January 2023 - 46

WILD COUNTRY DISPATCH
A word about books
T
Story by Tom Reed | Illustration by L. Eslick
here is no clear line, no
punctuated moment
where books entered
my life. I was born into a family
of readers where a good book
was as important as good food
and indeed was sustenance for
the brain, the imagination.
When I was young, my maternal grandmother
lived with us, as happened in many
households of the 1960s and 70s when the
boom that had been post-war lushness of the
1950s withered a bit. Then, two incomes were
far better than one so my mother went to
work and her mother moved in to watch the
kids during the day. My grandmother was
an unusual woman, born in 1908, college
educated when few sought higher education
and fewer still were women. She had a double
degree in Latin and Greek and she read
constantly. She was an ecologist, skilled in
the outdoors and a voracious bibliophile. She
read to my brother and I, and she read on her
own when she wasn't reading to us. Many of
the books she read to us were by naturalist
authors of an earlier age, Ernest Thompson
Seton and his ilk, who wrote stories of animals
and nature, the Wild West and the incomparable
outdoors. The books had an impact, as did
this view of the known and imagined world.
In our home the love of a good book
was not hers alone. When my mother came
home from her job teaching fourth graders,
she read to my brother and me. There was
little on television in those days worth watching.
Those words even today ring true despite
the thousands of options we have. Most of
what I remember from the screen were sports
events: Ali versus Frazier, Joe Namath against
the Baltimore Colts, Secretariat crushing the
competition at Belmont.
It was mostly books of my mother's classics
that took up an entire wall of the living room,
46 | January 2023
along with my father's wrinkled and dog-eared
Louis L'Amour Bantam paperbacks with their
black spines and yellow titles. After I learned
to read, I read them all - often on the long
school bus ride from our home on the mountain
into town. When my grandmother moved
out she bought several hundred acres and built
a cabin in the mountains far to the south. I
spent long stretches of my summers there and
my memories of that land, along with the
ever-lasting image of shooting my first mule
deer, include rich, summer days reading in a
hammock beneath the quaking aspens while
broad-tailed and rufous hummingbirds made
combat in the skies around the feeder.
Much has been written of our children
today and how their attention has been sucked
away with any number of activities from television
to video games. As parents we fret these
technologies, worry about young brains in
front of screens rather than pages. Whole
industries have been spawned to encourage
youth reading, or to guide parents in their
quest to make their children readers. I think
this lack of reading may be worrisome in other
households, but for my own children I also see
their love of books in the mix. Frankly, it must
be a mix in this time of change and evolution.
My son likes his Mickey Mouse cartoons, but
he also enjoys the same books I did when I was
his age - volumes somehow surviving decades
of children and saved for the next generation
by his book-loving grandmother.
I think much of this is tactile. Hold a book
in your hands, smell the tangy ink and new
paper of a just-printed book or the musty
goodness of a very old book, thumb and bookmark
and dog-ear. You don't get this from the
screen. Not long ago I enjoyed an excellent
book, " My Sixty Years on the Plains, " that
was written around the same time my grandmother
was born. The author was one of the
early, but relatively unknown explorers of the
West, William T. Hamilton. The new reprint
book was a gift from an old friend and when
he gave it to me, he said, " let me show you
something, " and he pulled down a copy of the
same book, but a first edition signed by the
author. Here I thought it was a book that was
actually held by a man who sat across campfires
from Jim Bridger and rode on buffalo hunts
with the Cheyenne. This was a treasure, signed
in the hand of a frontiersman from an age I
can only dream.
Books are made to be held in hands, quite
literally. When e-books entered the market
years ago many worried that the print industry
was in trouble. But printed books and
book-making remain 2,000 years old and
counting. In 2019, for instance, real books
were a $22.6 billion industry and e-books were
$2 billion.
But what of video games and movies? My
theory is reading a book requires one to conjure,
an ingredient critical to human health
and what the reader imagines is as individual
as a fingerprint. John Grady Cole from the
book, " All the Pretty Horses, " is how you see
him. In the film adaptation, John Grady Cole
is how director Billy Bob Thornton sees him.
Everyone sees Cole as how Thornton imagines
him and casts him for the movie, while in the
book how he looks belongs only to you.
There are many wonders spawned from the
book industry: reading groups, book stores,
used book stores, audio books, libraries. When
I run into an old friend who I know is an avid
reader, one of the first questions I have is what
she has been reading, what she liked, what she
did not. Often when I read a notebook is not
far away so I can write down the name of an
author, or a title that I need to read.
Between 600,000 and 1 million new book
titles are published every year in the United
States. That's about 100 books an hour, a statistic
that defies the contention that books
are dying and the ranks of those who read
thinning.
It's January and the winter is upon us, deep
and dark. But for a reader this is a time to come
alive, sit by a crackling fire with a good book,
a glass or a cup and an adventure awaiting.
- Tom Reed's latest book, " Blue Lines, A Fishing Life, "
second edition, was published last fall and is available
online or in bookstores. He and his family work and
read on a small ranch not far from Yellowstone.
- Lori Eslick is an illustrator, artist, presenter, children's
picture book illustrator and workshop leader. She
regularly creates illustrations for Wyoming Wildlife
magazine's Wild Country Dispatch column. More of
her work can be seen at eslickart.com.
http://www.eslickart.com
January 2023

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of January 2023
