The Green Guide to Low-Impact Hiking and Camping by Laura and Guy Waterman; The Countryman Press; 276 pages; $24.95
East Corinth
Yet the new title is fitting, for the Watermans always intended the text to be just that, a guide, no matter how adamant their suggestions or convincing their convictions.
As iterated in a new, 12-page introduction by Laura Waterman — Guy famously died of suicide by exposure atop New Hampshire’s Mount Lafayette in 2000 — the work intends “not to provide answers as much as to provoke questions in the minds of all those who are concerned about the future of the backcountry environment.”
Though the second edition was released 23 years ago, Waterman was careful not to arbitrarily update text, hanging tight to the universal principles the work exudes.
“There are a couple paragraphs reworked so that the reader isn’t locked into 1993,” the 76-year-old Waterman said in her home near East Corinth village, a short distance from the 27-acre, completely off-the-grid land parcel known as Barra, where she and Guy dwelled from 1973-2000.
“It actually wasn’t that difficult. There weren’t a lot of revisions necessary because most of what the book talks about are timeless issues.”
Following a foreword by Vermont-based environmental scholar Bill McKibben, Waterman does address the technological changes that have altered hiking and camping practices since the second edition of Backwoods Ethics was released.
Camping gear — from boots and clothing to tents and freeze-dried food — is infinitely lighter and more efficient, while the advent of global positioning devices, via smartphone or otherwise, now carries the potential to dramatically alter the experiential landscape while immersed in the natural one.
She shares a story of a hiking party who, in 1960, lost their way on an unmarked trail in the Andes, spending a frosty night with no food or water before finding their way out the next day. The group was “on their own,” a situation Waterman calls unduplicatable today.
“(Being on one’s own has) a meaning now lost, a meaning hard to imagine with the digital technology at our fingertips,” she writes. “It’s impossible to reenact that ‘on our own’ experience with a cell phone in our pocket.”
She naturally points out the fallibility of over-reliance on technology both in terms of safety — what to do if the signal is poor or the battery dies? — and for the ways it tends to interfere with our connection to wild places.
“Safety reasons aside, being familiar with map and compass does something for us the GPS can’t duplicate: It puts us in touch with the terrain itself,” she writes.
From casual day hikers to extensive backbackers, fans of the wilderness will delight in the pages of The Green Guide to Low-Impact Hiking and Camping. Every ethical dilemma it addresses — the potentially damaging effects of campfires, bushwhacking, and large group outings, to name a few — is laced with at least a modicum of humor, and the insight the Watermans provide about the history and development of these activities is fascinating.
The authors are masters of “the list,” breaking up prose with numbered items explaining everything from New England’s most accomplished hikers (male and female) to axioms of wintertime camping and why it’s best to hike south-to-north on the Appalachian Trail.
A favorite chapter is titled “Backpackers’ Favorite Lies,” wherein fishermen-like exaggerations regarding pack weight, wind speeds and hiking distances are highlighted.
Other parts of the book are much more sobering. Prime witnesses of the backpacking boom in the late 1960s and 1970s, the Watermans are critical, if not downright scathing at times, toward the “lug soled army” who began “pockmarking” the landscape with tents and campsites.
While early 20th century campers routinely chopped down entire live trees for firewood and bedding, camping amid sensitive vegetation and sometimes simply burying their garbage in the ground, those practices became unsustainable once the woods became, as the Watermans write, “overrun with solitude seekers.”
Large groups are targeted at the start of one chapter for their tendency to return to the same places, ravaging its resources, and the pros and cons of “peak bagging” — pursuing all summits in a certain category, such as 4,000-footers, often as quickly as possible — is sufficiently debated.
“We started camping and hiking at a point just before the boom, so we were really in a position to watch it all unfold,” Laura Waterman said. “It’s not anyone’s fault. They weren’t being deliberately destructive with their practices, and that was one of the reasons we first sought to put out the book: to try to make people aware, at least get them talking about, some environmental sensibilities.”
As noted in the introduction, it isn’t only the physical environment the Watermans seek to help preserve, but also the psychological feeling of being in the wild. One eye-opening passage points to the cerebral impact of brightly colored camping gear, another to that of excessive trail blazing.
Part IV of the book, titled “Four Unresolved Impact Issues,” provides case studies regarding bushwhacking, canine accompaniment, rock climbing and winter alpine camping.
The Watermans were careful to present multiple sides of each argument before offering their own consensus. Their sole desire is that readers will develop their own — but only after thoughtful consideration.
“Whether you go along with our conclusions is not nearly as important as whether you’ll think about them,” they write in the intro to Part IV. “If your own mind is made up, unmake it. Join us in thinking about it, exchanging views, questioning set answers, looking curiously at alternative solutions.”
Waterman — who released a memoir, Losing the Garden: The Story of a Marriage in 2005 and recently completed her first full-length novel, Starvation Shore — hopes the third edition of The Green Guide appeals to new audiences.
“Hopefully (this release) helps some new people discover it,” Waterman said before taking a visitor along on one of her favorite walks through the idyllic woods and fields of East Corinth. “The questions it addresses are still quite important.”
Jared Pendak can be reached at jpendak@vnews.com or 603-727-3225.