Ecologist Anne LaBastille created the life that many people dream about. When she and her husband divorced, she needed a place to live. Through luck and perseverance, she found the ideal spot: a 20-acre parcel of land in the Adirondack mountains, where she built the cozy, primitive log cabin that became her permanent home. Miles from the nearest town, LaBastille had to depend on her wits, ingenuity, and the help of generous neighbors for her survival. In precise, poetic language, she chronicles her adventures on Black Bear Lake, capturing the power of the landscape, the rhythms of the changing seasons, and the beauty of nature’s many creatures. Most of all, she captures the struggle to balance her need for companionship and love with her desire for independence and solitude. Woodswoman is not simply a book about living in the wilderness, it is a book about living that contains a lesson for us all.
In 1976, Anne LaBastille, a young ecologist built her own log cabin at the edge of wilderness in the Adirondack Mountains of New York. She has lived there without electricity or a road for 30 years. Her first book, WOODSWOMAN, related encounters with wildlife, weather, & local folk over ten years. The sequel, BEYOND BLACK BEAR LAKE, described her building a new retreat for writing, "Thoreau II," closer to the wilderness. WOODSWOMAN III tells how Anne & her German shepherds encounter a perilous tornado, the joys of guiding, the sad passing of her noble dog, Condor, new environmental controversies & terrorism, the haunting beauty of the Adirondack Mountains, & the challenge of becoming an older woodswoman. She offers a strong inspirational message to women over 50 to become "fierce eco-feminists" & save our planet. In this third decade, Anne's writing is delightfully spunky & sensitive. WOODSWOMAN III is dynamite! Available May 1997 from West of the Wind Publications, Inc., R.D. 2, Westport, NY 12993. Phone & FAX: 518-962-8295. ISBN 0-9632846-1-4. $15.00. 256pp. (Orig.), Trade Paper.
Wildlife ecologist Anne LaBastille is a pioneer in the growing movement of women into wilderness-oriented careers. In this groundbreaking book, she documents this phenomenon, profiling fifteen remarkable women ranging in age from twenty-one to seventy whose lives and professions center on the outdoors. Some are field scientists or hold technical jobs--a zoologist, a speleologist (cave explorer), a builder of log houses--others have forged unique, self-reliant lifestyles in wilderness homesteads. These women, LaBastille herself among them, constitute a new and important category of role models for young women. LaBastille also looks at the complex web of social and psychosexual factors that have alienated women from wilderness in the past and shows how feminism and the rise of environmental consciousness have allowed the "wilderness within women" to emerge. Updated with a new Afterword for this edition, Women and Wilderness offers exciting career ideas and inspiration for women everywhere.
Jaguar Totem is the riveting account of Anne LaBastille's "other life" & the exciting counterpoint to the WOODSWOMAN Trilogy. From her log cabin at the edge of wilderness, Anne LaBastille fares out on fast-paced ecological consultancies which include teeming wildlife, dazzling land - & seascapes, world renowned scientists, glamorous conferences & daring field trips. Climb with Anne into magnificent cloud forests on Volcano Atitlan in Guatemala to establish a Quetzal Reserve. Camp on the beautiful beaches of remote Anegada Island in the Caribbean as she mist-nets birds & bats new to the area. Run rapids by dugout canoe in the Darien jungle of Panama where Anne meets a wondrous young female jaguar, "Mancha," while on a National Geographic assignment. Zodiak over the stormy North Atlantic to photograph huge gannet colonies off St. Kilda, Scotland. Jaguar Totem rivals anything in the WOODSWOMAN Trilogy. It tells of life intensely lived -- of life as vibrant as this book's cover. It reinforces Dr. LaBastille's strong belief that wildlands & wildlife everywhere need constant, compassionate care. Available from West of the Wind Publications, Inc., R.D. 2, Westport, NY 12993. Phone & FAX: 518-962-8295.
Snakes, gators, and bears, oh my! This book is a collection of humorous and emotional stirring events of one woman's attempt to share the land with various critters that resided on her farm located in the heart of Ocala National Forest. This 440,000 acre wooded swampland harbors over 20 spring fed lakes filled with large mouth bass, other fresh water fish and reptiles, including alligators. The piney forest that surrounds these awesome lakes in spring is also the home for many critters including a variety of aggressive snakes, wandering curious black bear and exotic often strange acting birds. These stories based on actual events will delight the heart of the reader. In addition, the reader will be exposed to rural Florida, a place spiritually sacred to those born and raised here, awesomely challenging to the newcomer.
Working in an American primitive style animated by the humor and storytelling genius for which he is renowned, Caldecott Winner artist Paul O. Zelinsky puts oils to cherry and maple for this tall-tale competition between a Tennessee woods-woman extraordinaire and a hungry, fearsome bear.Thundering Tarnation has a bottomless appetite for settler's grub. When word goes out about a competition to hunt this four-legged forest of stubble, a young woman, second to none in buckskin bravery, signs up. "How about baking a pie, Angel?" the other hunters taunt. "I aim to," says Swamp Angel. "A bear pie."What follows is as witty a round of roughhousing as ever jostled the ranks of Americana. Anne Isaacs' original text unfolds in a crackling combination of irony, exaggeration, and bold image-making. Zelinsky's paintings respond with deft yet hilarious expressions, rhythmic shapes, and a sense of monumental motion, as benefits a heroine who can wield a tornado like a lasso, drink a lake dry, and snore down a forest. In the course of these grand shenanigans, the Great Smoky Mountains are stirred up, Montana's short-grass prairie laid down, and Thundering Tarnation's fate proves to have no less a reach than the starry heavens.Swamp Angel marks the debut of a promising new storyteller and adds to the tall-tale traditions a pictorial counterpart that will entertain and endure for a long time to come.
In the tradition of Eiger Dreams, In the Zone: Epic Survival Stories from the Mountaineering World, and Not Without Peril, comes a new book that examines the thrills and perils of outdoor adventure in the “East’s greatest wilderness,” the Adirondacks.
A lively and lyrical account of one woman’s unlikely apprenticeship on a national park trail crew—and what she discovers about nature, gender, and the value of hard work Christine Byl first encountered the national parks the way most of us do: on vacation. But after she graduated from college, broke and ready for a new challenge, she joined a Glacier National Park trail crew as a seasonal “traildog” maintaining mountain trails for the millions of visitors Glacier draws every year. Byl first thought of the job as a paycheck, a summer diversion, a welcome break from “the real world” before going on to graduate school. She came to find out that work in the woods on a trail crew was more demanding, more rewarding—more real—than she ever imagined. During her first season, Byl embraces the backbreaking difficulty of the work, learning how to clear trees, move boulders, and build stairs in the backcountry. Her first mentors are the colorful characters with whom she works—the packers, sawyers, and traildogs from all walks of life—along with the tools in her hands: axe, shovel, chainsaw, rock bar. As she invests herself deeply in new work, the mountains, rivers, animals, and weather become teachers as well. While Byl expected that her tenure at the parks would be temporary, she ends up turning this summer gig into a decades-long job, moving from Montana to Alaska, breaking expectations—including her own—that she would follow a “professional” career path. Returning season after season, she eventually leads her own crews, mentoring other trail dogs along the way. In Dirt Work, Byl probes common assumptions about the division between mental and physical labor, “women’s work” and “men’s work,” white collars and blue collars. The supposedly simple work of digging holes, dropping trees, and blasting snowdrifts in fact offers her an education of the hands and the head, as well as membership in an utterly unique subculture. Dirt Work is a contemplative but unsentimental look at the pleasures of labor, the challenges of apprenticeship, and the way a place becomes a home.
My Life in the Maine Woods recounts Annette Jackson’s North Woods experiences during the 1930s when she, her husband and their children lived in a small cabin on the shore of Umsaskis Lake. Jackson, an avid sportswoman and nature lover, writes of hunting, fishing, campfire cooking, and the sounds of the wilderness through the seasons. She visits trappers and woodsmen, and tells what it’s like to sleep on a bed of pine boughs under the stars that shine on the legendary Allagash.
In this work Terrie offers an assessment of the roles that the Adirondacks have played in American history. He brings to life the scientists and scholars, the travellers and sportsmen, the publicists and bureaucrats, who together have contributed to the wilderness aesthetic.
