Author Explores Living Well in the West

By Ken Wright, 5-26-06

When I was a kid, my favorite book was My Side of the Mountain. It’s the story of a young boy who leaves his city home (with the blessings of his unimaginably understanding parents) to move to the Catskill Mountains of Upstate New York, where his family has inherited an old homestead property from his grandfather. Once there, the boy carves out the inside of an enormous old tree, creating a tiny hidden “cabin” inside, and moves in for a year – right on the edge of a town -- living off the bounty of those wildlands.

If that kid had grown up and moved to southwestern Colorado, he might be David Petersen. And if, later in life, he looked back and wrote a book about how he applied his wilderness adventure to his life, it could be Petersen’s On the Wild Edge: In Search of a Natural Life, recently released in paperback.

On the Wild Edge is Petersen’s memoir of his life after he left his own urban southern California home in the late 1980 and moved onto a piece of (then affordable) mountain land in Colorado’s San Juan Mountains. There, he and his new wife Caroline hand-built a small cabin, where they have lived for 25 years – right on the edge of a growing tourist town – living off the bounty of the wildlands that still survive in those Southwestern mountains.

Durango, Colo.-based David Petersen is one of the nation's leading nature and hunting-ethics writers, and the editor of the late Edward Abbey’s journals and forthcoming letters. He has authored six previous books of natural history, including the excellent Ghost Grizzlies, a report on Colorado's remnant grizzly population. He also edited A Hunter's Heart, a controversial anthology on the ethics of hunting that earned him national recognition as a "hunting ethicist.” He then went beyond mere ethics with the 2000 release of Heartsblood, an intriguing treatise and deeply personal narrative on the spiritual rewards and moral responsibilities of hunting and the wild country it requires.

In On the Wild Edge, Petersen reveals himself as a sort of modern mountain man. Even here in the early 21st century, he lives and eats by his hands, wits, skills, and woodland knowledge. But his modern mountain-man life is not way out there – he has electricity, running water, a radio, a truck, and a laptop (“My only utterly essential electrical appliance,” he writes) with which he makes his living. And he hasn’t set up in some remote Alaskan outback; he lives near a real town in the sunny, popular (but still wilderness-rich) Four Corners area.

That, right there, is what makes Petersen’s message of how we can better “live well” (“If there is a universal human desire,” he reflects, “it is simply to live well”) so illuminating and vital: because he has pursued his personal vision of how to live a wilder life right here, right now, in this day and age, on the edge – the “wild edge” -- of our modern world. How to do that? Simple enough: live consciously. “We do not seek to absolve our sins through self-denial,” he explains about his and his wife’s lifestyle choices, “but merely to control our own days and destinies by controlling our material consumption, financial encumbrances, and work and time obligations.” And because of that simple imperative, the power of Petersen’s “mountain man” life is that it is not way out there. It is here, now. Within everyone’s grasp. The life Petersen describes in Wild Edge is not Utopian, it’s just … deliberate … resolute … reflective … reverent. It’s just … aware. Alive. Appreciative.

It’s also not a new message, this “live simply and take control.” Petersen himself points out that “Chasing the good life by way of voluntary simplicity is an ancient pursuit.” But why do that? That’s where Petersen gets intriguing and his most provocative. In addressing this drive – why does simplicity reward our spirits so richly? – is where Petersen delivers his most potent message: The way forward is back (but not backward), individually and (therefore) culturally. “I firmly believe,” he announces, “that our ancient innate knowledge of how best to live is not irrevocably dead but has been drugged, sedated, and prostituted by modern material culture. It can be revived.”

Reviving that “ancient innate knowledge” in the world we live in today is the art that has been Petersen’s life. And that is what On the Wild Edge chronicles: the explorations, exploits, and reflections of one man’s attempt to live like primal people lived – independently, manifesting one’s own personal style; outside, engaged in the physical world; physically, by one’s own wits and skills; and tangibly, with few mediated intrusions that separate one’s attention from the real living going on around us, and within us.

Risky business, this telling people how to live better. But On the Wild Edge pulls it off because Petersen doesn’t lecture. Instead, he tells his story with a sincere and revealing intimacy that tempers what might otherwise come off as arrogance or righteousness. By telling stories rather than outlining programs, the narrative, then, becomes a perception itself rather than about a way of perceiving. This is achieved through Petersen’s witty, vivid, and lyrical storytelling. Of a close encounter of the bear kind, Petersen writes: “The alerted animal looks up and our eyes lock – his are tiny, incomprehensible, lustrous amber ingots set in a head like a basketball with ears. His hind paws are as long as my size eleven boots, with claws in need of trimming. I dare not sneeze, fart, or blink.” That is the power of good writing: you don’t hear, you experience.

Still, as lovely and exciting and joyful as Petersen’s prose reveals this “living well” to be, On the Wild Edge is not idealism – it is pragmatism informed by experience, and the rewards are tempered by trials and errors. But, much to his credit, and the credibility of his tale, Petersen doesn’t temper the yin for the yang here – he is fearlessly, almost fiercely, honest about himself and his experience, and so is unabashed about costs of his lifestyle choices: when his wife is diagnosed with cancer, they find themselves hard-pressed to pay for the expensive health care provided by the system they chose to not pay into via insurance.

But those risks, too, are the point here: “In order to sort out the most precious nuggets of life, we must learn to discern them from the dross,” Petersen advises. And, importantly, no matter where you are, that is a skill available to everyone: making choices on how to live based less on what our commercial culture tells us we need, and more on what our multi-million-year genetic callings tell us we want.
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