Eugene weekly., December 13, 2012, Page 15, Image 15

her family wealth with the abject poverty she experienced
in the U.S. and Central America; confronting personal
issues of family, race, sexuality and religion. And she
writes about the practical aspects of activism, such as how
to do war tax resistance without going to prison, and the
benefi ts of working in small groups. She ties it all together
with humility, gratitude and a profound respect for life.
“I am and have always been spiritually called to join
with others who are living and engaging in activism for
a better world,” she writes. “Doing nothing is less than
effective. For me that is not an option.” — Ted Taylor
Wild: From Lost to Found on
the Pacifi c Crest Trail
By Cheryl Strayed. Random House, $25.95. Oprah’s Book
Club 2.0, No. 1 on The New York Times bestseller list.
Dear Sugar, thank you for writing
such an honest, funny, sad, infuriating
and entertaining memoir. That’s exactly
what Cheryl Strayed, or has her legions
of fans know her, Dear Sugar (her alias
for an advice column on The Rumpus),
has done with Wild. Now Strayed has a
new fan pool, the rest of the world (and
Oprah), for bringing readers along to
share in her triumphs and shortcomings
on her path to fi guring out this crazy
thing called life.
Wild bounces back and forth in space
and time as Strayed doggedly walks
the Pacifi c Crest Trail (PCT), woefully
unprepared, revisiting her past like a
detective looking for clues into her own
psyche, fi nding meaning in her poverty-
stricken and love-fi lled childhood in rural
northern Minnesota, the death of her mother
to cancer when Strayed was 22, a failed
marriage before she was 25 to man she loved
but not quite in the right way, her heroin-
and-sex-fueled escapades in Portland and her
forays into the Pacifi c Northwest wilderness
to make sense of it all.
Strayed’s youthful bravery is both exhila-
rating and frustrating. At the tender age of 25,
the rookie hiker walked, stumbled, laughed
and cried her way through the PCT, from the
Mojave Desert through Oregon, ending poeti-
cally at the Bridge of the Gods over the Co-
Meaty Tomes
Books on hunting your dinner
k CALL OF THE MILD:
Learning to Hunt My Own Dinner
By Lily Raff McCaulou. Grand Central, $24.99.
MEAT EATER: Adventures from the Life
of an American Hunter
By Steven Rinella. Spiegal and Grau, $26.
T
he image many non-hunters have of hunters isn’t pretty.
Hunters are callous, camo-clad rednecks in big trucks,
gun-nuts unconcerned about their prey and the environ-
ment in general. There are boorish hunters to be sure. But
let’s not forget, Steven Rinella (American Buffalo, The
Scavenger’s Guide to Haute Cuisine) tells us, that America’s fi rst con-
servationists were avid hunters. And — as Lily Raff McCaulou fi nds to
her own amazement — becoming a hunter might make one a better en-
vironmentalist. Digging deeper, both agree that hunting has something
to tell us about who we are and how we fi t in with the world around us.
McCaulou, raised by uber-hippie parents in suburban Maryland, a
stone’s throw from Washington, D.C., is the epitome of the clueless
urbanite when she ditches the glamour of the New York fi lm industry
to take a newspaper job in Bend in 2003. Assigned a rural beat,
McCaulou stumbles onto a discovery: Hunters know an awful lot
about the places they hunt. What’s more, the hunters she meets evince
a profound love for the animals they pursue and nature in general.
Soon, McCaulou herself is hunting, in order to build a connection
to the Oregon country she’s learning to love and, more importantly, to
the food on her plate. Hunting proves no small challenge for a woman
who doesn’t know the front end of a deer track from the back, and who
is so afraid of guns that she frets in Call of the Mild over even touching
an unloaded rifl e.
McCaulou doesn’t just struggle with her fear of fi rearms. What kind
of relationship does she want with nature? Does she have what it takes
to kill her own dinner? Finding out becomes gut wrenching when Mc-
Caulou faces a wave of deaths among her friends and family and draws
connections between the lost lives of her loved ones and the wild ani-
mals she targets. Ultimately, she decides the connection hunting gives
her to the food she eats and the place she lives — a connection missing
in the prepackaged meat on grocery store shelves — is vitally impor-
tant: “If humans stop hunting, we could lose some of our humanity.”
Rinella is McCaulou’s polar opposite: born into rural Michigan’s
hunting culture, a former professional trapper, author of two previous
hunting books and host of two hunting-related cable TV shows. Though
aware of the disdain that urban, agriculturally dependent society feels for
hunters, Rinella doesn’t need to discover that hunting is part of the primal
human identity — that’s where he starts out. He sees hunting, and writing
about it, as “an act of guerrilla warfare against the inevitable advance of
time,” probing what it means to be a hunter in 11 episodes from a lifetime
spent in the fi eld. Most include “Tasting Notes” on an impressive variety
of game, from squirrel and venison to beaver tail and cougar.
Where McCaulou’s memoir is geared towards non-hunting readers
— maybe to explain why a perfectly sensible liberal woman might
embrace camoufl age and pick up a gun — Rinella’s is fully grounded
in the genre of hunting stories, gritty and primal, perhaps exhaustively
so to the non-initiated.
If you didn’t guess from reading the title, Meat Eater, Rinella is
unapologetically enthusiastic about turning animals into food. He
doesn’t shy away from the bloody underbelly of hunting, pondering
the exhilaration of the kill, the metaphysics of the “right way” to kill
and reconciling the hunter’s “happiness over an animal’s death with
your sense of reverence for its life.” By justifying the role of hunter
in a modern world, he’s arguing for protecting the remaining wildness
in human nature against the creeping encroachment of civilization.
While his philosophies might ring true for those comfortable with
eating meat, they could be tougher to swallow for the animal rights
crowd. — Ephraim Payne
TO
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