Breaking Into the Backcountry (University of Nebraska Press, 2010), is a memoir of solitude, anxiety, and beauty. It is the story of Edwards’s 2001 experience with the famed Boyden Wilderness Residency, in which an author lives in a remote homestead in the Klamath Mountains, alone, and with only a generator for (limited) power. A chance for the kind of true, unparalleled solitude the likes of which writers seldom get. But Edwards is young, and deeply inexperienced, having grown up in suburban Indiana and having spent little time outdoors beyond a KOA campground.

Into the Backcountry

In Breaking Into the Backcountry and with beautiful clarity and vulnerability, Edwards takes us through the months of his residency, from his first hard lessons on day one, when his car fails to make it to the cabin on the mud-slicked forest roads, to the anxieties about wildfires and locals, to having to learn about the September 11th attacks from an old CB radio and having nobody to call. To entertain himself, he hikes along the Rogue River in search of good fishing spots, though he seldom catches anything. When he runs out of trails to hike, he walks on his own that wind down from the homestead through the property and meet the river.

But eventually the grass grows wild, the vines overrun the trails, and the wood box runs low. While he wanted a Walden-esque experience of knowing the birds and the deer and the bears that float through his meadow, he realizes that what Thoreau leaves out is the mundanity, the labor, and at times, the fear. Edwards doesn’t pull the punches at himself, making it clear to the reader that he’s out of his depth in a big way, struggling to handle not just the isolation, but the realization of how reliant he is on the world around him. He walks the trails along the Rogue not to experience nature, but in the hopes of catching a backpacker for a brief chat, or for watching a raft slide around the bend, and in doing so hopes to meet a new group of friends. What nature offers him is solitude, but with it comes isolation, and the trails are his only connection to others. It’s this kind of vulnerability that gives us a kindred spirit: A discovery of not just how much we need society for all its bells and whistles, but of how much we need it for the human connection – to see, to hear, to interact with one another. But it’s also a discovery that this dependence is not something we must slough off to regain our true wild freedom; it’s something intensely human, and something to cherish. And if we can’t find it in each other, we can find it in our surroundings, as Edwards writes:

"Every day something beautiful and small. The way the deer can reach their heads around and bite at ticks on their flanks. The way they snort. The way they scratch their ears with their long back legs.

The way bats circle the cabin at dusk, snagging moths and mosquitoes attracted by my propane lamps.

The way tiny slugs glisten on the windfall apples. The way the grooves of a ponderosa pine smell like cream soda. The way rosemary, picked in big clumps from the bush in the garden and crushed between my fingers...”

Even when he can’t see or speak to others, he reaches for that communication across time and across distance, and he does find it. But he doesn’t get to know these beauties without acknowledging the hours of labor, of anxiety. The recognition of the beautiful doesn’t come with denying the existence of the hardship, nor by embracing and romanticizing it, but by acknowledging it, learning to live with it and construct meaning from it.

On a rare visit to the homestead, the owner of the property has some words for Edwards:

"Bradley looks at me for a moment, a concerned look spreading across his face (a look not all that different from when he eyeballed my truck that first weekend), and I realize that I’ve said something wrong, that I have somehow offended Bradley’s sense of propriety."

“You know,” he says, “it doesn’t have to be in the manual for you to do it. You’re living here now. You own this place. Take ownership.” "

Back to Civilization

When his time in solitude finally ends, his return to Indiana, to working at the YMCA to teaching composition classes at Purdue, crashes hard on him. That ownership he learned to take, the building, the hiking, the solitude which he grew to appreciate, was unavailable to him in the same way. The following year, he and another former resident, the poet Joe Green, spend four days backpacking the Rogue River past the homestead. On this hike, he reflects on his time. As he walks, he travels the trails he grew to know as his connection to the world, he walks the path up to the homestead that he, as Joe Green did before him and John Daniel before him, called his own. And this is the beauty of this book: The hours of labor are long, and anxiety and fear and loneliness fill much of it, but by taking ownership of your world, or at least of the part of the world you can claim ownership of, you can find those moments of happiness, of beauty. We can go into the wilderness for solitude, but we need not renounce all society, for the trails keep us connected. The wilderness experience doesn’t just come with great mountains and lithe, powerful rivers; it comes with owning your surroundings. Every day, something beautiful and small.

You can find Breaking Into the Backcountry here at Amazon.com.

Editor's Note: This review originally appeared in Issue 46 of TrailGroove Magazine. You can read the original article here.