"So perhaps this book is merely an invitation to walk home ground, to understand what the terrain is now and what it has been across time, and how the transition that created what it is now came about...something that one day might interest another such seeker, someone looking over her shoulder while she attentively walks her own home ground." – Robert Root, from Walking Home Ground


The invitation is simple: take a second look at the familiar surroundings of where you live – step away, so to speak, from the sidewalks and common roads of our daily lives (although these too of course count) and move out onto the periphery of the city trails and see another city, another town, another home. That refocusing is how Root's book works. He wanted to reassess what it means to live in the drift less area of southwestern Wisconsin (currently Waukesha area for him), and see if you could re-envison place by considering the writings and viewpoints of Muir, Leopold and Derleth, three of the more prodigious writers of the last century chronicling the land and this state of Wisconsin. Walking Home Ground is a simple invitation also because it is written in a style that, frankly, doesn't particularly resemble any of the three more famous writers above -- Leopold, Muir, or Derleth. Leopold's writing, all said, has a distinct feature of becoming something close to biblical in its taut narrative (especially the Almanac), symbolic metaphor and overt morality. It has been said of Leopold's writing that for some its blunt conclusions can come across as somewhat dogmatic and may serve as a turnoff to more casual readers; but that his concision, for others, is a fabulously expeditious way to get the heart of things. Either way, Leopold's voice is distinct, poetic, sometimes prescriptive, but also wildly prescient. As for Muir, his also is a voice that is considerably more literary than you and I might write. Although his The Story of My Boyhood and Youth is a neutrally stylistic chronicle, books such as My First Summer in the Sierra often reach to similar literary heights as Leopold, captivated, frequently, by fits of worshipful praise of the holiness found in nature. It is remarkable to consider that Leopold was not raised with any particularly religious underpinning other than a very deep respect for natural resources, but that Muir grew up under the thumb of a very soberly religious father so that one man's writing becomes a sort of lifelong quest to attach unknown religious sentiments to nature, and the other (Muir), who essentially finds a freedom of religious expression in nature from a religion of constriction presented to him in his youth. Both are essential Emersonians, both of a stock of true brilliance, but one a trained scientist, and one a self-trained polymath. The two no doubt would have made an exhilarating pair to observe observing the same landscape of the Baraboo hills. Derleth, the third writer looked at closely by Root, was the most profuse writer of the three but also, seemingly, the most scattered in his topics, and perhaps to some degree the least interested in the ideology of nature. Derleth's seems to be a voice far more in tune to the people that populate the landscape, in a voice that is less philosophically examining but more interested in the character of things, a trait found in storytellers and novelists. If a reader determined that she wanted to get to know a small Wisconsin town, its people, and how they live within the landscape of the valley of the Wisconsin River, she would certainly turn toward Derleth, with his brood and swooping sentences that wax poetic and earnestly try to capture every noticeable detail. Root does a remarkable job floating across the overlapping circles of these three writers' devoted chapters. With an eye and a style of a journalist (without interviews) he is able to avoid turning Home Ground into literary criticism or, for that matter, any kind of explicitly supportive tract. In other words, Root doesn't let on that he is a secret Leopoldian and that the two other writers are good but that they own everything to Leopold. He doesn't compare and contrast at great length Muir and Derleth, as another example. This neutral entry into the three writers becomes the style of the book. Nor is Walking Home Ground particularly personal. There are no severe encounters with Root's personal sufferings or spiritual triumphs; he talks some about his backgrounds in Colorado or Michigan, but causes of things isn't really the point of the book either. Instead, the title carries the essential news of the book: Walking Home Ground is truly about the inbvididucal experiences of taking hikes, looking around, meeting an occasional trail walker, and all the while considering what our other writers might have seen in their time. Without heightened praise or criticism, the invitation becomes, I believe, exactly what it should be: we are all (potential) walkers of our home ground. We can look toward the greatest of the documenters of the drift less area, but it is our observations and time spent out on the trail that is ultimately what has to matter. Get out there yourself! What are your descriptions and experiences? By reading, walking, and describing, we become the Robert Roots of the world, and we have as much of a right to our position as any other. And so, in this way, this neutral approach to chronicling and to juggling the voices of others, we are left with a book that is as much about time as anything else. Nature writers will have a tendency to write about the trail, as though from some outside or critical positions, or they show us the trail. Leopold does this in many of his writings, but most especially in Round River, a nice collection of journals that capture time. Muir certainly does this in My First Summer – we are placed in the mountains with him and we see the finite details of the trail. We spend time with Muir. Derleth does this also in Walden West. We walk around Sauk with him in documentarian style and see the world through his eyes. The cover of the book is a 'walking by' rendering of a fence post, a bluish sky, and a hawk crossing in the slight distance. It looks something like a live yet subjective portal into just another beautiful day out on the trail.