Edited by Sara Steele

Shortly after I came here to live, I met a young man at Shi Shi Beach who had just built a small cabin. It was in a little inaccessible cove on an 80 foot cliff, built out of a single cedar log. He’d split it out into these big huge old planks, paddled them out on two kayaks, him in one and another in tow, and hauled everything up the cliff by rope. I was totally enamored by Henry David Thoreau and the Chinese mountain poets, the hermit poets, and it was like meeting one. That winter he knocked on my door. Something had come up. He asked if I would be willing to take over the cabin. I didn’t have to think two seconds.

So I spent most of that next year out there, and that gave me a sense of really bonding with the place. As a naturalist, I was learning so much, and I also had a lot of time alone to work on my writing. Looking back, I think that was a pretty critical year for me, for really rooting myself here. It was almost like being an apprentice to this ecosystem. Later that year, I got involved in the conservation movement that led to an act of Congress being passed that added Shi Shi and the eastern shore of Lake Ozette to the Park. That legislation was kind of my introduction and baptism to wilderness and environmental politics.

When I was in college during the 60s and early 70s, a very tumultuous time, I would look back at this tradition of the Chinese hermit poets, many of whom were active in the government or cultural life of their time. They saw all that as transitory, scandals come, governments topple, one court overthrows another court. Really, where they find their meaning late in life, where they contribute to world history, is when they go back to a more intimate contact with the natural world. That's the world that endures century after century. What I found that was surprising, was that while I also went to that cabin to leave political turmoil behind, my attachment to natural systems, to the wildlife and forests that I became familiar with, kind of led me back into political activity in a different way, and I'm still there.

Soon after my pilgrimage on the coast, I began planting trees. It was a great way to get settled in here, because come June it got too dry to plant trees and in the winter it got cold and snowed. So there was summer for exploring, running around, climbing and backpacking and winters for settling in and writing. Some friends and I formed a tree-planting cooperative and we saw the extent that logging and clear cutting was heavily affecting the landscape. I really felt an urgency about the areas that weren't already saved. I wanted my poetry to address that issue in such a way that it would inspire people, the way I was inspired. I wanted it to convey a sense of urgency in the way that I felt a sense of urgency, that these last wild lands were slipping away acre by acre, road by road, species by species. I felt that this was my calling as a poet, which is a lot of freight to bring to trying to do something as difficult as write a poem. I really expected too much of myself and my poetry at that time. It was only by letting go of that other political agenda, steeping myself in the place and trying to accurately record, capture or evoke what I felt, that I began writing poems that did effect people.

At the same time, I was able to address those kinds of issues in a more advocacy journalistic kind of writing and natural history writing kind of grew out of those two. Natural history writing really does depend an awful lot on personal contact, personal experience, personal perception, an encounter, immersion in the landscape. Without that, you're more in the realm of science writing. As the 20th century evolved, our knowledge became more and more focused, sophisticated and objective. Specialists evolved who just didn't have the time and opportunity to verse themselves in everything else, because there was so much research in their narrow field. So, the sciences have kind of dropped a more integrated natural history approach, but the writers have stepped in and are picking that up, keeping the tradition alive to the point where many scientists look to writers to get their work out to a larger audience. I think as a natural history writer, or as a naturalist and a writer, that's what it's all about to me. It's taking as much information as I can gather, and finding the links that make it a story with a beginning, middle and an end; a story that a person can apply to other experiences in their life, their experience with their own environments or with larger political and social issues.

Tim McNulty is a poet, conservationist and nature writer who lives with his family on Lost Mountain, in the foothills of the Olympic Mountains, where "It's fun to watch the clouds move through, until they just move in and stay." He is the author of five books of poetry and seven books of natural history, including an award-winning series of books on national parks.

« Back

For more information, or to request a copy of the full manuscript, contact us.

© 2006 Benjamin Drummond and Sara Joy Steele