I’m all for what defies the cult of haste. I’m all for the millennia over the minute. I’m all in praise of the old and surprising, so it’s no wonder the Smokies are so special to me. It’s where my granddad was born. It’s a place I’ve known and loved my whole life. Any book that does justice to these mountains, to the complex, mistreated, treasured organism of the Smokies— the slow and the fast, the good and the bad— is a book I’m going to love to read. And this was a great one.
Although the “good” and the “bad”— near the end of the book, Arthur Stupka, mid-hike, puts a halt to Frome’s questions:
“I wish you would stop asking what good this or that may be,” he said. “Do you mean good for you and me? Or in terms of this place where they grow?”
He was right, of course. The most important lesson to learn from the primeval forest is that nature capably writes its own rules. [As Aldo Leopold wrote,] “The last word in ignorance is the man who says of a plant or animal, ‘What good is it?’ If the land mechanism as a whole is good, then every part is good, whether we understand it or not.”