|
|
Executive Times |
|||
|
|
|
|||
|
|
|
|||
|
|
2008 Book Reviews |
|||
|
|
The Other
by David Guterson |
|||
|
Rating: |
**** |
|||
|
|
(Highly Recommended) |
|||
|
|
|
|||
|
|
Click
on title or picture to buy from amazon.com |
|||
|
|
|
|||
|
|
Friendship Earlier
this summer, for the first time
in eleven years, I hiked in
the valley of the South Fork Hoh, where John William and I went without a
compass or matches two days after our acid trip, and where John William spent
seven years living alone. The trail passes under -Sitka spruces, some more
than five hundred years old, and under bigleaf maples hung with club moss.
You would have to say that, given the presence of these maples, this isn't
quite your classic rain forest but a variation, with the maples thriving amid
cobbles and rockslides and in the glacial till of the river bottom. Rain on
the South Fork Hoh is common, but on my recent walk there was no sign of
rain-instead, it was warm, and.
a little dusty where the silt had baked in the sun on the north bank. Still,
rain remains this region's most obvious feature in any season but summer.
Notable, too, is the silence here, broken infrequently by the winter wren's
trill--reminiscent of a hysterically played flute-at other times by the
ventriloquy of ravens. Then there's the din of the river, fed by snow in the
Valhallas and glaciers on Mount Olympus. In June, the South Fork Hoh runs
gray and milky.. It's in places slow enough to suggest tranquillity, but
elsewhere it's - extreme in its energy and. character. So this is a hike of
disparate feeling, unfolding under a dense forest canopy broken by glades of
arcadian maples. It's also a hike through lonely country, four and a half
hours by car from Seattle, infrequently visited not only for this reason but
because the main fork, a few miles to the north, has a better road and a
visitors' center near its bank. More, the main-fork trail takes climbers to
Mount Olympus, whereas the South Fork Trail just leads to deeper gloom and,
eventually, into a canyon. Sometimes anglers will try the South Fork's upper
stretches; even more rarely, a party of climbers will pass through on its way
to the Valhallas, though I should point out that the first ascents of those
peaks were mostly made in 1978, and none earlier than 1966, which should give
you some idea of their remoteness. When John William and I first went there,
in '74, wandering into Valkyrie Creek Basin and making camp on Valhalla Ridge,
the pinnacles of Bragi, Mimir, Sleipnir, and Vidar North and South had not
yet been climbed, and this wasn't because of their difficulties but because
few climbers had gotten to them. They might have been busy with more
accessible mountains, or maybe they hadn't noticed this part of the map yet,
southeast of the town of Forks. This June, I walked alone on the South Fork
Hoh Trail, three days after the end of the school year, one day after the
graduation ceremony held, because of foreboding skies, in our remodeled gym,
where students hooted as I strode to the podium in order to recite, into all
that space, underneath a raised basketball hoop, "The Road Not
Taken." I have an annual date with Frost at this ceremony, and in the
past have read the poem's well-known final lines with embarrassed
misgivings: "Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— / I took the one less
traveled by, / And that has made all the difference." Will the
narrator's apparent self-regard accrue to me? Will the convocation, seeing
Frost's narrator as superior, see me as superior by association? This year,
after I cleared my throat, a student yelled, "C's all filthy!,"
meaning "Mr. Countryman's rich," and after everyone twittered, I
delivered the Frost. The following day—the first of vacation—I got up early,
filled my thermos with coffee, made a sandwich, and drove away before first
light, and, frankly, despite the things I like about my work, felt glad I was
free to walk along the South Fork Hoh instead of teach. It's an easy journey
in its lower reaches; in three miles a hiker gains five hundred feet, and
after that, where the trail fades to moss, it's a matter of meandering across
soft green flats or treading
on gravel bars near the current. I found myself preferring moss to gravel,
even though there's less gloom beside the water, because recently I've
developed a Morton's neuroma where the third and fourth toes on my right
foot meet, and this makes me wince if I walk too many hours on unforgiving
surfaces like river stones. Pain gives me reason to stop more often than I
once did. I take off my boots. I eat a little something, or shut my eyes for
a few minutes. Sometimes I lie in
the fetal position and try, unsuccessfully, to sleep in the forest. It was in
this posture, in June, that I heard a trilling winter wren and, later, a
raven. The raven's call was like water dripping loudly---like large drops of
water striking a pool. It seemed to have nothing to do with nature;
instead, it sounded like
a plumbing problem. I wouldn't have thought it
was made by a bird at all except that on other occasions I'd
watched ravens make this noise, though even with such clear verification it's
a note that still seems improbable and dreamlike. As does the past,
sometimes. John William and I, finished with high school,
came at the South Fork Hoh from its headwaters, entering the woods at Boulder Creek
Campground, and traversing
the Bailey Range over four cloudless days, finally departing from published routes beneath Mount
Olympus, where at close to eight thousand feet you can smell salt water on
the wind. From there we found our way to the South Fork Hoh—which we didn't
know was the South Fork Hoh, because we didn't have a map or compass, by
intention-or, rather, to where it gathers in a moraine of icy water and
wind-blasted scree, and then, walking in the river itself while the current
wrapped around our legs, and using a climbing rope in watery belays, we came
down from the high country in a canyon. Between rock walls, the falling water
was so loud we couldn't speak to each other. Trees grew from clefts in the
cliffs or lay askew in the current. It seemed to me our purpose was to drown.
Climbing down vertical walls in a river was something you had to be young to
try, a form of lunacy, and yet my friend's face was animated by happiness.
Water dripped from his well-made chin. He'd come all this way committing
landmarks to memory, so that we might, if necessary, reverse our course, and
there was something in this epic mental effort, I saw, that appealed to him as
an adjunct to danger. You
get the sense that Guterson constructs each sentence by carefully deciding
which word will be best, and never settles for anything short of that. The Other
is an unrushed exploration of the choices of two individuals and the
consequences of those choices, bound in a lifelong friendship. Steve
Hopkins, July 18, 2008 |
|||
|
|
|
|||
|
Go to Executive Times Archives |
||||
|
|
||||
|
|
|
|||
|
|
The recommendation rating for
this book appeared in the August 2008 issue of Executive Times URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/The Other.htm For Reprint Permission, Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
|||
|
|
|
|||
|
|
|
|||
