The Trials of Puget Sound

...Sometimes at supper she knocked on wood with a knuckle or pointed a wedge of pie away from someone's heart...

...To record 50 years of so many people's lives, Dillard has interspersed her scenes of action with passages that seem straightforward summaries by the author...

...With the benefit of 20th-century freedoms and insights, Dillard brings to a past community her remarkable ability to select the decisive detail that makes it vividly alive today...

...Clare Fishburn, achiever and likely politician, meets a threat that not only makes his life a day-to-day gamble but subjects it to questions almost too terrifying to face...

...That evening, once John's elders think he is asleep, he listens to his grand father describe the tortures Indians inflict on members of unfriendly tribes...

...For measles, she fed her patients a roasted mouse, and Ada herself had seen it work in Clare...

...We are aware from her memoirs that she has lived on an island in Puget Sound, looking and listening...

...Dillard must have buried herself in libraries, pursuing old letters and diaries...

...She treated ailments and injuries in an orderly sequence that began with whiskey...

...There they "got to spreeing sometimes and pronouncing the preamble to the Constitution...

...She sees him matter-offactly as "a right big boy for five," reflecting that "life suited him very well, and he found his enjoyment...

...she simply leaves them for the thoughtful reader to ponder...

...they went down stiff and upright in their filled gum boots and soaked skirts...

...they stood dead on the bottom and swayed with the currents like fixed kelp, his mother and father and sisters and brothers standing in a row on the ocean floor...

...This will hardly surprise readers who know Dillard's Pulitzer-winning Pilgrim at Tinker Creek or any of her other seven volumes of memoirs, essays and poetry...

...She prays to God for strength to bear this affliction, unaware that beneath her prayer she risks another, to His better nature: "that He was finished with the worst of it...

...When a frenzy of cruelty seizes almost everyone, with even the Socialists joining the mobs that brutally expel the Chinese workers who had built the railroad through seemingly impassable mountains, Clare's still-carefree spirit saves him from the depth of disillusionment suffered by his friend John Ireland Sharp...

...Eventually he would charm June, a debutante from Baltimore, and become a happy husband and father, surviving one boom and bust brought on by gold-crazy hordes who made the town a way station for Alaska, then another due to false hopes for the major Northern Pacific terminal...

...She decides "she would let herself love him for that virtuous, uncomplaining restraint men have—Rooney had it, too, and even her grown boys, a kind of nobility, valor, hitching up their britches and keeping on-and she would...

...When the walls crushed the steamer," John thinks, "the hissing whirlpools in the current would carry them under the sea...

...We know how the Puget Sound fogs and storms and sunrises stirred her imagination...

...To prevent pneumonia, she plastered rib cages with chopped-up onions...

...Even when Dillard steps back to observe from outside, she seems really there, close by...

...Although he was slow to anger and quick to forget...

...This "jolted John Ireland's habitual studiousness and made him sit up and take notice...

...Here was Lura Rush ready-to-hand in the lodge with real medicine in a grass basket...

...she had turned down a hundred suitors...

...As the old man talks he seems as alien "as an immortal bear speaking from unimaginable caverns of experience...

...Some of Dillard's homesteaders encounter perils less tangible but finally more staggering even than a family drowned, children caught in a burning house, or illness that all the wisdom of devoted Indian friends can't cure...

...If whiskey failed she used quinine...

...Yet how to account for the immediacy she gives to action that seems as far from her experience as that period from today...

...There yellow crabs as big as their faces would eat them alive, and their bones would swirl on forever...

...Axel Obenchain, who found the drifting boat, takes John into his island home...

...She would step out of her cedar-shake shack (like those of the early settlers) to waylay and chat with passing neighbors...

...No suggestion of Clare's danger occurs until Book IV of the seven differently focused segments that carry on the story...

...These psychological undercurrents surge well below the constant physical action...

...he enjoyed some smart slinging, and bested more often than he was bested...

...Few of the fellow citizens mourning Eustace Honer, a respected scientific farmer, may have known that his career had grown out of an Eastern rich boy's almost comically questing discontent...

...Beside either rail, near enough almost to touch, the pitted rock walls, grown with green ferns, firs, cedar, and twisting red madrone trees, seemed to converge...

...pay him back for making her feel shot up like a Chinese firecracker, and show him the tenderness she wished she'd had the sense to pile on Rooney...

...She must have drawn from them some of the fishermen's lore in The Living that makes us familiar with the catching of salmon, the vital currency of gifts and commerce among the whites and Indians...

...Dillard also has an uncanny talent for giving her language the flavor of the personality whose story she is telling...

...The first one shows him in 1855 on the boat that has brought the Fishburn family up the coast from the end of their months-long cross-country journey behind plodding (and often failing) oxen...

...During the next 50 years, Clare finds enjoyment in his own blithe way until the threat shocks him out of all insouciance...

...her own striking insights appear really to belong to the character...

...Pearl was the first and only girl he courted, and she stormed his heart, in the company of the scented forgotten land and its skies.' It takes more than an adventure tale, even one vividly based in history, with cougars sleeping on the roof and Indians coming freely in the door, to hold literate readers today the way 19th-century novelists held theirs...

...When John Ireland Sharp comes back to his early surroundings from his Eastern education, he sees Pearl Rush play Titania in Midsummer Night's Dream...

...This happens in a narrow gorge...

...The day of moment-by-moment tension ends with success, and only one life lost...

...Norval possessed some sorry habits for a man of God-as if he were an ordinary man—but he had some sand in him, and he seemed easily pleased with her, so that his big old hairless forehead colored up and he pointed his pointy face at her wherever she went...

...A nimbus of glints shone around her golden head and moved when she moved, and her pigtails swayed...

...When the settlement's great Indian friend, a chief curiously named Chowitzit, seems about to die, Ada arrives to find at his bedside the woman who serves the white community as doctor, dentist, nurse, and surgeon...

...here she shares her way of looking around her...

...Meanwhile she hears Clare singing beside her on the deck...

...On a morning soon afterward, John comes from collecting eggs in the marsh rye behind his house to learn that his father's boat has been found empty, except for two pigs the family had planned to sell on a nearby island...

...Now the rock walls slid back over the stern and delivered them into the wide and lighted world in perfect silence, in a glassy calm, on water hushed and pale as the sky...

...The reader will slowly become aware that death may not be the greatest threat to life...

...Reviewed by Hope Hale Davis Author, "The Dark Way to the Plaza" Rooney Fishburn, the 1850s homesteader in Annie Dillard's time-sweeping first novel, liked to have his wife Ada read Scripture to him when he came in from a day cutting down the tremendous fir trees of their Puget Sound settlement...

...Those who have explored literary theory with her in Living by Fiction and felt the intensity of her concentration in The Writing Life, appreciate how seriously she takes her responsibility as a writer of her time...

...As a young boy taken along on a freezing, exhausting mountain trek to find a passage for the prospecting miners, he comes upon a man barely breathing who has been staked to the ground...

...She was 30 years old...

...She leaned into the lamplight to pinch spilled salt and throw it over her left shoulder...

...Some years after the day Ada sees Rooney die in the well where his digging released a fountain of lethal gas, she considers marrying again...

...We learn from women not only the secrets of making butter and growing hops but of winning essential help from the original owners of the land, the Lummi and Nooksack Indian tribes...

...As a youngster he regularly sails south 90 miles with his brother Gleason to the new town of Seattle to visit a bordello...

...For the past week they have seen only unbroken forest?the rough edge of the world," his mother Ada calls it, as she mourns silently for three-year-old Charlie, who died under the wheels of the covered wagon...

...The goodness of the Lord...

...In her collection Teachinga Stone to Talk, she describes a total solar eclipse...

...The adopted son repays the family with such hard work that he replaces their own decamping Beal, a sadistic bully who has been John's schoolboy nemesis...

...But no 19th-century novelist could have given quite what she gives us here...

...Anyone who has shared the moment when she sees the sudden dark cloud coming straight for her at 18,000 miles an hour will understand the fear she evokes in this novel when a different kind of shadow falls across a path...

...In the years ahead the Fishburns and their neighbors would begin to wonder...

...Research can often leave marks of dusty fingers, but not with Dillard...

...Sharp, one of the more complex of the scores whose lives Dillard records, carries in painful quiet the all but intolerable memories of his childhood...

...We ask a writer, whether describing scenes of disaster or comedy, the humdrum or the harrowing, to find words that somehow lift the spirit...

...He was 22 years old, too young to think of marrying, but he lost his head...

...he noticed Pearl Rush...

...In that raw wilderness a man's courage, work, hard-won skill, and even piety might not serve to keep him long among the living...

...And Dillard, in The Living, without the sense of effort suggested by some of her earlier writing, brings this off...

...They tangled their fists with roisterers, bamboozlers, and buffalo hunters...

...Dillard does not explore such connections...

...The boy's heart pounded in the racket while the balance of forces shifted...

...To Dillard a logjam is no mere metaphor: We take part in the town's united struggle, spurred by a strong woman, to break up a real one that has long blocked profitable traffic...

...She continued, when necessary, down through camphor and, finally, turpentine...

...On John's boyhood trip to map the ill-fated route for the Northern Pacific, the group goes partway by side-wheeler through Deception Pass, "a narrow tickle on the coast between cliffs, where the current overpowered steam engines...

...But this is authorial voice with a difference...

...We watch Clare teach Eustace Honer how to avoid the need of sawing an immense tree by using the fir's own resin to burn its core and bring about its perilous fall...

...Later, as a mysteriously twisted intellectual hermit capable of lashing a faithful Chinese worker to a wharf piling so that the incoming tide will drown him, Beal becomes Clare Fishburn's nemesis in a far more serious way...

...Perhaps she found fragile stray issues of the newspapers that an incoming editor would suddenly begin to publish during a boom, then suddenly abandon when the bust came, taking the printing press with him...

...When Senator Randall comes west after the drowning of his son-in-law at the logjam, he takes a walk: "The plants by the roadside bore white smooth berries, or pink hairy ones, or thorned leaves or glossy ones, and looked, among the ferns and moss, like trial plants of the beginning world...

...We ask not only for new insights but new language...

...Her characters haunt us when we have to break off, leaving us with a sense of another world to which we hurry to return...

...A line forms to pass all the wood, and finally sides of bacon, to stoke the fires...

...Though in giving the first glimpse of Nan Obenchain she reports only what anyone at the time could have observed, she tells by choice of detail almost all we need to know to understand what happens to Nan later: "Back and forth from the stove moved young Nan, graceful and listless...

...Dillard's chronicle of this struggle offers all the old-fashioned satisfactions of the 19th-century novel...

...It was a pity Chowitzit was superstitious...

...Only Annie Dillard could have entered a child's imagination to see the picture that would stay with John always...

...I believe that I shall see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living,' she read, and Rooney believed it too...