By Eva Ciabattoni

A few weeks after the 2000 presidential election, poet and award-winning writer of literary nonfiction John Daniel took to the Klamath Mountain woods to “live the simple life in my Spartan but comfortable cabin in the wilderness, with no phone to answer, no traffic to fight, no groceries to buy or bills to pay, no damnable election or anything else of the human world to grab me by the collar and boil my blood. A garden to eat from, a river to fish, backcountry to hike, wild animals where wild animals belong, a vast silence to soothe me, and no human light at night except the occasional satellite slipping inconspicuously between the stars.”

As he chronicles in the lyrical “Rogue River Journal: A Winter Alone” (Shoemaker & Hoard, 2005), he was anything but alone. Daniel intersperses scenes of his Thoreauvian life with scenes from a childhood spent in the shadow of a talented, complicated and fallible father - Franz Daniel, a hard-driving, hard-drinking labor activist. Daniel mixes a poet’s ear for language with a journalist’s investigative skills. He arrives at his winter homestead having interviewed his father’s friends, relatives and associates as well as his mother, who shared her husband’s passion for the labor movement. He has read correspondence and documents and clippings - his own and those in the Reuther Library in Detroit and the George Meany Archive in Washington.

As he reaches the edges of his knowledge about his father, he writes: “Once, just once, I’d like to have gotten thoroughly drunk with him, sailed round the horn of midnight in his company, all sheets to the wind. I’d like to have known the man his friends knew in his prime. … Perfectly alone, many miles from another human being, I find myself tearing up at times, lumped in the throat with the living presence of a man whose ashes have rested in a Missouri graveyard for twenty-five years.”

Daniel muses that most men are Fisher Kings (after the Grail myth), including his father, who “never came into the kingly wholeness that his gifts might have won for him.” Daniel looks back on his own circuitous route growing up - the tension between wanting to remain a child and the yearning to become a man. He tells of the people who showed him the way, like the logging foreman whose grudging respect he earned after a hard season of scrambling up and down clear-cut slopes attaching grappling hooks to felled timber. Called up for Vietnam because he dropped out of college, he weighs whether to flee or risk jail as a conscientious objector.

While often falling short and detouring away from the kingly wholeness he seeks, Daniel finds that despite having chosen a life of poverty as a writer, he has chosen a life that has allowed him to use and develop his gifts, a good life, one that he returns to at the end of his sojourn in the woods.