Wilderness Values (I): Aesthetic and Scientific Rhetoric in Mark Hume’s River of the Angry Moon

Abstract

River of the Angry Moon follows a solitary man on his journeys to, around, and in the Bella Coola River on the Pacific Coast of British Columbia, Canada. As a nonfictional account that focuses on both the natural and the personal, it ascribes to the genre conventions of nature writing, exploring environmental issues without neglecting human concerns, evoking both scientific knowledge and narrative forms. Structurally divided into 12 sections named for the months of the year, it plays with genre conventions of the almanac. In the context of this study, Hume’s text constitutes most prominently an example of “utilizing the wilderness” writing, as it foregrounds practices—in particular, fly-fishing—that are undertaken in pristine environments. The solitary nature of most of Hume’s fishing expeditions and his disdain at other human presences and other forms of utilizing the environment, like logging and commercial fishing, indicate an overlap with the “into the wilderness” type.