By Steven M. Pappas
The Barre-Montpelier Times Argus

Living in New England as we do, we are truly blessed to see all four seasons (five, if you count "mud") and the myriad natural gifts gracing each one. In the hustle and bustle of our lives, we try to notice and appreciate all we can when enjoying the outdoors. We wish we could do a better job of identifying various bird calls, animal tracks, constellations in the night sky, and trees and leaves (especially poison ivy).
We try.
Dana Wilde, an editor and columnist at the Bangor Daily News in Maine, has compiled a book of essays that does what we all wish we could accomplish: Stop and enjoy the natural world.
Wilde, who grew up in southern Maine and is a Fulbright scholar, uses the lenses of both discovery (as an amateur naturalist) and innocence (as a father) to often illustrate how he became aware of the world he shares.
Generations of writers related to Thoreau when he wrote about the world around him. Likewise, John Muir and others crystallized the effect of the natural world on us. Their writings became somewhat definitive.
Wilde makes it accessible. "Everything in this book is meant to generate a bright spot," Wilde writes in his preface. "Like Thoreau I think they inhere in the facts of nature, and one sort of natural brightness is the unusual or even the commonplace fact about some leaf or bird or apparition in a field. Also like Thoreau, I think a fact is meaningless until it blossoms into a truth."
In his way, Wilde's essays almost serve as a user's guide to New England's natural world. He starts readers at the bottom of the learning curve and expertly carries them up and over paths, fields, streams, skies and even rainbows. Throughout the 65 or so essays, we learn as he (and his son Jack) learns. The mysteries around us suddenly are answered and explained.
The essays range in titles from "Noiseless and Patient" to "Web Weavers" to "Teaching the American Weirdoes" to "On the Longevity of Species by the Natural Experience of Time."
But Wilde is unwilling to just accept the conventional answers provided in most naturalists' guides. He presses issues from scientific and philosophical points of view; he asks tough questions -- really tough questions. He delves into the universe, be it measuring starlight, time or even creation. While those answers could be lofty and ethereal, Wilde has done his research -- sometimes incorporating very difficult concepts about universe, time and natural laws -- so that he can explain them with surprising ease.
"Time tumbles on. In modern terms the universe is a perpetual series of statistical accidents. The world looks like it does and moves like it does because of a tendency for things to become disorderly. In other words, there are always many different ways for a clump of things to exist apart in a jumble, like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle for example, but only one way for them to exist together in order," he writes in an explanation of the expanding universe and Olbers' paradox.
Wilde is never pretentious or preachy; nor is he overly opinionated. As a former English teacher (and now editor), he is a wonderful, simple storyteller who uses the nuances of the language coupled with timely seasonal topics to weave together matter-of-fact observations, anecdotes, humor and even misperceptions (he always later clarifies). The journey along the learning curve suits him. (There is a classic story of stargazing that ends in an ultra-hasty retreat after a curious skunk stops by.) He is painfully thoughtful and careful with his choice of words -- far more poetic than most newspaper columnists.
In an essay titled "Spring Song," Wilde concludes, "Their whistles are pretty surely not words. But neither is Mozart's concerto, which nonetheless feels meaningful. Music is the tone of meaning without the words. The birds appear to grasp this somehow. To them, the experience is the meaning. Never again will bird song be the same."
By the end, the world makes a little more sense, be it the Maine woods, the Vermont woods, or those nagging questions nature seems to throw at us.
For anyone living in New England eager to be more aware of what is all around us, this self-published book is a must. In fact, while amateur naturalists will enjoy Wilde's wild observations, students of earth science, astronomy, biology and even evolution will appreciate the work he has done. In effect, we should be grateful Wilde has "tried" for us, because as a result, he has explained a lot.

To order "The Other End of the Driveway: An Amateur Naturalist's Observations in the Maine Woods," go online to http://booklocker.com/books/5473.html. For more information on Wilde, go to www.dwildepress.net.

Steven Pappas is editor at The Times Argus.

This review appeared in The Barre-Montpelier Times Argus, Feb. 6, 2012