A true mountain mystery

I went into the woods because
I wished to live deliberately,
to front only the
essential facts of life,
and see if I could not learn
what it had to teach,
and not, when I came to die,
discover that I had not lived.

~Henry David Thoreau, Walden

"The Last Season" (HarperCollins, 2007, 384 pp.), Eric Blehm's account of a missing backcountry ranger is captivating and sad, in the vein of Jon Krakauer's "Into the Wild."

Blehm details the life and ultimate disappearance of Randy Morgenson, a ranger in the wilds of California's High Sierra. Randy was raised in the Yosemite Valley by parents with a love of nature and of passing that reverence on to their children. Notably, and fascinatingly, guests at the Morgenson family dinner table included famed nature photographer Ansel Adams and his wife, Virginia, and writer and naturalist Wallace Stegner.

Randy turned a lifelong affinity for the mountains and nature into what seemed like the perfect life for him: Tending to a ranger station in the middle of nowhere in one of the country's largest national parks. He spent 28 summers manning a ranger station for the National Park System. But the solitary life proved taxing on his marriage, to a woman who seemed like a great fit for him: Judi would hike into the backcountry something like 18 miles just to spend time with him, and one year spent a happy winter season snowed in at a high-country station with him.

In the year preceding his July 1996 disappearance, Randy and Judi had a falling out. Randy, 54, had strayed with a female ranger and lied about it to Judi. She filed for divorce. He took the divorce papers with him that season to look over and presumably sign, and was in a noticeable funk to all those around him. The woman he had the affair with also moved on.

One day in July, Randy goes out on patrol and doesn't return. He leaves a note on his ranger station saying he'll be back. The rangers' radios were notorious for malfunctioning, so no one thought much about it at first when Randy was out of radio communication. But after 4 days, they organized an intensive search-and-rescue operation. After a thorough search involving dozens of rangers trained in searching, K-9 and helicopter searches of a vast amount of country, nothing turned up. No clues, nothing. Randy, who lived by the philosophy of preserving nature and not leaving a trace of oneself on it, was gone. Theories abounded that he'd done himself in, took off to Mexico, or perhaps was out there in the woods, injured.

Randy was a highly skilled hiker, extensively knew the country in which he was paid to patrol, and had a knack for finding injured or stranded hikers. That he would get himself into a life-threatening situation seemed unlikely to those who knew him best who were part of the search for him. Blehm plays to this theory. He includes others' accounts/corroborations of evidence of Randy's less than enthusiastic mental status the summer of his disappearance. The fact that Randy had written, at one point in his diaries, that "The least I owe these mountains is a body" seems prescient, foreboding.

So you read on, wanting to find out what became of Randy. And here's where this adventure tale seems to lag. The book is interesting, but parts of it (some of the myriad minute details) seem to stretch on unnecessarily.

A New York Times review questioned whether the tale had any legs beyond a magazine article. That's gotta smart for Blehm, a former editor of Transworld SNOWboarding magazine, who had written two books before this one: One about snowboarding ("P3: Pipes, Parks, and Powder") and one about a business ("Agents of Change: The Story of DC Shoes and Its Athletes"). "The Last Season" seems to be on a whole other intellectual level for Blehm, however.

Blehm's strength is in telling and interesting tale and completing the in-depth research he did to back it up. It may be his folly that it was not more throroughly edited.

Thatwithstanding, I enjoyed the descriptions of Randy's hikes in the backcountry and excerpts from his ranger logs and diaries. Blehm's descriptions of the beautiful isolated valleys and meadows Randy loved make you want to hop the nearest plane and go exploring there.

In addition to being about Randy Morgenson and what became of him, this book, a winner of the National Outdoor Book Award, is also about what it takes to be a backcountry ranger, a vocation that requires intense training and dedication, long absences from society, little glory, and for which the perks are decidedly not paid in money or respect from the NPS.

Blehm's book is a good summer read that will keep you up past your bedtime and will serve as a call to the wild for those of us currently camped in suburbia.

I will not spoil the book's ending by telling you the outcome.

Notably, Blehm is at work on a new book "The Only Thing Worth Dying For: How Eleven Green Berets Forged a New Afghanistan," which is due to be released in November 2009. I would expect nothing less than a riveting true adventure tale that is meticulously researched.

Thanks to Mercury Online Editor Eileen Faust, who has a yen for travel/adventure writing, for the loan of her paperback version.

A long wait for my BFF

I just became the 124th Montgomery County resident to request Jennifer Weiner's latest novel, "Best Friends Forever," from the library system.

I'm a fan of Weiner's work, and am fascinated by the fact that she got her start at my hometown paper, The Centre Daily Times, then worked for the Philadelphia Inquirer and is now a wildly successful novelist. Pie in the sky? Perhaps not.

So I tried to persuade Simon and Shuster to mail me a free "review" copy of the book, which is just out this month. No dice. No. 124 it is.

Below is the Associated Press review of the book (the reporter didn't like it so much).

It might be some time before I can write my own...

'Best Friends Forever' - not Weiner's best book

By ALICIA RANCILIO

Associated Press Writer

"Best Friends Forever" (Simon & Schuster, 368 pages, $26.99), by Jennifer Weiner: Addie Downs and Valerie Adler became BFFs when they were both 9. Then something happened. And, as it goes with so many best friends, it was TTYN — talk to you never.

Jennifer Weiner introduces us to the lonely, single Addie in her newest exploration of women, friendship, relationships and the random emotions of life in "Best Friends Forever."

Addie, who lives in her parents' house and takes care of her damaged brother, searches for love on the Internet. Then, she gets an unexpected late night visit from her former childhood friend, Valerie, who needs Addie's help because Valerie may have seriously injured a former school classmate at their high school reunion. Unlike Addie, Valerie has built a successful career as a TV weather reporter.

Addie's parents have both died and her brother has a brain injury. She was very overweight until recently. (Weight, a problem that has challenged the author, is a recurring theme in Weiner's books from her very first, "Good in Bed.") Addie was made fun of so much as a child that she's isolated herself as an adult.

Weiner knows how to create characters that make you care about them. She mastered this from the get-go with "Good in Bed." There, lead character, Cannie Shapiro, was so likable she made a cameo in Weiner's second book as a wink to readers. And last year, Weiner published a sequel to Cannie's story called, "Certain Girls."

Addie Downs is similar to Cannie Shapiro in that she's got self-esteem issues and you want her to be OK. Valerie Adler is just the opposite: She's self-absorbed, flighty and where she's intended to be quirky she's annoying.

Once back in Addie's life, the two women leave town to figure out what happened. They again elevate each other to best friend status in a way that feels superficial, insincere and silly. Meanwhile, a detective investigating the case pieces together details about Addie's life and finds himself falling for her.

The book leaves you feeling as though Weiner thought her first draft was too long so she highlighted random chunks of detail and hit the delete button. There are conclusions that seem unnatural and poorly developed secondary characters, such as police officers investigating the case who seem unnecessary.

While Weiner's writing has heart, it falls flat and doesn't measure up to her previous works. She can do better. Much better.

Sadly, the plot doesn't pull you in the way "Good in Bed" and "In Her Shoes" do, and one endearing character can't save the story.

A Walk in the Woods

I'm penning this review of Bill Bryson's "A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail" (Broadway Books, 1998, $13.95, 302 pp.), for the benefit of, I believe, the only person who reads my blog, my friend Evan.

I started the book, a New York Times Bestseller, about a month ago. It was suggested by and loaned to me by my boss, the well read Nancy March, and recommended by her and Evan, to whom the moniker well read would be a vast understatement (the man just posted 100+ books on his Goodreads account, within about 20 minutes of opening it...).

It won't surprise you, after this introduction from The Mercury's editorial big hitters, that Bryson was a longtime newspaperman in both the U.S. and the U.K. and is the author of several travel memoirs and books on language.

He has an easy way with language that draws you in and makes you a part of the moment, so that in the course of reading his adventure, you're sitting around a campfire with him on the Appalachian trail, sharing his fear of bears and mountain lions and such, or freezing your ass off in a dilapidated shelter during a partcularly slow-to-start spring in Georgia.

This may shock those of you who know me, but I have never been much of a camper (apart from a truly wonderful week-long stay on Assateaugue Island, Md., circa 1989, complete with giant mosquitoes and cold showers), though I do enjoy a day hike now and then. But hiking the Appalachian Trail is the stuff of legends and dreams. Wouldn't it be great to have six months free to take on that challenge?

Bryson did just that, for the sake of curiosity and art (writing the book) and proving something to himself. Not a born camper, either, Bryson got himself outfitted for the momentous undertaking, recruited a friend, the enigmatic and curmudgeonly Stephen Katz, to join him on his journey, and got himself to Springer Mountain, Georgia, early one spring.

Bryson and Katz embarked with the intention of hiking the entire AT, from Georgia to Maine -- a trip of about 2,100 miles. Their struggles and triumphs, the people they meet and the misadventures they have -- and Bryson's laugh-inducing retelling -- make the book a sheer delight. Aside from being a travel tale, Bryson includes a lot of history of the trail, the good and the bad of the National Park Service, the towns, wildlife, unsolved murders along the trail, what kind of food to bring with you (they breakfasted on raisins a lot, and ate lots of noodles...?).

One passage describes a group of hikers the two encounter while they are getting ready to camp on a nasty, rainy day in a trailside shelter in Shenandoah National Park:

"At about five o'clock, just to make our day complete, a group of six noisy people arrived, three men and three women, drest in the most preposterously Ralph Lauren-style hiking clothes - safari jackets and broad-brimme canvas hats and suede hiking boots. These were clothes for sauntering along the veranda at Mackinac or perhaps going on a jeep safari, but patently not for hiking. One of the women, arriving a few paces behind the others and walking through the mud as if it were radioactive, peered into the shelter at me and Katz and said with undisguised distaste, 'Ooh, do we have to share?'"

After this pack of fashionable hikers crams into and pretty much takes over the shelter, Katz and Bryson opt to leave and pitch a tent in the horrid weather rather than endure a night with a buch of pains-in-the-asses.

"We pitched our tens about thirty yards away -- not an easy or enjoyable process in the driving rain, believe me -- and climbed in."

The next day they packed up and left while their new acquaintances were still asleep. AFter they were out of sight of the camp, Katz says.

"You know that woman who said 'Ooh, do we have to share?' and shoved our clothes to the end of the clothesline?... Well, I'm not real proud of this. I want you to understand that. But when I went to get my shirt, I noticed her boots were right by the edge of the platform and, well, I did something kind of bad."

"What?" Bryson asked. And then Katz opens up his hand and there were two suede shoelaces. Then he beamed -- a big, winning beam -- and stuck them in his pocket and walked on.

Sometimes Katz is such a character, we forget he's actually a real fellow. He's a nice, if burly and crude, foil to Bryson's Everyman.

When the two decide to take a month-long break from the trail, because it's hard, because they miss civilization -- basically, because they need a break, I was kind of disappointed yet I could completely understand and relate. I don't think I could do the 2,100 entirety of the trail, not with my knees, or what's left of them, my fear of bears, especially since watching the documentary "Grizzly Man," and my lack of fondness for crazed hillbillies, giant insects, blisters and raisins for breakfast. But I was glad their adventures continued when they got back on the Trail a few weeks later in Maine's Hundred Mile Wilderness.

But before they do that, Bryson does some solo day trips though good old PA, which is home to 230 miles of the Appalachian Trail.

"I never met a hiker with a good word to say about the trail in Pennsylvania," Bryson writes. The trail is rocky in the Keystone state. Very rocky. And does not, apparently, traverse the most scenic mountain ranges. "Lots of people leave Pennsylvania limping and bruised. The state also has what are reputed to be the meanest rattlesnakes anywhere along the trail, and the most unreliable water sources, particularly in high summer."

He also makes stops in Centralia, a town that's been on fire for nearly 50 years, and where I have not visited but am nonetheless fascinated by; and Palmerton, site of my beloved ski destination, Blue Mountain, and also of some mean hillbillies, according to Bryson.

After spending four days in Pennsylvania, walking just 11 miles of the trail, Bryson moved on to the Delaware Water Gap. By his description, I wanted to put the book down and go there tout de suite. There, in the state of New Jersey, which, according to Bryson knows how to maintain a trail that's not just a bunch of rocks like its western neighbor, are several worthwhile sites. These include a 41-acre mountaintop pond, formed by glaciers, called Sunfish Pond that's surrounded by trees, is secluded and "flawless."

All told, Bryson manages to log 870 miles on the AT -- a feat that he is proud of, yet he still has some regrets.

"I regret that I didn't do (Maine's Mount) Katahdin (though I will, I promise you, I will." I regret that I never saw a bear or wolf or follwoed the paddling retreat of a giant hellbender salamander, never shooed away a bobcat or sidestepped a rattlesnake, never flushed a startled boar. I wish that just once I had truly stared death in the face (briefly, with a written assurance of survival). But I got a great deal else from the experience," he writes. "...I had discovered an America that millions of people scarcely know exists."

And he shared it with us.

Anyone want to go explore the Delaware Water Gap?

How 'bout running your family like you run your business?

Could your family benefit from being run like a business?

That's the premise behind author Patrick Lencioni's latest, "The Three Big Questions for a Frantic Family: A Leadership Fable ... About restoring Sanity to the Most Important Organization in Your Life," (Jossey-Bass, a Wiley Imprint, 2008, $24.95, 208 pp.) (I favorably reviewed Lencioni's book "The Three Signs of a Miserable Job" in January 2008 -- check that review out here.)

While this book is labeled in the "family & relationship/parenting" category, it certainly doesn't hurt to look at it from a business perspective.

Much as he did in "The Three Signs of a Miserable Job," Lencioni uses a simple tale to communicate what might be to some a complicated business concept -- or in this case, an idea for improving family time.

A father of four and business consultant/bestselling author who's often on the road, Lencioni said he tested out his model in his own home. After all, if your family is the most important organization in your life, why wouldn't a business executive apply the tools they use at work to improve the way his/her family functions?

"Family chaos is just a part of life, and so we accept levels of confusion and disorganization and craziness at home that we would not tolerate at work," Lencioni states in the book's introduction. Less chaos, for most families, including a few extremely busy young families I know, would be good.

Lencioni said he and his wife have found benefits to applying a few simple strategic concepts to managing his own family.

"The vast majority of families I know - including my own - wold admit that one or more of the following adjectives apply to them: reactive, scattered, frantic chaotic, stressed," he writes. "And if you were to ask them if they were living their lives with the sense of purpose and intentionality that they want, every last one of them would look at you like you were mocking them and say 'Are you kidding?'"

And so Lencioni has come up with this easy-to-understand fable about a couple who are struggling to keep on top of three kids, school and church obligations, sports and other extracurriculars, and simply finding time to hang out as a family.

The book opens with a frustrated husband, Jude making the following (rather loaded) statement to his stay-at-home wife, Theresa: "If my clients ran their companies the way we run this family, they'd be out of business!" After taking some time to get over her initial indignation, the wife proceeds to investigate that claim.

It all boils down to these three questions a family can live by to restore sanity and clarity. I'll tell you the questions, but it will be in very simplistic and out-of-context form. They're better illustrated by reading this little fable, which you could easily do in a night or two (no matter how busy you are).

1) What makes your family unique? Basically, what makes you you and differentiates you from everyone else on the block.

2) What's your family's top priority (aka rallying cry) right now? That would be your main goal over the next 2 to 6 months, and it could be something like carve out more family time or it could be something like moving to a bigger house. It's the main thing that drives you as a family at this time.

3) How do you talk about and use the answers to these questions? What are you doing to implement the first two questions. Holding weekly family meetings? Keeping a spreadsheet?

How did Theresa and Jude answer these questions and implement the answers? They're "rallying cry" was to spend more time together as a family. That meant Theresa had to said no to taking on a time-consuming post at church. Jude and Theresa decided to cut back on their kids' extracurriculars. They cut back on social activities as well as TV-watching. They made family vacations a priority. And, lastly, Jude decided to cut back in his business travel for the overall benefit of the family.

Then they met weekly for 10 minutes to keep up with it all and adjust as needed. They kept a whiteboard in the kitchen as a reminder of the "rallying cry" and what was needed to achieve it. And, lo and behold, it worked. And they were on to their next "rallying cry," which had to do with helping one of their kids with an attention deficit.

To further illustrate the concept, Lencioni goes through several other "families" and their experiences with the "three big questions." He also notes that his own family is far from picture perfect:

"Well, I have to tell you that the Lencioni family continues to experience its fair share of stress, and we don't expect that to go away anytime soon. But I am glad to report that by answering the questions laid out here, we have begun to channel that stress in a general direction and obtain a sense of progress," he writes.

A good deal of chaos remains, he admits, but "we're being more purposeful now about which chaos to tolerate and which to squash."

I really like his wife's comment at the end of the book:

"When something is part of a bigger goal that I know we're going to be talking about every week, it's harder for me to let it get pushed aside by those pesky, tactical, and artificially urgent things that distract us from what really matters. Now I can let some things go that I would have felt guilty about ignoring in the past when everything was equally important."

Working together toward a pre-determined common goal: Not a novel concept, but one that might help some stressed out family-type folks I know.