Personal Canon: Cahill, Quammen & Ehrlich

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Outside Magazine January 2003

The Outside Adventure Canon
Personal Canon: Cahill, Quammen & Ehrlich

ANOTHER GREEN WORLD
By Tim Cahill
IN LATE 1978, Outside proudly published an excerpt from THE FARM ON THE RIVER OF EMERALDS, by Moritz Thomsen. I thought the book read like the best of Joseph Conrad, only funny. Thomsen, at 53, had returned to work a farm in Ecuador, where he'd served with the Peace Corps in the 1960s. We see how poverty twists and distorts people and places. We sit with him as he listens to opera and watches vast thunderstorms roll over the land. We cringe at a reflective honesty that spares no one, least of all the author himself. And then we learn of Arcario Cortez, who, on his honeymoon, made love to his new wife eight times in eight hours: "He was another Sir Edmund Hillary who—without ropes or tanks of oxygen or snacks of cheese or chocolate, without Sherpa guides or sponsorship from the National Geographic Society, all on his own with nothing but youthful grit—now stood alone on his solitary peak, every bit as exhausted and triumphant as Hillary himself." Thomsen died in Ecuador in 1991. He had written four books, all brilliant, but I think The Farm on the River of Emeralds is his masterpiece. Naturally, it is out of print, a tragic circumstance that would have amused Thomsen to no end.

TIM CAHILL'S LATEST BOOK IS HOLD THE ENLIGHTENMENT: MORE TRAVEL, LESS BLISS THE ONE THAT GOT AWAY
By David Quammen
EYELIDS OF MORNING: THE MINGLED DESTINIES OF CROCODILES AND MEN, by Alistair Graham and Peter Beard, is the most wonderfully lurid coffee-table book ever assembled. It's also a far-ranging meditation on the role of man-eating reptiles in human history and psychology, and a vivid account of a valuable, difficult, bloody scientific study. Over the past three decades it has been out of print, hard to find, impossible to find, venerated as an underground classic, and then back in print. It's currently out of print but findable.

Alistair Graham was the biologist of the team; Peter Beard took the photos and designed the book. Together they spent a year on Lake Rudolf (now called Lake Turkana) in northern Kenya, killing and dissecting about 500 animals in order to learn what they could about Crocodilus niloticus, the Nile crocodile. At that time—1966-68—Graham was a hard-headed young scientist with a visceral admiration for crocodiles and no patience whatsoever for sentimentalizing them. He did some other intriguing work and then, it seems, disappeared. I've been trying to locate him for three years, in connection with a project about big predators. No luck. I've traced him from Africa, heard he worked as a chauffeur in England, and found folks who knew him as manager of a crocodile farm in northern Australia. Then the trail goes cold. Alistair, if you're reading this: Great book! And please call me.

MONSTER OF GOD, BY EDITOR-AT-LARGE DAVID QUAMMEN, WILL BE PUBLISHED IN AUGUST

GONE TO THE DOGS
By Gretel Ehrlich
DURING HIS NEARLY three-year dogsled journey (1921-24) from Greenland to Point Barrow, Alaska, explorer Knud Rasmussen amassed roughly 6,000 pages of field notes that were condensed into ACROSS ARCTIC AMERICA. When I first went to Greenland in 1993, I took an old, out-of-print copy. It was like holding living history. Rasmussen lived in igloos and houses made of stone, bone, and turf, and his descriptions of the white landscape, and of life on the ice—where you got around by sled only, lived by the light of seal-blubber lamps, and hunted and ate whales—excite the imagination.

In spring, when there is round-the-clock light and it's difficult to sleep, the Inuit I was dogsledding with would ask me to read passages aloud, even though they couldn't understand my English version. They all knew about Rasmussen, though, and loved to listen. "Give me dogs, give me winter," he wrote, "and you can have the rest."

GRETEL EHRLICH IS THE AUTHOR OF THIS COLD HEAVEN

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