"How long will these readers continue to miss walking in the woods enough to employ oddballs like me and Edward Abbey and Peter Matthiessen and John McPhee to do it for them? Not long, I suspect. We're a peculiar lot: McPhee long bent to the traces of The New Yorker, Matthiessen an explorer in remote regions that would hound most people into a nervous breakdown, Abbey angry, molded by what is nowadays euphemistically called 'Appalachia.' As a boy, I myself was mute for years, forced either to become acutely intuitive or to take to the woods. By default, we are the ones the phone rings for, old enough to have known real cowboys and real woods."

There's Edward Hoagland; I'd know the author of that paragraph from a mile off. It comes from the middle of an essay titled "Writing Wild," and like a wolf pissing along...