaire also carries an inscription. It reads: In memory of Edward Abbey, who died this month, at 62, in Tuscon. He was a "radical environmentalist and author of a score of books," according to Time, of March 27.

These books "eloquently attacked the defiling of the American West by dam builders, mobile home denizens and ski-resort developers."

Solitaire is reprising for me days spent in Moab, at the Arches National Park, in vigorous, shining prose, a manner of writing much different from Leopold's in Sand County. Leopold, one of the fathers of the environmental movement, writis like a poet-sage, a self-deprecating woodland guru.

They will shortly be joined by Annie Dillard's meditation, which, according to the message on the receiver, has arrived in Show Low from the Bookworm's warehouse in Oregon.

Back to nature

Strange how ones reading goes into cycles: these days I find myself going back to nature. It started with Pilgrim at Tinker Creek which I re-ordered since the copy in my possession has grown old, the pages brown and brittle. That made me reach for two favorites, Sand County Almanac and Desert Solitaire.

The inner cover of Solitaire (Edward Abbey) has an inscription, written, I see, on March 29, 1998, at Snow Canyon, Utah. It says: In memory of Edward Abbey, who died this month, at 62, in Tuscon.