Janisse Ray - Wild Spectacle: Seeking Wonders in a World Beyond Humans

Here is Janisse Ray at her bestfully immersed in wilderness, immersed in friendship, immersed in parenthood. She engages with the world in a way that few can manage in this screened-off age. If theres a more open, honest, and appealing writer today, Ive not met her.

Bill McKibben, author of Wandering Home: Long Walk across Americas Most Hopeful Landscape

Janisse Rays sense of wonder in the presence of the natural world permeates this collection of essays on how to love the Earth and measure the value of a life surrounded by the mother we all share.

Pam Houston, author of Deep Creek: Finding Hope in the High Country

Rays richness of observation, clarity of expression, and moral purpose are in such balance that this book hums like a gyroscope in your hands. I read Wild Spectacle at the speed of Rays travel across many landscapes. Read and reread it again to savor the scenes and sentences.

Melissa Fay Greene, author of No Biking in the House without a Helmet: 9 Kids, 3 Continents, 2 Parents, 1 Family

Wonderful. Janisse Ray has a heart the size of a manatee and the tenacity (and laugh) of a pileated woodpecker. She is incapable of not loving this world and all that is in it. If you dont yet know her work, today is your lucky day.

Rick Bass, author of For a Little While: New and Selected Stories

Seriously great. In its brilliantly detailed celebrations of geography, Janisse Rays writing suggests Walt Whitman. Hers is a literary ambition that makes no pretenses to modesty.

Franklin Burroughs, author of Billy Watsons Croker Sack

Curious, humble, bright, and compelling. Whenever I read Janisse Ray, I come away feeling both moved and fortunate. She is one of Americas best chroniclers of spiritual and physical wilderness. Her prose is as gorgeous as her mind is wise, and lands a necessary punch: how should a human enter a wild place?

Megan Mayhew Bergman, author of Almost Famous Women

These seductive and diverse essays evoke wildness themselves, weaving narratives of community, love, and heroism. Ray writes with the heart of a poet and warrior, casting a spell that leaves us wanting to love and protect all that is wild. She urges us to remember what beauty there is in the world, and how much that world needs us.

Sheryl St. Germain, author of Fifty Miles

Janisse Rays lyricism winds us to a heightened attentiveness to nature and calls with the clarity of dawn song throughout. I count her words as a wild blessing to the world.

J. Drew Lanham, author of Sparrow Envy: Field Guide to Birds and Lesser Beasts

Think about epiphany. Think about change. Think about the moments that make your face burn, your fingers tingle. Wild Spectacle is about those shocks, encounters that shift the way we see the world and ourselves in it. Although these essays range far and wide, Ray is the vortex around which everything spins. We journey with her into these places of salt and darkness and stone, into the sound and silence of conversations taken up and left off. These essays love wild people and trees, birds and wind, dirt and spiders. Reading this book, I rememberedif the water we drink is maybe older than the sun, then ancient magic pounds inside our skins, too.

Joni Tevis, author of The World Is on Fire: Scrap, Treasure, and Songs of Apocalypse

An urgent love letter to our wild places. Part poet, naturalist, and tour guide, Ray is a gifted observer. We finish this remarkable book brimming with gratitude and alive to the wild spectacles around us.

Beth Ann Fennelly, author of Heating and Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs

Janisse Ray doesnt explore nature so much as remind us of what we have forgotten. She is our Rachel Carson and our Walt Whitmanboth fierce prophet and courageous teacher. She reminds us of what we have forgotten: that we are part of the beauty of the world, so long as we remember to be.

Mark Powell, author of Firebird

Wild Spectacle is a stirring book. To experience the truth of Thoreaus claim that wildness preserves the world, take these journeys with Janisse Ray. She is an exhilarating observer who explores untamed places where that shaping, animating energy is on vivid display.

Scott Russell Sanders, author of The Way of Imagination

JANISSE RAY

TRINITY UNIVERSITY PRESS
San Antonio, Texas

Trinity University Press

San Antonio, Texas 78212

Copyright 2021 by Janisse Ray

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Book design by BookMatters, Berkeley

Jacket design by Derek Thornton, Notch Design

Jacket art, Bridgeman Images 235633

Author photo by Christopher Ian Smith

ISBN 978-1-59534-957-6 hardcover

ISBN 978-1-59534-958-3 ebook

Trinity University Press strives to produce its books using methods and materials in an environmentally sensitive manner. We favor working with manufacturers that practice sustainable management of all natural resources, produce paper using recycled stock, and manage forests with the best possible practices for people, biodiversity, and sustainability. The press is a member of the Green Press Initiative, a nonprofit program dedicated to supporting publishers in their efforts to reduce their impacts on endangered forests, climate change, and forest-dependent communities.

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI 39.48-1992.

CIP data on file at the Library of Congress

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To my teachers, past, present, and future

Out beyond houses and mailboxes, roads and bridges, a person can see a realm that exists alongside this world in which we humans live.

I say again, another world flanks the constructed one. Often the view from ours is skewed, as through fractile glass, limited by narrow apertures of scope and angle and crack, the view fleeting. We cant see it on demand.

In the wild world, relationship is evolutionary, time is geologic, beauty is intelligent. There we find ourselves under a powerful spell.

Although I was reared on a junkyard by parents who did not waste time hiking or camping, I knew pine trees and pitcher plants, bobcats and brown thrashers, as my people. I understood wild things as beings with intentions, foremost a searing desire to live pleasant, fulfilling lives.

Once the storyteller Joseph Bruchac explained to me that there are people to whom animals are attracted, to whom animals listen. Later I met such a person, an Abenaki man named Oannes. He visited environmental studies classes at a university where I was in residence, and my colleagues described an odd thing that often occurred during Oanness visits. As he sat outside, on a green or by a lake, talking to students about his ethos, an animal would ease up to listen. It might be a heron or squirrel, it might be an alligator. When Oannes lectured my own class, we convened outside, and I was gobsmacked when a black racer came sliding along with its head lifted from the mown grass, startling my students. It circled behind Oannes before hunkering down in shrubbery, as if to eavesdrop.