T he High Sierra is exoteric-attentive to the general reader, instructive, open in character. John Muir, he writes, was an early “psychogeologist.” So is Robinson’s friend Gary Snyder and-from an earlier generation-the San Francisco poet Kenneth Rexroth, who, like Robinson, “took a youthful trip into the High Sierra and fell in love with the place, and for the rest of his life went back as often as he could.” But being a psychogeologist-even a hippie poet-requires, in Robinson’s thinking, a way of staying real with the mountains, finding a perceptual precision up in the Sierra rather than getting lost in the easy vagaries of so much nature writing. Psychogeology is Robinson’s term for it: the feelings and perceptions caused by the exposed rock, the light, the thinner air at altitude-“hippie poet” stuff, in other words. His subject in The High Sierra is the landscape of “the best mountain range on Earth” and its effect on the human mind. Read: Swimming in the wild will change you Prosy perhaps-he’s talking right at you-but only literally pedestrian. The Robinson fluency is here: the compact, mobile sentences the narrative ease the technical detail. But in The High Sierra, it’s as though a carbon-fiber panel in the wall of one of his novels has slid open and out has stepped il miglior fabbro himself, a fit 70-year-old from Davis, California, with a pair of walking poles and a whisper-light backpack, looking forward at sunset to a little Scotch, chilled, if possible, by a shard of vestigial glacier in a world he didn’t have to invent. If you know Robinson’s highly regarded novels- The Ministry for the Futureor the Mars trilogy, for instance-you know the sound of his crisp, impersonal omniscience.
Robinson is hiking off-trail, and-as he writes in his new book, The High Sierra: A Love Story-his easy gait is a mode of being: “pedestrian and prosy.” He may be paying close attention to anything or nothing: his plantar fasciitis, a scatter of obsidian chips at a Native American knapping site, the way the mountains “seem to glow from within, to pulse with an internal light, under a sky as dark and solid as enamel.” Or he may be comforting himself “with my usual science fiction exercise,” imagining a scene elsewhere in time, working it through in his mind until he can say, yes, “it had been like that.”
He could be a sunwalker from his novel 2312, but the planet is Earth, not Mercury, and the California sun won’t incinerate him. P icture a lone human walking across the rocky expanse of a planet, talking to himself as he goes-a lone human alert to signs that this is a planetary surface, to “the speed,” as he puts it, “of the planet rolling under your feet.” This is the science-fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson somewhere high in the southern Sierra Nevada-“the heart of the range”-almost any time in the past 49 years.
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