Wild and Dirty Living

A few years back, I used to listen to a lot of audio books while walking my dog. They’re a great way to catch up on your “reading,” and memoirs were always my favorite. They’re like calling up a friend each time you set out and asking them to keep going with that (very long) story they were telling you the other day. Except they don’t get annoyed when you stop listening because your dog decided to run after squirrels or dig for moles, and you had to “correct” her.

Recently, I rediscovered this joy and listened to two memoirs, both by women recounting pivotal moments in their lives when they deepened their connections to the natural world and in doing so discovered new parts of themselves.

The first was the bestseller Wild by Cheryl Strayed. Strayed writes about a time in her mid-20s, when her marriage had recently ended and her mother recently passed, and she set off to hike the Pacific Crest Trail alone, with very little backpacking experience. Actually, she had no backpacking experience. Some descriptions of the book make Wild sound like a distant cousin to the notorious Eat, Pray, Love—a woman whose life has fallen apart sets off on a journey in order to get quiet, test herself and rediscover what makes her tick. And in many ways, it does share those same themes. But what I liked about Wild was that Strayed wrote the book quite a few years after (15+) she hiked the trail, so she’s writing from the perspective of her older, wiser self, looking back with a mixture of surprise at her self-proclaimed stupidity, admiration for her tenacity, and fondness for a time when she was discovering, against the backdrop of the Sierras, what exactly she was made of. While a lot of people haven’t hiked alone for months at a stretch, or spent heaps of time alone in nature (I haven’t), most can still relate to those aspects of the story with fondness, too. And it’s fun. And gutsy. Strayed encountered moments of intense fear, beauty, loneliness and quiet that make Wild poignant. And it made me want to go backpacking, even though her pack is so heavy she nicknamed it monster. If you’re going camping this summer, or want to but can't, this is good company.

Here’s a nice trailer about the book. (Warning: it does give away the ending.)

Next up was The Dirty Life, by Kristin Kimball. In this memoir, Kimball recounts the tale of her transition from a New York City single-living, travel writer to farmer and wife. Initially, Kimball was sent to report on a sustainable farmer in Pennsylvania named Mark, and the book is about what happened next: she got engaged and the two of them moved upstate New York to start Essex Farm, which is now a “a year-round, full diet” farm, meaning for around $3,000 a year, CSA members get all the meat (beef, pork and chicken), dairy, fruits, veggies, herbs, grains, flour and maple syrup you can eat. And soap! Pretty amazing. Although, in the beginning, it was far from amazing. It was hard work, messy and cold, but Kimball strikes a nice balance between conveying the glory and the back-breaking work that is organic farming at this large scale. The term “organic farming” doesn’t seem to do this place justice. Their mission statement claims “Our desire is to build an agro-ecosystem that is sustainable economically, environmentally, and socially.” They are agro-ecostysteming. The book is a fun journey through all their start up foibles and successes, which parallel their path as a new couple. These guys just went for it, in every sense of the word, and while I was never nervous that they’d fail as farmers—Kimball’s husband is a fount of knowledge and experience—the book builds suspense through Kimball’s own doubts about whether she’s cut out for a life so drastically different from the one for which she’d planned. If you’re curious about what it takes to work on a farm, but can’t quite rearrange your life to experience it firsthand (or simply don’t want to), you might enjoy this.

For more about Kimball, here's an interview with her about her life and work on the farm.

Both of these books came to me as recommendations (thanks Karen and Susie!). Any other recommendations (memoirs or not) about nature, food, farming…? I’d love to hear them.