Running to the Mountain: A Midlife Adventure
by Jon Katz

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Book Reviews of Running to the Mountain: A Midlife Adventure

Book Review: Pudgy Putz Stumbles Round the Mountain As He Comes....
Summary: 4 Stars

Yet armed with armfuls of Merton material, an IBM powerbook, a cellular phone, 100 channels of media noise, and some old Glenlivet, he makes the astounding discovery that rural life lacks the luxuries, conveniences, and the kind of instant gratification of life he has come to expect in that suffocating suburban stalag he's sentenced in by living in New Jersey. Hey, where's the nearest Starbucks, anyway, buddy?

Hey, Jon, that's why country folk have been fleeing to the city for hundreds of years, to see them bright city lights! One afternoon lightning strikes a tree near his house and his neighbor has to call him on the phone to warn him to go inside! Wow! What an adventure. Wow! What a putz! A strong winter wind blows and shakes the house and he suddenly discovers the "MEANING" of his own spirituality. Mother of pearl, give us pause! Give me a break.

Please don't misunderstand me- I liked the book for what it is. But, while the book is eminently worth reading, it confuses mere frustration with painful privation, annoyance with adventure, and upper middle class financial juggling with fateful personal economic disaster.

It is all too typical of today's confusion among urban dwellers. Living in the land of hyperbole, they can no longer tell the difference between superficial experiences and the genuine article. Thus, they think annoyance is some kind of spiritual tribulation, and that everything they experience or think or wonder about on the way to the grocery market is philosophical grist for the world's attention. Does the phrase pampered self-absorption strike anyone as relevant here? Most simply put, this is just another urban book, written by another clever urban author full of what sometime seem to be arrogant urban assumptions, someone who is just beginning his journey toward any real country consciousness.

Placing this slim and silly volume alongside real rural adventures like "Edges of the Earth", or "Living the Good Life' makes this painfully obvious. Too bad Jon didn't do some research before writing about his journey to the center of the void. He is a skilled and talented writer, and I enjoyed his tall tale. One gets the sense there is a warm and emotionally valuable human being writing in there.

Yet one finishes the book hoping other urbanites don't mistake this loosely threaded-together 'adventure' as a Thoreau-like return to nature (although both Jon and Henry David did return home whenever things got a little rough in the woods). Rural life is much more complicated and requires a passle more of self-reliance and endurance than is evidenced here. Most of us living in the country cannot simply "buy" our way out of our difficulties the way Mr. Katz describes.

The real shortcoming of the book stems from a shortcoming Mr. Katz cannot avoid; his own urban-based consciousness. Sadly, though, the danger here is that he is speaking to an audience even more ignorant and inured to hyperbole than he is, who is likely to honestly believe that what he describes is some kind of meaningful adventure instead of just an impromptu afternoon playing with his ducky in the neighbor's above-ground pool. Mr Katz no more experienced the wilderness by his commando raids into upstate New York than I experienced the spirit of Paris with a two hour layover in Orly airport a couple of years ago. Some things can't be rushed or experienced on the fly.

After fifteen years spent living on the cusp between the urban and rural worlds and learning the lessons of how to live a rural lifestyle, I understand it takes years to drown out one's need for constant, anxious busyness and goal-orientation that one carries around as a result of lonmg-term immersion in an urban environment. Mr. Katz just doen't allow enough time to lose all the noise before whipping out his power book to describe the life and times abroad in the wild wilderness. Natty Bumpo, stand aside. No time to waste. Print out the manuscript and mail it off to meet the schedule. Rural life should be so easy to understand and capture...

Buy the book, by all means. Read it. But don't mistake it for anything like a return to nature or an effort to seriously get back to the kind of spiritual simplicity a meaningful rural life requires. It's just an inside joke, like the New Yorkers that come up here looking for true wilderness and not understanding why it isn't right off the freeway. Straight Ahead! Wilderness and the scary dark woods! Button up your woolies. Natty Bumpo has arrived. Hope you continue to season in your country skills, as well, Jon. Glad you survived your first year or so, and good luck in your further adventures. Anyone reading your book will agree you've got a lot of heart, and a lot of gumption. Just not much country sense.

Summary of Running to the Mountain: A Midlife Adventure

Merton was obsessed with a central issue for our time--figuring out how to live, trying to forge a life of balance, purpose and meaning. I've grown to share his obsession, his belief that life demands a lot of tinkering, and requires people to give birth to themselves not just once, but over and over.

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