Book: A Gathering Of Stones:
Journeys To The Edges Of A Changing World
Written By Carol Ann Bassett (Oregon State University Press)
Reviewed by Erick Mertz

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Scarce anymore are places free from the complicated technological matrix of modern communication. Any place that lies untouched by a cell phone or the internet's grasp seem to exist more across a boundary of time than distance.

Natural writers such as Carol Ann Bassett are out to remind us that, in the blanket of circuits laid over the globe, there are holes and places where old ways of life have gone on uninterrupted. They are few, but in A Gathering of Stones: Journeys to the Edges of a Changing World this assistant professor of communications and journalism at the University of Oregon collects ten evocative essays intimating her journeys into some of these few remaining isolated communities.

Touching the fringes of this seemingly shrinking world, Bassett takes her reader as far from the maddening throng of modernity as could be imagined. Her trip to the Mackenzie Mountain Barrens via prop plane might as well have been taken in George Orwell's time machine as the place she lands is seemingly cut from another century when the North American wilderness was more than myth. She captures here the idyllic vision of an unspoiled commune between man and nature. "He digs a small hole into the side of the palsa with the tip of a caribou antler. 'If you stick your hand in here, you can feel that the interior is formed from a lens of ice.'" The Ecuadorian frontier Bassett finds is amid a nation beset with an energy crisis that threatens to spoil, with a massive dam project, the ancient ways of indigenous farmers. The same is true for the Galapagos Islands where the slow infiltration of tourists and settlers has pushed the famed tortoises further to the margins of the marine ecosystem and near extinction. In her explorations, Bassett has not only found the last hold outs of a simpler more environmentally harmonious time, but those imminently threatened by impending progress.

Bassett's observations are intelligent and enthusiastic as she is tireless in her desire to probe the very teeth of the cultures she is writing about. There are relatively few places where she turns an abrupt shoulder against objectivity and chides those who have tainted her subject before her arrival. In her chapter about the Bio Bio river of South America she writes: "The week we pass through, the wise men of one village are decked out in red ESPN baseball caps; a television crew had visited not long before and thoughtlessly awarded the hats as souvenirs, thus diminishing the cultural integrity they'd come to document." Aside from an occasionally shortsighted assessment of what is in actuality a legitimate exchange between cultures, Bassett's journal is an enthralling plunge into a vanishing wilderness, lingering seemingly on the edges of a teetering globe.

© 2003 - Erick Mertz