Outpost

Dan Richards, in his book Outpost (Canongate Books, 2019), tells us stories about some of the most remote places on earth.  However, his work here cannot compare to Philip Connors’ Fire Season (Ecco, 2011), Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire (Touchstone/Simon & Schuster, 1990) or anything by John Muir or Gretel Ehrlich.  He cites frequently from all of these writers, but his own work is, when all is said and done, a bit of a disappointment.  Richards is not writing about what it is like to live in these places of solitude, but how he, the writer, traveled to these places.  We get up close and personal with him hitching rides and calling in favors from friends with cars, and therein lies the problem:  we are never allowed to forget that Richards is only stumbling around on his way to these far-flung places.  For a book about places of solitude and emptiness, it is annoying to hear about how Richards waited in a gas station for a ride.

The book starts out promising enough with a poem by Wendell Berry, and that illustrates an important point.  There are so many writers who have done the solitude standing thing so much better.  In this age of climate change and melting Arctic and Antarctic ice, a nature writer must have an extraordinary story to tell.  Richards gives us an observation of those who are actually living in these places.  It is second hand at best.  Berry ends his poem with his resting “in the grace of the world,” his freedom out in the big blue yonder.  We can already guess that there is a lot of empty blacktop and gravel to get away from it all, but that is not the most interesting part of the story.

In his study of people in these places, Richards again does not really break new ground.  We know Jack Kerouac did time on Desolation Peak in Washington state as a fire watcher.  Read Philip Connors if you want to know what that is like or Cactus Jack himself.  Richards spends considerable time talking about the logistics of going to Mars, Utah.  We get it:  the landscape is just like Mars.  It is used as training ground for astronauts. Fantastic.

Richards does make the point that homo sapiens is a destructive species, and we are living in the Age of Anthropocene where humans are ruining the planet.  But there are not enough nuts and bolts here, nor a full explanation of the delicate balance of the eco-system we are supposed to be destroying.  This is something Gretel Ehrlich does so well in her books; she puts us in the muck of it.  With Richards we are always kept at a distance.

Instead, we get a meditation on writers’ cabins.  We learn that Roald Dahl wrote in a cabin in his garden.  For Dylan Thomas, it was a shed above his home.  George Bernard Shaw had a hut on his property mounted on a turntable so it could be rotated to follow the sun.  Writers need solitude; do we not know this?

Then there is Theseus’ Paradox:  Richards muses on whether or not an object, such as a boat, if it has all of its constituent parts replaced, is it fundamentally the same object?  All of this is well and good, but I found myself chuckling in skepticism when Richards tells us, “Much of this book examines emptiness, the way particular spaces affect people and vice versa in a creative and explorative sense, but ‘space’ itself, outer space, mankind’s fascination with the heavens, the mechanisms, mysteries and beauty of vaults and worlds unknown, explode such thoughts to a dazzling degree.”  Say what?  The book talks about the roads to those spaces, and the last part of that quote just seems like gobbledygook.  What is “to a dazzling degree?”  Then, he quotes Sylvain Tesson in a footnote:  “To be alone is to hear silence.”  Now we have philosophy; now we have something worth contemplating.  Why, exactly, do we need to hear silence?  What is the value of silence?  Why do we seek such places of solitude?  For the answers, go to Muir, go to Ehrlich, go to Abbey.  Instead, we get Richards on a plane talking with a seatmate, a lawyer for Amazon.  She is looking for a new base for the company away from Seattle because North Korean nukes can hit the city and in a post-apocalyptic world, people will still need to buy stuff.  Is that insight into why we crave solitude?

Richards does not stop there.  He believes, in his informal survey along his travels to these outposts in the United States, that the country is pretty well split with half thinking Obama was the worst president and the other half believing that Trump is the worst.  Is there anything connecting that “fiery” thesis to solitude?  I can tell you that every night when I turn on the news, I want to flee to the Arctic circle, build a snow house, and hide away until the end of civilization has come and gone.  The need for solitude and time to think has never been more sorely imperative.  Then come the clichés about Los Angeles—everyone is working on a screenplay.  Not the freshest of revelations.  In fairness, he does offer an insight into the desire to dump the digital—we need to get in touch with the wild, be present in the moment, concentrate, realize our smallness in the world.  But let’s see that in action.  What do those manning the outposts have to say about that?

I did like his take on stories and storytelling.  It is necessary to the world and how we make sense of this life.  A story crosses cultural boundaries and human frailties.  Stories give us heroes and modes of behavior and the thrill of being alive.  Richards concludes from this, though, that stories make us better humans.  Again, a soft landing to an imperative.  Storytelling in cultures is passion and history.  It is a way to save the memory of the dead, the wisdom of ancestors.  Try that hat on for size.  And he ends the book the way he began, with a fragment of poetry, this time from Gary Snyder:

At the last turn in the path

            goodbye—

All goodbyes are little deaths.  Outposts take us to the edge of that.  They remind us of boundaries and borders between who we are and who we wish to become, of ancestors and future kings and queens who will carry on long after we are gone.  If I am going to travel to the rim of the world, send John Muir and Gretel Ehrlich along as soul companions.  The hike up is just a lot of sweat and steam; the view, the aloneness, the solitude absolute, the great vault of heaven—that is what we came for; only that is worth the loneliness of the last outpost.