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Mail Tribune file photo Mary Paetzel contemplates the wilderness she loves near Dutchman Peak. Paetzel's journals, chronicling her outdoor treks, have been published. Take a read on the wild side Outdoor lover's detailed journal becomes book of back-country essays By PAUL FATTIG GRANTS PASS -- Shortly after Mary Paetzel moved here after World War II, she began working in the gladiola fields that once formed spring rainbows in the area. "But when we were digging bulbs in the fall and the Canada geese would fly over, somebody would say, `Don't let Mary hear 'em. She'll take off,' " she recalled, then added, "I would, too." Indeed, Mother Nature's call of the wild was one Paetzel, now 79, could never resist answering. But she faithfully kept a journal of her treks into the Southern Oregon mountains. Last month, the Oregon State University Press published the "Spirit of the Siskiyous," a 164-page book filled with vignettes from that journal. The publication also includes 60 prints of Paetzel's sketches. Paetzel, a small woman whose warm eyes and quick wit belie her crusty exterior, shrugs off the publicity. "I don't feel a thing," she said. "Twenty years ago I would have been ecstatic about this. That's when I really worked trying to be a free-lance writer. All I got was rejection slips. "Finally, I just decided I'm not spending any more time and effort with these paranoid editors," she added, using the word as an adjective every time she refers to editors who had rejected her work over the years. "So it doesn't make much difference to me now. It's kind of late in the day." Not to Lee Webb, a Siskiyou National Forest wildlife biologist, who edited the book along with Grants Pass resident Jackie Elliott. The two began compiling Paetzel's essays six years ago. "This is something I wanted to do when I first saw her journals, probably 10 years ago," Webb said. "It seemed to me that it ought to be available to the public." Warren Slesinger, acquiring editor of the OSU Press, was equally impressed with Paetzel's gift for writing about and sketching nature. "It also coincided with the direction the (OSU) Press wanted to go," he said. "We wanted to get into regional writing about the flora and the fauna and the people in it." Paetzel delivered on all counts, he said. Consider her observations along the Rogue River during a sunset in April of 1983: "This evening the sunset sky is a colorless pale blue washed with the faintest hint of gold, but its reflection on the river has turned to molten silver with golden ripples and eddies," she writes. Her writing often takes the reader to the small details of nature that are often ignored. She wrote about the pleasant sound of the bee-fly in late April of 1969. "As she hovers in the air before a blossom she's hardly audible at all, but when she revs her tiny propellers to dart away she produces a high-pitched whine that only hover flies are capable of," she writes. "But most of all I love to hear them in the heat of summer when two dance in midair and, facing each other a few inches apart, converse by altering the sound of their wings. First, a whine almost too high for my ears to catch, then a lower, droning hum, then a series of middle notes, sustained like a lingering chord on the violin." Her essays focus on everything from butterflies to buttercups, from meadows to mountains. While she may not be overtly enthusiastic about the book's publication, she did acknowledge satisfaction that her message is getting out. "It may make somebody think of what's out there," she said. What is out there? "Why, everything -- the natural world," she retorted. "And it's disappearing. We're losing so many little things -- birds, butterflies. But those are the little things that make the world run." She'll tell you that encroaching urban sprawl on the edge of Grants Pass has chased off the wildlife that once hung about her home where she had lived for half a century. She has since moved to Merrill, where she works as a volunteer at the Klamath Basin National Wildlife Refuge. "I go out in the woods where I used to see a beautiful old-growth forest," she said. "I come back two years later and it's nothing but a bunch of stumps." Her love of nature comes from a childhood spent in rural Delores, Colo. Born in Peru, Ind. in 1919, she admits she was never one to take the path most traveled. "I walked away from high school because I couldn't take what I wanted," she said. She wanted to take solid science courses. School officials wanted her to take domestic science of sewing and cooking. For awhile, she owned and operated a service station in California. She also worked as an aircraft mechanic during World War II. After working in the gladiola fields, she began collecting pollen, used by pharmaceutical firms for allergy testing. "My word, you gotta have the patience of Job to do that," she said of flitting from flower to flower. But the job took her into the mountains she loved. She drove a Volkswagen van, often camping out under the stars. For the past five years, she has spent the summers in Colorado, working on what she calls her "Colorado journals." The summer before last she climbed one mountain to the 12,000-foot level. "I can't climb the highest peaks anymore and I can't hike a 10-mile trail anymore," she said. "But there are other things I can do. "As long as I can drive that big old truck of mine out on four-wheel-drive roads somewhere, I'll be all right," she added. Mail Tribune Copyright � The Mail Tribune 1998, Medford, Oregon USA