Joel Everett
Harding
True Stories from the Wilderness - A Memoir with Insights on Ecology and Natural Environments
Latest Book Now on Sale
"Loose on the Landscape"
An Ecologist Looks for Meaning in the Wildest Places
"Sometimes nothing is more important than going off into the woods and contemplating the frog chorus of a vernal pool."
Published by Willow Oak Books, an imprint of Green Peach Publishing
Published by Green Peach Publishing
My newest book, "Loose on the Landscape: An Ecologist Looks for Meaning in the Wildest Places" is now available for purchase. Find out what it’s like alone at midnight in the depths of a vast marsh, or stumbling into a roiling geyser field in the dark. Can you sense an Amazon rainforest breathing? Does the Jersey Devil still inhabit the pine barrens?
Such adventures show us how to appreciate the mental, emotional, and physical benefits of immersing ourselves in wild environments. The book guides the reader through a host of remote landscapes and wilderness areas I have visited throughout North America and elsewhere. Along the way, keen-eyed observations are presented that underlie our innate personal connections with nature. These may encourage the reader to "collect" their own personal landscapes and ecosystems. In doing so, they may find outdoor eureka moments that can inspire and increase their understanding of the natural world. And further, they might realize they gained enhanced personal well-being as well.
In this remarkable and moving memoir the author "Vagabond Boy: Memoir of a Youth's Journey Through a Heartland of Chaos," relates the startling boyhood he spent traveling across 1950s America with his restless parents before interstate highways were invented, bumping into reality at every turn. It abounds in adventure and nostalgia as though Tom Sawyer and Kevin Arnold of "The Wonder Years" were combined in one boy leaving a trail of shenanigans from coast to coast.
His encounters with strange landscapes, curious people, and dubious caretakers dangle lessons in life for his taking, and sometimes leaving. When his parents abandon him on a lonely highway at six years old, however, trust in others suffers. As he struggles to make sense of it other events accumulate, sometimes humorous, heartwarming, even harrowing, and a growing sense of unease mounts with increasing turbulence that infects and threatens the family. When calm eventually seems to be restored he learns his whole childhood was a deception and a startling new reality sweeps him toward the edge of an emotional chasm of discontent that threatens to swallow and imprison him forever.
He realizes he must find a hidden door to his future before he is finally thrust unprepared to face the world as an adult, where the only road remaining open points towards a wasted life ahead. "Vagabond Boy" is a true story of resilience and perseverance by a boy discovering himself and the difficult world he encountered. Yet the work also offers a deeper inspirational message for today's readers who struggle with their past in an ambiguous and fragmented culture, precisely where most of us still live today.