2016 read #65: Mountains of the Heart by Scott Weidensaul.

Mountains of the Heart: A Natural History of the Appalachians by Scott Weidensaul
266 pages
Published 1994
Read from August 24 to August 26
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5

At heart I've always considered myself a Rocky Mountains boy. Born in Ohio, a mere two generations removed from the Appalachian plateau country of Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee, by happenstance my consecutive, autobiographical memories began when I lived in Colorado Springs, and much of my peripatetic minor years were spent in Colorado, New Mexico, and Montana. Just the other day I was reminded of how deep this connection runs, when I heard "Rocky Mountain High" for the first time in years and felt a visceral music-memory association with being 5 or 6 years old and feeling proprietary and proud that such a classic song would be sung about my home. 

I've lived in New York a dozen years now, and have resisted any sense of feeling at home here. (I live in the dreadful suburbs of Long Island, not the city -- a crucial distinction often lost on people from outside New York.) Yet all the same, since I began hiking the mainland hills about five years back, I've developed a creeping sort of fondness for the Hudson Highlands, the Catskills, the Kittatinny Ridge of New Jersey, a sort of pride in my orographic province, a pride I've become aware of only recently. The first time I realized this pride was while watching a hiking vlogger named Red Beard enjoy the Appalachian Trail through New Jersey and New York, and in recent months, planning and sometimes even hiking my own AT adventures, I've become positively fixated on the charms of "my" modest mid-Atlantic ranges.

Scott Weidensaul is an author I've enjoyed, from the hills I've grown fond of, and once I learned he'd written a natural history of the Appalachians, it climbed to near the top of my to-read list. His Return to Wild America was a minor disappointment, but here, writing about the high country he's known his whole life, Weidensaul avoids the tedious journalistic format that dulled Return and permits his unabashed delight for the trees, the birds, and the wild spaces of his native range to warm his prose. This book makes an excellent companion to Weidensaul's The First Frontier, a speculative history of culture contact along the Eastern seaboard, and reminded me at times of Steve Nicholls' exquisite, mournful Paradise Found. They form a loose, obviously unofficial trilogy of sorts, sketching in an archaeological and biological memory-picture of the lost, pre-Columbian magnificence of the Eastern half of the continent.

Weidensaul's science is of course dated (the last two decades have seen explosive progress in the biological sciences), and also not nearly as pessimistic as more recent natural histories (the last two decades have also seen an explosion in invasive pests and diseases, exurban sprawl, climate change, and other cataclysmic alterations of the natural world). In that sense reading it now is a bit like reading Tim Flannery's The Future Eaters -- it's hard to tell just how reliable some of its assertions may be. And as with almost all other popular science books, I personally found myself bored with the inevitable beginner's level explanations of everything from plate tectonics and ice ages to Paleoindian settlement of the New World (which chapter is, as one might expect, particularly out of date). In fact the geology chapter made me wish for an entirely separate book altogether, a thorough and readable geological history of eastern North America. Geology seems even sparser on popular science shelves than the other natural sciences, which is to say almost nonexistent, so I'm probably out of luck -- but a nerd can dream.