Coming Out Of The Woods - Wallace Kaufman

A beautifully written, unsentimental account that challenges our Thoreauvian romance with nature and offers the conclusion that in civilization is the preservation of the wildness that we cherish. . In 1974 Wallace Kaufman, following the romantic vision of a simpler life in harmony with nature he first glimpsed in Thoreau's Walden , moved on to his own land by a small stream in the North Carolina woods. Now, twenty-five years later, he emerges to tell a tale somewhat different from Thoreau's-an entertaining, moving, and distinctly late-twentieth-century story of a life lived in the wild as landowner, environmentally conscious developer, builder, farmer, conservationist, wilderness steward.;His love of nature and his commitment to preserving it never waver, even as he tells the sometimes hilarious, sometimes catastrophic story of the ragtag cast of 1970s "back-to-the-land" characters who buy shares of his land in the wake of the first Earth Day; of trying to build a road without cutting down trees or disturbing a streambed, but at last giving in and learning to chainsaw and dynamite; of building his own home; of resorting to violence when flying squirrels refuse the special niches he builds into his walls and insist on taking up residence in his ceiling; of preserving his old-growth forest; of the awesome devastation of hurricanes.