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Carolina Civic Voice Winter 2005-06 Vol. 5, No 4 |
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The Prophet of Dry Hill: lessons from a life in nature by David Gessner (Boston: Beacon Press, 2005)
A Book Review
This is not a book about John Hay, the prophet of Dry Hill. It is about John Hay, the prophet as known to David Gessner, therefore a memoir rather than the biography of Hay, as Gessner had originally intended. His change of mind made all the difference. By doing this, Gessner depicts his own growing friendship with Hay within the context of fragmented conversation and woods-tramping that gave both men the chance to agree and disagree, to mull and mellow their convictions and to expand on their certainties and uncertainties about how to live. Their philosophical differences were few. They both saw Cape Cod’s fate as a sacrificial lamb to developers as only a small part of the epidemic of unnatural three story vacation homes along the Atlantic. Both of these men, from inner knowing and outward observation, rage at this trend. It is not only self-centered but brashly and boldly out of touch with the natural environment as a home for plants and animals. If only the builders were not so callously oblivious to the property of people who do not choose to live with such an impact on their neighbors. It is also foolish since these homes are the most vulnerable to destruction of hurricanes which pound and pummel the southeastern coastline of the US. Hay is angry, mitigated at times by measured acceptance. He believes if people live in nature, they will learn to think in terms of nature, not attempting to live as the Native Americans did because that degree of self-sufficiency is impossible in these times. However, today’s citizens who care to learn what the natural world has to teach can still relive the spiritual basis for life that the native settlers believed in and the Great Spirit that they worshipped. Gessner was, in some ways rebellious, as a good student should be, he says. He offers the idea that the final stage in being mentored is to rebel against the mentor. “We don’t know how to look. We don’t see how much life there is that hasn’t anything to do with us,” says Gessner. Hay claims we share consciousness with other life forms. “We are not superior,” Hay said, in response to his climbing Mt. Katadin. Thoreau, whose rambling walks through Mr. Emerson’s woods did not seem to ask the same lofty questions, did not live in dependency upon the woods. He saw, smelled, heard and examined, and then he went home to his mother’s pies. He spent his time wandering in the woods. Ironically, he also made small sums working in his family-owned pencil factory, a timber-based cottage industry. A week was the longest time he spent living in his cabin. The word “Prophet,” for some, is a bigger-than-life figure in the Old Testament with burning eyes, wild hair that needs combing, and a big dose of bad tidings. Actually, sometimes John Hay’s hair did need combing, growing down his neck from under the brim of his floppy hat. John Hay has good news amid the despair, it being that a person can find himself in wildness, transformed without therapy, without having vicious battles and hordes of fanatic followers. Gessner shows us a man who was not a scholar or an academician, but a man deeply human who fears for the world because we don’t know nature and don’t care. Hay is carefully sketched-in by Gessner. His exuberance and passion for everything natural that takes part in “the dance” makes him seem a giant. He sees the constant motion of everything living as the art nature makes. Get in the swim like the herring running. But we restrain ourselves from this motion. We are too inward to break out. Here, in tenderness and conviviality, these two men develop a friendship that is tough and yet has a lilt of sadness in it because, like everything, it is mortal. Yet there is no question that Gessner celebrates the life, near its end, of a man who could save us if we would listen to him. He was a prophet after all. David Gessner is a professor at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. He teaches creative writing. Among his most outstanding books are, Return of the Osprey, Sick of Nature, and A Wild Rank Place. He has settled here with his wife and child, and lives at the beach.
Agnes McDonald is a Wilmington poet, a teaching of writing and a staff member of Carolina Civic Voice.
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Order Now! The Prophet of Dry Hill By David Gessner
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