Author’s essays appeal to all walks ‘Into Woods’ a fine life retrospective

INTO WOODS, by Bill Roorbach, University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame, Ind., 2002, 177 pages.

In “Into Woods,” Bill Roorbach has collected essays written over more than a decade. They encompass a time span much broader, however: from his teen-age years in Connecticut to his return, just this last year, to Maine.

Roorbach taught during the mid-1990s at the University of Maine at Farmington and he and his wife, Juliet, bought a house and became a part of the community. Always needing more time to write, though, Roorbach left Maine (and became a summer person) for The Ohio State University, a kinder, gentler schedule, and a much-improved salary. But fortunately for us, Roorbach said his goodbye to Columbus and is back in Farmington where he feels, as he writes in “My Life as a Move,” the external landscape and his internal landscape match.

The range of subject matter in this collection is impressive: Fans of nonfiction will surely find at least one essay – and probably many more – that interest, enlighten, and entertain them. They can be roughly divided into two categories: the personal and familiar essay, with Roorbach playing the leading role; and essays about the natural environment, primarily in Maine.

The collection begins with a delightful essay about Roorbach’s honeymoon in France, trying to write on a farm (cows, vegetables, wine) in the small village of Cerqueux sous Passavant while Juliet was studying art for the summer. The landscape, vividly described, acts as a backdrop to the drama being played out on the farm, where three generations of the Rochelle family argue, vie for attention, and offer advice to the honeymooners. Grandp?re, one of Roorbach’s most sharply drawn and amusing characters, continually interrupts the new groom “Thumb in mouth, pinky in the air. ‘A little taste?'” he asks. When Roorbach refuses, citing all the work he’d like to be doing, Grandp?re replies “‘But it is thy honeymoon! No work for thee till thy wife returns! How without wine will thy cornstalk grow?'”

Always light, never sentimental, Roorbach manages to leave no doubt that the six weeks of his honeymoon were a golden time. But the essay that most clearly conveys a sense of exuberance is “Vortex,” describing an afternoon, some 20 years ago, spent fishing near Menemsha Harbor in Martha’s Vineyard, Mass., with his buddy Mike. Having foolishly (given past experience) promised to supply the fish for a party that night, they arrive at the beach just as the bluefish do – in a feeding frenzy, chasing mackerel and herring before them. Some five pages and 20 blues later, Roorbach somehow has managed to convince readers – even nonfisherman – of the unparalleled joy of that day.

My favorite of the personal essays is the eponymous “Into Woods,” which, to me, combines self-revelation and self-deprecation in a way that’s particularly appealing. The essay covers a lot of ground and a lot of time, but always stays true to its focus: The struggle to find a rewarding life. Few writers today are capable of bridging the cultural divide that separates those who work with their hands from those who work with their heads; “Into Woods” does it in style.

A couple of the personal essays I find not so successful – too inward-looking, not enough for the reader to take hold of. When Roorbach looks outward, though, he can make every page a treat. “S–diggers, Mudflats, and the Worm Men of Maine” piles one interesting fact on top of another, illuminating details and remarkable characters crowding the essay. “S–diggers…” most reminds me of the writing of John McPhee (although McPhee would probably have excised himself from the goings-on), another Mainer-by-adoption, who teaches a course at Princeton called “The Literature of Fact – which most certainly describes this essay.

For those of us who live in Maine, the added attraction of essays like “S–diggers…” and “Spirits” (about Roorbach’s house in Farmington) is his ability to clearly characterize the life and the people he sees around him. After decades of reading dialogue (often written by Mainers) in which Mainers say “Ayeh,” how great is it to read in “Into Woods” about the Roorbachs’ neighbor in Farmington who uses “The ultimate expression of empathy [when talking about a friend’s death], breathed inward: ‘Yuh. Yuh. Yuh!'”

The essays focusing on the environment should prove especially popular with readers who are not, as Woody Allen put it, “at two with nature.” Since I’m included in Allen’s category, I probably can’t judge very objectively the writing in “Into Woods” that describes long walks or canoe trips on rivers in both Ohio and Maine. But the fact that one of Roorbach’s most recent essays, “Temple Stream,” about the geology and geography of the stream that flows into the Sandy River, appears in last December’s Harper’s Magazine, attests to the soundness of his observations and the clarity of his prose.

Most likely that’s the best way to read essays: One at a time, as they appear in various journals and magazines, sometimes months or years apart. Few writers of short stories or essays plan deliberately to write a collection of their works – but that’s what happens when there’s enough short material out there. In later writing, for example, Roorbach has been using a great many sentence fragments, a great many sentences with the subject or verb or article left out; after two or three essays, the style, I find, becomes distracting: you find yourself focusing on what seems like a tic rather than on the substance of the writing.

Small quibble. All in all, “Into Woods” is a trip of discovering one pleasure after another. And even the most xenophobic of Maine natives can’t help but be won over by Roorbach’s love of his adopted state, the place where both landscapes meet.

All of us should hope that he stays for many years, and continues writing through all of them.