In Barefoot Hearted: A Wild Life Among Wildlife,
bestselling author Kathleen Meyer showcases her love affairs—passionate,
tempestuous, quirky—with wildlife, wild traveling, and wild
living. With deft and lyrical prose, she captures the close-up
beat and daily struggle of species, human and otherwise, inhabiting
the northern Rocky Mountain West. This is a coming into the country
story, in every respect—the country, in this case, being
Montana's tall, reaching landscape with its ever-underfoot feral
critters; the on-tenterhooks territory of a new romantic relationship;
and the pressure cooker tableau that is our precarious global
imbalance.
Ever the outdoor adventurer and nontraditional spirit, Meyer
chooses—over housework—a life of rowing big rapids and
driving draft horses cross-country from the seat of a hundred-year-old
wagon. Standing out among the sagebrush and cactus, with her donned
prairie bonnet and petticoats billowing, she meets her match in
the six-foot-six, gypsying farrier Patrick McCarron, a man of
full Irish blood. Over the course of two years, they travel three
mountain states by team and covered wagon and then settle into
an old Bitterroot Valley dairy barn "not yet made fit for
human habitation." Here, in country once traversed by Meriwether
Lewis and William Clark, against the backdrop of a magnificent
mountain valley now rapidly going to sprawl, the author introduces
us to a range of Montana wildlife, many of which take shelter
in parts of the barn. We learn the length of a bat's penis; the
curious, on-the-face placement of the female mosquito's labium;
the overly aromatic courting rituals of wild skunks; how to act
when a hummingbird mistakes human nostrils for honeysuckle blossoms;
what it takes to rescue a season's seventy-seven orphaned bear
cubs. Meyer gives accounts of "weedy" and "orchidy"
species, using intimate and introspective story to portray the
complex, interlocking nature of ecosystems and the part humans
play in the world's accelerated rate of disappearing species.
Barefoot Hearted has been compared in its depth to Thoreau's Walden and Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at
Tinker Creek.
The final chapter contains a rare interview with the Bitterroot
Valley cattle rancher immediately involved with the Bass Creek
wolf pack (a product of the Northern Rockies Wolf Recovery Program),
as well as a telling conversation with David Quammen, author of
The Song of the Dodo. By carrying us vividly back to the
Old West, Meyer brings us to pondering the pressing dilemmas of
living in a modern-day world "grown mega-industrial, super
high-tech, and virtual all in half a lifetime." "Problems
now," she says, "are like prairie grasshoppers propagating
exponentially on the turn of a season."
Barefoot Hearted is a volume of
earnest and earthy literature. A tale of uncommon adventure and
a personal chronicle of conscience. Meyer's writing has been called
thoughtful, compelling, irreverent, and hilarious. The Washington
Post calls it "shoot-from-the-hip." |
