- Here's a familiar story: an urban couple seeking to "get away from it all" purchases a cabin and a hundred acres of forest, naively expecting to find peace and serenity in their private corner of the natural world. In this case, the author is a Swiss emigre who grew up reading adventure stories about the American wilderness and her husband is a native New Yorker and weekend outdoorsman. Their "away from it all" was two aging cabins on an acreage bordering the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in northeastern Minnesota.
- Verena Andermatt Conley is an unusual author for such a book, being a scholarly professor of French language and literature with texts like "Syncope: The Philosophy of Rapture" to her credit. Her life on the edge of the wilderness, though, was more nature study and attempted appreciation than homesteading.
- "I never found in the North Woods the long-sought adventures of my childhood heroes Chief Winnetou and Old Shatterhand," she writes. "I never found what I thought was the harmony advocated by more modern writers. I discovered, however, that every order is fragile and that harmony is fleeting."
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The
War Against The Beavers Verena Andermatt Conley University of Minnesota Press, 2003 |
 Boundary Waters Canoe Area |
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"A
beaver pond?!" I exclaimed.
Forgetting about harmony and peace and abandoning my ecological ideals, I was now ranting. I wanted a forest, but a clean forest with a sparkling creek and not one with stagnant waters and trees lying around every which way and across the creek. I had no use for shavings all over the forest floor to absorb our footsteps! I did not pay top dollar for a beaver pond! |
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Also
by Verena
Andermatt Conley
Readings:
The Poetics of Blanchot, Joyce, Kafka, Kleist, Lispector, and Tsvetayeva Ecopolitics:
The Environment in Poststructuralist Thought |
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 The Minnesota Guide |
The incoveniences and conflicts inherent in rural life are impediments to the tranqulity Conley expected to find. Wild beaver, hungry insects and irrepressible fungi challenge and rebuff attempts at human control, teaching her a valuable lesson: "In nature an unpredictable element would always reign." |
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Back to The Nature Pages
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