You may have heard it all before, but I’m going to go on saying it anyway. Welcome to Dean’s bloggy hollow, it’s about books and woods and big mountain snow and people who devote themselves to the preservation of wild-er-ness and my friends and Jenkins, the good-natured little dog that ate L.A., and journalism and making newspapers and heroes who are too numerous to count and that makes me lucky. Did you ever read a story by Alice Munroe? I started re-reading the title story in “Runaway” last night and just about collapsed. It’s so good to read it’s too good to finish. I am crippled by fits of sentimentality about a story I’ve only read once before. Too hot, have to go on to read something in which I am slightly less invested.
For about a month I have been reading “Three Cups of Tea,” which I enjoy in little sips and if only for the descriptions of the mountain country inhabited by the Balto near K2 in the Karakoram range in Pakistan. It’s a big book-club kind of book, full of moral uplift about building schools for kids in isolated Islamic strongholds and the like, and it’s got an enviable story and there’s nothing wrong with that except the writing lays a little flat. But I keep going back to it for the mountains and the struggle. Like most books, it’ll take me about two years to finish, but as I’m reading 7 or 8 of them at any one time, it all evens out.
My new book, “Operation Bite Back,” comes out June 23. It’s powered mostly by a driving, undeniable story. It’s impossible not to be swept up by the urgency and commitment of Rod Coronado’s fast-moving campaigns to protect North American wildlife in the early ’90s. I suppose that is exactly what law enforcement is afraid of now, because he’s out of jail and Probation is currently trying to bury him in constrictions. He hasn’t burned anything since 1992, as far as I know. And he has two young kids. I suppose they’ll succeed in bring more attention to his old campaigns that way.
Let’s find out how that all spools out. I look forward to detailing here some of my outings with the book and all the drama, good and bad, that attends its publication. Hope you’ll participate in person.
Dean, I am a resident of Elkhart who read your book, Burning Rainbow Farm, with great interest. I see that you are a proponent of environmental protection, and I wonder if you would know where I might publish an article about the impending military buildup in Guam, the damage it will cause, and specifically, a conference in San Diego in May where attendees learned of the business “opportunies” there. This issue has not received enough coverage. Thanks, TC