How to Catch a Mole: And Find Yourself in Nature by Marc Hamer
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
If Margaret Renkl recommends it, I will read it, and she called this one the “most charming book” she’d read all year. I am not sure I would call it “charming,” which suggests a certain pleasing sweetness, and Marc Hamer’s life and profession of molecatcher is not exactly like that. What it is is deeply thoughtful, splendidly descriptive, often sad, and even violent. While he mentions Buddhism specifically only once, his life outlook is very much along those lines: focusing on acceptance, not possessing, the eternal impermanence of all things – including himself.
Yes, there is much about moles, those secret little “gentlemen in black velvet,” solitary and grumpy deep in their tunnels. Hamer skillfully weaves their natural history into his own, and into that of humanity in general. He is unashamed of his predilection for an existence more like an animal – sensory, in the moment, unshod in the grass, smelling the earth, simply being another creature on this planet among others. Molecatching is complex, bloody, and physically demanding. His aching knees, sore back, shivering cold, and yearning for his warm fireside and a tot of whisky are signs of his age, and he knows when he cannot live this way any more. So he will start a new way of living. And that is okay. He can be cold, he can be sad, he can be tired or in pain, and he will die. Everything dies. And it will be all right. That is simply the way the universe works, and he is content to be a part of it, in whatever form his molecules take.
EPILOGUE: Today I cut sumac. Chinese sumac, also known (ironically) as the tree of heaven, is a wildly invasive, fast-growing, impossible-to-get-rid-of plant. Every summer, we hack back new sprouts that can grow six feet in a few weeks. It invades our fencelines, crowds out other trees, and its root system produces toxins that kill neighboring trees. We don’t use herbicides. We mow, we clip, we lop, we tear and break it. I spend several hours, a couple times a year, to do battle. I stoop and bend, yank, untangle, chop, heave, pile, trundle… my hair is in my face, my glasses fall off, I trip over the stumps, I lose the pruners and find them again. My back starts to hurt, my hips twinge, and my hands ache. But slowly, methodically, at a steady, mindful pace, I trek along the fenceline. The wind is in the elms. The sumac gives off a nutty, popcorn-like scent when it is cut. I figure out the best way to stuff the wheelbarrow, and can empty it in two armloads onto the brushpile. Time passes. I think of nothing except what I am doing. And – a little bit – of what Marc Hamer described in his book: the focused attention, the awareness of the scents and sounds and textures around me, of acknowledging the blooming muscle soreness without experiencing it as pain. When I am finished, we can see over the fence into the dun-colored, crewcut wheat stubble and across to the treeline to the west. There are rabbits and quail in the brushpile. I’ve done a good job. And learned to appreciate the work itself a little better.
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