Mountain Madness

Clinton Crockett Peters traces the path that carried him from a childhood in West Texas evangelical circles to a life consumed by mountain climbing, and finally to a more modest, human-centered outlook. The turning point came when a serious accident in Japan's Chichibu range nearly cost him his life.

From 2007 to 2010, Peters lived in Kosuge Village, a community of about nine hundred people in the peaks of central Japan, where he was the only foreigner. These three years give the collection its structure. From that setting, he looks back at the person he was before leaving Texas and examines why the mountains took such hold of him.

The essays also reckon with the costs of that fixation. One piece turns to Craig Arnold, the poet who vanished on a volcano in Japan, and sets his story beside Peters's own. Throughout, the book asks how a landscape can both build a sense of self and dismantle it.