The Wild Excellence

by Leslie Patten

In 2005, Leslie Patten took a leap of faith, buying a run-down cabin a few miles from Yellowstone Park's most remote boundary. Moving from the bustle of the Bay Area, Patten recounts the ineffable wonder of seeing an elk calf being born, or hearing the howls of a wolf pack under a wintry moon. In a series of personal essays on wildlife, interspersed with modern-day homesteading, Patten describes her view of Land as spiritual refreshment; Land which must include the full array of wildlife. A new and important perspective on why we need to preserve our last wild lands.

Genres: Nature

256 pages, Paperback

First published August 15, 2014

About the author

Leslie Patten has an unusual combination of experience that allows her to write her new book The Wild Excellence. She is a published author of Biocircuits: Amazing New Tools for Energy Health. She also has written several eBooks on gardening, and has kept an online blog journal for many years on wildlife issues from her home in the remote regions next to Yellowstone National Park.

Leslie has worked with land her entire life. She is an avid gardener, and still practices as a professional landscape designer in Marin County, California. She has a degree in horticulture, a certificate of design from The San Francisco Botanical Garden at Strybing Arboretum, as well as two years of formal naturalist training from the College of Marin. She spent over five years working with elementary school children in Muir Woods National Monument and Muir Beach, teaching them about ecology and the natural world. She also worked on a three year spotted owl study conducted by the Golden Gate National Recreation Area locating owl nest sites and conducting chick counts. Patten is a member of the Marin County Tracking Club and spent over thirteen years in a spiritual community studying meditation.

Since moving to Wyoming in 2005, she has helped on wolf, elk and grizzly bear studies, as well as The Gloria Project, a climate change study, in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. She volunteers at the Draper Natural History lab of the Buffalo Bill Museum of the West preparing museum quality specimens of birds and mammals. Leslie enjoys hiking with her dog Koda and exploring the Greater Yellowstone Area.

Reviews

[Darlene Lancer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Leslie takes you on a journey that is intimate, exciting, and educational. Her exploration and knowledge of the land, the animals, and our Native American history are historically and scientifically sound, while providing adventure and a sense of unfolding. She conveys a passionate, spiritual connection to the earth and reverence for the wild that is palpable and inspiring. We grow to develop deeper respect and understanding of nature as Leslie shares her personal discoveries about the intricate and interconnected ecosystem she lives in - the only intact one in No. America. She learned to track and intuit the ways of the wolves, elk, and bear. This is the perfect book for anyone traveling to the area or who wants to learn more about our ecosystem, animals, or living close to nature. Anyone who appreciates the natural world will love this book.

[Tara · Rating 5 out of 5]

The author provided me with a free copy of this book in return for my honest review.

Unlike the previous reviewer, I lean toward a pantheistic perspective, so Patten’s book was right up my alley. Patten recounts her spiritual discovery and adventure of going off the grid and reconnecting with nature in one of the most beautiful areas of North America. The book is broken up into a series of personal essays that cover a wide array of topics, from everyday homesteading accounts and interactions with wildlife, to broad theories on ecology, land and wildlife preservation and the human-nature spiritual connection. This book is easy, enlightening, educational and enjoyable. I am happy to recommend it.

[Mary · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book. Each essay was a mix of personal story, spiritual centering mixing in biology, homesteading and history as needed. The deep connection to wild, open spaces and all of our kin who live in them was obvious and beautifully rendered in this book.

[Elizabeth Danielson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting look at Leslie's new adventure of Wyoming mountain living and the animals and people she encountered there. Sometimes it was a bit mystical for my likes.

[Story Circle Book Reviews · Rating 4 out of 5]

I walked through the little woods near my cabin to retrieve my trail camera, a nifty little device that snaps photos automatically—one every second when it detects the heat and movement of an animal. I keep the camouflaged unit stationed by the trail to the springs so I can track all that ventures bye [sic]. The camera, a little bigger than my hand, is fixed around a tree with a bicycle cable and a heavy lock. I opened the front, scrolled through the menu to see if I had any photos. Twenty three.

So begins Leslie Patten's book about life in wild country east of Yellowstone National Park. That scene reveals as much about Patten herself, a single mom (her son is in college) who recently moved from Central California to an isolated, fixer-upper Wyoming cabin, as it does about the wildlife she counts as neighbors. It's an intriguing beginning, hinting at a book that will reveal an iconic American landscape through her wondering eyes. Back in her cabin, Patten puts the camera's memory chip in her computer:

One by one all the photos loaded in, revealing all of the visitors in the last few days. A boar grizzly bear. A beautiful mother black bear with two cubs of the year. A young female cougar. Two wolves traveling through to a den on the other side of the river. A small red fox, and of course, deer. Apart from a sprinkling of human residents, these are my neighbors, along with a host of other wildlife visitors.

The Wild Excellence does provide that personal look at an extraordinary landscape. Patten writes about the Shoshone and Crow who were the valley's first human residents, about wolves and grizzly bears, elk and deer, coyote and badger, as well scientists, land managers, archeologists and ordinary folk. Her chapters weave myth and science with history and with her experiences as she digs out her clogged spring system, hikes and explores, copes with weather and isolation, and grows an intimate relationship with a place that her heart recognized on first sight as home. In the doing, Patten poses valid questions about how we inhabit this earth, about the role of big expanses of wild land with intact populations of predators and other wildlife, and about what is really important in our lives.

I wanted to love this book. It's clear that Patten loves her adopted place, and I admire her ability to evoke the landscape and her wild and human neighbors, and to consider the volatile issues stemming from the collision of humans and true wilderness. What keeps The Wild Excellence from being a great book, I think, is that Patten herself, our guide to this extraordinary place, never emerges as a fully developed character. She delves deeply into the lives around her, but the stories that might illuminate the woman and her inner life are abbreviated, as when Patten moves to the cabin full-time one winter months earlier than she planned, partly because she is ill from giardia, a debilitating waterborne parasite picked up on a summer backpacking trip. That first full Wyoming winter brings epic snows, marooning Patten in her cabin for days or weeks at a time. "I lived through that winter," she writes, "experiencing a death and rebirth inside the den of my little cabin." And that's it. What was that death and rebirth like? Was she lonely? Frightened? Sick? Fearful? We don't know, because she doesn't explain.

Small errors of grammar and word choice crop up throughout the book ("bye" instead of "by" in the second sentence, for instance) suggesting that the book lacked the kind of editing that might have nudged Patten's writing deeper and farther. That's too bad, because while The Wild Excellence is a good book, with some help it could have been so much more.

by Susan J. Tweit
for Story Circle Book Reviews
reviewing books by, for, and about women

[DMREAnne · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Wild Excellence is a series of personal essays inspired by Leslie Patten’s experiences as she gradually moves from the busy world of California to living full time in a sparsely populated mountain valley, not too far from Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming. We see her passionate love of the land, and her intelligent, curious nature which inspires her to explore, feel, and think about living with nature. This book covers a variety of topics, including the wildlife of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, the early people who had lived in the valley, stories from old timers, and her own experiences settling into a new environment and way of life. Part memoir, part science, part information on conflicts with wildlife and today's modern times, Leslie conveys an understanding and spiritual connection to the earth, one that man has had since the beginning of time, but has often lost as we go about our busy lives in the populated, developed landscape we have surrounded ourselves with. The book is well written and packed full of interesting observations and facts. I would highly recommend this book to anyone who loves nature, and would like to experience it through the eyes of someone who lives with it on a daily basis. It may even reawaken your own spiritual need to commune with the natural world.

[Heidi · Rating 3 out of 5]

First a disclaimer: I am not an environmentalist. This book's foundation is based in the premises that the land is god and it's preservation a deeply spiritual matter, both of which I disagree with philosophically.

But, that rather important element aside, I did enjoy the stories and information that the author shared. From hiking to ancient Indian culture to wolf reintroduction, she covered a broad range of topics that was very interesting to read about.

I won this book as part of the First Reads program, and I am glad. It was a good read.

[Dennis Dupuis · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting, filled with facts, but didn't engage me or keep me wanting to read when other fun beckoned. The undertones of activism on behalf of nature were admirable, but the naiveté was a bit off-putting.

[Joanne Timm · Rating 4 out of 5]

read for High Plains Book Award, good story