Altitude Adjustment: A Quest for Love, Home, and Meaning in the Tetons

Many works of nonfiction refuse to take stylistic risks like the kind taken quiet often by Baptiste- splurging with words and verging on the poetic in moments of emotional overflow. Take for instance, the following passage describing the mood after she stumbles on clear signs of a nearby grizzly bear: "Time goes static. The peaks to the west eclipse the sun, draining light and confidence, but we charge ahead through the palpable, ashy light of dusk.".. .For those of us who have always entertained mysticism about the mountains, longing to enjoy them in a way more intense than mere sightseeing, this book is like a good session with your psychoanalyst. More broadly, it ponders the search for self in a world where we increasingly share our life with everyone...-- "Billings Gazette"

"With a wide cast of characters and a narrator who is smart, engaging, self-effacing, and forever curious, this memoir is refreshingly complex. Though it tracks a woman's journey from her 'entrenched Portuguese roots in coastal Massachusetts to the macho, quirky milieu' of a group of wildlife biologists, the memoir reveals with a clockmaker's precision the inner workings of the human heart: its desires, pains, confusions, and joys, all of them at play in a single beat."
Connie May Fowler, Author of How Clarissa Burden Learned to Fly and When Katie Wakes: A Memoir

"Altitude Adjustment gives honest, inspiring testimony to the inexorable power of the human will when seized by a grand dream. We cannot help but root for Mary Beth Baptiste as she risks all to live more freely and meaningfully. With her combined skills as both poet and naturalist, she brings every character she encounters on her journey-whether surly moose cow, grizzly bear, or surly, grizzled ranger-to exuberant life."
Julene Bair, Author of The Ogallala Road: A Memoir of Love and Reckoning

"These dreams of yours are too far-fetched," Mary Beth Baptiste's mother told her. That pulled me right into Altitude Adjustment: A Quest for Love, Home, and Meaning in the Tetons, and I gladly followed Mary Beth as she yanked herself out of her Portuguese family culture and an unhappy marriage in Massachusetts. Off she went to work for the Park Service, "feeling very single," as she says. It was both a relief and a fear. Battling loneliness, she navigates the ups and downs of relationships with her eccentric male colleagues, earning their respect and cultivating friendships. As a seasonal employee at Grand Teton's Division of Science and Resource Management, she adapts to living in a decrepit trailer to work as a wildlife biologist. With considerable emotional insight and a sense of humor about herself and her situation, Baptiste passionately shares her love for the forested world of birds, plants, sheep, ducks, elk and bears. Altitude Adjustment is a treasure, imbued with Baptiste's resilient courage to venture into the wilderness of both heart and landscape.
Gail D. Storey, author of I Promise Not to Suffer: A Fool for Love Hikes the Pacific Crest Trail, winner of the National Outdoor Book Award

"What is love? Mary Beth Baptiste's exquisite book probes that question. Yes, as the title suggests, she is looking for romantic love, but that is only part of her story. Yes, she loves the Tetons, which attracted her away from her tight-knit Portuguese family in Massachusetts. But at her core, Baptiste is a wildlife biologist. She becomes weak kneed and giddy watching the gyrations of the boreal toads. Her deep feelings for the cygnet swans and their plight drive her to despair. Her heart melts when she runs her hands through the hair of a tranquilized bear and checks its ears for mites - the same bear that minutes earlier stood six feet away, threatening to charge. She stood her ground, leaving the reader trembling and breathless. This is not a book you will soon forget."
Marjane Ambler, Author of Yellowstone Has Teeth: A Memoir of Living
Year-Round in the World's First National Park

"Altitude Adjustment is Mary Beth Baptiste's story of longing and taking a chance on a dream, of stepping into the unknown and finding home. I was completely submerged in the struggle of this woman who answered the call of adventure that so many hear and ignore. Baptiste uprooted herself from her marriage and career, familiar places and people, to move to the Grand Teton Mountains. There, Altitude Adjustment takes place as Baptiste finds her place within Wyoming wildlife - both four-legged and two-legged. Using gorgeous language, she tells us intimate truths about her inner landscape while enchanting us with an outer setting of astounding beauty. I wanted this book to go on and on. Reading Altitude Adjustment gave me the same joyous fulfillment that Mary Beth Baptiste eventually found."
Tina Welling, Author of Writing Wild: Forming a Creative Partnership with Nature