NATURE SHOCK

Coleman opens with an only-in-America vignette, describing a company that places clients in remote places with the aim of their “finding their true selves in bespoke isolation.” Getting lost in the woods in search of self-discovery has possibilities both positive and negative: One can become like Kerouac in The Dharma Bums or Piggy in Lord of the Flies. As the author discusses, there’s getting lost, and then there’s getting lost, as with Hernando de Soto and Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca, the Spanish conquistadors, or the French explorer Samuel de Champlain, who marveled at the fact that a Huron guide assigned to him “knew how to find again the place from which he started so well that it was something very remarkable.” Coleman sometimes ventures into arid academic territory, and his excurses into the howling wilderness of the Puritans and pioneers have been done better by other scholars, such as Perry Miller and Henry Nash Smith. Still, he makes a number of salient points. For example, early advocates of camping that was recreational rather than required willingly put themselves in harm’s way even as the development of managed campgrounds reduced that danger while replacing it with a “feeling of detachment [that] was an amenity, and clients and managers pushed the limits of safety to conjure sensations of being out-there, on the edge of the known world….Visitors accepted risks because they expected nature to blow their minds—in a healthy, sublime way.” The payoff for moderns? Perhaps respite from the flood of information that washes over us, to say nothing of growing a stronger hippocampus, which is never a bad idea.

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