Wild Rides and Wildflowers:
Philosophy and Botany with Bikes
March 2014
A note about the cover:
Caspar David Friedrich, a German painter affiliated with painters, writers, and philosophers of the Romantic movement, painted his “Sunset (Brothers) or Evening Landscape with Two Men” about 1835. His depiction of a fraternal contemplation of nature reflected many of our own experiences, as in this section of the book:
Sam’s standing form, silhouetted against the valley below, reminds me of early nineteenth-century paintings by Caspar David Friedrich. Responding to the new sense among German Romantics for the importance of the subject as it relates to objects of perception, Friedrich painted human figures from behind, their gazes turned to nature. “Nature,” Friedrich’s contemporary Schelling wrote, “is visible spirit, spirit is invisible nature.”
We liked that intimate dialectic between minds/spirits and the natural world and so, despite the funny hats (or was it because of the hats?) we chose the painting as the cover image. The creative book designer did the rest.
Our book has just been named a finalist in Foreword Review's 2014 INDIEFAB Book of the Year Award.
(available for order at IndieBound, Powells, and Amazon)
[A March 18th conversation with NPR/UPR's Tom Williams is available HERE.]
This book bears only passing resemblance to any book we have read to date.
We hope it is comical, perhaps in ways that will remind readers of NPR’s “Car Talk,” where listeners share the good natured and sometimes acidic banter between brothers who also know a lot about cars.
We hope it is moving, not in the extended ways Terry Tempest Williams often achieves, but through surprising comments and stories that accompany the bike rides and that, over the course of four years, add up to a larger picture.
We hope it is informative, not in the comprehensive way John McPhee’s fine texts are (in part because of their tight focus), but in a more conversational manner. Readers will learn a lot of botany, a lot of environmental science, and even a lot of German philosophy and literature.
We hope this is a new kind of nature writing. When people raise questions about nature writing, they often do so because they are put off by forms of new-age certainty and claims that feel one-sided. Two distinct voices that constantly bring each other up short don’t leave much room for cloying certainty.
We hope it is a good account of a friendship. When we think about other books that involve two distinct voices, contrasting and colluding voices that encourage and question one another — we can’t really think of one.
And that, finally, is what makes our book stand out.
Scott and Sam
. . . and another take, this one on the philosophy of the book's subtitle:
In his early review of the book, Larry Menlove asks a reader to “imagine Plato’s Phaedrus and a field guide to Utah fauna and flora left in an inside pocket of a sweaty, oft-used CamelBak to get acquainted and copulate. The wise progeny, scratched and scented, philosophizing its way out, would be the new book Wild Rides and Wildflowers” (The Provo Canyon Review).
Scott Carrier writes of the book that “It’s like Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance meets Desert Solitare in Utah County.”
While neither of the authors is a philosopher (Rushforth is a botanist, Abbott a literary critic), in the course of peripatetic conversations they both turn to philosophy (as they do to poetry and art and science) for answers and for good questions.
Chapter titles are one indication of the topics under discussion: This is True Worship, Ecstatic Phenomenon, Jesus is the Answer, As Common as Paradox, As Odd as Love, Transcendental Balance, God Stories.
Epistemology is a constant concern:
“You’ve stumbled onto something controversial and interesting here,” Sam says. “It’s a classic disagreement between the lumpers (me included) and the splitters. Your second guide [with a larger number of species] was written by splitters and your first by lumpers.”
“I bought those guides,” I tell Sam, “expecting scientific facts. Instead, I get judgments, assessments, interpretations built on biases. ‘Truth,’ Nietzsche wrote, ‘is a mobile army of metaphors.’ I’m fifty years old and have known this for decades. Now I know it again.”
Human interaction with nature is a related question:
Sam’s standing form, silhouetted against the valley below, reminds me of early nineteenth-century paintings by Caspar David Friedrich. Responding to the new sense among German Romantics for the importance of the subject as it relates to objects of perception, Friedrich painted human figures from behind, their gazes turned to nature. “Nature,” Friedrich’s contemporary Schelling wrote, “is visible spirit, spirit is invisible nature.”
There are questions of aesthetics:“
Getting dark. Mountain hanging over us. Wind whipping up. We’re insignificant here.” “Sam, I don’t want to put words between us and the experience, but your response bears out Kant’s theory of the sublime. Nature overwhelms us with sheer size or power, then reason moves us past fear to a fine mixed pleasure.”“No shit,” Sam agrees thoughtfully.
Theology haunts the authors, although neither is a believer:
“Stanley Hauerwas claims that only ‘god stories’ have the power to inspire commitment, only stories that start ‘In the beginning...’ I pressed him on the issue, claiming that plenty of atheists with no belief in any sort of divine creation live strongly committed lives.”
“What did he answer?” Sam yells back from high on the hill.
“He’s a hell of a smart guy,” I answer, “so I’m not sure exactly what he said. I think I partly misunderstood his original point, and I think he said that like you and me, he sees human existence as absolutely contingent. But that god stuff confused the issue for me. I think he underestimates the commitment potential of stories that end with death!”
In short, as the authors converse about family and friendship and wilderness and loss and botany and mountain bikes and aging and sex and meaning, they have no recourse but to turn to philosophy now and then.
