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Was It Worth It? Kindle Edition
“If wilderness is outlawed,
only outlaws can save wilderness.” Edward Abbey
In a collection of
gripping stories of adventure, Doug Peacock, loner, iconoclast,
environmentalist, and contemporary of Edward Abbey, reflects on a life lived in
the wild, asking the question many ask in their twilight years: “Was It Worth
It?”
Recounting sojourns
with Abbey, but also Peter Matthiessen, Doug Tompkins, Jim Harrison, Yvon
Chouinard and others, Peacock observes that what he calls “solitary walks” were
the greatest currency he and his buddies ever shared. He asserts that “solitude
is the deepest well I have encountered in this life,” and the introspection it
affords has made him who he is: a lifelong protector of the wilderness and its
many awe-inspiring inhabitants.
With adventures both
close to home (grizzlies in Yellowstone and jaguars in the high Sonoran Desert)
and farther afield (tigers in Siberia, jaguars again in Belize, spirit bears in
the wilds of British Columbia, all the amazing birds of the Galapagos), Peacock
acknowledges that Covid 19 has put “everyone’s mortality in the lens now and
it’s not necessarily a telephoto shot.” Peacock recounts these adventures to
try to understand and explain his perspective on Nature: That wilderness is the
only thing left worth saving.
In the tradition of
Peacock’s many best-selling books, Was It Worth It? is both
entertaining and thought provoking. It challenges any reader to make certain
that the answer to the question for their own life is “Yes!”
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherPatagonia
- Publication dateJanuary 25, 2022
- File size36452 KB
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Editorial Reviews
Review
Publishers Weekly Starred Review: "This passionate work is a welcome and worthy addition to the growing canon of environmental literature."
About The Essential Grizzly: “In this riveting work, the Peacocks convincingly show how America’s greatest carnivore connects Americans to their culture, their history, their humanity, and the values we most treasure.” ―Robert R. Kennedy, Jr.
About Walking It Off: “Peacock is a direct literary descendant of Thoreau, with a few genes from Audubon and his mentor, Edward Abbey… His response to the natural world is visceral, intellectual and spiritual at the same time. In this book, he writes about it beautifully, in prose that begs comparison to the best of Peter Matthiessen… His meditations on war and wilderness are painfully apt today, with America fighting new battles abroad, led by an administration that seems to be at war with wilderness at home.” ―Phil Caputo, Pulitzer Prize winner for A Rumor of War
So, was it worth it overall? For Peacock, rescued by wildlings from war traumas and from then on embracing conservation, the answer is a resounding “yes” — his has been “a good life full of swamps, rivers, woods, deserts, and mountains.”
For readers craving inspiration and vicarious thrills through tales of adventures in some of the world’s last untamed, uncrowded places? Likewise. As for the lasting impact of his work for the grizzlies and other charismatic fauna which are now being decimated by heatwaves, hunting, and development? That remains to be seen. -- Earth Island Journal
"Proving again why he’s a vital voice for the wild, Doug Peacock takes us there and back again with his new memoir Was It Worth It?: A Wilderness Warrior’s Long Trail Home (Patagonia, $27.95). This series of vignettes of high adventure and contemplative meanderings provides an unflinching assessment of a life lived in, and for, the wild spaces of the world."
"The stand-alone narratives range from a search for signs of the last grizzly in Mexico’s Sierra Madres to walking point to protect an expedition from polar bears in Canada’s High Arctic; from island hopping via kayak off the coast of Belize to repatriating arrowheads via canoe in the Shiawassee Flats, known by some as the “Michigan Everglades.” Any sharing of such episodes would make for fascinating reading, but it is Peacock’s natural grace with language that elevates this book from the crowded ground of mere adventure writing into the rarified air of literature."
"Peacock is mostly known as a grizzly bear expert, a monkey wrencher, an advocate for the wild, and even as a damn fine cook. But beyond all of that — or maybe because of it — he is a gifted writer of necessary and beautiful work. His recent award in literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters is evidence of this, and his newly-released book is further proof." --Big Sky Journal
a spellbinding collection of stories and
adventures. -- CFF Review
"Each of Peacock’s adventures unravels with wit, insight, and devotion. Describing a place or an event isn’t too challenging, but bringing a reader into your consciousness and taking them along for the ride is something few writers capture well. At this, Peacock is superb." -- Adventures Northwest
Review
There’s a reason that Doug Peacock is a living legend on America’s environmental battlefront. He fights -- and writes -- with unmatched passion. -- Carl Hiaasen, bestselling author
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Preface
WINTER COUNT
I log my life by winter counts, in the fashion of Plains Indians who etched significant events on the inner side of a buffalo hide. This might be a battle, a treaty, an encounter with a dangerous creature or finding a spirit animal and possibly a winter so cold the cottonwood trees split apart. Though the Indigenous Tribes tended to mark each year, not every year of my life was worthy of a winter count. Some counts could come bundled in decades with only the rivulets of spring runoff and the emergence of bears to mark their passage.
So it was with me. I started a new count in 1968. There was my life before the war that prepared me for a life in the wilderness: a good life full of swamps, rivers, woods, deserts and mountains. From 1965 to 1968, I worked as a Special Forces medic who attended too much collateral damage―that cowardly phrase they applied to the pile of dismembered small bodies after a botched air attack. After March 1968, I applied that anger and wounding to defense of wild things, dimly realizing that that the fate of the earth and her inhabitants depended on an uncompromising protection of the wilderness homeland and wild creatures. My war experiences, good and bad, prepared me for the fight; it was a gift. I learned to love grizzly bears but as a slow learner, this took a while.
I also fell in love with the Lower Sonoran Desert, a romance of the sixties, broken by the separation of the war: Space, endless, clean vistas unbroken by the forests I so cherished up north. By late 1968, I had two polar mistresses: grizzly bears in the Northern Rockies and the desert. When the bears hibernated, I high tailed it south. ***
It’s winter now and I sit in a sun-filled desert wash; a few ground flowers are blooming and the stalks of brittlebush show a rare yellow blossom. I sit several days walk from where Ed Abbey is buried. This Lower Sonoran Desert country is still considered a wilderness and I miss my buddies with whom I shared those wild adventures: Ed Abbey, Peter Matthiessen, Doug Tompkins and Jim Harrison, though camps with Jim were on a decidedly tamer scale. Stories, even common ones, have endings and I always dreaded the loss of wild country, so much I cared not to live without it. Now another plague, far worse than the current industrial trashing of the land, has edged into the sky, and every creature on earth bigger than a field mouse is of risk of decimation or extinction.
And there it is. Back to Abbey’s ancient quandary: What to do, what to do? Duty textured in the joy of living fully and loving the earth. Except for a pledge to fight to the literal end I never quite solved this problem. Everyone’s mortality is in the lens now and it’s not necessarily a telephoto shot.
So I’ve spliced together some stories to fill the spaces between the infrequent books I’ve written. I’ve omitted writing about the eight epic walks I took in this vast desert wilderness stretching before me. It’s the huge roadless country between Ajo and Yuma, Arizona. Or more precisely, between places like Welton, AZ and Quitobaquito Springs in Organ Pipe National Monument. The core of the area is the Cabeza Prieta Wildlife Refuge. I made seven of these walks from end to end and another from the I-8 freeway south to the Mexican border. They take 10 days and cover around 130 miles, depending on the different routes I chose, never the same. I seldom if ever saw a human track on any of these walks. All were solo and I carried my own water, though you also had to find wild water in the high tanks every three days or so. You have to know where the water is out there or you die.
These solitary walks were the greatest currency Ed Abbey and I ever shared. Ed finished one and attempted another even after he had begun to die. So, with three friends, I buried him out there.
Solitude is as deep a well as I have encountered in this life and I found most of it either down here in the desert or up in grizzly country. Introspection arrives easily, blowing off the two-needle pines or on the desert breeze. It’s also a human luxury, best indulged in before your children are born. My long west to east walks were often taken during the holidays and I had to give them up cold turkey once my kids were old enough to know what Christmas was.
But what trips they were! Looking across a creosote bajada to a distant mountain range 40 impossible miles away and then just walking there. Startling bighorn sheep, pronghorn antelope, javelina, deer and crossing mountain lion tracks in the uninhabited, seemingly endless expanse of arid terrain: Finding broken pottery ollas of prehistoric Yuma and Pima people. Sitting on a memorial hill fasting and meditating for the entire day.
There’s more recent human sign out there too, most of it graves of the 1849 gold rush hordes and signs of a few miners from the turn of the 19 century. Of course, since the border wall and desperate immigrants, many unmarked and recent graves have been added.
The one name I have run across out there is “John Moore.” I’ve stumbled across it four times, etched on boulders in some of the most rugged and remote parts of the Cabeza Prieta: twice in the Cabeza Prieta Mountains, once in the Sierra Pinta and another rock scratching in the Growler Range. The dates range from 1906 to 1909. Twice the name John Moore is punctuated by a startling phrase: This was very rough country in the early 1900s. Sometimes the water tanks ran dry and the temperatures soared to 130 Fahrenheit.
The closest wild water west of where I sit is in the mountains, up 700 feet over treacherous scree and ankle-breaking basaltic boulders. Prehistoric people visited this natural tank. A boulder not far from the water is etched with a name and that enigmatic inscription:
"John Moore 1909 Was it worth it?"
Product details
- ASIN : B09GK9TG2B
- Publisher : Patagonia (January 25, 2022)
- Publication date : January 25, 2022
- Language : English
- File size : 36452 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Not Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
- Print length : 293 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: #494,196 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #208 in Conservation
- #492 in Adventurer & Explorer Biographies
- #498 in Travel Biographies & Memoirs
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Author, Vietnam veteran, filmmaker and naturalist Doug Peacock has published widely on wilderness issues: from grizzly bears to buffalo, from the Sierra Madres of the Sonoran desert to the fjords of British Columbia, from the tigers of Siberia to the blue sheep of Nepal. Doug Peacock was a Green Beret medic and the real-life model for Edward Abbey’s George Washington Hayduke in The Monkey Wrench Gang.
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Customers find the book a great read with wonderful writing style. They also find the stories engaging and enlightening. Readers describe the content as intriguing, entertaining, and inspirational.
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Customers find the book an intriguing, entertaining, enlightening, and inspirational read.
"...I found his writing intriguing, entertaining, enlightening and inspirational...." Read more
"Another excellent book by a great author, you may want to read his other books." Read more
"Doug Peacock’s Was It Worth It was an interesting, poignant, yet at times uneven read...." Read more
"...Really a fun read." Read more
Customers find the writing style wonderful.
"...I found his writing intriguing, entertaining, enlightening and inspirational...." Read more
"...Peacock writes well, and the description of the locales he experienced in the 15 chapter book are beautiful, but at times during his travelogues I..." Read more
"...Writing skills and editing have improved dramatically over the years. Really a fun read." Read more
"Great book Doug. Sometimes uncomfortable reading, but always wonderful writing." Read more
Customers find the stories in the book engaging and stunning. They also say the author's knowledge of nature is stunning and his skills as an outdoorsman measure up.
"...His intimate, engaging stories are the kind you hear sitting around a campfire, or across the table from a friend after finishing a home cooked meal..." Read more
"His wonderful description of various journeys is excellent. Writing skills and editing have improved dramatically over the years. Really a fun read." Read more
"Great stories - a reflection on a life of passion for the environment..." Read more
"an admirable collection of experiences...." Read more
Customers find the content intriguing, entertaining, enlightening, and inspirational. They also say it touches on all of the author's passions, not just bears.
"...I found his writing intriguing, entertaining, enlightening and inspirational...." Read more
"Doug Peacock’s Was It Worth It was an interesting, poignant, yet at times uneven read...." Read more
"...It touches on all of his passions, instead of just bears, which I dearly loved. So, was it worth it...yes, it was" Read more
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I found his writing intriguing, entertaining, enlightening and inspirational. From Yellowstone to Africa, Siberia and places in between, he pens a journey of adventure, love and lust for what is left here on Earth of wilderness, wildlife and the wild spirit that lives within every living creature, part and particle of our Universe and Cosmos.
Thus, early on in the book, the ground was set for a niche read of sorts. The book also read like a collection of essays or short stories. I truly enjoyed the portions of the book where Peacock traded wits with the aforementioned characters, his close association with Abbey, and the fervent respect these men had for each other and for their cause of preserving wilderness. Peacock writes well, and the description of the locales he experienced in the 15 chapter book are beautiful, but at times during his travelogues I felt as if I was trapped watching somebody’s old slide show.
Peacock writes with both seriousness, and a sense of humor. Anybody who has experienced wilderness areas solo or with kindred spirits can identify with Peacock’s desire to savor, experience and preserve these rapidly disappearing places, and the wildlife (some which have no real issues with stalking and eating humans) that inhabit these wilderness areas. Photographs, both from Peacock’s collection and those of associates help put the words into pictures.
The last chapter, The Perfect Bait For An Outbreak, is a clarion call for humans to mend their rapacious ways, or our days are numbered. This reader believes we are already well beyond the “tipping point”. Peacock writes, “ For the first three hundred thousand years of our time on Earth, human intelligence was carved in habitats whose remnants today we would call wilderness. Only in the past 15,000 years have we modified that wilderness, first with the extinction of the great late Pleistocene megafauna...For over 95% of our time on Earth, human evolution, organic and intellectual evolution was honed in our preagricultural landscape...the fight to preserve wilderness is still primary.
As far as our own future goes, Peacock writes with dry humor we can expect more “roommates” in the form of zoonotic diseases, of which Covid-19 is one, and the ramifications of “7.8 billion people on Earth, the fragmentation of habitats drawing humans and animals into increasing contact, and the relentless,irreversible warming of the planet—we witnessed those thunderheads taking shape.”
In this beautiful book, Peacock takes us on several adventures as well as an exploration of his life. His knowledge of nature is stunning and his skills as an outdoorsman measure up to his academic wisdom.
His intimate, engaging stories are the kind you hear sitting around a campfire, or across the table from a friend after finishing a home cooked meal, preferably by the light of a kerosene lantern.
Peacock's newest tome has it all. Treks across the desert, a trip down a river, grizzlies, Vietnam, and even taking projectile points back to their natural habitat. The numerous pictures are breathtaking and gorgeous.
Newcomers and Peacock scholars alike will find "Was it Worth It" a read that will linger in their minds long after it is finished. This is not only a book for nature lovers, as anyone who loves a good story will be completely enamored by the adventures that lie within it's covers.
Reviewed in the United States on January 28, 2022
In this beautiful book, Peacock takes us on several adventures as well as an exploration of his life. His knowledge of nature is stunning and his skills as an outdoorsman measure up to his academic wisdom.
His intimate, engaging stories are the kind you hear sitting around a campfire, or across the table from a friend after finishing a home cooked meal, preferably by the light of a kerosene lantern.
Peacock's newest tome has it all. Treks across the desert, a trip down a river, grizzlies, Vietnam, and even taking projectile points back to their natural habitat. The numerous pictures are breathtaking and gorgeous.
Newcomers and Peacock scholars alike will find "Was it Worth It" a read that will linger in their minds long after it is finished. This is not only a book for nature lovers, as anyone who loves a good story will be completely enamored by the adventures that lie within it's covers.