Paula Whyman‘s memoir Bad Naturalist vividly recounts her efforts to return 200 acres of former Blue Ridge farmland to its native habitat.
Booklist wrote of the book:
“Albeit a cautionary tale, Whyman’s sprightly memoir of her super-sized endeavor provides valuable insight for like-minded gardeners, no matter how large or small their project.”
In her own words, here is Paula Whyman‘s Book Notes music playlist for her memoir Bad Naturalist:
Bad Naturalist is a memoir about my attempts to restore native meadows on a mountaintop in the foothills of the Blue Ridge. In it, I describe the obstacles I encountered, the many (many) mistakes I made, the failures, and a few notable successes. In the process of writing the book, I thought a lot about my childhood and growing up, about what led me to try this conservation project and to write this book. For years, I thought of myself as primarily a fiction writer, so this was a big change in a lot of ways. Unlike my first book (the linked short story collection You May See a Stranger), I don’t think I mention any specific songs in Bad Naturalist.
I’ve never been able to listen to music while I write; I need complete quiet. But music played a big part in the process of reflection that led to the writing.
Music for me exists around my writing time, and whatever I’m working on seeps into the music I lean toward when I’m not writing, and vice versa. When I was working on this book, I had to reach way back to my childhood and try to remember how I felt about nature, how I behaved in the outdoors, with insects and with animals. That led to nostalgic reveries that bled over into my musical inclinations. This in turn led to a weird nostalgia for songs that were popular when I was growing up, some of which I would have found irritatingly mellow until a few years ago. Maybe something about spending a lot of time in a quiet place, in nature, will do that; I don’t know. The noise of the world makes me reach for music from an imagined or idealized “simpler time” in my life—even though I know it wasn’t really a simpler time, since there is no such thing, and I wouldn’t have seen it that way when I was living through it.
For more than 3 years, I was driving back and forth between the DC area and the mountain where I’m doing the meadow work. I spent a lot of time on highways, often stuck in traffic, and I needed constant music to keep from losing it. (But even a five-minute drive has always been an excuse for me to turn on music.) The music I listened to put me in the daydreamy mood I needed for writing.
On these drives, I’d eventually reach a point when I was far enough away from the city and the suburbs that the road would empty out ahead of me. Soon after, there came a moment, a particular spot, where the mountains seemed to suddenly appear above the horizon. That’s when any stress I was carrying would fall away.
I subscribe to Sirius/XM in my car, and more than once, at approximately that exact moment, the song “Country Roads” by John Denver would begin to play, as if it knew. I used to mock John Denver songs severely, but now when I hear him singing, I feel sad that he died young and tragically. He had such a clear, seemingly effortless voice, a voice that rings, that’s perfect for singing about mountains. And he was a great guest on the Muppet Show.
The lyrics of “Country Roads” were more likely intended to describe western Virginia, not West Virginia—the Blue Ridge Mountains and Shenandoah River mentioned in the opening lines are primarily located in Virginia–but Denver and the original lyricists changed that because the extra syllable—that “-ern”– didn’t fit with the music. There’s probably still a debate about whether they meant to change it to “west” Virginia, lower case, or to change states all together. Weird small world thing: my late uncle was best friends with Bill Danoff, one of the pair who wrote the original song. These were the same folks who wrote and sang “Afternoon Delight,” a delightfully cheesy 1970s song by Starland Vocal Band that I will sing along with every time. (But that’s not on this play list…)
I listened to a lot of Fleetwood Mac on those drives out to the country. I was in 7th grade when the Rumours album came out. At that time, 7th grade was still part of what was called “junior high school,” rather than middle school. Junior high consisted of grades 7 through 9, so it was my first year in a new school. I walked a mile (uphill! both ways! in a blizzard!) to get there every day. The location of the school I attended typified the growth and expansion of suburbs onto farmland, which is something I touch on in the book. My school was across the street from a strip mall with an excellent record store called Joe’s Record Paradise, and it was next door to a cow pasture. I looked forward to seeing the cows on my way into the building each morning. Before I started at that school, I had been a Junior Farmer, taking care of livestock at a local park, and I missed the animals. The pasture is gone now; years ago it was turned into a development of townhomes. Now, funny enough, I’m living on a former cow pasture that has been turned into a meadow. I’ve somehow gone backward in order to move forward.
When the Rumours album came out, just about every day, groups of girls would gather in the halls of my school doing impromptu a capella renditions of Fleetwood Mac songs. A lot of them started dressing like Stevie Nicks. Maybe that gives you a sense of the vibe at that time. Years later, I learned to play “Landslide” on electric guitar. (I still couldn’t sing it.) Despite being a person who is constantly changing the station to see what else is playing, I never tune away from “The Chain” or “Gold Dust Woman.”
“Ventura Highway” by America is a song I probably didn’t like when it first became popular, but I like it now, and it’s perfect for a long drive down a country road and keeping an eye out for “alligator lizards in the air.” I always wondered what they were talking about—what’s an alligator lizard? An alligator is a reptile, but it’s not a lizard. And why is it in the air? Maybe I was the last one to learn that the lyric refers to the shape of the clouds the songwriter remembered seeing on long drives as a child. Now I look for them, too.
Mellow is not always the way to go. When traffic is completely stopped because of endless and seemingly purposeless road construction, the situation often calls for a head-banger. Veruca Salt’s “Seether” fits the bill, and it has the added benefit of getting me in the right mood to cut through bramble and pull a lot of weeds, which is a big part of what I need to do on the mountain.
Driving to the country in a pickup truck (a mountain necessity) has brought me back to another early favorite, this time from my high school days. I still know all the words to Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Gimme Three Steps.” The song was based on something that happened to Ronnie Van Zant when he danced with the wrong guy’s girlfriend in a bar. It’s underplayed, if you ask me, in favor of Skynyrd’s more well-known hits.
The Traveling Wilburys was a “super-group” of heavy-hitters formed in the late 1980s by George Harrison and consisting of Harrison, Roy Orbison, Jeff Lynne, Tom Petty, and Bob Dylan. I appreciated all of these musicians individually, but at the time, I wasn’t a big fan of the collective. That has changed. Maybe the message of the song “End of the Line” a hit from their first album, Traveling Wilburys, Vol. 1, sort of speaks to me, now that I’m, ahem, a little older. Each verse is sung by a different band member. These lines, sung by Harrison, are simple, almost trite, but hearing someone like him say it somehow gives it a little weight and meaning: “well, it’s all right/even if you’re old and gray/well it’s all right/you’ve still got something to say.” It’s a similar attitude, I think, that led me to take on a ridiculously large project with a huge learning curve (restoring many acres of meadow) at the age of (mumble mumble). And write a very different kind of book than what I’d previously worked on.
One of my favorite songs right now, the song that somehow puts me in the right frame of mind to be here on the mountain, is Bonnie Raitt’s rendition of “Angel from Montgomery.” It’s a rueful, sad song transported by Raitt’s resonant, aching performance. The song was written by John Prine, and from what I’ve read, it was probably intended as a song about an older person’s regrets and longing. The lyrics do a lot of looking back. But for me, it’s a song about memory— the mother she might resemble, the old boyfriend, the old rodeo poster. As if the speaker needs the past “to hold onto,” to keep her going forward. The mountain has a long history, longer than anything I can know about for sure. My own history, the history of the mountain, my family’s history are all intertwined in the book. What appeals to me in “Angel” is the sense that we’re a collection of our memories, and without them we’d be floating, disconnected. It’s at least in part those histories that ground us in the present and prepare us for what comes.
also at Largehearted Boy:
Paula Whyman’s playlist for her story collection You May See a Stranger
Paula Whyman’s first book of nonfiction is Bad Naturalist. Her earlier book, You May See a Stranger, is an award-winning linked short story collection. Her writing has also appeared in The Washington Post and The American Scholar, and in journals including McSweeney’s Quarterly, Virginia Quarterly Review, Ploughshares, and The Hudson Review. She was awarded residencies by MacDowell, Yaddo, VCCA, The Studios of Key West, and Oak Spring Garden Foundation. Her work on this book was supported in part by the Maryland State Arts Council. She spends her time on a mountain in Virginia with her husband and a mercurial standard poodle. Visit Paula online at paulawhyman.com
