Wild women

The freedom to take off the apron and shoulder a pack — a surprisingly recent development in the timeline of outdoor pursuits — has put women outside on equal footing with men.

Nowhere is the result more obvious than on the adventurer’s bookshelf.

For centuries — well into the baby-boom generation — the wild at heart have learned about camping, climbing, sailing, hunting, fishing, hiking, paddling and conserving natural resources from literature written mostly by men.

More recently, women have been blazing new trails in a genre that seemed as over-explored as the summit of Mount Everest.

Women authors seem to have a different eye for the practical, the passion and the irony of modern forays through the planet’s natural flora and fauna.

It was a woman who, in the 1990s, finally wrote “How to (Poop) In the Woods,” a book that has sold well across the nation even though its actual title was forbidden to be printed in most daily newspapers, including this one.

The topic was useful and overlooked, and author Kathleen Meyer pulled it off with good humor and the authority of a veteran rafting guide.

Without the woman’s view, our perception of the Great Outdoors is as one-sided as catching trout without listening to the river.

In “Now Go Home: Wilderness, Belonging, and the Crosscut Saw,” (Oregon State University Press) Ana Maria Spagna slices through the sap of what brings people to the woods, whether to work or play.

The title owes to the bumper sticker the former California beach blonde saw after making her maiden trek to college in the Beaver State — “Welcome to Oregon: Now Go Home.” Undeterred, she plunged into the male bastion of forest grunt work. She had learned that the government was willing to pay her to live in the wilderness and by god that’s what she was going to do, in the drizzle of Washington’s Olympics and North Cascades, even if it took her years to figure out why.

Her writing is remarkable in the way it scrutinizes and probes while accepting the way things are.

As her muscles harden to the back-breaking work of building footbridges and grubbing trails, she wants to fight the righteous battle against the greed and thoughtlessness that fouls wild places.

But she can’t quite be perfect herself.

She’s fond of Edward Abbey’s irreverent intolerance for park rangers hobbled by rules as well as park visitors unweaned from wheels and natural places consumed by greed.

Yet she scrapes through the veneer of the Sierra Club and points out that, “Even Ed Abbey moved to Tucson, bought land, settled for long vacations and imaginary rebellions.”

Spagna takes a close look at almost everything, including the way we walk through wildflowers and even herself, with a perception that sometimes stings and carries on like a bare-legged walk through stinging nettles.

You read a third of the book hoping she’ll somehow be happy. She likes to be a step ahead of the reader, occasionally releasing a verbal branch that flings back and smacks you in the face.

She leads us along as she discovers that woodsmen are entertaining and vulnerable, strong and weak, competent and confused. Not so different than herself.

If you waded warily through Walden, wondering whether Thoreau was genuine, you’ll have no such doubts about Spagna. She’s the real thing.

In contrast, Maria Eschen of Boise taps her vast outdoor experience not to philosophize about wilderness issues, but rather to tackle them head-on.

“River Otter: Handbook for Trip Planning” (Anotter Press) is a guidebook for planning a river trip by raft, kayak or canoe. It teaches how to be efficient, practical, economical, safe, well-fed and light on the land.

She even donates a portion of her profits to the conservation group Idaho Rivers United.

“I’ve been keeping notes on our trips for years,” she said in an interview last week, noting that friends started requesting printouts of her lists, tips, recipes, organization strategies and exercises in group dynamics.

Well-connected with the who’s who of West whitewater, Eschen has fine-tuned her approach to rivers to impeccable standards, including the safety and rescue techniques taught by Les Bechdel.

“When we used to take the raft or canoe out 30 years ago, we’d throw everything into it, including the kids, and didn’t have a concept on how to do it in an organized way,” she said.

By getting organized, she said the trip planning was smoother, she was fussing less and playing more while on the trip.

Rivers are getting busier and regulations are being enforced to keep people from loving them to death, she said. “The book helps people realize that it’s easy to use a fire pan or a portable toilet. There’s nothing to fear.”

Tami Oldham Ashcraft might agree there’s nothing to fear even on the high seas, but she qualifies that statement with a lesson she learned through a gripping story of courage and the will to live.

“Red Sky in Mourning: A True Story of Love, Loss, and Survival at Sea,” (Hyperion) was published nearly two decades after an October 1983 hurricane caught Ashcraft and her lover as they sailed a 44-foot ketch from Tahiti toward San Diego.

She was young and adventurous, a ‘70s West Coast surfer girl who balked at school and thrilled at the freedom of sailing to sun-drenched lands and remote islands. She crewed with experienced sailors and worked her way into an idyllic lifestyle, living the good life on a nickel and dime.

Ashcraft is neither a wordsmith like Spagna (she hired the help of a writer) nor a detail cruncher like Eschen.

She is a competent sailor swept away by love and then by the ruthless violence of waves that flipped their yacht, sheering off the mast and snapping her fiancé’s safety harness and sweeping him away to his death.

When she woke below deck, knee-deep in seawater and covered in blood, the storm had passed leaving her eerily adrift, alone, in a mechanically disarmed boat.

Had she been anything less than she was, unable to conquer her fears, a whimper beneath the 41-day ordeal ahead; had she been just a beach babe tagging along for a ride….

The story is compelling. The lesson is important.

“The cruising life is complete — full of adventure, education, freedom, and fun,” says Ashcraft, who lives on Washington’s San Juan Island. “I emphasize that I share my story to inform everyone who goes to sea, man or woman, of the importance of being prepared to assume the captain’s role.”