Laura and Guy Waterman were among the most important chroniclers of the great surge of American zeal for hiking, camping and mountain climbing during the 1960s and '70s. During their three decades of marriage, the Watermans wrote scores of magazine articles and five books together, all still in print and classics of their field, including Forest and Crag: A History of Hiking, Trail Blazing, and Adventure in the Northeast Mountains (1989) and Wilderness Ethics: Preserving the Spirit of Wildness (1993). They lived in a spartan cabin in East Corinth, feeding themselves with a big garden and earning some money by maple sugaring and growing blueberries. Writing was also a vital cash crop in their household economy. They worked and wrote collaboratively, sharing bylines and a first-person-plural "we." Since Guy's death by suicide in 2000, Laura has made her own way as a writer. This year, at 84, she published Calling Wild Places Home: A Memoir in Essays, her third book as a soloist. Some of the essays in the collection previously appeared in publications such as Appalachia, the Concord Monitor, Alpinist, Northern Woodlands and Vermont Almanac. In Laura's previous books, she notes in the preface to this one, "I had not looked closely at my relationship with the twenty-first century ... I was still too close to the world we had lived in, a world without central heating, electricity, plumbing, telephones, and road access. [F]or various reasons we had chosen to plant our feet in the nineteenth century." Calling Wild Places Home explores Laura's changed circumstances and her present life, as well as revisits the past. Its first section reflects on childhood, family life, and the special communion of reading and writing with another person, as in her partnership with Guy; the second remembers the Watermans' 30-year adventure in no-frills, self-reliant living; and the third describes Laura's continuing encounters with forests and mountains, inevitably different at her age. A recurring fascination in these essays is the meaning of "the wild." What are people seeking when they go into the woods? How do human beings place themselves in the natural world without damaging what they love and want to share? How does our experience of nature change when we're older? In 1972, Laura and Guy left corporate jobs in New York City — she as junior editor for publisher Atheneum Books, he as a speechwriter for General Electric executives…