Shred Lightly: 'A Field Guide to the Subterranean'

From the kaleidoscopic pages of “A Field Guide to the Subterranean: Reclaiming the Deep Earth and our Deepest Selves,” a new memoir by Justin Hocking, tumbles the author’s ambition, as a young man, to be hard.

He cultivated a stiff upper lip in his late teens by training to become a mountaineering guide in his native Colorado’s Rocky Mountains. Fasting during three-day solo outings in the San Juan range, the younger Hocking, perched on mountain tops, felt superior to the couch-locked plebes invisible below — and maybe even the mountains themselves. Bagging peaks had, for Hocking, carried an overtone of conquest, domination over terrain — total extraction.

Hocking writes that he had cobbled together these youthful, macho ideals from reading books, many of which his outdoorsy dad gave him; significantly, Robert Bly’s “Iron John: A Book about Men,” a 1990 bestseller that catalyzed a men’s movement. Bly argues that men had conceded far too much equality to women at home, in sport and in the workplace. As a result, men had grown soft. Feminized. Men needed to take back their place in society.

This advocacy of a domineering approach to the world was appealing to Hocking, he writes, for a deeply troubling reason.

In sparse, interlaced sections he sketches with a distanced perspective — Hocking refers to himself in the third person as “the latchkey kid” — he details the prolonged sexual abuse he experienced as a child. The effects lingered into adulthood, manifesting as debilitating panic attacks and chronic depression. Like so many men, Hocking writes, cultivating a hard, impenetrable upper crust seemed not just appealing, but integral to tamping down tectonic, and potentially ruinous, emotions.

Entering his 20s, Hocking sought to sculpt himself in the image of a burly man doing burly things: shredding Portland’s Burnside skatepark, thrashing his drum kit and training to become a mountaineering guide in remote mountains, hundreds of miles from civilization.

Hocking writes: “In my fantasy a group of bearded men emerged from the mountains and fetched me away from my mundane life, taking me up above tree line — above all my worldly concerns and insecurities — to initiate me into true wildness and manhood.”

Throughout his memoir, published June 10 by Counterpoint Press, Hocking also weaves together naturalist observations and gripping accounts of Western Expansion’s imperial drive to not only eradicate Indigenous peoples but deprive so many mountains of their buried resources. Hocking, fascinatingly, correlates his own micro impulse to extract meaning from his surroundings, and from those around him, with the industrialized surge of robber baron Capitalism that clear cut old-growth forests and turned mountains, once revered as deities, into toxic wastelands where exploited miners worked in deplorable conditions with no labor protections.

Here, Hocking wields gender theory and history as a miner does a pickaxe and drill: A rugged, macho identity seemed as necessary as a hardhat for legions of young miners as young as 12. If you can cut off emotionality, you might be able to drag yourself down into the mines for another 16-hour day of backbreaking work. But machismo alone can’t keep a roof overhead, nor distract miners from the increasingly raw deal handed to them by East Coast titans like John D. Rockefeller Jr, who co-owned the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company and kept his workers in company camps that resembled jails. Hocking details the Colorado Coalfield Strike, which began in 1913. Instead of considering whether the strikers had a point, Rockefeller, in perhaps peak macho maneuvering, sent in militias. Strikebreaking efforts included random shootings and company-camp evictions, culminating in the Ludlow Massacre in 1914, when militias strafed miners and their families with machine gunfire. With about 75 dead between the two sides, historians consider it one of the country’s deadliest labor conflicts. Testifying under oath before Congress, Rockefeller, who was never charged with a crime, was unrepentant; he would have allowed the slaughter all over again.

“John D. Rockefeller Jr. was such a bastard,” said Hocking, chatting by phone. “But that massacre actually helped catalyze the union movement which eventually pushed through a lot of reforms, including weekends and an eight-hour workday.”

Hocking began working on “A Field Guide” 10 years ago. He wanted to write about the abuse he experienced as a child, but he wasn’t sure how to do it. Then, one of Hocking’s favorite nature writers, Barry Lopez, began exploring his own childhood sexual abuse in the 2013 Harper’s Magazine essay, “Sliver of Sky.” Hocking was struck by Lopez’s approach — not sensationalized nor self-pitying.

“I was interested in how we take wounds and traumas and then turn them into a deeper sense of empathy and care for the natural world — for vulnerable places and people,” Hocking said. “Reading Barry’s work made me realize, ‘OK, I could actually write about [the abuse] in this way.'”

In a late section of “A Field Guide,” Hocking chronicles his long-term partner’s battle with breast cancer. He joins her convalescence at a Hindu ashram in Costa Rica. There:

“We took meals sitting on a clean cement floor near the kitchen, where a queer, heavily tattooed, former-punk-rocker-turned-monastic cooked flavorful curries, chutneys, and fresh-baked parathas, and afterward always made sure everyone enjoyed seconds and thirds. His soft-spoken gentleness reminded me of the warm-handed Episcopal minister from my childhood.”

The monastic moved through the world in a way that was genuine, considerate, yet completely masculine. Aging through his 30s and 40s, Hocking reflects on his own shifted appreciation of the natural world:

“In my early twenties I thought I wanted to spend every waking moment in the deep backcountry, exerting myself on trails and rock walls. By my thirties and forties, I came to realize that I prefer to spend my yearly vacation tooling around in the surf on a nine-foot longboard, then lounging on the beach with friends or wandering around in flip-flops, admiring birds. It’s a tremendously privileged position, of course. Yet spending so much time in the ocean, living in accord with the shifting tides, makes for my most memorable and blissful encounters with nature. I still love hiking and the occasional short backpacking trips, but I just no longer feel the urge to conquer anything.”

—This story is powered by the Lay It Out Foundation, the nonprofit with a mission of promoting deep reporting and investigative journalism in Central Oregon. Learn more and be part of this important work by visiting layitoutfoundation.org.

This article appears in Source Weekly June 12, 2025.