Nick Offerman’s fifth book, Where the Dear and the Antelope Play: The Pastoral Observations of One Ignorant American who Loves to Walk Outside is as unnecessarily wordy and rambling as its title.
Arranged as a collection of three separate journeys, Where the Dear recounts actor/writer/humorist Nick Offerman’s hiking trip in Montana with Wilco musician Jeff Tweedy and writer George Saunders, his repeated visits to the farm home of James Rebanks, author of The Shepherd’s Life, outside of Liverpool, and finally a cross country ramble to various RV parks and trails with his wife Megan Mullaly. If you have not read any of Offerman’s other books, he writes as he speaks. The audiobook is available but his style is so singular just reading the book allows you easily to hear his voice and cadence. Throughout the essays Offerman pontificates his views on the need for a return to an agrarian lifestyle, as well as reparations to the Native Americans we stole the land from and the Black people enslaved to build the country. He also really hates Trump and the Republicans standing in the way of progressive ideals but still lives an (admittedly) damned privileged life.
If that last sentence seems out of place with the first few you can now see the problem with this collection. One paragraph finds Offerman talking about hiking along a beautiful lake in Montana, the next he’s railing against the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. A treatise about the necessity of moving away from industrial farming to one that favors the natural balance of nature is interrupted with Offerman describing the beautiful sets of the FX series Devs. To be kind, Offerman is all over the place and while the call to return to agrarian focussed farming is decently researched, including quotes from noted environmentalists Aldo Leopold and Wendel Berry, the injection of his political opinions grinds the message to a halt.
Let me be clear, I agree almost 100% with Offerman’s political and societal views. I too think industrial farming is destructive and bad for everything, I too am a fan of Michael Pollan and am consciously aware of what I put in my body. I also loathe Trump, I hate the MAGA cult, I want every last one of his enablers in Washington and state governments to be thrown in jail for the rest of their lives. But I don’t want to read Offerman’s political opinions, or recounting of various MAGA exploits, in a book ostensibly about national parks and returning to a farm-to-table lifestyle. I really don’t want my blood pressure up just before turning out the light at night and going to sleep. I have pulled myself nearly off social media for a reason and Offerman’s anti-Trump comments come off like comment posts on Facebook. Make no mistake, his comments are amusing but this is not lighthearted subject matter to inject alongside stories about rafting trips and accidentally draining the RV batteries.
The book was written between 2019-2021 so it encompasses all the many (awful) events that occurred in that time span. I understand the lack of focus, I commiserate one hundred percent. It is a horrible time (ongoing), exhausting, and infuriating for various reasons. However, with a better focus and judicious editing, I think the book would be better. Offerman even calls the book “meandering” in his epilogue, and in his self-deprecating style, admits he doesn’t know anything and isn’t an expert on this subject. If you like Offerman’s other books I do recommend this one. It is an easy, mostly soothing read, that occasionally veers into political territory. Depending on your tolerance, and how exhausted you are with politics, you may fare better with this than I in enduring the political sojourns within.