Bryce Andrews: Harsh Terrain

I’m sitting at a worn table, pecking this out on the keys of a borrowed laptop and thinking about the fact that in the jungle, nothing moves quickly or comes together easily. This is a beautiful hothouse — the last remnant of intact, lowland rainforest in Costa Rica. The Osa Peninsula is not Costa Rica as most know it, complete with glitz, hotels, zip-lines, and hawkers. It is instead the country’s most impoverished — and debatably wildest — corner, where countless palm-sized, iridescent butterflies whirl through the air, and howler monkeys roar up the dawn.

The jungle here is dangerous, and it presses in on every side of the research station that has been my home for the past month. Beyond the edge of this clearing, the trails are haunted by a half-dozen species of deadly snakes. The coast is one long stretch of undertow and violent shore-break. Jaguars walk the hills at night, hunting peccary and tapir. The nearest hospital is an hour from here on a bad dirt road. Two people from the station have made that jostling trip in the last ten days.

I am, in short, quite far from home. My Montana is dry, expansive, cold and austere. The Osa, in contrast, is lush, fecund and claustrophobic. But alien as this teeming wonderland seems, it has a certain quality in common with the peaks and grassy valleys that I know well.

Though the landscapes of western Montana and the Osa are as different as night and day, both require a similar fortitude, commitment, and flexibility from the people who would call them home. In both places, men and women earn their living on the ragged edge of the wild.

I am drawn to peaks, peninsulas, fields, and islands where the domestic world rubs uneasily against an older, more elemental one. I love these beautiful, brutal places because they’re demanding, and because they lay bare the essential wildness remaining in us all. Badluck Way is about one such landscape, the Madison Valley. The following titles are explorations in a similar vein, and I hope you’ll read them all. – Bryce Andrews

The Meadow
By James Galvin

A clear, beautiful story about a single homestead carved from the high, cold forests of Wyoming, and the succession of men and women who call it home.

The Star Thrower
By Loren Eisley

In these essays from the uneasy confluence of science and myth, you’ll have the rare opportunity to follow a keen, searching mind into, and sometimes out of, a great many dark places.

Coming Home to the Pleistocene
By Paul Shepard

This book is the record of a lifetime’s worth of considering the animal in man. It’s a compelling study of human cultural development, as well as an exploration of what we have lost in the process of creating the modern world.

Monster of God
By David Quammen

These are ghost stories from the real world, stories about predators that remain heedless of the distance we try to place between ourselves and other animals. In this book, tigers and crocodiles cross the line we hold so dear, to pluck us like ripe fruit.