This Ain't No Party. This Ain't No Disco. (This Ain't No Lake Wobegon)

You can't say he didn't warn us. Paul Gruchow laid out his program clearly in the prose fragment that introduces Letters to a Young Madman, his recently and posthumously published memoir. He writes that a book of this sort cannot be "both amusing and truthful." You want amusing? Read about a place where all the men are good looking, all the women are strong, and so on. "There," he writes,” you could be amused forever and ever, and you need never know the heights and depths to which human beings are ordinarily called." Here, on the other hand, is a serious book.

For a loyal and affectionate readership, Gruchow was at once a great comfort and a great instigator. He wrote ecstatically, but precisely, about the natural world—especially about hiking in what he called the "empty" places from the Minnesota Northwoods to the Rockies and the Big Horns. Back home on the Minnesota prairie, he enthused about the potential of humans to work toward sustainable lifestyles and to return human culture to agriculture. At odds with these two passions were the depredation of the natural world and the ascendancy of a food-production system that, as he often said, "made the countryside safe for machines." And these pernicious forces, according Gruchow, share a provenance. As he wrote in a 1999 preface to a reprint of his 1988 essay collection, The Necessity of Empty Places, "In paying tribute to places counted worthless, I . . . hoped to offer homage to people treated as expendable. The same forces that ravage the land, I came to believe in the writing of this book, are the ones that destroy human communities." In Letters to a Young Madman, these same evil forces rise up to enable the dehumanizing, infantilizing, and humiliating treatment that he received and witnessed during his struggle with borderline personality disorder, the disease that that ultimately led him to suicide.

The range of Gruchow's writing is impressive; his popularity and success was enviable. As a nature writer, he attracted such a devoted readership that when he mentioned that he enjoyed a relaxing smoke after a day's hike, his fans flooded him with cigars. His natural history knowledge was extensive, and what he didn't already know he researched voraciously and grasped immediately. However, in the essays and talks collected in 1995 in Grass Roots, he turned advocate, fighting and arguing in his own unique and engaging version of agitprop. Through it all a love of land and place radiated that might be described as devotion. The natural world transported him. Again from the Empty Places preface: "If there is any cure [for sorrow] on this side of the grave, I am certain it lies in the balm of nature." In this, Paul was fatally disappointed.

However deep his depression, Gruchow never stopped being an activist and an advocate. He fumed against the institutional treatment of the mentally ill, and he longed to write again after being blocked for years. According to Louis Martinelli, who prepared Letters to a Young Madman for its publication, Paul had been working during 2003 on a disjointed manuscript made up of short pieces of memoir, research, and narrative. Martinelli suggested a structure patterned after that of Eduardo Galeano, an elliptical pastiche that eschewed transitions and other traditional devices. This freedom enabled Gruchow to finish a remarkable collection of prose fragments —few of more than one page—that are courageously brutal in their honest portrayals of depression and desperation. These combine with research, analysis, and description of treatments to expose the pathetic shortcomings of the mental health system. He recounts the chilling moments before and after electroconvulsive therapy, a night of struggling against suicide, the frustrating absurdity of occupational group sessions. He analyzes the utter loss and grief of clinical depression and uses his own case to represent the suffering of his fellow patients, the failure of his treatment to embody the failure of the entire establishment.

Paul died in February of 2004, but it wasn't until 2013 that Letters finally appeared. The book is, as he promised, a truthful and difficult read—with one heartbreaking exception: a 775-word mini-essay three pages from the book's end that describes a walk onto the escarpment above Duluth, Minnesota, where he was living at the time. It's like hiking with the old Paul, the ecstatic naturalist who had, in better times, experienced "the great power of healthy land to render consolation" and who believed that the "one absolutely irreplaceable and indispensable service that so-called empty places provide is keeping us sane."

The walk begins haltingly, but soon the former enticements of nature take hold:  "I was met face-to-face with a burst of wind. I felt its delicious coolness on my check. There was another sensation. It took me a moment to place it. Pines! It was the scent of pines! I could smell again!" Awakened, he begins to remember boyhood adventures and the names of the plants he walked alongside. "I ran their names over my tongue as if they were draughts of cool water." Earlier in the book he had said that the only two deterrents to his suicide were not wanting his children to have that legacy and not wanting to influence some of his friends by example—not a word anywhere in the book about watching a sunset over a lake in the boundary waters or a storm rolling in over the mountains. But after this last walk, even though "the darkness, as it does, closed in again," he was able to reassure himself, "if I could just get there, I knew where to go to find the light."

Sadly, in the same preface to The Necessity of Empty Places in which Gruchow invokes the balm of nature, he mentions another truth he discovered: "the futility of running away." Letters to a Young Madman tells the story of the mentally ill: "They take their meds, they see their doctors, they go to the hospital from time to time, and they continue to struggle and suffer. The name of the story is not triumph or redemption, but survival." And his story is no different. "It ends," he says, "with me alive. . . . That has to be enough, because it's all there is." And that moment, unhappily, was far too brief.

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Visit the Paul Gruchow Foundation at www.paulgruchow.org