conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me a description for a story titled American Wilderness about There's, Others, McNeil-Lehrer with the genre: Arts & Photography, Photography & Video.. Start with the sentence 'Some people can take a trip to the gas station and make it sound wild, so surreally alive, that you can see it as a feature-length film'.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Some people can take a trip to the gas station and make it sound wild, so surreally alive, that you can see it as a feature-length film. Others could journey to a distant sun and you'd find yourself nodding off, thinking their descriptions make the McNeil-Lehrer Report seem outrageous and riveting. Author-photographer the author, earnest, enthused, and talented though he is, sometimes falls into the second category of adventurer whose storytelling becomes snoreytelling. Where the exact problem lies is anyone's guess. There's nothing wrong with the writing of this journalist, published in Audubon , Outside , and Men's Journal. In this story he travels through wilderness areas from Maine to Hawaii, some so isolated he feels guilty writing of them. There's nothing wrong with following the trails of others before him--be they of Hudson Bay traders, Lewis and Clark, or the Nez Perce--that take him through abandoned canyons, across the Everglades, into pristine waters, or old mountain "towns" so isolated that outlaws by the hundreds once went there to disappear. He canoes, he hikes, he swims; he shadows his text with historical insights and today's environmental woes.