cover image Bringing the Mountain Home

Bringing the Mountain Home

SueEllen Campbell. University of Arizona Press, $16.95 (118pp) ISBN 978-0-8165-1617-9

Campbell, an English teacher at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, sets the gentle tone and pace of this paean to wilderness when she makes clear that ""in wild places I'm just about the slowest traveler I know."" Everything that lures her outdoors disappears when she has to rush. In the fullest sense of this spirit-building book, she's a natural. ""Reading, walking, dreaming, on a trail, on unmarked ground, I follow the landwriting and find my way."" Precise attention to detail sharpens her focus on the landscape, be it Boundary Waters of Minnesota and Canada, the Grand Canyon or her beloved Rockies. Wildflowers remind her of the link between beauty and transience. She suffers the metropolitanism of backcountry camping with brie and freeze-dried chocolate fondue and wants none of the urbane, eco-gourmet business. Going into the wild intensifies the ultimate relief of trudging on as she gathers wild lupine seed to take home. A woman who knows what she wants, she seeks not only roadless wilderness but also signless, trailless, mapless, nameless sites--""an absence that signals the purity of the land."" Often afraid in cities and almost never in wild places, Campbell shows readers where her serenity lies. That she offers reassurance to readers that they, too, can go fearless into the wild is a major charm of this endearing guidebook into the delights of nature. (Oct.)