From the first pages of this epic debut novel by the author of the "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek," we are thrillingly dropped into a time that stands in exact opposition to our own. We living at the end of this millennium have been made acutely aware of our imposition on a planet we've all but used up. Annie Dillard's characters, settlers opening up the Pacific Northwest in the middle of the 19th Century, are conversely faced with abounding nature--dense, treacherous, daunting and capricious--that begs to be thrashed through, cut down, burnt out, brought to heel by these new arrivals, who view this unfettered landscape as both home and adversary.
Dillard focuses on the settlement of Whatcom and its environs on Bellingham Bay, high up in the northwesternmost corner of the country, a territory that will eventually become the state of Washington. Here cedars and firs choke the ground, grow so thick it takes a day to walk half a mile. The early white settlers--the Rushes and Fishburns and Sharps--come from the East and South, depleted by their long and arduous journeys. Ada and Rooney Fishburn have already lost a child along the way; their boy Charley "fell out of the wagon and their own wheels ran him over, one big wooden wheel after the other, and he burst inwardly and died."
Soon others drop away--Lura Rush in a carriage accident, her oldest boy of "the putrid sore throat." Rooney Fishburn falls dead on his spade in a well hole when he hits a pocket of lethal gas rather than the water he was looking for. Chot Harshaw is cut in two by a fall of slate from a coal mine roof. "Death mowed the generations raggedly, and out of order," the book's narrator informs matter-of-factly, often noting the passing of main characters in a mere phrase. "It was in May that the Sharp family met with an accident; they drowned, except for John Ireland." Later, "It took three months to clear the logjam on the Nooksack and Eustace Honer drowned doing it."
It is in great part by death that these living define themselves; they can't help but be aware that time might run out on them at any moment. Living in the constant presence of peril brings on an exhilarating adrenaline rush. For both the men and the women, this is a great adventure, living on the brink of the new, making it up as they go along, living utterly in the present because so little of their past applies. Every day must be figured out from scratch.
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