A Year in the Maine Woods

A Year In The Maine Woods by Bernd Heinrich
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

"Escapist fantasies usually involve the open road, but Bernd Heinrich's dream was to focus on the riches of one small place -- a few green acres along Alder Brook just east of the Presidential Mountains. The year begins as he settles into a cabin with no running water and no electricity, built of hand-cut logs he dragged out of the woods with a team of oxen. There, alone except for his pet raven, Jack, he rediscovers the meaning of peace and quiet and harmony with nature -- of days spent not filling out forms, but tracking deer, or listening to the sound of a moth's wings."
~~back cover

I should have loved this book. This kind of thing is right up my alley, and I love ravens -- so it should have been a slam dunk. Instead, I had a hard time finishing this book, and it took a lot of thinking about why that was. The book is everything the blurb promises: the author spends a year in a cabin off the grid in the Maine Woods, and spends a great deal of time watching, thinking about, drawing and generally enjoying the seasons, the seasonal changes and contrasts, the seasonal successions of birds, plants and animals. So why didn't I much care for it?

After a great deal of thinking about it, I realized the book is about the author watching nature unfolding around him rather than being about nature unfolding through the seasons. There's nothing wrong with that, but I wasn't looking to find out about his divorce, the visits of his son, the visits of his students, etc. I wanted the book to be just about a year in the Maine woods, and for my money, the rest of that stuff just got in the way and made the book less interesting to read.