Living Up There

Living Up There is a memoir of time lived mostly at 10,000 feet in the Colorado Rocky Mountains in a home-made cabin. Inimitably personal, it is written with the sensibility of a loving field biologist and human wonderer.\nThis book holds obvious relations with two literary-cultural first, that of journal memoirs of days spent intentionally removed from the speed and ease and at least some of the understood contracts of "civilization," two of whose best known forbears are Henry David Thoreau's Walden and Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek; and second, that of retreat to the natural basis of the world following the attainment of certain age and completion of responsibility cycles of family and livelihood.\nA guiding metaphor for the book's overall spirit comes from Wodening's contemplation of deep connections operating between apparently individual existences. While working as a tour guide in Mojave Desert, she learns of creosote as an underground system of progressively radiating sucker plants so that, "like mushrooms, it is not really what shows above ground that is the individual. What shows above ground is reaching out to sun and air and produces viable seed but it is feeding the root, and it's the root that carries on, spreads, [as] in the case of the aspen, across a mountainside for, yes, millennia, if nothing stops it."\nWhat I find so rare and immediate in this journal is the self-grown quality of the knowledge gained from the presented experience. How many of us live with this degree of attention to the events of our experience, and then stop to look again into ways they meet underground in larger relations, perhaps magical, that we share with them?\nWodening writes, "Even if all I can do is represent all these things I'm part of, I'd want to represent my special clarity on life, would like to present what I present with a sturdy and inspiring grace. . . . I feel that a certain amount of loneliness is essential for the development of integrity and self-reliance and I feel that those two aspects of personality are as essential as water and air." A big motive within Wodening's retreat to non-human nature is the opportunity it offers for direct investigation and revelation of her own.\nAs rich and rare as are these encounters with life "up there" in the Rockies -- including bears, martens, eagles, orchids, pines, chickadees, and humans -- just so are the glimpses into the particular heart and mind of their recorder, living intrepidly and passionately in the knowledge that "Reality was not something invented ten thousand years ago by humans."\nReed Bye, 2008