John Daniel makes his living as a writer and a traveling workshop teacher. Of him, the famous author Wallace Stegner has said: "John Daniel loves wilderness of all kinds, and gets out into it every chance, but it is more than scenery he is after. He has a streak of mysticism, some generalized religious sense, that is stimulated by the natural world, by physical effort, as in climbing, and by participation in the sounds and smells and seasons of nature . . . His essays will win him devoted readers." We agree and really loved The Trail Home (1992), his last collection of essays.
Daniel takes us to a beach he loves and lets his restless mind clear of pop tunes, the need to move or eat. He lets the ocean, as he says, round my edges. Later, he lets the water's vastness unsettle him with its formlessness and power. Daniel enjoys the pleasures of being a rambling man who moves from one adventure to the next. He writes about his sojourn for four and a half months in a cabin on Oregon's Rogue River. One of his major epiphanies is that he savors writing at night where "I sense in the mystery of night a beauty exceeding even the great and noble beauties of the daylit world."
Whether writing about the destruction of forests, the drying up of rivers, or the homelessness of salmon, Daniel evokes our reverence for these wild and wonderful aspects of the natural world now under siege by human beings on the so-called quest for progress. The author has a special place in his heart for the antics of writer Ken Kesey and the wholeness of Wallace Stegner. This pleasing collection of essays closes with pieces on the imponderables of life: beauty, death, solitude, and impermanence.
