Theory and Practice of Life

Crabbing upcurrent some evenings [walking in the river], feeling the force of the water on my legs and a night breeze in my face, I often think of myself as passing the house offshore. Up there in that room, as I see it, is the reading and the thinking through, a theory of rivers, of trees, of falling light. Here on the river, as I lurch against a freshening in the current, is the practice of rivers. In navigating by the glow of the Milky Way, the practice of light. In steadying up with a staff, the practice of wood.

 

-      Barry Lopez, “The Whaleboat,” in About This Life: Journeys on the Threshold of Memory

 

Carried away as I had been and still was by the writing, I felt a shock of recognition (a happy shock) when I came upon these lines in the Barry Lopez essay. This must be, I thought, the seed that Jim Harrison found and nurtured into a tree, his poem “The Theory and Practice of Rivers,” and then into the forest of his collection carrying the same name. Jim himself was a walker of rivers—the Sucker River that flowed by his U.P. cabin, the Santa Cruz (or was it a tributary?) outside the place he and Linda lived in Patagonia, Arizona, and others I don’t know at all in Montana. Somehow I feel closer to Barry Lopez through this bridge Jim built between us, and of course the Artist is there, too, with us, as one of the Artist's images along with a stanza from Jim's river poem appeared on the poster and wine label from the 1991 vendange Leelanau Cellars called Vis-à-Vis. 

(The Artist and I walked the Crystal River many times....)

 

***

 

But now, breaking news, sent by a friend in Tucson: There is a new threat to the Santa Cruz River, in the form of a 30-ft.- tall stretch of new border wall between the U.S. and Mexico, 25 miles of it, through the grasslands of the San Rafael Valley, where cameras placed along that section of the border have recorded an average of five pedestrian crossings a month, including Border Patrol agents, hunters, and hikers. Estimates are that there is one illegal border crossing in the area every 20 months.

 

Read those numbers again. Now once more. 

 

An article in the Arizona Daily Star by Emily Bregel reports that conservationists forecast “devastating” effects for migrating animals, along with a disruption of the hydrology of the Santa Cruz River. “‘Wall construction will bulldoze into a steep cliffside at the [Coronado National] memorial, which already acts as a natural barrier,’ said Eamon Harrity, wildlife program manager for the Sky Island Alliance. ‘The cliff where they're going to place new wall will be twice as tall as the wall itself,’ he said. ‘It really highlights how disconnected from logic this wall is.’”

 

Some pork barrel projects are simply a waste of money. This one qualifies on that count: “The $309 million contract for the border-wall project went to Fisher Sand and Gravel, a North Dakota-based company with a record of thousands of environmental violations and legal problems including a 2019 lawsuit, filed by the U.S. Department of Justice, alleging poor workmanship on a 3.5-mile border-wall segment in Texas, which was privately funded by Trump supporters.”

 

But other kinds of pork barrel—and this one qualifies also on the second count—seem calculated not only to make money for a private construction company but also to set the stage for environmental tragedy and, no doubt intentionally, to spit in the faces of those who care.

 

In sum, the current U.S. administration has given a $309 million contract to a company with a record number of violations and lawsuits against it to build an environmentally destructive, unnecessary wall, accomplishing nothing of value. Hello, DOGE? Anyone home?

 

Oh, rivers, rivers! How the human race continues to desecrate you!

 

***

 

Back to my little corner of the world --  

 

(Not its permanent location)

The Artist and I moved from Leland out to our Leelanau Township farmhouse 24 years ago, and only now, inspired by having grandson Jack and his crew camping here recently, have I finally taken the plunge and gotten a fire ring for the yard. Sunny and I did not have our agility session this morning, due to rain and wet grass, so a trip to the hardware store fit in nicely, and I was also able to score some jar lids for the next round of rhubarb chutney, having made the first batch on Sunday.

 

My bedside reading stacks had gotten out of control, so it was good to finish three books in the last couple of days—Zeitoun, by Dave Eggers, a mesmerizing post-Katrina true story; The Forest for the Trees: An Editor’s Advice to Writers, by Betsy Lerner, a reality check for all would-be published authors; and, finally, the book of Barry Lopez essays quoted at the beginning of this post. I had gotten about 1/3 of the way through a biography of Judge Learned Hand before other books tempted me away from it. Will I ever read all of To the Finland Station: A Study in the Writing and Acting of History, by Edmund Wilson? Fascinating as it is, I find myself skipping around in the chapters…. And then there is Wilma Dykeman’s The French Broad from the “Rivers of America” series. I’ve only just begun that one and should really not have started it, with the others still waiting to be finished, but—no reading rules in my life! Taking classes, required reading, even teaching are all behind me now, and I can browse the endless buffet to my heart’s desire.

 

It's almost the 4^th of July! And the day after the 4^th (the 5^th, right?) is the annual Friends of Leelanau Township Library book sale in Northport, beginning at 9 a.m. Last year I was so busy and had so much on my mind that I completely forgot the sale, and the organizers were exclaiming to each other over my absence, as I am one of their best customers every year (if not the best). In the coming week the FOLTL summer author series kicks off with Karen Mulvahill and her historical novel, The Lost Woman, on Tuesday evening. I’ve taken a picture of the poster, since I didn’t see the list on the FOLTL website:

Planning an August bookstore guest

And sometime in August I’ll have as my bookstore guest author Tim Mulherin. (Note to self: We really need to set a date for that!) Tim’s book, The Magnetic North, addresses the idea that, as I put it, “Everyone wants to be here!” If you grew up in Leelanau County, do you regard newcomers as an invading force or grist for your make-a-living mill? If you’ve been coming up for summers all your life, are you dismayed or heartened by changes you see? Maybe you have just “discovered” Leelanau (I know it feels like that to a lot of people, some of whom have never been in Michigan before) and dream about living here someday. We are not the only area in the country experiencing growing pains, either, so Tim’s exploration of the issues will be of interest to just about everyone.

 

Before leaving the subject of books, I’ll mention that I’ve started carrying a few bilingual board books for little ones. So far I have English-French and English-Spanish but will look into other languages if anyone is interested. 

Now, breaking news, local—and good!

 

Saw this sign when I walked by today! Hooray!

More ice cream! Now there is Buster’s on Nagonaba, Barb’s Bakery on Mill Street for frozen custard, and Deep’s at the corner of Waukazoo and Nagonaba for your Moomer’s fix!

I wrote a four-page letter to a friend this morning, and almost all of it was about trees and wildflowers, appearances and disappearances of same in my little world. Will the purple coneflowers that failed to show up last year get back to me this summer? Time will tell. In the meantime, I’m enjoying every blooming thing in its time. 

 

Lately, the letters I write are less and less like chatty “newsletters” and more and more like rambling meditations, occasionally on a single theme. Do you ever read collections of some famous person’s letters? If you do, what interests you most in them? Their daily activities, family and social interactions, their reflections on contemporary events, or something else entirely? What do you most appreciate and enjoy in a letter you receive in the mail?

It occurred to me this morning that I may never write a book for publication—my doing so isn’t unthinkable, but neither is it highly probable after so many decades—and so my writing is of a very ephemeral nature, mostly letters and blog posts. Ephemeral and unremunerative, not to put too fine a point on it. But that takes a lot of pressure off. Metaphorically, I am scrawling messages and corking them up in bottles flung out onto the waves, in hopes someone will be entertained or someone's heart warmed, if only briefly. Sending a letter says, I hope, “I’ve been thinking of you. You were on my mind. Wish we could sit together in the shade and visit in person. If we could, here is some of what I would have to say.” Of course, if my friend were here, there would be no telling where our conversation would go. Even a reply to a letter isn’t always a response but the correspondent’s own rambling thoughts shared in turn. And that’s just fine! 

 

Last thought for the day: One of my recent customers thanked me for having the Ukranian flag in the window, telling me he was born and raised in Ukraine and showing me his tattoo (you can read about the symbol here), which he allowed me to photograph. Here is a statement today from Johann Walter David Rudolf "Jo" Wadephul , member of the German parliament and current Federal Minister of Foreign Affairs, pledging European support to Ukraine. Why? Because all men are brothers. And because theory of freedom is nothing without practice. Will we Americans hold onto our freedom? That remains to be seen.

How I Spent My Christmas Vacation

I'll explain this further down.

Here I am (since November) in what is at present my winter home, far from Michigan, a little rented cabin in an Arizona ghost town in the Sulphur Springs Valley, mountains looming all around, where a beautiful sunrise occurs just about every morning and a breathtaking sunset at the end of each day. Southeast Arizona’s landscape is austere and can seem unforgiving, forbidding, even foreboding, but in fact, the land is characterized by indifference rather than hostility, and I find comfort in Nature’s absence of malice. I also enjoy, here in the ghost town, sufficient distance between human habitations that we don’t often rub up against each other the wrong way.

 

My own small living space, large enough to share with my canine companion, in previous years accommodated me, our dog, and my dear husband, the love of my life. Now, there’s just me and the dog, and I miss David every minute! Make no mistake about that! Although in many ways he is still here, all around me -- in his paintings, his hats and boots, his books on the shelves with mine, unlimited memories, and constant thoughts. Every day I wear his watch and one of his favorite belts, and often I’ll reach for one of his caps or pull on a pair of his socks.

Me and my girl

On the morning of Christmas Eve, my neighbor and I took our usual long morning dog walk with Sunny Juliet. We hiked high enough in the foothills to reach ocotillo territory, and then quickly turned downhill again so Sunny would not disturb cows that had climbed high on the slope for the first sunlight of the day. Due to Midwest weather, my friend’s December 22^nd flight to Detroit was cancelled, and I’d been reading books featuring travels in Mexico and Spain, re-igniting what had been until recently fairly dormant wanderlust. And so it was, as we compared notes on travels planned and desired, we decided on the spur of the moment to drive down to Whitewater Draw that very day to see the wintering sandhill cranes. 

Cranes by the thousand are very noisy, but I have always found their clattering, purling calls joyful and comforting. There were many other birds to see, as well. American shovelers, both male and female, have coloring reminiscent of mallards back in Michigan, though with much longer bills. Sweet little black coots scoot along with bobbing heads and then dive. My friend’s sudden excited cry of “Red bird!” drew my attention to a vermilion flycatcher. One waterside tree held a woodpecker (Ladderback? We didn’t have binoculars with us!), and if you look closely at the sign in the photograph below you’ll see what I think is a black phoebe.

Need telephoto for good photo of black phoebe, if that's what this is!

Long trail to largest flocks....

At the very far end of the longest path, even without the binoculars we had forgotten (along with field guides we’d also forgotten, so eager were we to get on the road), we were able to see a long line of about 100-150 snow geese, hunkered down near another even larger crowd of more sandhill cranes. I don’t ever remember seeing snow geese before, here or anywhere else, so that was exciting. 

That white line in the distance is a flock of snow geese.

 

Whitewater Draw was one of the Artist’s favorite places in Cochise County, its water scenes so reminiscent of the watery landscapes he loved to paint, that whenever we were there together he would ask me repeatedly to photograph certain scenes. He never painted directly from photographs, but he liked looking at them for inspiration, so on that sunny Christmas Eve afternoon I kept stopping to photograph scenes for him, a habit I’ll probably never break. 

 

That night I made the oyster stew (just for myself) that I’d planned for Christmas Eve supper. Lots of cubed potatoes, sliced celery, onions, mushrooms, evaporated milk, a little coarse kosher salt, and a small can of oysters. It was good. I had a second bowl. Then on my way to bed, rather than turning off my Christmas tree lights, I picked up the big platter that holds the tiny potted Norfolk pine with its battery-powered tiny lights and moved it over to the bedroom corner of the cabin where I could look up from my nighttime reading and see it from pillowland. In the morning I brought my 5 a.m. coffee and a cold blueberry pancake back to bed and shared the pancake with Sunny. “I’m glad you’re here,” I told her. “What would I do without you?”

 

My Christmas morning reading was the second chapter of The Mays of Ventadorn, by W. S. Merwin, a journey and exploration into a particular strain of troubadour poetry but, for me, also the story of Merwin’s finding a home away from home in a part of France that I too fell in love with.

 

…My vocation as a tourist has always been dubious. Reading a guidebook and then glancing up to identify what the resume has been summarizing is likely to seem to me, quite soon, like an exercise in alienation. I am more given to imagining what it might be like to spend time in a given spot, to get to know the sounds and the light, the people and the faces of the buildings, and how some of it had come to look the way it did.  

 

-      W. S. Merwin. The Mays of Ventadorn

 

This is the way I have always loved to travel and the way the Artist and I traveled together, “imagining what it might be like to spend time” here and there, which is why having a vacation “home base” – a hotel in Paris or in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, the ghost town cabin here in Cochise County, Arizona – and making daily explorations out from that base was our perfect idea of travel, enriched and expanded always by armchair travel with our beloved books, often read aloud to each other, in whole or in part.

 

On the afternoon of Christmas Day, my regular hiking partner and I walked over across the highway for dinner with other neighbors and later walked home under a new moon in a lavender sky.

Then only two days later, again without planning ahead to do so, we took one of our longer, more ambitious hikes here in the ghost town environs, gaining about 400 feet in elevation and reaching an entirely different life zone, where green-leafed oak trees flourished. It was so exciting! Sunny proved herself an able rock dog, too -- explanation for my first photograph on this post.

And the day after that I accompanied my friend on a long, rainy, stressful expressway drive – to pick up her new puppy! All in all, quite a week! 

 

Now as 2022 draws to a close I look around this little cabin at my modest belongings and feel comfortably at home, lucky to be here, safe and warm, lucky to have little Sunny Juliet, to have good neighbors and blue skies, enough to eat, more than enough to read (no such thing as “too many books” in my lexicon!), and family and friends who keep in touch across the miles. It would be easy -- and sometimes, I admit, the temptation is more than I can resist -- for me to look at 2022 as a catalog of loss, but I guess if I have a single resolution for 2023, it is to continue to count my blessings daily and to recount them whenever I start feeling blue. But here's the tricky thing. Although people say, “Count your blessings,” they generally say it when a person is feeling more blue than blessed -- because why would you need reminding otherwise? – and yet it’s when I’m already feeling blessed and contented that I am more likely to enumerate positive reasons for good feelings. Does that sound familiar to anyone else? It’s those blue hours and moods that are difficult, although heaven knows -- and I am certainly aware -- that in this life I have been a very lucky woman.

 

Last Books (Almost!) Read in the Year 2022

 

129. Steinbeck, John. A Log From the Sea of Cortez (nonfiction)

The pattern of a book, or a day, or a trip, becomes a characteristic design. The factors in a trip by boat, the many-formed personality phases all shuffled together, changing a little to fit into the box and yet bringing their own lumps and corners, make the trip. And from all these factors your expedition has a character of its own, so that one may say of it, “That was a good, kind trip.” Or, “That was a mean one.” The character of the whole becomes defined and definite. 

 

Steinbeck’s chartered boat expedition with Ed Ricketts and crew to collect marine specimens in the Sea of Cortez between Baja California and the Mexican mainland in 1941 is as full of portraits of nature and philosophical topics as it is observations of the land and people encountered. Did you know that Steinbeck studied marine biology in college? Any fan of Cannery Row will find this book fascinating!

 

 

130. Lee, Laurie. As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning (nonfiction) 

Ever since childhood I’d imagined myself walking down a white dusty road through groves of orange trees to a city called Seville. The fantasy may have been induced by the Cotswold damp, or by something my mother had told me, but it was one of several such clichés which had brought me to Spain….

 

Laurie Lee’s writing is magical. He walks from his home village to London, travels by boat to Spain, walks across Spain – like a mad dog Englishman, without a hat, courting sunstroke! But who else has ever written like this? 

I was awakened next morning by the high clear voice of a young boy singing in the street below. The sound lifted me gradually with a swaying motion as though I was being cradled on silken cords. It was cool crisp singing, full-throated and pure, and surely the most painless way to be awakened – and as I lay listening, with the sun filtering over me, I thought this was how it should always be. To be charmed from sleep by a voice like this, eased softly back into life, rather than by the customary brutalities of shouts, knocking, and alarm-bells like blows on the head. The borders of consciousness are anxious enough, raw and desperate places; we shouldn’t be dragged across them like struggling thieves as if sleep was a felony.

 

131. Merwin, W.S. The Mays of Ventadorn (nonfiction)

…I was twenty-six, with no money at all and a house in the depths of the country in France. In all the years that followed, the house, the remains of the farm, the village, became a constant, insistent part of my life, invaluable, cherished, demanding, inescapable. 

 

(from late in Chapter 2)

 

…One attractive element in the farming life that had evolved by then in the Quercy was an unobtrusive independence of spirit, a quality rooted in the practice of polyculture – the growing of more or less everything. It was an immemorial system encouraged by the variations of the crumpled landscape with its small irregular fields fitted into the stony contours, but deplored by theorists as inefficient…. Most families possessed a few hectares of upland woods, a few hectares of open pasture in different places, a few hectares of arable land, which they farmed on a careful four-year system of rotation, a sizable number of ritually tended walnut trees, at least one vineyard, and at least one vegetable garden…. They grew much of what they ate, and all that they fed to their animals. They sold walnuts, plums, milk, wool, calves, lambs, cheese, and they raised tobacco some years as a cash crop. They thought that was the way it had always been….

 

(from early in Chapter 3)

 

You can see how for me, this was another book with subject matter and language to work magic on my soul.

  

All three of the books I’ve quoted from above are books I could quote from endlessly, so I have restrained myself and leave you only with these scanty passages to illustrate, I hope, the wonders provided in these priceless works by John Steinbeck, Laurie Lee, and W.S. Merwin.

 

132. Smith, Betty. Maggie-Now (fiction). I have read Maggie-Now almost as many times as I have read A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, the author’s most famous novel, and I love them equally. Highly recommended, both!

 

133. Robertson, Thomas A. A Southwestern Utopia (nonfiction). An excessive accumulation of facts that nevertheless failed to cohere into any kind of convincing atmosphere. Disappointing but no doubt important reading for researchers into experimental utopian communities. 

December disappointment: holiday lights and decorations in Willcox taken down way too soon!

 

Unexpected thrill this last week of the year: Western bluebirds at my feeders here in Dos Cabezas!

Life -- it is a mixed bag, my friends!

 

Happy new year

and 

happy reading in 2023!!!

Smörgåsbord Grazing of the Bookish Variety

Happy holidays with (a few) jingle bells!

 

…There is an “idea” boat that is an emotion, and because the emotion is so strong it is probable that no other tool is made with so much honesty as a boat. Bad boats are built, surely, but not many of them. It can be argued that a bad boat cannot survive tide and wave and hence is not worth building, but the same might be said of a bad automobile on a rough road. Apparently the builder of a boat acts under a compulsion greater than himself. Ribs are strong by definition and feeling. Keels are sound, planking truly chosen and set. A man builds the best of himself into a boat – builds many of the unconscious memories of his ancestors….

- John Steinbeck, The Log From the ‘Sea of Cortez’

 

I wanted to title this post “Smörgåsbord of Books” and have that title in Swedish. Alas! Search as I might for a Swedish translation of the phrase, all I could come up with was books of recipes for a smörgåsbord, and it isn’t tasty food tidbits that is my subject today but a mode of reading that some of us get into from time to time, which consists of dipping into one book for a few greedy pages and then moving on to something entirely different, until one has bookmarks in half a dozen or so books.

 

This happened recently (once again, I should say, because it is no rare occurrence with me) because – I went to a book sale! Oh, more than that! I went twice, on the first day and again on the third and last day. I took my camera, thinking I might photograph the sale, but what was I thinking? Do I forget who I am? Of course I could do nothing but look at books, pick up books, make piles of books, until I had filled – well, never mind how many boxes! 

 

(How will I get all these books back to Michigan? The Artist and I had already accumulated so many books here in Arizona that the question was hardly a new one, and so, by my logic, it mattered not at all how many I added to an already-problematic collection. I’ll worry about transporting my treasures when the time comes.)

Winnowed through and rearranged #1

Before attending the sale, I was halfway through A Southwestern Utopia, by Thomas A. Robertson, the story of an experimental colony established in Mexico in the latter 1800s, based on Albert K. Owen’s principles of “Integral Co-operation,” but from my Thursday morning haul, I couldn’t resist slipping into the first few pages of Washington Irving’s A Tour on the Prairies. Irving made his expedition from the East Coast of the United States to Buffalo, New York, and from there to St. Louis and eventually into what is now Oklahoma, land that had been designated as “Indian country” but was already then, in 1832, being subjected to President Andrew Jackson’s infamous Indian Removal Act of 1830.

Winnowed through and reorganized #2

Thus I was deep in the nineteenth century of North America, with two different books competing for my attention; however, my Saturday’s repeat foray into the gigantic book sale overloaded my table of bookish temptations, and one little paperback in particular, the one quoted from at the head of this post, stole –and broke! – my heart from the very first page. 

 

The Artist and I were both, we had discovered early in our acquaintance, fans of Steinbeck’s Cannery Row and found the character of Doc especially enchanting. So imagine my mingled delight and heartbreak to find the first 70 pages of the little volume in my hands devoted to Steinbeck’s reminiscences of Ed Ricketts, the friend on whom he modeled the character of Doc! And then – he and Ed, a.k.a. “Doc,” are going on off together on a boat! The Artist, a self-described “stone Pisces,” although never a sailor, loved boats! Houseboats and rowing boats, mostly, though he didn’t turn up his nose at a quiet trolling motor. 

River Rat's summer abode

But he would read about any kind of adventure on any kind of boat, from Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat to Melville’s Moby Dick, and I am finding it almost unbearable that he never had a chance to read this book that would undoubtedly have had a prominent place on his shelf of favorites. So when I wake up at 2 a.m. and reach for the little volume, I am reading it for him as much as for myself. 

An Arizona friend had a request, though, and I turned my mind to that on Sunday afternoon. She wanted “something light” for her holiday flight back east to visit family in Michigan. When I found two different Laurie Lee titles at the sale, Cider with Rosie and As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning, my first thought was, Perfect! But then I wondered. Maybe that wouldn’t exactly be my friend’s cup of tea. I know that when she reads novels, she focuses more on action and dialogue than description – in fact, she confesses that she sometimes skips over long passages of description. So with that in mind, I went back to my shelves, and when a little paperback edition of The Borrowers, by Mary Norton, whispered, “Take me!” I thought, yes, that’s a good choice. Still playing it safe, however, I went to my Southwest corner, where Lisa G. Sharp’s memoir, A Slow Trot Home, seemed another likely winner. There! Three books – and all together, in volume and weight, less than many a hardcover novel. This way, whichever book she tries first, if it doesn’t suit her mood, she will have backup. But then, naturally, I had to read the first few pages of both the Laurie Lee books! 

 

It was 1934. I was nineteen years old, still soft at the edges, but with a confident belief in good fortune. I carried a small rolled-up tent, a violin in a blanket, a change of clothes, a tin of treacle biscuits, and some cheese. I was excited, vain-glorious, knowing I had far to go; but not, as yet, how far. As I left home that morning and walked away from the sleeping village, it never occurred to me that others had done this before me. 

    -  Laurie Lee, As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning

Also, since I had a lot of work to do, what with de-acquisitioning and rearranging books to make room for those recently acquired, naturally I was looking into several of those “new” books and couldn’t help reading a couple of chapters in Edmund Wilson’s Red, Black, Blond and Olive: Studies in Four Civilizations, which reads more like a detailed travel narrative than a sociological tract, I’m happy to say. 

Minimally rearranged; cannot eliminate much from this corner.

Tucked away -- but not completely out of sight like the 17 books in a box in the closet!

 

Well, Sunday was a grey day. Overcast. Chilly. I’d thought I might drive to Willcox for fresh-roasted coffee beans but decided to stay put with puppy and private library instead. Sunny Juliet and I did some more “work” on identifying her various toys (rabbit, skunk, kong, ball, bear), although she would have been just as happy or happier to have me throw the tennis ball from one end of the house to the other, over and over, if we were going to stay indoors. 

Not a reader, but I love her!

Allow Me to Recommend a Book For Your Consideration

I have never asked a bookseller for a book recommendation. Disclosing desires and expectations to a stranger whose only connection to me is, in abstract, the book, seems too much like Catholic confession, if only a more intellectualized version of it. Dear bookseller, I would like to read a novel about the banal pursuit of carnal desire, which ultimately brings unhappiness to the ones who pursue it, and to everyone else around them. A novel about a couple trying to rid themselves of each other, and at the same time trying to save the little tribe they have so carefully, lovingly, and painstakingly created. They are desperate and confused, dear bookseller; don’t judge them. I need a novel about two people who simply stop understanding each other…. 

- Valerie Luiselli, Lost Children Archive

As a bookseller myself, I am perhaps oddly cautious about recommending books. I absolutely never tell anyone they should or, worse — God forbid! must read something, but my reticence goes further than that. Even when directly asked for to make a recommendation, I counter gently with a general question of my own, such as, “What kind of books do you like to read?” Because there’s no point in recommending a tome on history or economics to someone looking for light fiction or vice versa. And I cannot think of a single book, no matter how extraordinarily wonderful, that would do as a recommendation for anyone and everyone. Often I’ll go so far as to say that I enjoyed or even loved a particular book and to suggest that the person looking for something to read might also enjoy or even love it because..., giving a few of my reasons, which might or not be reasons for that other person, but I never insist. There is no better way, I believe, to put someone off a book by trying to trap or shame them into reading it. Years ago, a man visiting my bookstore who learned I had not, at that time, yet read Kristin Lavransdatter told me, in these very words, actually (I kid you not!) shaking his finger as he scolded, “You should be ashamed of yourself!” Rather than rushing to mend this fault in my character, I avoided reading the book for years, seeing that horrible man’s scolding face whenever the title came up in conversation or a copy of the novel came, briefly, into my hands. 

No, no, there are books I wish more people would read, but I refuse to present reading them as a duty.

I will, however, if asked — and occasionally without being asked, as I do in today’s post — recommend a book for someone’s consideration on the basis of my own fascination with it. So if your interests and reading tastes and preferences are similar to mine, you might be moved to try it, and if it’s not up your alley at all, for whatever reason, you’ve saved time by finding that out, too. Although I’m not sure, now that I think about that…. Maybe if it sounds like something you wouldn’t care for, I’ve somehow misrepresented it? I certainly hope that won’t be the case today!

…We order four hamburgers and four pink lemonades and spread our map out on the table while we wait for the food. We follow yellow and red highway lines with the tips of our index fingers, like a troupe of gypsies reading an enormous open palm. We look into our past and future: a departure, a change, long life, short life, hard circumstances, here you will head south, here you will encounter doubt and uncertainty, a crossroads ahead.

Brief digression: Years ago I sat at a table in a bar with a group of other graduate students in philosophy, and one of the group, a student from another country (the young man from Spain or Otto from Finland?) asked innocently, of a song playing on the jukebox just then, what "City of New Orleans" was about. Well, ask eight philosophers what anything in this world is about and prepare yourself for a perfect storm of disputation! 

I think of that evening and the philosophical discussion that ensued because Lost Children Archive could be characterized in so many ways. In the most basic and simple sense, it is the story of a road trip, as a couple married for four years, his young son, and her even younger daughter set out on a cross-country road trip from New York to the American Southwest. They travel first in a southerly direction, then in South Carolina begin their westward trek. Their progress is unhurried, as they take time to sight-see along the way. In the car they listen to audiobooks and music but always remain attuned to towns and landscapes they are passing through, parts of the country they have never seen before. Road trip. That’s the simplest, shortest way to describe the book.

Of course, there’s much, much more to it.

Right at the beginning we learn that the man and woman share an unusual career. She is a sound “documentarian” (her word), he a “documentarist” (his word). Both record and assemble documentary soundscapes. They first met on a project in New York, where their assignment was to go about the city and record as many of the world’s spoken languages as they could find. The different names they give to what they do, however, indicate differences in both background experience and what kind of projects they want to take on in the future, differences that put their future as a couple in doubt. Will they remain together or part to go in different directions? That is one of the relationship questions posed by the novel.

At Chiricahua National Monument

Their travel destination is one the man has chosen for a new project he has conceived on “echoes” of the Apaches who lived in the Chiricahua Mountains in southeast Arizona, and the woman has realized that she can expand new work she began with immigrant children in New York to an exploration of the situation of undocumented children along the border with Mexico. In that way, their separate projects can be pursued in parallel, at least for a while, once the family reaches the Southwest. As they makes its way toward what they mistakenly believe to be Fort Still, Oklahoma — learning of their error only when they arrive, which seems strange, because wouldn’t they have seen it written as Fort Sill on their maps? Yet we often see what we expect to see rather than what is before our eyes — the woman begins to see a way in which the separate projects may actually overlap, at least for her. As the man tells the children about the Indian Removal Act,

I don’t interrupt his story to say so out loud, but the word “removal” is still used today as a euphemism for “deportation.” I read somewhere, though I don’t remember where, that removal is to deportation what sex is to rape. When an “illegal” immigrant is deported nowadays, he or she is, in written history, “removed.” I take my recorder from the glove compartment and start recording my husband, without him or anyone noticing. His stories are not directly linked to the piece I’m working on, but the more I listen to the stories he tells about this country’s past, the more it seems like he’s talking about the present. 

art on border wall at Douglas, AZ

And so, the novel is also about American history and American current events, Apache history, history of the Western frontier (and the myth of the frontier and the vanished frontier), about U.S.-Mexican history, the current situation on the border, immigration, and more. With makers of sound documentaries at its center, documents and documentation and archives form another general theme of the book, specific needed documents also being what the immigrant children, at risk of being “removed,” too often lack. And it is about what makes families and what holds them together. There are also two very specific "lost children," two girls, undocumented, that the woman has been asked by their mother to look for in New Mexico or Arizona. 

The main characters are referred to simply as “the man,” “the woman,” “the boy,” and “the girl” throughout the novel. We are never given their names. The woman tells the story -- thus we have more physical descriptions of the other three, more of the woman’s thoughts as they travel -- but we see and hear them all as they interact. The boy, ten years old, is learning to use a camera, undertaking his own documentation of their trip. The five-year-old girl, full of life, brings a fresh perspective to many moments. [Later note: Halfway through the book, the boy takes over for a while as narrator, and later still voices mingle, in ways and for reasons I leave you to discover for yourself.]

All this “about” talk, though, tells you nothing of the spellbinding narrator’s voice. Indeed, it tells you nothing of the spell cast by the the story of the trip itself, deepening with every mile as we learn more of what has brought these people to where they are and what propels them forward into their uncertain future, as we share their experiences along the road. 

For a reader without deep concerns about immigration or border security or lost children (though I ask myself, who could that reader possibly be?), Luiselli’s novel can/could be read for the innovative and yet somehow timeless beauty of the writing. That would be reading at the level of enjoyment. Deeper still, one can read the story (as I’m sure most will) for both its contemporary and historical context. 

Finally, then, a personal note, one that comes very early on in the novel:

Finally, one night, my husband spread the big map out on our bed and called the children and me into our room. He swiped the tip of his index finger from New York all the way down to Arizona, and then tapped twice on a point, a tiny dot in the southeastern corner of the state. He said:

Here. 

Here, what? the boy asked.

Here are the Chiricahua Mountains, he said.

And? the boy asked.

And that is the heart of Apacheria, he answered.

There it is, you see, for me. It all comes together for me, as it seems to be coming together (I am as yet not halfway through the novel) for the woman telling the story: the Chiricahuas (Echo Canyon), the Dos Cabezas, the Dragoons (Cochise Stronghold); Cochise and Geronimo and Lozen and U.S. policy with Native Americans from the beginning of our country's history; the U.S. border with Mexico; immigration and immigrants without documents and the lost immigrant children; where we’ve been as a nation, where we are now, and where we’re going; the sights and sounds and roads and small towns and big cities across this land. It’s all here. It’s all in this book.

north of border

south of border

You might want to think about reading Lost Children Archive. If you love it only half as much as I do, it will be well worth your time.

July 1 postscript: The only part of the book that really bothered me was reading about Cochise being buried at Fort Sill. He wasn't. His grave is not there and never was. Cochise died in Arizona and was buried somewhere in the Stronghold, by Apaches, in an unmarked grave. When the fictional family in the book is on the road, on their way west, they think they are going to Fort Still — they have the name wrong — and that took me aback, but it’s their mistake, and when they see the sign they realize their error, so I kept thinking they would correct the part about where Cochise was buried, too, but apparently the author is the one who misinformed her characters on that score. Did she visit Fort Sill? I’d say not. There is so much Apache history in the book, how did she miss the fact that Cochise died before Geronimo and the others were “relocated” by train to Florida? In biographical/historical terms, it’s a serious error. In literary terms, in terms of the length of a book’s life span, maybe it doesn’t matter quite as much. Who am I to say? Historians, as well as living descendants of Cochise today, cannot have the viewpoint of possible heirs of world literature centuries in the future — if civilization lasts that long.

The thing is, I haven't even begun to describe for you the lyrical beauty and the interweaving of life, literature, and documentation that make this book worth your consideration. Please give it a try!