One of the more unusual books I received for Christmas was Wickerby: An Urban Pastoral by Charles Siebert. A blurb on the back cover refers to the book as the “un-Walden.”
Published in 1998, it is the reflections of a struggling writer living in a deteriorating section of Brooklyn. With his girlfriend off on an extended film-making junket to Africa and frustrations building up in the city, he quite suddenly decamps to a old log cabin in the Canadian woods owned by his girlfriend’s family.
It’s been six years since anyone last spent any time in the cabin and nature is taking over. There are bats in the attic, a woodchuck under the floor and carpenter ants in the corner. The foundation is slowly giving way on one corner and it’s just a matter of time before the whole structure rolls down the hillside. The author doesn’t really attempt to change any of this. He just fits himself into it for five months and then is back in Brooklyn as suddenly as he came.
The author switches back and forth between reflections on growing up in Brooklyn, life there now, and his experiences in the woods. His adventures can be humorous, but he brings up some interesting ideas along the way about nature and civilization.
We are no less natural than the next creature, except that thinking makes it seem so, makes us invent a place called nature from which we can think of ourselves as having been exiled, and into which we can constantly seek readmittance…
To an alien who just arrived on the planet in a spaceship I expect a skyscraper would seem just as “natural” as an ant colony. And to the bird looking for a place to build a nest, a skyscraper may seem as natural as a tree. Only we humans see a distinction.
I don’t know why this is so, but it is rooted far back in time. Some of the oldest literary documents we have talk about man’s exile from the Garden of Eden.
As you can tell this is not a book about the delights of living off the land. I’ve lived most of my life in urban settings and I could relate to the many little stories about life in the city. The author tends to flit rapidly from one thing to another rather quickly but once you get used to that he is very enjoyable to read.