Hannah and the Mountain: Notes toward a Wilderness Fatherhood by Jonathan JohnsonUniversity of Nebraska Press, 2005

I was more interested in the “wilderness” part of the story than in the “parenthood” part, but of course they’re intertwined. Johnson writes about moving from Michigan out to Idaho, where his grandparents have a ranch, and where he and his wife, Amy, will finish a cabin they’ve been building up on a hilltop: no electricity, no running water, no phone. On their first day there, they learn that Amy is pregnant: they’d decided already that once they were settled in Idaho they’d have a baby, but the reality of their experiences of pregnancy out in the mountains is harder than expected. I like what Johnson writes about space & place: about the desire for “a landscape to trust our daydreams to” (p 5) and what kind of a landscape that is for him. Mountains, snow, tamaracks and pines, sky, elk, alfalfa fields, a hilltop where, at night, you can’t see a single light through the trees, in the quiet. “There is joy in cities,” he writes, “but it is most often deliberate, premeditated joy—you choose your off-ramp; you stand in line for your takeout Thai food” (p 77). (That’s so far from my experience, of course: there is so much unexpected joy in my city life: ending up on a subway train where a guy asks a girl with a guitar to play Janis Joplin, & then he and his girlfriend end up singing along to the chorus, “freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose” at 3:30 pm on a Wednesday as everyone stares, or walking past the open gates of a community farm in the middle of Brooklyn, going inside to see the sunflowers, the yellow pattypan squash.) But Johnson writes about joy & grace in the largeness of the natural world: he writes about going to a Quaker meeting, being with this silent circle of people like “being alone in the wilderness,” (p 64) and he writes about it well.