Living in the Natural World

“A thin, black cloud appeared on the horizon…rapidly filled the sky until not one spot of blue remained.  Hundreds of thousands of snow geese, flapping, honking, and gliding, covered the world…Perhaps a half million white wings flared in unison, as pink-orange feet dangled down, and a blizzard of birds came in to land…the wet meadow filled until it was covered in downy snow.“

Kya, the main character lives there, by herself, in an isolated shack. We first meet her when she is six, on the day she is abandoned by her mother, left to live with her older siblings and drunken brutal father. One by one they all leave until she is left alone as a child of ten.

Kya turns to the marsh for support and sustenance. She digs oysters for food, talks to the social flock of gulls for company, learns to pilot the left-behind motorboat into its interior. Naturally drawn to the wildlife of the marsh, she immerses herself, learns the ways of its inhabitants, and is nurtured. “The sun, warm as a blanket, wrapped Kya’s shoulders…whenever she stumbled, it was the land that caught her…Kya laid her hand upon the breathing, wet earth, and the marsh became her mother.”

Few people help her but those who do, become true friends. There is the boy, then young man, who teaches her to read. There is the proprietor of the general store who sells her fuel, and his wife, people who are black and marginalized like she is.

But there is a dark current that reaches her. In the small town at the edge of the marsh, a man has been murdered. Slowly, we learn of a connection between him, young, handsome, popular, and Kya, the strange, shunned, maturing marsh girl. Her accusation of his murder is the focal point of the story.

In her book, Owens makes worthwhile points: the importance of the marsh, the difference kindness can make, the tendency of most to offer indifference or ostracism to someone who is unusual. But these ideas play only supporting roles. 

This is a novel that must be read to the last page. What is the main theme? Why does Kya handle the situation the way she does and is she right to do so?  Because of the ending, the reader is left pondering what the book has to say for a long time after the reading is finished.

Delia Owens wrote this, her first novel, which has been on the best seller charts for three years, when she was 70. She had returned to the US after living in isolated areas of Africa for twenty years with her husband. They were both heavily involved in conservation issues and are connected with a story that says an elephant poacher was mysteriously and justifiably killed, his body dumped in a remote lake. An interested reader can find seeds of Crawdads in Owens’s life story.

This is what makes reading, especially with others, so much fun. The same book is different for each person. We bring our individual knowledge and research, likes and prejudices, and combine them with the printed words to make our own personal novel.

This novella starts beautifully with descriptions of a successful Iowa farm in all of its blooming fertility. A young husband and wife are waiting at the railroad station for her sister to arrive from Scotland to live with them. The wife has a bit of a puritanical streak; the husband does not.  The sister who comes is young, lively, and fun.  After a very short time, the predictable happens and sister is pregnant. 

How the three of them deal with this, in a time when religion and reputation are paramount, makes up the rest of the story.  They continue to live together and just don’t speak of it. The results of buried emotions are so depressing I could hardly believe that no one, once, ever, was forced into screaming and shouting and exploding the silence away.

Although Roberts does talk about rock art, it is in the context of its location.  He is drawn to the art, granaries and artifacts found on the faces of sheer almost unscalable cliffs.  “Genius climbers” he calls the old ones who lived in the Four Corners of the Southwest.  Why did they choose inaccessible locations and how did they get to them carrying tools and maize when he and his friends could barely reach them using modern equipment?

Roberts is interested in the Ancestral Puebloans, formerly called the Anasazi, who apparently disappeared in the 1100’s and left these tantalizing clues behind. Where did they go – and why? His book travels from information directed towards someone very knowledgeable about the early Southwest inhabitants, to personal stories about climbing trips with friends and their children.

One chapter explores the intellectual theory of the Chaco Meridian.  An archeologist realizes that three famous ruins, Chaco, Aztec, and Paquimé are on a line of longitude and posits that this was done on purpose.  Others point out that Europeans couldn’t measure longitude until the 1700’s when the chronometer was invented, and these SW ruins are hundreds of years older, with no chronometers in sight. 

On the other end of the spectrum is a chapter about climbing with friends to revisit a beautiful 1500-year-old basket preserved in a desolate canyon. He discusses whether the “outdoor museum” concept is a good one and whether artifacts should be left in situ rather than removed to languish in drawers in museums.

Roberts explores the many conflicts among academics who theorize about these pueblo dwellers. Also the conflicts between them and the ranchers who first raised cattle in the area and had their own ideas. Also the conflicts between all those theories and the oral histories of today’s natives living in the area. The reader is left with an understanding of how difficult it is to know anything definitive about ancient people who did not have a written language. Unfortunately, the petroglyphs are not it and are as obscure as everything else.

David Roberts died last summer. In his obituary the NYT described him as “an accomplished mountain climber with a literary gift to match…who turned adventure writing into art.”