RAMBLING MAN

Peter Matthiessen's quest to escape himself—at any cost.

- BY MAGGIE DOHERTY

On November 20, 1959, at a pier in Brooklyn, the writer Peter Matthiessen boarded the M.V. Venimos, a freighter bound for Iquitos, a port town deep in the Peruvian Amazon. He was fresh off the publication of “Wildlife in America,” a travelogue-cum-polemic that lavished attention on the endangered species of North America, indicted the humans who had destroyed their habitats, and established Matthiessen as a nature writer in the tradition of Henry David Thoreau and John Muir. Now he was ready for wilder climes. As Matthiessen stepped across the ship’s gray deck, the writer William Styron, his close friend, looked on with admiration.

Matthiessen liked peril; one could even say he courted it. In the course of a long literary career, during which he wrote thirty-three books and was celebrated for both his fiction and his nonfiction, he travelled to places most writers would never dare to go. He flew through thick fog across the Bering Sea in pursuit of musk oxen. He accompanied a crew of Caymanian turtle hunters on a barely seaworthy schooner. He roamed solo across the Serengeti, dodging predators and scrutinizing dead prey. Most memorably, in 1973, he accompanied the famed field biologist George Schaller on a late-autumn hike in the Dolpo Mountains of Nepal. Schaller was looking for rare Himalayan blue sheep; Matthiessen was looking for enlightenment, which he compared to the elusive snow leopard, sensed but seldom seen. The book that resulted from this trip, “The Snow Leopard” (1978), won Matthiessen the first of two National Book Awards.