When walking on a beach or a forest trail, I am generally scouting the ground for two kinds of rocks: rocks with stripes or heart-shaped rocks. Invariably, a find feels like a gift.
This morning in Truro I wasn’t looking but found a heart-shaped rock anyway — one of the best I’ve ever come across.
This being the morning of opening statements in the election interference case against trump in Manhattan, I take the stone to mean something positive — a sign that justice might in fact be coming, coming for a nation starved for it.
The wind was bracing on the Cape this weekend but my time away with a friend was relaxing nonetheless. We snacked. Walked. Read. Wrote Postcards to Voters. Not a second of TV for two whole days!
On Saturday, I finished North Woods by Daniel Mason, a challenging and extraordinary read that I might put in the same category as The Overstory, in no small part because trees feature so centrally.
The novel takes place over several hundred years in Western Mass where one piece of property in the so-called North Woods is the connecting link between various sequential stories. There are twin girls undone by jealousy. A painter who loves another man and pays the price for that. A mother with a schizophrenic son, forever holding out hope that he will somehow straighten himself out even as he frantically wanders the land, believing his footsteps are stitching the ground and keeping it pieced together.
Chestnut trees come and go. An apple orchard is planted and then goes to ruin. Elm and hemlock suffer from blight or invasive insects and vanish. Mountain lions and passenger pigeons disappear too.
The haunting spirits of people who came before affect subsequent residents to a greater or lesser degree. As my husband said, “It’s essentially a ghost story.”
Yes. And perhaps the central ghost story is the one produced by the land itself. Earlier incarnations of nature haunt the landscape with what came before, producing a sense of profound loss.
Because I grew up in Western Mass (sort of), I felt an especially strong connection to the setting. I could see those fields, those trail heads, the banks of snow.
Since the Berkshires might be the only place that has ever felt like home to me, the stories made me miss the place. Or the feeling of the place. Or my youth. I guess it’s complicated even though it’s an old and widely-shared story.
And then, because the climate crisis has produced terrifying evidence of the planet’s warming, the descriptions of blizzards (so many blizzards!) caused an acute nostalgia for a vanishing world. Not just dying plants and creatures, but the disruption of seasons and the loss of habitability. In other words, the book prompts mourning not just for our particular past, but for humanity’s collective past.
I’ll be thinking about this story for a while.
