Into the Woods

Wildwood A Journey Through Trees by Roger Deakin
Free Press, 416 pp., $26.95

Over the years any number of scientific, literary, and philosophical explanations have been offered to explain our enduring fascination with wood, which Roger Deakin calls the "fifth element."

Harvard's sociobiologist E. O. Wilson, for instance, has argued that our cross-cultural preference for landscapes with open, scattered trees derives from humanity's origins on the African savannas. John Fowles, in his provocative short book The Tree, interpreted the ancient English myth of the "green man"-a figure half-human, half-leaves-as a powerful metaphor for our need to periodically submerge our psyches in the restorative chaos of "a green wood." And John Steinbeck once remarked that the best use of a giant sequoia was "to feel small next to."

To this long list of musings on the perennial appeal of forests, Roger Deakin offers a peculiarly British take. In Britain he is best known as the author of Waterlog, a sort of naturalist's version of John Cheever's famous story "The Swimmer," in which Deakin swam in rivers, lakes, canals, and swimming pools from his home in Suffolk to the Hebrides. Waterlog is credited with sparking a movement to reopen and restore Britain's waterways to the public.

In Wildwood Deakin (who died in 2006 shortly after finishing the book) also submerges himself in his subject. He portrays himself as a kind of green man, living in a rambling 16th- century house in Suffolk surrounded by a moat, happily cohabiting with mice, bats, bees, wasps, and "the inquisitive tendrils of ivy that poked their heads in through the cracks in the rotted windows, fogged green with algae, patterned by questing snails."

As a writer, Deakin is an accomplished stylist. His prose is both precise and lyrical; it reflects an intelligence that responds deeply to its sensory environments, especially those he is most familiar with. The richest parts of the book are the first two sections, "Roots" and "Sapwood," in which he explores the woodlands in and around his home county of Suffolk. Like his English literary predecessors Gilbert White, Richard Jefferies, W. H. Hudson, and Edward Thomas, Deakin draws strength as a writer from his intimate knowledge of (and emotive connections to) these landscapes.

One of his gifts is making metaphoric parallels between the human and nonhuman, as in this description of a posse of badgers: "Emerging early from the snouting dingles of the town at dusk, they went their rounds with impatient efficiency, jogging from house to house like council workers on some lucrative bonus scheme."

Deakin is at his best when he is chronicling the ancient connection between men and trees and the ways in which traditional uses of wood have created the essential identity of rural Britain. In the chapter "Willow," for instance, he gives a fascinating history of the ancient craft of basket-making, for which 1,200 different varieties of willows were developed over the centuries, and a loving explanation of why "you can only make a decent [cricket] bat from the wood of the cricket bat willow."

In a remarkable short chapter entitled "Shelter," he spends the night in a primitive oak cabin and achieves that most difficult thing: an unforced epiphany, an extended moment of pure attentiveness worthy of Annie Dillard.

Like all good environmental writing, Wildwood convinces the reader, without preaching, that the places Deakin loves are worth saving. But like much well-written nature literature, it is limited by a kind of sameness, a lack of narrative or psychological movement. It also suffers from a forced celebration of contemporary attempts to regain the connection with local woodlands held by traditional rural societies, without recognizing that the essence of that connection was that their lives were involuntarily rooted in their home ground.

There are also a number of portraits of contemporary artists and sculptors who use local wood to create conceptual and environmental statements. Although the artworks themselves are effectively described and often intriguing, Deakin's appreciations and critiques tend to the superficial and ingenuous. Indeed, some of his examples cry out for satire, as in the case of one John Wolseley, who practices what might be termed The Scorched Earth School of Art: dragging large sheets of drawing paper across stands of burnt bushes. According to Deakin, Wolseley "realized the marks it made were more interesting than his half-finished conventional drawing: the landscape was drawing itself. "

The third section, "Driftwood," takes Deakin on a far-flung quest to investigate our relationship to wood in parts of continental Europe, Central Asia, and Australia. These efforts are, in general, less successful, though not just because he is a stranger in these places: After all, the outsider's perspective can be just as perceptive and valuable as the insider's-witness Tocqueville or Thoreau's Cape Cod. But in Deakin's case his strength as a writer is rooted in familiarity and intimacy, and here, in these unfamiliar settings, his portraits of landscape and people generally lack depth and complexity. The individuals he meets, whether artists or Aboriginal hunter-gatherers, are presented with British deference and unvaried admiration. After a while, despite Deakin's unflagging enthusiasm, I found myself flipping through the later chapters.

The one exception is the chapter on "The Bieszczady Woods," a large forested area in southeastern Poland, part of which is now a national park. Deakin and Annette, a female companion (there is an intriguing assortment of these throughout the book) travel by train and on foot from Prague to the Polish-Ukrainian border. Their journey retraces one undertaken by Annette's father, who fled from Ukraine back to his family in Poland just after the German invasion in 1939. Here the prose is clipped and stark, full of bleak humor, irony, fatalism, understated pity, and an unflinching recognition of the dark side of both landscape and human nature.

The woods themselves seem merely the motivation for a long passage through a devastated land and a grim history, birdless, full of lost, burnt villages, abandoned churches, nuclear bunkers, blind singing beggars, and "gluey mound[s] of desiccated condoms." Tellingly, they lose their way several times.

"Wood" here is used not as an Edenic image but as a metaphor for what was destroyed in the wars and crushing political systems of the 20th century. The whole dark haunted history of Eastern Europe is allowed to intrude on and overshadow Deakin's environmental quest, and for once he does not try to impose a redemptive ending:

This corner of Poland has achieved a difficult regeneration, from being a place where everything happened, almost all of it brutal and bloody, to a place where hardly anything happens at all. At the post office, Annette sends a postcard to her father in Australia. He is happier living there, as far away as possible from Baligrod and its memories.

Here Deakin achieves the power of the narrator-witness, acknowledging that which he can see and feel but cannot understand or redeem.

I don't know what environmental good Wildwood may or may not achieve, but as a writer I wish Deakin had more often stood thus naked before the mysteries of both wood and flesh.

Robert Finch is author, most recently, of Death of a Hornet and Other Cape Cod Essays and coeditor of The Norton Book of Nature Writing.