Nature's Housekeeper

Proud postmodern consumer and card-carrying member of the "I Hate Nature" Club, Michael Gurnow is content in his role as American literature professor at a Midwest college. Everything changes once he gets done reading Thoreau's masterpiece. Realizing he has been living a life of quiet desperation, it suddenly occurs to him that even though it's his job to teach tales of other people's adventures, he hasn't lived any of his own.

Without a second thought, Gurnow hands in his resignation before driving to the nearest state park and applies to be the wilderness equivalent of a construction worker. "How hard can trail maintenance be?" he asks himself. "It's a minimum-wage job."

He quickly learns there's a difference between book smarts and common sense. In this mile-a-minute comedy of errors, Gurnow discovers why it's a bad idea to get into a fistfight with a mudslide, horny hornets are a force to be reckoned with, being able to identify poison ivy is a grossly undervalued skill, and you can't outrun deer—even if you're naked.

With a tie-dye cast of characters, Gurnow compresses several hard-won years in the wilderness into four side-splitting seasons. With his newly minted critical eye toward consumer culture, he reveals the surprisingly complex world of trail maintenance while taking the reader on a guided, philosophic tour of the nature classics.

Introduction by The Aldo Leopold Foundation; Afterword by Lawton Grinter, author of I Hike.