A Year in Paradise by Floyd Schmoe is a mountaineer's nature journal. Through the black and textured white of text on paper, Schmoe colors a world of natural wonder and holy significance. Although he is writing this after being years on Rainier, he writes of his first year with the same acquisitions of surprise and wonder as if he was narrating it. That's how the reader feels. That's how I felt. I’ll tell you, sitting in a park full of rain and gray clouds, reading the novel really lifts the spirit. I felt involved in his world as much as I did in my own. While reading, I observed the world in the way he has. In this case the rain which seemed immediately harsh and cruel took a more reasonable and obvious form. While reading I also noticed his writing to be inviting and it easily resonates for the mind to picture. Why do I feel like I’ve been to Rainier before but I’ve never been there before? Hmm? Now there’s a double edged sword for the masochist: Lift your spirits and imagination into the hills of Mount Rainier and be comforted in your own presence wherever you are. Listening to Schmoe’ s comfort but more importantly, faith, in nature directs the reader to share the same qualities. I felt open again to the sure force that we live in. It is the power of nature that drives this book to dissect and study the world we were born into. It is hard for a people, so separate from the natural world to touch it without the slightest sense of arrogance created out of fear. The modern state’s taming of nature is due to the inflexible life schedules that surpass seasons and weather to infinitely carry on. The reason Schmoe writes with such ease of nature’s presence is because it is his career. His day is shaped on the fabric of the individual day. He is not part of a schedule of schematic attempts trying to produce something (mechanical day), but a day that schedules him. There is a difference in his tone of speech that allows nature to be his controller rather than the opposite. We feel so much presence in his writing because of this. A Year in Paradise by Floyd Schmoe is from the account of a man immersed in nature and who never put an effort into capturing the land, but rather put effort into observing it and learning to respect it.