“The Travelling Tree” by Michio Hoshino
“If bears disappeared from this land,” writes Michio Hoshino in The Travelling Tree, “and we could sleep fearlessly in our camps at night, what a boring kind of nature it would be.” Mostly taking the author’s beloved Alaska as their topic, the short essays in this collection explore a human desire to reconnect with a natural world that appears, in its very essence, resistant to such a union. Hoshino nevertheless perseveres, and his enduring love of nature proves insightful reading for those chasing, in the author’s own words, “the other time that flows alongside the frantic daily exertions of humankind.”
Hoshino wrote these thirty-three essays from 1993-5, a period when he was already considered a world-class nature photographer. The Travelling Tree makes clear his talents extended to prose, with all of the pieces collected here eloquent and accessible. For the sake of classification, the essays may qualify as travel-writing, and it is true that many include explorations of place, from exotic locales like the Galapagos Islands to, well, Pittsburgh. Most common, however, are accounts of the Alaskan wilderness and those who call it home.In Hoshino’s writing, fauna animates the landscape, with birds, bears, and moose featuring alongside the recurrent caribou. Sometimes the land itself becomes the subject, as the author endows even the most inhospitable locales—from tundra to glaciers—with enlivening attributes. Other, more welcoming areas burst with vitality. The reader can feel the icy bite of a river as it winds through a meadow, itself awash with nodding flowers.Humans make frequent appearances. Hoshino’s biographical accounts are invariably touching, even if his descriptions of indigenous people can occasionally conform to noble savage clichés. In the author’s defence, his overt admiration for these people ultimately derives from respect, and the author’s respect becomes outright reverence when he discusses the natural world.Translator Eli KP William is equal to Hoshino’s lyricism.
Hoshino’s prose sits somewhere between Henry David Thoreau’s matter-of-fact observations in Walden and Annie Dillard’s poetical musings in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. At his most rhapsodic, auroras “dance” and “bleed” as mist roves through the forest like a sentient being. Depending on the reader’s tolerance for “majestic” eagles, “immense” trees and “inexpressibly sublime” flora, some of The Travelling Tree’s purple prose may grate, yet it is easy to get caught up in the enthusiasm inspiring these odes.
Translator Eli KP William is equal to Hoshino’s lyricism. He writes in his Acknowledgements that translating the Traveling Tree has been a sixteen-year ambition, and his passion for the project shines through in a fluid and considered prose that hardly feels like a translation at all. This early passage, for example, encapsulates both Hoshino’s wonder and William’s skill:I hiked the pristine mountains and valleys of the Brooks Range that cut across the Arctic reaches of the state. I voyaged by kayak through Glacier Bay, listening to the primeval groan of glaciers. I rowed a seal skin umiak with Inuit to hunt white whales in the Arctic Ocean. I witnessed a magical potlatch festival in an Athabascan village. I followed the caribou on their intrepid journeys, enthralled by their seasonal migrations. I gazed up at countless northern lights and came across countless wolves. Most illuminating of all, I met all sorts of people and came to know many different ways of life… And before I knew it, fifteen years had gone by.
This final elegy echoes Hoshino’s nostalgia for a disappearing nature, which, in turn, fuels his romance for an unspoiled Alaska. The US state is Hoshino’s Walden Pond, his Tinker Creek—it is, in other words, his ideal. And this sometimes leads to idealism. While Hoshino’s accounts of individuals are tender in their particularity, his descriptions of Alaskan societies tend towards rosy generalisation, such as when he deems the inhabitants of Sitka to be at one with “the rhythm of timeless nature”. The Alaskan environment and its wild animals also fall foul of idealistic naivety, a naivety that led to Hoshino’s own personal tragedy in 1996 when, at the age of 43, he was killed by a brown bear after ignoring the warnings of his guide.Though published thirty years ago, his essays also offer a timely remedy to a digital society in which reflection has been lost under an ever-cresting wave of useless factoids.
Whatever his failings, there is an undeniable appeal to Hoshino’s unrequited love of nature. Giving colour to his essays is also the intrigue of a life less ordinary. Growing up in Chiba Prefecture, at sixteen Hoshino stowed away on a Transpacific liner and hitchhiked across the US for two months, during a time (the 1960s) when Japanese people hardly travelled abroad at all. After a later self-organized homestay with an Inuit family, Hoshino resolved to live in Alaska and moved to Fairbanks after university. The city remained his home until his death. As in Dillard’s Pilgrim, The Travelling Tree presents readers with an individual growing—almost evolving—through a love of their chosen environment. The book is thus as much a compelling autobiography as it is travel- or nature writing. Like Dillard, Hoshino also possesses a keen philosophical spirit:
