Edward Hoagland is dead, who helped me to see and fall in love.
He died in February. In the outpouring of media trash and catastrophe, I missed it.
From the summer of 1977 and into the early 80’s I read all of his essays. His observations on turtles, tigers, bears, wolves, rivers and walking and woods felt as if I had found Thoreau’s more prickly, direct and ironic descendent, but someone just as deeply in love with the natural world (and cities and most people which he wrote of in describing summer in NYC, “Life in bulk is good.”) He instilled in me a love of Maine before I had ever visited it.
He stuttered badly all his life which taught him how to listen and wait and watch. He showed me that others have stories they are eager to share. His sentences are splendid, lovely, lyrical and complex.
I read him now, almost 50 years later, with a sense of wonder about the wide expanse of his curiosity, his travels, his courage while clinched up by blindness and old age.
I read him most avidly as a young man when I was spending summers in the West, in the wilderness, and taking long hikes alone in Pennsylvania’s mountains.
Today, I can look up and out the window and still believe that “Summer is when we believe, all of a sudden, that if we just walked out the back door and kept going long enough and far enough, we would reach the Rocky Mountains.” Even copying his sentence stirs up the old yearning to head into the far away hills.
I never met him, this man who was one of the great teachers of my life. I never wrote to him to thank him. I wish I had done so.
