— foreword —

E D W A R D H O A G L A N D
T he T h o reau of O u r Times

L ately, I’ve been dismayed and astonished by the almost total

absence of “nature,” not only as a theme but even as a background
or setting, from a great deal of our contemporary literature. Of course,
there are notable exceptions. Cold Mountain springs to mind. So does
almost anything written by Wendell Berry, John McPhee, or Barbara
Kingsolver. But stop and imagine. Whatever would Huckleberry Finn
read like without the Mississippi winding through it? Moby-Dick
without the whale? Walden without Walden Pond? I could go on,
but there’s no need to. Without the natural world, and not just in the
background, but up front and center, those classic works of American
literature wouldn’t exist at all.
Fortunately, at least for those of us who can’t conceive of a world
without literature or nature, the natural world—or its alarming dimi-
nution in the early twenty-first century—is the principal subject of
Edward Hoagland’s latest, and best, collection of essays. Sex and the
River Styx is a memoir-like evocation of the current embattlement
of wild and unspoiled places and the once nearly infinite variety of
species that lived there, from northern Vermont to the African veldt.
Employing, as its chief narrative prism, the perspective of an aging,
but almost preternaturally alert, lifelong writer, Sex and the River Styx
examines, in thirteen linked essays, what it means to be a human being
in an era when “not just honeybees and chimpanzees are disappear-
ing, but incomprehensibly innumerable species that have never been
discovered at all.”

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 se x a nd the r iv er st y x

Hailed by John Updike as “our finest living essayist,” and by The

Washington Post as “the Thoreau of our time,” Edward Hoagland wrote
his first book, Cat Man, an exuberant novel inspired by two stints
working with the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, when
he was still a student at Harvard. Since then, he’s gone on to publish
twenty. His titles include the acclaimed essay collections Walking the
Dead Diamond River, Red Wolves and Black Bears, and The Courage of
Turtles; one of the seminal works of fiction inspired by our relentless
westering quests, the novel Seven Rivers West; and the highly praised
literary travel memoirs Notes from the Century Before (set in northern
British Columbia) and African Calliope. In its clear-eyed celebration of
subjects as diverse as the New York City harbor, outback Alaska, and
the splendid diversity of wildlife on the Vermont mountain where he
has lived part of each year for four decades, much of Hoagland’s early
work is indeed Thoreauvian. A self-described “rhapsodist by tempera-
ment,” he could fairly be considered our last great transcendentalist.
That, at least, is how I often think of him.
As he tells us in “Small Silences,” the highly autobiographical open-
ing essay of his new collection, Edward Hoagland moved, at eight,
from the city to rural Connecticut, where he enjoyed a Tom Sawyer-
ish, out-of-doors boyhood. Thoreau tells us little or nothing about his
early youth. Hoagland, for his part, revels in his recollections of the
backyard brook he explored down to a secluded pond abounding with
mud turtles, sunfish, and ribbon snakes, with even its own resident
mink. In between college semesters, he ventured out with the Big
Top as a “cage boy,” helping tend to the lions, tigers, and other large
animals, sometimes sleeping under the stars on one of the circus train’s
flatbed cars. “We had charge of some of the most glorious and legend-
ary creatures,” he writes, but even then he sensed the doom awaiting
those “legendary” animals and their untamed brothers and sisters. The
elephants, especially, “appeared to recognize the tenor of events. They

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 for ewor d

were not optimistic—at least I thought not—and forty years later,

seeing shattered herds in India and Africa, I was surer still that the
road for them shambled off downhill.”
As a young man, Hoagland thumbed across America “with a $20
bill for emergencies tucked in his shoe,” and drove a rattling Model A
Ford over Route 66. After a tour of duty for Uncle Sam, he ranged out
farther still as a traveler and a writer. Like the drifter in the old Hank
Snow roadhouse jukebox favorite, Edward Hoagland really does seem
to have “been everywhere”—even, in his case, Antarctica. It’s Africa,
however, along with his beloved mountain in northern Vermont, that
he’s kept coming back to, as indeed he does in many of the essays in
Sex and the River Styx.
Time was when, on early trips to the great plains of East Africa,
Hoagland, like Hemingway before him, witnessed “pristine herds . . .
browsing among the thorn trees as creatures do when engaged in being
themselves.” No more. Today those wild herds are “shattered” and
much of the continent a “crucible of mayhem, torture, and murder.”
Yet for all of his passion for elephants and lions and reptiles large and
small, it has always been human nature that has concerned Edward
Hoagland the most. In “A Last Look Around,” he reports that roughly
two million people have died recently in the southern Sudan alone,
where “the very air smelled burnt.” “Visiting Norah,” a wonderfully
poignant, personal essay, chronicles his first visit to a Ugandan family
he’s been sending money to for years—a $20 bill here, $50 or $100
there, slipped into “a greeting card so that they wouldn’t show through
the envelope if a larcenous clerk were looking for them.” Somehow,
Norah has kept part of her family alive and intact through famine,
war, and the AIDS epidemic. But then, with the laser-like, startling
truthfulness that has characterized his writing from the beginning:
“With these new friends, there remained the tacit barrier that they
were nearly destitute and I was not.”

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Turning to those long-ago days and nights riding the rails with
the Greatest Show on Earth, in “Circus Music” Hoagland reveals the
harsher truths just under the glitter and stardust of circus life: the “Ten
in One”—ten different “freaks” to gawk at under one sideshow tent;
and the way the circus reflects, in its ruthless code of survivalism, our
own lives, “rolling, juggling, and strutting our stuff.” He’s marvelous
on the “bull men”—the cookhouse crew and “seat men” and aerial-
act riggers with “a seaman’s way with ropes.” They’re drifters, mainly,
ex-cons, alcoholics, misfits who nonetheless dreaded, above all else,
that pink slip that said “no rehire.” Where is their like today? Gone
the way of the fabled railroad circuses themselves: “They’d slammed
around with their hats pulled down over their eyes, every mother-in-
law’s nightmare, and knew how to jump on a moving train without
saying goodbye to anybody—knew the Front Range of the Rockies
and the Tex-Mex border.”

Of our contemporary writers, perhaps only Edward Hoagland could pull

off the sentence cited just above. I love its racy diction, reminiscent of
Malamud’s and Bellow’s, the roustabouts “slamming around. . . every
mother-in-law’s nightmare,” and the indelible image of these circus
tramps, hats pulled low, hopping a freight without so much as a back-
ward glance, then waking up to the vista of those soaring, snow-capped
mountains.
Nowhere does Hoagland use his gift for what H. L. Mencken
called the “American language” more effectively than in his essays on
his own aging at a time when so much of the natural world, as he once
knew it, is vanishing. He’s funny and lively on the indignities and
advantages, to the species Homo sapiens, of growing older, dropping
terms like “coots,” “codgers,” “old dogs,” and “old crocks” the way a
canny major-league pitcher, aging himself, drops a sneaky backdoor
curveball over the outermost corner of the plate for a surprise called

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strike three (How’d he ever do that!). Then, look out, lest we readers,
like an aggressive hitter, begin to dig in and get too comfortable. Here’s
that still-blazing, inside fastball knocking you right back off the dish,
as he reminds us that death, when untimely, can “stink like cordite,”
and wonders, Job-like, why lightning “lathes down one tree but not
another.” At the end of “Small Silences,” Hoagland’s legendary fastball
hits 100 mph as he bluntly warns us that “nature, when abused, may
react eventually like a tiger whose tail has been pulled. We shall see,
indeed, if that is the case. We will definitely find out.”
Still, Edward Hoagland is no raging Jeremiah, shrieking down
imprecations upon his fellow men and women from some pillar in the
wilderness. Like Thoreau, he sees more day to dawn, in Hoagland’s
case in the blessedness of children at play, animals “being themselves,”
the spark of divinity in an unexpected act of generosity, and the mere
existence of a being as wondrous as an elephant. Like all great writers,
what’s more, he can’t quite be classified. The Thoreau of our times?
Well, yes, right down to his fierce egalitarianism. But while Wendell
Berry celebrates the traditions of agrarian life, and John McPhee, that
greatest of all nature journalists, tells us all we could ever wish to know
about our geological history, it seems to me that Hoagland’s rightful
literary bedfellows, in addition to Thoreau, are Faulkner, Whitman,
and Twain.
What, then, might a twenty-first-century reader take away from
Edward Hoagland’s magnificent and unforgettable portraits of land-
scapes beleaguered and our last frontiersmen and frontierswomen,
circus aerialists, African matriarchs, and New England cattle dealers,
not to mention the displaced Tibetan yak herder he bumped into not
long ago in China’s Forbidden City who asked “if he couldn’t find him
a job herding yaks in the United States”? In his title essay, “Sex and
the River Styx,” Hoagland remarks that the “disjunction between the
sexes keeps the world on an even keel.” To me, each of the essays in his

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latest collection serves the same purpose, of helping us, as creatures of

the natural world ourselves, maintain our natural equilibrium.
“My allegiance,” Edward Hoagland writes in “Last Call,” “is to
what’s alive, or was. Sea wrack, and the crab that eats a hangnail I spit
into it; the porcupine on an apple limb folding leaves into its mouth at
dawn, while a nightcrawler, as pink as my fingertip, disappears into the
soil under the tree before an early bird wakes up and grabs it. Giraffes
licked salt off my cheeks when I worked in the circus at eighteen and
discovered that sweat often coexists with pleasure but that everything
should be seen as temporary . . . except I was going to love elephants at
a throbbing level as long as I lived.”
Me, too, Mr. Hoagland. Us, too. All of us who have read and
marveled over your essays for decades and will for decades to come.
“Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth,” Thoreau
writes in the conclusion of Walden. Edward Hoagland has spent his
entire writing life doing just that. Yes, he is most assuredly telling us
in Sex and the River Styx that it’s late in the game. Yet there’s always
the sense, in this sobering and beautiful book, that this is a world, and
we are a species, eminently worth saving. No one, from the author of
the “Song of Solomon” to Henry David Thoreau himself, has ever said
it better.
Howard Frank Mosher

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