I heard there was going to be an Ecosex Convergence in the woods of Washington state in June – our first summer in London since our return. It was to “bring together wild souls who express a love for Life by stewarding and merging with the Earth through the whole of their bodies, minds, and spirits”. The gathering was to be called “Surrender” and was described as “a cauldron for deep connection, healing, and collective creation where life is sacred, our bodies are sovereign, and the Earth is our beloved partner with whom we collaborate to create abundance”.
Frequently while reading Surrender: The Call of the American West, I would stop and wonder what author Joanna Pocock's overall thesis was meant to be – the chapters detail some of her experiences while living in Missoula, Montana over a course of two years, but to me, I felt the absence of a real connective thread. It wasn't until the afterword – where Pocock notes which of these collected essays were previously published elsewhere – that I even realised these were supposed to be thought of as essays. I begin with that fact because that late knowledge helped to elevate the whole for me (and I hope the knowledge is just as helpful for future readers). Partly memoir, partly investigate journalism, partly a philosophical deep-dive into how one can live an authentic life in false times, I was ultimately won over by Pocock's curiosity, self-reflection, and candor. Four stars is a rounding up from three-and-a-halfish. (Note: I read an ARC and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
The West is one of the last places on earth where thoughts around wilderness as inoculation against the darker forces of modernity are still in the ether, in the discourse, in people's decisions to live off the grid, on the land, in the hoop. For the first time in my life, I was beginning to understand the West and its promise, real and imagined, of freedom, escape, transcendence, and its promise to turn us from predator to prey.Long an adventurer, London-based writer Joanna Pocock was avid to relocate to the American West with her husband (a filmmaker who was set to research a project there) and their six-year-old daughter; choosing Missoula more or less at random based on vague notions of its writing scene; a place where Pocock might finish the novel she was working on. The city itself turned out to be disappointing – negatively reminding Pocock of her suburban Ottawa childhood – but she was able to use her new home as a base for investigating “the West” itself. Despite stating that she went out of curiosity alone, the essays in which Pocock describes attending a leghold trap certification course and a tour of a proposed copper mine site read like gotcha journalism. And despite the events happening during her stay in Missoula, the parts about family matters back in Ottawa felt out of place in the overall narrative. But the sections in which Pocock meets with back-to-earthers – rewilders, nomads, planters and scavengers – are warm and respectful; the obvious connection that Pocock felt with these people shine through these essays and make them the most interesting and informative to read. (In particular, I was fascinated to learn about Finisia Medrano: a rewilder who lived “on the hoop”; making a nomadic annual circle throughout the American West, foraging for food and replanting the native species that had been lost to human expansion; a “crime” for which Finisia has done jail time.) Ultimately, these travelogue-like essays expose the internal journey that Pocock was traversing:
Sometimes all we can do is surrender, to our circumstances, our desires and fears, our need for escape, our failures, our pain, our inner wildness, our domestication and in turn surrender to whatever essence is at the centre of our very beings. I yearn for the land of the West. I want to obey Finisia's words, to “kneel down and dig”. My conversations there are not finished. There is so much more to say. And I have much more listening to do.It was very interesting to me that Pocock outlines the ways in which the doomsday-prepper/minuteman movements are akin to the back-to-earthers (with their mutual disdain of laws and government, distrust of modern medicine, preferring to hunt their own meat, homeschooling; self-reliance above all), and while a common theme among all of them is an animosity towards people at large (the Three Percenters might have the AK-47s but Finisia implies that she could murder in defence of the Earth), it was also very interesting that the “Ecosexual” movement (from the first quote) is all about love: love for the Earth, as the ultimate expression of one's sexuality. Pocock acknowledges that as attracted as she is to these rewilding movements, she's also attached to civilisation (even acknowledging the disconnect between deeply caring for the planet and its most vulnerable inhabitants while using a computer whose various metallic components were likely mined by child labourers in developing countries). Examining this kind of internal hypocrisy seems to be Pocock's real thesis, and with the many included quotes from both a lifetime of reading and the interviews that she has conducted over the years, it seems like this has been the central question of her entire life. With all of its information about the ecodisasters looming in the future of humanity, Surrender sure makes it seem that the majority of us are fiddling as Rome burns; Pocock makes the case that we can acknowledge the flames while the tune plays on.
