Island Year

Hazel Heckman is absorbed by the identification and general splendor of all living things. She has filled her most recent book with delightful descriptions of life as it is represented in its varied forms on Anderson Island in Puget Sound. Although her attention to wildflowers, weeds, trees, insects, birds, and animals seems a bit excessive, one is easily swept away by her enthusiasm for all of nature's treasures that most of us fail to notice in our preoccupation with the pace of modern life. In a series of chapters, one for each month, she takes the reader through an entire year of natural beauty as it unfolds and disappears with the seasons. But all is not idyllic on Anderson Island. The young hunters come in the fall to revel in the slaughter of trusting deer. Beer cans begin to litter the beach and roads. The dense forest is a victim of the bulldozer. Small lots are dividing this microcosm of the unspoiled world. Fences and property lines are established and to walk about freely is to trespass. The insensitivity of modern man to his natural world is an embarrassing and disquieting interruption to the intricate but smooth flow of life in its undisturbed habitat. Such wild retreats are vanishing, victims of the real estate developer, the passion for manicured lawns, and the ever-present outboard motor. With bodies riveted before a ffickering television set, most Americans miss the best program of all-the continuous drama of the living world just beyond the door. Island Year reminds us of the limitless pleasures that abound in the observation, appreciation, and preservation of all natural life.