A little over a year ago, Paul Gruchow killed himself—and we are still feeling robbed. At the time, we put pen to paper and tried to memorialize him as best we could. We still believe that he was one of the finest environmental essayists ever, anywhere.
Just today, we finally got around to reading Michael Finley’s remembrance in an issue of Minnesota Monthly from a few months ago. Though he handles his subject delicately—and maybe just a hair too solicitously, but it is after all unkind to speak ill of the dead—Finley makes it clear that Gruchow was a troubled man. What was clearly a diagnosed case of bipolar disorder was activated and aggravated by Gruchow’s chosen profession. Gruchow was irritated that he hadn’t achieved wider acclaim. He knew what we know—he deserved it. Jealousy and envy are ugly emotions, but they are universal.
Finley stumbles a little in his tribute to Gruchow in trying to explain what Gruchow did on the printed page. It would have helped to quote Gruchow himself more, but this is a challenge in trying to reproduce a writer whose impact was subtle and cumulative—no major fireworks, just the slow accretion truth, rather like the way hay is baled.
The last time we spoke to Gruchow we talked about the unique kernal of truth that he shares with John Muir and with Aldo Leopold—but what is conspicuously missing in the writings of the better-known (and wealthy) Annie Dillard, and his real nemesis, the exceedingly popular Gretel Ehrlich.
Ehrlich titled her seminal book “The Solace of Open Spaces,” which was published in December of 1986. Two years later, Gruchow published his indispensible “The Necessity of Empty Places.” The slight play in titles is rhetorically a key to understanding the difference between the writers and where each belongs, relative to the canon of nature writing.
For Ehrlich and her long list of (predominantly female) acolytes, nature is really just a projection screen for an unrelenting program of self-help. To be fair, this tradition goes back to some fine American forebears—especially the Transcendentalists Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. Nature is a proving ground for the human spirit—the value of flora and fauna in the environment is their capacity to communicate profound truths for the betterment of the observer—that is, the writer. We concern ourselves with nature because “open spaces” have the capacity to provide “solace” to human actors in their midst.
If that were as simple and true as many fleecey, tree-hugging, journaling hikers would like to believe, Gruchow would undoubtedly be alive today. Still, it’s not as if Gruchow didn’t cover some of the same territory, but he did it from exactly the opposite side of the mountain. Nature exists in, of, and for itself—it owes nothing to humanity. On the contrary, humanity owes it everything. It is enough to talk about conservation and perservation as goals in themselves—irrespecive of their “spiritual” or therapeutic value to the funny two-legged mammal with opposable thumbs.
This dichotomy is, interestingly enough, built into the charter of the United States park service. Congress charges our rangers with administering the national parks for both preservation AND access. Today, we constantly see the users fighting with the preservers. If more people read Gruchow today (and we are sure they eventually will) we’d talk less about parks as a “national resource” or “reserve” and more about how to protect environments that show minimal human input (or, more commonly, outtake). In other words wilderness has value independent of humans, and we’d be wise to start acting that way. Ironically, it would serve our long-range interests better. Gruchow knew that. It was not a truth that could save one man, but one for an entire community.
