The COMPASSION of OAK TREES................

July 6, 2008 Landscape Artist By HOLLY MORRIS Skip to next paragraph THE WILD PLACES By Robert Macfarlane. Illustrated. 340 pp. Penguin Books. Paper, $15. Robert Macfarlane is looking for his wild in England, Ireland and Wales, territory that for most of us evokes words like “manicured,” “turf” or, at the very least, “domesticated.” His book about a series of pilgrimages to the moors, islands, lochs, capes and holloways that season the British Isles might seem quaint or even confusing (a holloway?) to those whose notion of wildness demands “rock, altitude and ice,” as he puts it. Yet “The Wild Places” is anything but twee. It is a formidable consideration by a naturalist who can unfurl a sentence — poetry, really — with the breathless ease of a master angler, a writer whose ideas and reach far transcend the physical region he explores. The same quiet optimism that inhabited his previous book, “Mountains of the Mind: A History of a Fascination,” makes Macfarlane unwilling to accept the “obituaries for the wild” put out by today’s eco-punditry. Only occasionally does he cite examples of current environmental peril, like the minke whale that washed up on the Normandy coast in 2002 with nearly a ton of plastic packaging and shopping bags in its stomach. He leapfrogs certain aspects of the moment in pursuit of deeper, older truths. Macfarlane sets out to create an unconventional map — a cartography not subject to the imperialisms of roadways or humanity or grid, but rather, a prose map that would “seek to make some of the remaining wild places of the archipelago visible again, or that would record them before they vanished for good. ... It would link headlands, cliffs, beaches, mountaintops, tors, forests, river mouths and waterfalls.” Tree climbing is a preferred methodology. The 10- or 20-foot elevation (as well as all that he learns on the way up) gives Macfarlane precious perspective. At the outset, from his roost in a beech tree near his home in Cambridge, he experiences “the relief of relief” and explains tree climbing as “a way of defraying the city’s claim” on him, though it was not an experience of “wild” as he originally defines it. Wild requires isolation, the elements, a stepping “outside human history,” he tells us. The more than a dozen accounts of starry sleep-outs, freezing tramps and phosphorescent swims — at places like the valley of Coruisk on the Isle of Skye and the summit of Ben Hope in Scotland — are ripe with scholarship and pleasantly egoless. The natural world swells with meaning through Macfarlane’s devoted observations, which can be both minutely detailed and vast in scope. Few can finesse, as he does, the lickety-split life cycle of a midge and the grandiosity of lumbering geologic eras into the space of a couple of sentences. But his natural world is not all creatures and weather and gratitude for the moonlight that traveled 93 million miles to give him “an eyeful of silver” as he watched his moon-shadow jig on an icy ridge. As often as not, the landscapes are tilled with human histories. Macfarlane camps on the Welsh island of Ynys Enlli, where, starting around A.D. 500, Celtic monks called peregrini began crossing treacherous waters to retreat and “achieve correspondence between belief and place, between inner and outer landscapes” — to “consider infinitude.” While in Ireland, he offers a wrenching account of the potato famine. But death is not only in the land and the past, but in the present tense of the book. Brain cancer swiftly claims Macfarlane’s friend and sometime companion on these journeys, Roger Deakin. Deakin was a writer who deepened Macfarlane’s notion of wildness and taught him, among many things, about the compassion of oak trees, which spring to action and “share nutrients via their root systems” when one of their clan is ailing. Literary prophets also haunt Macfarlane’s outings. For W. H. Auden, he says while noting the particular erosions of the limestone slabs near the Burren in Ireland, “this was a human as well as a geological quality: he found in limestone an honesty — an acknowledgment that we are as defined by our faults as by our substance.” Ideas about wildness change. Macfarlane’s original plan — to find and map stashes of untouched wild — isn’t panning out. That “chaste land” in the British Isles doesn’t exist (ah, we were right!), and he comes to believe that the human and the wild cannot be mutually exclusive. He now feels that his “old sense of the wild was to an ideal of tutelary harshness” and geologic past. Meanwhile, down in the gryke he notices some lusty new vegetable life, bristling with “nowness,” existing in a “constant and fecund present.” Macfarlane ultimately sees wildness as “not about asperity, but about luxuriance, vitality, fun. The weed thrusting through a crack in a pavement, the tree root impudently cracking a carapace of tarmac.” Back straddling the limb of his beechwood, having come full circle, he considers his journeys: “A webbing of story and memory joined up my places, as well as other more material affinities. The connections made by all of these forces — rocks, creatures, weathers, people — had laid new patterns upon the country, as though it had been swilled in a developing fluid, and unexpected images had emerged, ghostly figures showing through the mesh of roads and cities.” The wild, now a quality of organic vigor that lives in his urban beechwood as much as on remote summits, “prefaced us, and it will outlive us,” he writes. And it hones our faith. For those of us disinclined toward religion — we who find our values, our hereafter, our happiness in the rhythms, the “fizz and riot” of the natural world — Macfarlane’s map, which is this book, is a kindred, bewitching tract. And like the wild it parses, it quietly returns us to ourselves. Holly Morris is the author of “Adventure Divas: Searching the Globe for a New Kind of Heroine” and a host for the National Geographic television documentary series “Treks in a Wild World.” http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/06/books/review/Morris-t.html