Review by Ken Wright
Mountain Living – April 2005 – Colorado Central Magazine
On the Wild Edge: In search of a natural life
by David Petersen
Published in 2005 by Henry Holt and Company
ISBN 0-8050-4774-3
DAVID PETERSEN doesn’t want to tell you how to live. He just wants to tell you how he has lived, and why.
“Nature saved my life. I could never have survived in a ‘normal’ life,” he says. “I just don’t need a lot of the stimulation you get in a city or town.”
But that doesn’t mean he doesn’t get a lot of stimulation.
Petersen is a sort of modern mountain man. Even now, in the early 21st century, he lives and eats by his hands, wits, skills, and woodland knowledge. But his modern mountain-man life is not way out there; he has electricity, running water, a radio, a truck, and a laptop computer (“My only utterly essential electrical appliance,” he admits) with which he makes his living as a writer. And he hasn’t set up in some remote Alaskan outback; he lives just outside Durango, in the sunny, popular (but still wilderness-rich) Four Corners area.
That, right there, is what makes Petersen’s message of how we can better “live well” so illuminating and vital: because he has pursued his personal vision of how to live a wilder life right here, right now, in this day and age, on the edge – the “wild edge” — of our modern world. In regard to living well, Petersen reflects, “If there is a universal human desire, it is simply to live well.”
“The real matter,” he writes, “is outside versus in: keeping outside of culture, if only just barely.” That living just outside of mass culture – on the edge – is the story Petersen tells in On the Wild Edge, his 13th book.
Petersen is one of the nation’s leading nature and hunting-ethics writers, and the editor of the late Edward Abbey’s journals and forthcoming letters. He has authored six previous books of natural history, including the excellent Ghost Grizzlies, a report on Colorado’s remnant grizzly population. He also edited A Hunter’s Heart, a controversial anthology on the ethics of hunting that earned him national recognition as a “hunting ethicist.” He then went beyond mere ethics with the 2000 release of Heartsblood, an intriguing treatise and deeply personal narrative about the spiritual rewards and moral responsibilities of hunting.
ON THE WILD EDGE is the memoir of Petersen’s life after he left his urban southern California home in1980 and moved onto a piece of land in Colorado’s San Juan Mountains. He and his new wife, Caroline, hand-built a small cabin, right on the edge of a growing tourist town, and for twenty-five years they have lived off of the bounty of the wildlands which still survive in that region.
“I firmly believe that our ancient innate knowledge of how best to live is not irrevocably dead but has been drugged, sedated, and prostituted by modern material culture. It can be revived,” Petersen argues. “I want to show people a gentler way to live. On the edge. It’s not aestheticism; it’s controlling your own time. Not letting material things possess you,” he explains. “Don’t listen to what they tell you. People try to buy their freedoms. It’s easier than you think to do without money. And it’s not a sacrifice.”
What Petersen did with those life lessons is chronicled in On the Wild Edge. The book is written as an ongoing series of mini-essays and vignettes, framed in a year-long seasonal cycle around his mountain home. The “drama” is generally mundane, but certainly not about normal social affairs. He writes about snow shoeing, roof shoveling, dog walking, bear-den inspection, mushroom gathering, wildlife watching, and, the crowning time of Petersen’s year, bow hunting for his beloved elk.
Risky business, this telling people how to live better. But On the Wild Edge pulls it off because Petersen doesn’t lecture. Instead, he tells his story by example, with a sincere and revealing intimacy that tempers what might otherwise come off as arrogance or righteousness. He doesn’t tell you how to get there, he just tells you what he did, why he did it, and what he thinks about doing it.
Importantly, Petersen’s philosophizing is not idealism – it is pragmatism informed by experience, and the rewards are tempered by trials and errors. He is fearlessly, almost fiercely, honest about himself and his experience, and about the costs of his lifestyle choices.
“In order to sort out the most precious nuggets of life, we must learn to discern them from the dross,” Petersen advises. And, importantly, he argues that this discerning is a skill available to everyone: we have choices on how to live lives based less on what our culture tells us we need, and more on what our nature tells us we want.