Out of Place No.04: 'The Summer Book' by Tove Jansson

Out of Place is an irregular series about movement and place, and the novels that take us elsewhere, by regular contributor Anna Evans. 

‘Floating on the water like a drifting leaf.’ – Islands and imaginary worlds in Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book.

The sea is always subject to unusual events; things drift in or run aground or shift in the night when the wind changes, and keeping track of all this takes experience, imagination, and unflagging watchfulness.

In a cabin on an island somewhere in the Gulf of Finland, a little girl awakes under a full moon to find herself alone in bed. Perhaps it is the moonlight that illuminates and sweeps across the island to wake her, like the sea covered by ice at its shores. She remembers that she is sleeping in a bed by herself on the island because her mother is dead. She climbs out of bed and looks out of the window. It is April, and the floor is very cold under her feet. The fire is lit and flames flicker on the ceiling. The black ice on the sea mingles with reflections of the room, and its furniture and objects. It appears as if the suitcases and trunks that are lying open on the floor are filled with moss and snow, and ‘coal-black shadow’. There is a dreamlike intensity to the images and reflections that she sees, a mingling of perspectives of inside and outside, so that we are not sure if she is awake or dreaming. She watches their luggage float out in a river of moonlight, ‘All the suitcases were open and full of darkness and moss, and none of them ever came back.’ As she drifts back to sleep, Sophia lets the whole island float out on the ice and on to the horizon, as if she is letting go.

The Summer Book is full of such moments of space and solitude. Ali Smith writes that ‘the novel reads like looking through clear water and seeing, suddenly, the depth.’ The presence of water is a constant and the book is full of images of floating and drifting, sinking and diving. For the inhabitants of an island, the sea is always there, ‘a long blue landscape of vanishing waves,’ an immersion in water. The book contains beautiful and striking descriptions of the sea and the archipelago, such as the arrival of a storm, when the island begins to look small and insignificant and the sea becomes immense, ‘white and yellow and grey and horizonless’. 

Tove Jansson, known mainly as creator of the Moomins, was a writer, illustrator, and painter, who wrote several novels and short stories for adults including The Summer Book, published in 1972. Running through the book is the relationship between a grandmother and granddaughter, and their shifting perspectives, which Jansson navigates with a light touch. They are companions who explore and have adventures together, arguing and playing together during a summer on the island. Recurring throughout are their thoughts and conversations which touch on questions about life and death in a way that is open-minded and truthful, irreverent, and unconventional. 

There is a sense of displacement and loss that comes from those images of the suitcases gliding away, the black ice and the moonlight, reflections of the darkness outside and the fire inside. This moment of grief is never dealt with explicitly, but perhaps a sense of loss hovers at the edges of the narrative. Jansson wrote The Summer Book after her mother’s death and in some ways the book feels like a remembrance of absent friends, and of an intense spirit of creativity and imagination which seems emblematic of her art and personal relationships. Contained within its pages is a deeply held belief in difference and free thinking, and a tolerance for others. It is a book about age and wisdom – ‘you have to come to it by yourself’ - that manages to be both weighty and understated, philosophical and poetic, moving and very funny. 

It is a book that resists characterisation and one that creates space for the reader through its structure: a series of vignettes, of connecting episodes and stories that are interlinked and overlapping. Ali Smith describes how the ‘profound quiet of the setting’ allows space for all the things left unsaid to be heard. ‘Jansson's brilliance is to create a narrative that seems, at least, to have no forward motion, to exist in lit moments, gleaming dark moments, like lights on a string, each chapter its own beautifully constructed, random-seeming, complete story.’

It is a book that rewards re-reading, one of those books in which you notice different things each time you read. Reminding me of a time when I sat down to write, with the book beside me, in the early mornings of a long dark winter. I would set an alarm for 5am and sit with a blanket around me, often lighting a candle, and write for an hour or two when daily life would start to intrude again; the rituals of getting ready for school and work. The flame of the candle was the space I was carving out for myself, and sometimes a glimmer of an idea would surface. Writing back through the lens of memories real and imagined, I started to realize that it was places I was seeking to capture in words, a particular kind of longing.

The Summer Book is rich in place with a deep respect for the natural landscape. The setting is a tiny rocky island in the Pellinge archipelago in the Gulf of Finland. Tove and her brother Lars built a house on the island of Bredskär in 1947, and Tove and her long-term partner Tuulikki Pietilä spent many years together on a nearby island Klovharun further out on the rim of the archipelago, where it is possible to visit their summer cottage. The book is set during a summer, or perhaps a series of summers spent on the island: ‘It was just the same long summer, always, and everything lived and grew at its own pace.’ For me, Tove’s writing, and her descriptions of the island, render a landscape I recognize from summers spent in Sweden as a child, the forests, lakes and archipelagos, the moss and granite rocks. The vividness of that landscape for me feels like the experience of summer, a place I associate with space and light.  

The book describes how these tiny rocky islands are remarkably resilient and self-contained. A small island ‘takes care of itself. It drinks melting snow and spring rain and, finally, dew, and if there is a drought the island waits for the next summer and grows its flowers then instead. The flowers are used to it and wait quietly in their roots.’ The human inhabitants of the island are self-sufficient too and the book is full of reflections on island living and island dwellers. In her foreword to The Summer Book, Esther Freud describes her visit to the island and how amazed she is to find how tiny it really is. She marvels at the use Jansson made of her surroundings ‘investing so much detail in every patch of ground’. Here, she thinks, was a writer who understood ‘the proper magnitudes of our small worlds’.

Although its setting is a tiny island, it is a book that is full of travel and imaginary worlds. When a picture postcard of Venice arrives one day, Grandmother begins to recall her travels in Venice and Sophia is curious about this city built on the water. Tove herself loved to travel and had spent time in Italy. The postcard is ‘the prettiest picture anyone in the family had ever seen. There was a long row of pink and gilded palaces rising from a dark waterway that mirrored the lanterns on several slim gondolas. The full moon was shining on a dark blue sky, and a beautiful, lonely woman stood on a little bridge with one had covering her eyes.’ The image of Venice sinking into the sea fuels their imaginations and they build their own pretend version of Venice, carefully constructing palazzos and bridges and gondolas: ‘There is something very elegant about throwing the plates out the window after dinner, and about living in a house that is slowly sinking to its doom.’

For Grandmother, moments of stillness and of careful observation are meaningful. She observes with care a blade of grass, a fragment of seabird down, becoming entranced by tiny details - the way they are constructed, how they move in a draft of air. This attentiveness to details can be revelatory, and Grandmother knows that she must give these moments her full attention: ‘It was important for her not to stand up too quickly, so she had time to watch the blade of grass just as the down left its hold and was borne away in a light morning breeze. It was carried out of her field of vision, and when she got on her feet the landscape had grown smaller.’ A tiny piece of driftwood, a scrap of bark that she finds on the shores of the island, could become a whole world. ‘If you looked at it for a long time it grew and became a very ancient mountain. The upper side had craters and excavations that looked like whirlpools.’ 

Running through the book is a deep awareness and respect for the living creatures they share the landscape with, for every plant, insect, bird, and animal that dwells on the island. The magic forest is a ‘dense, sheltering wall of trees’ that ‘had shaped itself with slow and laborious care, and the balance between survival and extinction was so delicate that even the smallest change was unthinkable.’ They leave the trees untouched, for to clear a space between them or attempt to separate them ‘might lead to the ruin of the magic forest’. Grandmother sits in the magic forest and carves animals from driftwood that she finds: ‘They retained their wooden souls, and the curve of their backs and legs had the enigmatic shape of growth itself and remained a part of the decaying forest.’ As for the forest, left to themselves, ‘the trees slipped deeper and deeper into each other’s arms as time went by.’

This sense of preservation and letting things be is part of their existence on the island, to leave parts untouched, to not leave too many traces. They are part of a bigger system, a sustainable island environment in which you sense that all things are equal and have their place. The human inhabitants of the island stick to narrow paths by which they wander the different parts of the island, the rocks and to the sand beach, bypassing the carpet of moss and being careful not to step on the frail moss: ‘Step on it once and it rises the next time it rains. The second time, it doesn’t rise back up. And the third time you step on the moss, it dies.’ Their habitation of the island is based on a deep understanding and reverence for the other forms of life with which they co-habit. 

‘The Tent’ is an incredibly beautiful and moving section of the book, in which the story seems to echo through the dual perspectives of grandmother and granddaughter. Sophia wants to hear Grandmother’s stories about the past and about her days as a Scout leader, and what it was like to camp outside in a tent. But when Grandmother tries to put her memories into words, they feel fragile and distant; it is as if everything is gliding away from her. Sophia sets out to spend the night in a tent, and as she sets out on her adventure, the creek where the tent is placed starts to feel like a ravine, distant and forsaken. She zips up the little yellow tent which feels small and friendly, ‘a cocoon of light and silence’. In the long summer evenings, it is still light outside, and she falls asleep. Later, waking up in the night, she finds that darkness has entered the tent and now surrounds her. She can hear strange movements and sounds, ‘the kind no one can trace or account for’. In this darkness she finds she really listens for the first time in her life and notices the feel of the ground under her feet which is ‘cold, grainy, terribly complicated’. In this awareness and surrounded by darkness she has the sense that the island has grown tiny, that it is ‘floating on the water like a drifting leaf’. Returning to find Grandmother awake, Sophia begins to tell, in her own words, what it feels like to sleep in a tent.

As the summer nights begin to fade away, the human inhabitants begin to remove their marks and traces from the island, ‘a place for everything and everything in its place’.  Grandmother feels the island becoming cleaner and returning to its original condition. It begins to feel lonelier and more distant and secret. There is a sense of taking leave, as Grandmother sits by the water at nightfall, watching the passing boats. The Summer Book is full of such quiet moments, where the lightness of Tove’s writing reveals depths. 

***

Anna Evans is a writer from Huddersfield who lives in Cambridge, with interests in place, memory, literature, migration, and travel. She enjoys writing about landscape – nature, cities, and all the places in-between. You can read more about Anna and her work on her website The Street Walks In. You can find more of Anna’s contributions to Elsewhere here.

Leaving Epping

By Michael Shann:

Entering the forest with your back 
to Bell Common, skip out of your other self.
You are not who you were on the High Road.
In two hundred yards, ignore the waymarker.
Despite what they say, you can take this path, 
that path, it doesn’t really matter. 
The forest is a slender creature - 
you’ve stepped onto its tail and will follow 
the supple curve of its spine till you find 
its head fourteen miles away in Wanstead. 
You’ll cross fifteen roads and one meridian.

You might get lost. Enjoy getting lost.
It isn’t easy to get lost these days.
Keep the map in your bag and just keep going,
heading south with half an eye on the sun. 
If you see houses beyond the trees,
turn back and keep the trees about you.

When no one is looking, put your ear
to the rippled bark of a hornbeam.
This is what the past sounds like. And when
you can, dip your fingers in a stream.
Any stream. This is what the future feels like.
And listen: the green factories are working 
overtime. The pulse of the forest rhymes 
with your own pulse. The forest contains you.
You enter it as you enter a poem or prayer.
Read it like a poem, walk it like a prayer.

***

Michael Shann is a poet and printmaker based in Walthamstow, East London, and is a member of the Forest Poets stanza. He has had three poetry pamphlets published by the Paekakariki Press (Euphrasy, Walthamstow and To London) and has recently completed a collection of poems about Epping Forest. Michael works for the charity Carers UK.

Film: Single Use Only by Sarah Alwin and Patrick Wray

This piece started with the music, composed and produced by Patrick Wray at the start of 2023. It seemed a little sci-fi to me. Also it conjured for me a sense of Elsewhere, coincidentally the name of this journal, a place other than here. I thought about the places which evoked the early series Star Trek technicolour aesthetic and for me and these were definitely fairgrounds and seaside resorts. These spaces do have out-of-season periods too where the atmosphere changes.

The photographs are from Blackpool, Llandudno, and Sheffield and were all taken by me during the summer and autumn of 2022.

Last year I posted a picture of a sock I was knitting on Twitter and someone asked if I would photograph the sock turned inside out so they could see how I had constructed it. I felt like that was a really personal request, unseemly almost, like being asked to undress, and I resisted. Here I wanted to show some of these images inside out, from behind, as a kind of concession to the potential curiosity about the process, even though you never asked for it.

This is a companion piece to Surprise View.

***

Patrick Wray is an artist and bookseller based in London. He recently published 'Ghost Stories I Remember' with Colossive Press. For more about his work visit his website.
Twitter / Instagram

Sarah Alwin is a special needs and English tutor and writes about domestic space in South East Asian literature. She lives in Sheffield and co-produces and co-hosts a weekly review programme, Radioactive, for community radio at Sheffield Live 93.2FM.
Twitter / Instagram

Film: Surprise View by Sarah Alwin and Patrick Wray

By Sarah Alwin:

When I come here it is not the quiet of the landscape that I experience but the residual resonances of the city which unsettle my head and my heart. It is a place of outlandishness and of natural and stinging beauty. Its impertinence is overwhelming. This space is full of busyness and clarity and colour. 

My friend Patrick Wray made the music for this piece, knowing that there was noise and strangeness in this. His music glues this work together.

I took these photographs from the end of 2019 to the start of 2023 at Surprise View, a ten minute drive from my home in Sheffield. I filtered the digital images with my printer and scanner and by stitching into them. What used to be a source of frustration (my beleaguered printer running out of ink) has become, for me, a new way of seeing this beloved place.

***

Patrick Wray is an artist and bookseller based in London. He recently published 'Ghost Stories I Remember' with Colossive Press. For more about his work visit his website.
Twitter / Instagram

Sarah Alwin is a special needs and English tutor and writes about domestic space in South East Asian literature. She lives in Sheffield and co-produces and co-hosts a weekly review programme, Radioactive, for community radio at Sheffield Live 93.2FM.
Twitter / Instagram

Statue in Bronze and Andesite

By Fiona M Jones:

The North Berwickshire coast, from Eyemouth along past St Abbs, wanders through hills and cliffs and narrow fragmented shores. The North Sea, cold even in summer, has cut through centuries and rocks and history and lives. Last winter a vicious December storm swept away the whole autumn’s baby seals, and back in October 1881 nearly two hundred fishermen died at sea or capsized on the very point of reentering their harbours. 

History doesn’t say much about it: a major disaster to a string of very small communities. The story is kept now by a little bronze statue in the middle of the village of St Abbs: a group of women and children standing staring out to sea. The sea that had brought them food and now had taken their loved ones away. 

You are visiting St Abbs on a clear and pleasant weekend afternoon, buffeted a little by the wind and out of breath by the steepness of the path; dizzied perhaps by the vertical heights and awed by the wild beauty of the place. You sense a fierceness of landscape and sky, but it’s hard to imagine the time when fishermen battled the unforgiving North Sea with nothing but sail and oar—and didn’t always win. 

St Abbs itself sits in a partial hollow between cliffs that rise up like towers to break the sky and sea. The sea in turn breaks cliffs, serrating them into deep coves and teetering seaward stacks of wind-weathering stone. If you follow the cliff-path to the north of the village, you’ll wind up and down and over and around places accessible only to seabirds and seaweed and seals. 

And then you’ll pass an eerie rock formation that seems to echo something. A small ragged group of people, standing and staring out to sea. It looks like a rough cliff-formed copy of the statue in the village. It has to be coincidence, or at most an example of the way that a scene from nature will feed the inspiration of a sculptor. But you can’t quite shake an impression that the rocks are grieving in sympathy with the almost-forgotten people from a century and a half ago. 

***

Fiona M Jones writes short fiction, poetry and nature-themed CNF. Her published work is linked through @FiiJ20 on Facebook and Twitter.

Blowout Tide

By Joe Labriola:

You shift across the pebble-pocked sand, scouring the pale flaxen dunes for all manner of seaside treasures. Pink spiral shells and sand-smoothed stones are among your favorites, peeking out from the wild patchwork. But among these beautiful bits of beachside bounty, more than all else, you find trash.

You’ve noticed more in recent years. More and more. Harder and harder to ignore. Bleached water bottles and frayed strings sit tangled within the tidal muck. White bags hiss upon the tips of inland reeds, rippling in the cold March wind as if waving, as if wavering, as if breathing their surrender.

You aren’t a vagabond can collector or a hipster hobbyist. But you see. You see candy wrappers and drink caps. Glints of plastic waste simmer in the sunlit brine. You can’t say why you do it. You can’t say how much it helps. All you can say is that it just sort of feels like the right thing to do: picking it up, one piece at a time.

You and your four-legged companion work hard. Harder every time. You are the only two who seem to care, even as the ocean vomits more trash each weekend, seemingly to replace whatever you’ve filled your big black bag with, and then some.

“We just gotta keep at it, boy,” you say, struggling to maintain your balance upon a steep tuft as you pluck battered sandals and cracked milk jugs out of the weeds. “We’re doing good work.”

Your dog just sniffs and stares.

You continue this way for months. Years. You never venture beyond your route from the parking lot to the pier. There’s always plenty to clean right here. Always more and more.

But one day your old dog pants and wheezes. He sighs and slumps. The vet says he doesn’t have long. Maybe days. Maybe weeks. But not long. You know the truth but don’t want to believe it.

“It would be for the best if we put him down,” the vet tells you plainly.

“Not yet,” you strain to say back. “Not just yet.”

The next morning you take your old friend for one final stroll. It’s breezy, breezier than usual. But that’s never stopped you before. It’s slowed you, yes, but never stopped. You follow your usual path. Of course you don’t come close to getting it all. You never do. But you needn’t go far. You still fill your bags, and that seems to count for something.

“Biggest haul yet, boy!” you say through a gust, loading your garbage and recyclables into the trunk.

The old dog gazes back at you with big, shadowed eyes. He tugs on his leash. A weak motion but with conviction all the same. Maybe he knows?

You glance up toward the opposite direction where you’ve never ventured on your weekly cleaning treks. But why not? Why haven’t you ever gone that way? Because you like your way? Because you’re just used to it?

You don’t know such answers. But you smile tiredly and grab one more bag from the car.

You trudge down the beach together into the cutting wind. There’s even more trash this way. Much more. “Won’t get it all today, boy,” you call down to your friend. You continue, smiling as best as you can.

You stop after you reach a sharp bend along the dunes. You almost turn around here where the wind is strongest, rippling your loose shirt. But then you notice a small brushy clearing atop a stout cliff not far in the distance. Perched upon its edge are a group of teenagers: five or six scraggly-haired youths. They lounge in various positions, surrounded by beer cans and take-out food containers. Some of the debris has already trickled down the crumbling wall of hard-packed sand. You watch for a while. One kid hurls a sack of fast food remnants out into the water. Another chucks a half-empty beer at his friend, who dodges and shoves his friend back playfully.

They all laugh freely.

You open your dry mouth to cry out. But the warm wind sucks at your breath. You stare for another moment, and then finally just plop down in the sand, watching the trash-ridden tide rise closer.

“That’s enough, boy,” you say, scratching your old dog’s ear. “That’s enough.”

***

Joe Labriola is an author, podcaster, and professor of Writing and Rhetoric at Stony Brook University in New York. His short fiction usually features some speculative or environmental lens with the goal of helping to raise awareness about ocean plastic pollution. He regularly hosts beach clean up events, presents lectures, and tries to spread awareness however he can. You can most often find him scouring his local shores filming his detrashing experiences—and enjoying a swim once the water is cleaned.

The Bleak and Wild Desolate Shore

By David Murphy:

Along the very tip of the Olympic Peninsula—
harbored by sea stacks,
washed by the ablutions of frequent rain,
and scrutinized by the salmon-keen eyes of fierce eagles
who sit perched with feathers made wet and salty by ocean spray—
lies a beach spliced by piney evergreens and the wintry Pacific Ocean.

It wears as its mantle a cloak of becoming fog:
wide filaments of thick mist wreathe the beach’s shoulders,
narrow wisps tuck into the crevices of teeming pine,
and, like a stole, that pale brume softly embraces
the necks of the majesterial, protruding stones.
The beach’s curvaceous, serene form lies upon its side
with its back to the land, knees tucked up against the tide,
with its stone lips ever kissing the briny, icy waves.
Water is its heart. In the rain, in the sea and spume,
throbs the lifeforce that begets the beach’s growth and decay,
shapes its projecting stone fingers, and creates its austere beauty.

In the night, the wan moon with its grey craters
beams down on sword ferns glowing nearly phosphorescent
and flashes on the bottle-gold eyes of great horned owls.
The moon turns milky the evergreen forest that adorns
the beach’s hips, and the moon tints the bleached driftwood
from day’s ivory to an iridescent alabaster of night.
That moon casts upon the beach’s cliffs a lustre
that speaks of shining rock, and, with its hushing silence,
it seems to make the surf’s voice boom.
With wind, the beach’s trees move sinuously and with susurrant song.
In the moonlight, upon the beach’s damp and footless shore,
lie whips of bull kelp, washed up and drying,
with algae blades like Medusa’s chaotic hair, their origins
in the marine forests of stone mantlepieces and rocky shelves.

The crows cackle madly in their rookery, the wind whishes,
surf roars, eagles scream, seals honk and bark and cry,
clouds morph then rework their hues, tides ebb and rise,
marshy mushrooms rise and rot with the sun’s circling,
the fragrance of evergreen sap freshens the air, salmon run,
gulls bed their island colonies with bones, osprey preen and fish,
glossy baneberries bear fruit like murderous scarlet pearls,
and purple mountain saxifrage color the cliffs.

In antiquity, the Makah resided here
using yarrow for childbirth, red cedar for dugout canoes,
yellow cedar for clothing, spermaceti for candles,
stones buffed by water to high polish and wound
by withy willows for anchor stones, having halibut for dinner,
sea otter teeth and whale fins for art, cherry bark for basketry—
which tightens as it dries—and bones for awls and adze handles.
They used tides and stones and fences to catch fish,
laid white clam shells on the tidal floor for better contrast
to see the fish in their traps. On a crisp, windy spring night
six hundred years ago, the tribe gathered on the damp beach
after partaking in a feast of salmon, octopus, and halibut
for a sacred ritual conducted to send its rowers and harpooners offshore
in a twelve-seated canoe to hunt whale. A chief chanted,
sang, worked the crowd into a frenzy before the night fire,
and when the throng felt most animated, the chief
poured whale oil onto the fire, so that it soared, crackling to
a crescendo, rose like the wave of a tsunami, and
in the dark night the bellowing and shrieking
of the Makah were swallowed up by the forest.

Over this desolate beach there is a kind of peacefulness:
gently lapping waves, the soft pattern of rain,
the rustle of a crow’s wings. It appears desolate, Shi Shi,
here in winter.

***

David Murphy was born on Easter Sunday in a small town in northern Oklahoma.  He attended public and private schools in Oklahoma and Louisiana.  He graduated from Oklahoma State University and Kansas State University, and he studied abroad on scholarship at Lunds Universitet in Sweden.  Later, he worked in Afghanistan during the war as the Administrative Director of a project funded by The World Bank.  He worked in Riyadh, then he won two English Language Fellowships from the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs.  He was posted to Mexico.  He then worked for four years in Washington state government as a Program Supervisor for Title III funds.  Now he lives and writes full time in a small Mexican pueblo near the Pacific Ocean.  

Spring Grove

By Eugene Navakas: 

Winter:

Three mute swans live in this cemetery. We hear one before we see it. It flings itself forward against a stiff, stubborn sheet of surface ice, so fiercely, so indefatigably, that we wonder whether we should help. This is common winter behavior, our phones tell us, not to worry, but the force is so brutal and compulsive, the breast so soft and undefended, that we struggle to believe them. The swan’s face is unreadable. It makes no vocal sound. We’ve seen it in strange postures before⎯once, standing on the steps of a grand mausoleum, gazing into the tomb through a bronze veil of Arts-and-Crafts grape leaves, as if contemplating the past and future and all the world’s lost things⎯but it is, after all, an animal. There is a limit to our ability, however much we may refine it, to understand what it wants.

What we can do is walk. Every Saturday, for twelve months, with our boots we trace trails across 450 acres of hilly parkland devoted to the peculiar mix of feral nature and steady human memorialization. We aren’t the only ones. There are long, snaking funeral corteges for which we respectfully step aside and sometimes halt, arrested by a driving, rhythmic rumble leaking through the windows of a hatchback at the rear. There are joggers, whooshing past in suspended clouds of breath, cheeks flush with wind and cold and the heightened fluency of pounding, reliable hearts. There are even guided tours, groups of five or ten around a single, heavily bundled figure. Sharp mitten-dartings punctuate her recitation, before a familiarly grand mausoleum, about the Canteloupe King within. He grew rich, she says, by using refrigerated rail cars to ship Colorado melons nationwide.

Spring:

In March we turn and gasp at a great blue heron, portent of the coming profusion. It freezes at the lip of a pond, amid sunning turtles, and so do we. The turtles are red-eared sliders, the most popular pet turtles in the United States. They are also among the most damaging invasive species, outcompeting native turtles at great expense to ecosystem biodiversity and even human health, in the form of salmonella infection. The heron is a juvenile, more gently shaded than its maturer counterparts. Instead of blacks and whites, here suffuse more smoky blues and grays, fading as they extend from wing and impossibly sinuous neck to a long spearpoint of orange-bellied beak. The bird stares back at us, sidelong, from the black pit at the center of its banana-bright eye, then flaps up and out over green water⎯gliding, mouth open wide with seeming glee, until resettling, safer, on the far shore. The Eastern Redbuds show early signs of flower, but they’re barely intimations of the riotous, purple future.

Our asphalt path leads straight to May, beneath skies deep as ocean and the soaring, white-hulled wings of turkey vultures. Each branch, now, is fragrant color, sweet with bees. The Higan Cherries weep tears so cream they’re pink, so pink they’re cream, moody and intense as dreams. Around one bend, the stones themselves sprout flowers. Arcing, vibrant, lush cascades of custom, deeply felt bouquets⎯GRAMMY; a can of energy drink; a three-foot baseball; the wreathed photo-print of an ultrasound⎯dazzle gray- and red-granite monuments like stars. Thistles carved in sharp relief peek out behind the floral burst, below all-capped Scottish surnames. Each year, come Memorial Day, Scottish Travelers return to these stones, this parkland cemetery, to mourn and cherish their dead. If you search the digital record, you’ll find a contemptible archive of fear and bigotry, exoticized misunderstanding. An online business magazine tries to link the changing scope and luxury of the annual display to its own broad economic forecast. But if, for a moment, you breathe in the display yourself; if you pause, at respectful distance, on the trip back toward the sliders and the Weeping Cherries; you may feel a sharper, more familiar pang⎯something living, something lost.

Summer:

Summer is a season for the ears. What better place than a graveyard for hungry, roused life to fly shrieking from the ground? Here, specifically, over half a billion Brood X cicadas⎯roughly 1.5 million per acre⎯burrowed into the soil as fresh-hatched nymphs in 2004. For seventeen years, they fed on roots and tree sap less than a foot below the surface, until last week they tunneled up and out. The males broke through first, shedding skins and rapidly contracting tymbals, the clicking reverberators that, in chorus, sync into a jangly, hissing call loud as a motorcycle engine. The females heard that call, and now they’re everywhere. Pavement, grass, bushes, trees. Your car, your hair. Even the chocolate shop uptown, if you’re game for a crunch and can brave a mid-pandemic crowd. Their eyes are ladybugs, glossy red buttons with faint black spots for holes. Or at least that’s what we think their eyes are, until, much later, magnified, we spot the other three. Onscreen, inset like jewels on an igneous plain between submerged red moons, hides a tiny triangular trio. They’re called “ocelli,” simple eyes, and as far as we can see, they distinguish light from dark.

It’s funny how the greenest days, air thick with water, hot with sound, can also feel so full of death. In two short months, the cicadas will have come and gone, their seventeen-year regeneration restarted, today’s lively bodies in stacks like rotting blankets, warming future generations beneath the dirt. One of the most spectacular structures in these half-shorn, half-wild hills is a private Gothic Revival funerary monument built in 1870 in the style of Paris’s medieval Sainte-Chapelle. Its first interment was the English whiskey magnate whose fortune paid for its construction, as well as the transfer of his remains to marble catacombs eight years after initial burial in parts no longer known. On the second floor, above the crypts, sleeps a tall and narrow chapel twelve feet wide but thirty deep and thirty-four high⎯an austere, long-suffering space we’ll likely never see. While even on sweltering, swarming summer afternoons, the exterior remains a popular stage for professional photography, the heavy doors stay locked, the wrought-iron gates chained. Brides and grooms and Instagram influencers grin wide before the retreating flying buttresses of a family in disrepair. Just three Brood-X life-cycles after the building’s birth, the magnate’s granddaughter tried, and failed, to have it razed.

Fall:

It’s not hidden, but it takes a little looking to find the graves of Levi and Catherine Coffin, unmarked until 1902, when a memorial was erected in personal tribute by the city of Cincinnati’s Black population. During the forty-one years from their marriage to the end of the Civil War, the Coffins aided 3,000 enslaved people as they risked their lives in search of freedom. The Coffins’ home in Fountain City, Indiana became known as the Grand Central Station of the Underground Railroad. Levi himself was often called its President. The landmark we use to return to this quiet, shattering spot⎯just seven miles north of the Ohio River and the Mason-Dixon, the old, antebellum border⎯beckons only a few paces away. A fat, trunk-like branch radiates out like a sine wave from the base of a squat tree. It skims briefly above the trimmed, leaf-pocked grass, then dives, submerged, before again swooping back up. So much of Autumn feels between. Leaves turning, half-glorious, half-gone.

Our air comes quick, our tendons groan, as we lean ahead into the circuit’s final stretch. The trees buoy us⎯great oaks and beeches; sycamores; maples; a prodigious, solitary September elm, a national champion⎯as if a god would compete. Pixelated crests of red and orange, green and yellow, each shade just slightly tilted off of true, draw up our eyes to the spotlit, golden-hour sunbursts of hunting hawks. Closer to our feet, a labored scurry. A groundhog galumphs through underbrush and disappears. A frog’s twin bulbs peep up like periscopes above a dollhouse sea, then quickly dive and vanish. Around a corner, flustered scrabbling from a bewildered flock of spindle-legged turkeys, surprised from their leisure beneath the awning of a portable funeral tent. A mermaid rises from a harp atop a bed of kelp and conch and a guardian ring of dolphins. Louisa Lawson fished her out from marble in 1887. Now she decorates the tomb of the world’s once-largest manufacturer of architectural sheet metal. In the end, however, we return to the swans⎯which today, though on opposite sides, all share the same turbid, algal pool. There’s a kind of paradox to writing through the seasons. A temptation to squeeze shape from a cycle that never stops. We turn away and keep walking.

***

Eugene Navakas is a lit. Ph.D. turned TV writer who splits time between Oxford, Ohio and Los Angeles, California. His 2020 crime drama pilot script GALAPAGOS, TEXAS was recognized on Kyle's List here, and his dramedy pilot script EXPECTATIONS won the 2016 UCLA Extension TV Pilot Writing Competition. He also updated and co-performed a 19th-c. folk song about coral, which was featured on a podcast hosted by the Newberry Library in conjunction with his wife's academic environmental research here.

Traces of Wildlife

By Karen Parra:

As we set out on the well-worn trail, I linger behind allowing them space and time. The cadence of their deep voices rises and falls over the crunch of leaves under my feet. Seeing the similarity of silhouettes between my husband and son, I adjust the strap of my camera, feeling content. This holiday has taken on a more festive note with our son’s visit, and reflecting on our gathering promises to be an exciting entry for my gratitude journal. The recent warm spell, a welcome reprieve from the bitter Midwest winter, has given the three of us a chance to walk off the second helping of stuffing and slice of pumpkin pie, highlights of our Thanksgiving feast. I've brought the boys to one of my favorite trails, and from the empty parking lot, it looks like we have the place all to ourselves.   

At this point in the season, and in the quiet of the late afternoon, I expect minimal activity, mere traces of the wildlife which inhabit the woods. The melted snow has uncovered leaves, withered berries, acorn shells, fallen branches, and dark soil to release a rustic, woodsy aroma. Hearing commotion in the midst of a pile of fallen leaves, I turn to see a squirrel searching for part of her cache she buried earlier this fall. Scanning the canopy of trees and finding the tallest one, I wonder how many years ago some squirrel forgot to collect that buried acorn. Or maybe it was an intentional act of the squirrel to bury this one small gift, knowing over time it would become a grand oak offering nourishment and a safe, warm home for future generations. Puddles are scattered along the path, and in the soft mud I can make out paw prints, likely raccoon tracks. Searching the network of intertwined branches above, I count a variety of nests visible now only for the lack of foliage. Off the path I notice several piles of fresh deer scat and wonder where this herd has bed down for the afternoon. As I move on, I realize our trio has been spotted.  From deeper in the woods, I hear the bold screech of a blue jay. Following us, she swoops to a new tree continuing her alarm call.  

It is typical for me to search for signs of nature, noticing individual elements. But, on this particular walk, I consider the evidence of life as a collection of essential living things. With every step I reflect on the significant role of each species, and yet, in a new way I see these as a part of something much larger. Like a cast of characters, each species within an ecosystem contributes to an encore performance. 

I hear the rap-rap-rap of a woodpecker off in the distance and wonder if it is gorging on insects, marking territory, or stashing a seed. In the spring, holes left behind by one species of woodpeckers will be oozing sap which renders a much-needed sugar boost for hungry migratory hummingbirds. Arriving too early to the Great Lakes region, hummingbirds and other pollinators such as butterflies will be unable to forage on nectar from the array of native flowers. Tree sap can be a vital food and energy source to sustain them until the spring blooming. I notice the ceiling of the forest begin to open to the blue sky. I feel a shift in the breeze, a signal we must be getting close. It is as if I’m entering the grand foyer of a mansion, an entryway leading to something unknown, but breathtaking. There is a sense of excitement of what is to come.

Though today the water of the low-lying marsh is dried up, the spine of a narrow wooden bridge stands ready for the wet season ahead. On previous walks, this overpass has served as an observation deck for me while taking photos of passing turtles, soaking frogs, and if lucky, a wading great blue heron or egret. I would focus my Canon on sunbathing dragonflies perched high on the peaks of cattails as they bow and aim their wings toward the warmth of the summer sun. At the perimeter of the wetland, the multitude of pink petals on the swamp milkweed would offer a pop of color to my images. Much to my delight, this plant would also try hard to grace the marshy stench of decay with a lighter more appealing scent. But now, with the quiet of the winter season and in absence of these features, I appreciate the rhythm of the seasons and this time of preparing for spring. 

Stepping off the bridge, my feet sink gently into the lag gravel. I notice trees that dwarf in contrast to those in the woods behind me. Now with full sun, a variety of grasses and shrubs line the sloping trail of sand. As I wander and adjust to the changing terrain, it feels as if I have been transported to a new land. Gazing across this area, one might mistake it for a barren wasteland unfit for wildlife. Exposed to strong winds, extreme temperatures and other harsh elements, what life forms could persist?  However, like the forest and marsh, this too has an assemblage of unique living things which thrive together in the dune habitat of the Great Lakes. 

The native plant Pitcher’s thistle, similar to our resilient frontier pioneers, is one of the first to establish and colonize a novel ecosystem for the good of others to come. This native plant with its heavy seeds and deep taproots can withstand the extreme conditions of an open sandy coastline. The presence of this valuable plant, some might mistake for a weed, is essential for the next wave of immigrating species, both flora and fauna, by supplying shelter, shade, and food. Now, with a more stable habitat, other vegetation such as Houghton's goldenrod can flourish and produce nectar to sustain pollinators such as the rusty patched bumble bee. Monarch butterflies, an iconic pollinator, will pass through during their migration north and east, and the bounty of these native plants will serve as a needed layover in their long journey. In addition, hundreds of migratory birds use this Mississippi flyway as an area to forage and rest before the next leg of their flight. Other birds, like the charismatic piping plover shorebird, make this their final stop to mate and raise their brood. The magnificent snowy owl represents other species who are year-round residents of this robust dune habitat. Each species with distinctive ecosystem functions, fulfilling a niche, and in concert with other wildlife, also lends balance and persistence to the dunes.     

At the top of the sandy ridge, I widen my gaze and scan the horizon. Similar to the illusion of an infinity edge pool, the lake appears never-ending, and the vast, vibrant blue water makes the sky pale in comparison. This immense body of water shifts my perspective, and I suddenly feel small. I try to imagine the size and magnitude of the series of glaciers that, in succession, scoured the land for thousands of years.  As they advanced and receded, the glaciers formed the five Great Lakes, leaving them abundant with fresh water and setting the stage for thousands of miles of dune and coastal habitat supporting an array of species. What they have left behind is stunning and unique.

Lost in thought, the squawk of a seagull pulls me back to the here and now. I notice my husband and son walking ahead and realize the gap between us is closing. Without the protection of the trees, the wind is brisk. I turn up the collar on my jacket, as the three of us come together where the trail fades and the shoreline begins. Taking turns with the binoculars we skirt the water’s edge, and after a time, the sun dips lower in the sky casting our long shadows on the sand, our signal to turn back. 

Once again, I look toward my family ahead of me on the trail. I follow their lead thinking of the future, and in my mind’s eye I see a little one with pigtails, no taller than their knees, stretching out her chubby little arms to hold their hands. Walking together in this place for us, they gently swing her between them.  As I envision this scene, I also notice a walking stick my husband is using to steady his balance, an indication that life moves on.

I stay with this thought, of leaping forward in time, and wonder what changes this natural space will endure and whether the wildlife will be able to adapt. While I retrace my steps on the path, I note the ecosystem as well as the essential parts. To protect the dune ecosystem will ensure a place for endemic species in addition to the wildlife only passing through. Further, I consider how the loss of one species might affect the system’s ability to persist. Would the dune landscape persevere in the absence of Pitcher’s thistle? Could pollinators and migratory birds thrive without the resources provided by this and other native plants? More questions continue to surface as I pass through the marsh and forest ecosystems. However, as I take the last few steps of this walk and rejoin my family, I realize it is the health and preservation of natural spaces like these which are necessary to support the indispensable species of plants and animals.  

***

Karen Parra is a graduate student of Project Dragonfly, an Advanced Inquiry Program offered through Miami University in Oxford, Ohio.  Her work is a blend of her curiosity of nature, academics in biology, passion for environmental conservation, as well as the joy of photography. She lives with her husband in Illinois, near Lake Michigan.

Broken

by Lori Mairs:

Uphill from the chilled dark of the cedars and into the warm light of the desert scape above, it is here on this parapet that the formations of hoodoos begin and end and where the prickly pear cactus grows. In some parts of Woodhaven there's a visual and temperate signature where distinctive bi-zones intersect, where the crossing from one to the other sometimes happens within eight or ten feet. This is one of them. 

The air is still cool from a surprising mid-March storm that thrashed down from an angry black sky. Window-rattling booms of thunder, sheets and strips of lightning ripped beyond the width of the horizon with a wall of hail pelting anything unsheltered below it. 

I like to walk after big weather. Mostly the walk is driven by curiosity and a pull to witness the affects of a wild that can't be tamed. This part of the dry interior is a desert knoll and the highest point of the trail system inside the fence line. It's a sheer drop, sixty feet or so in some places, to the forest floor. Steep-sloped honeyed-grey grasslands are still flattened from a winter dump of snow. On the forest floor, dirt changes from mottled grey-rust to a thick reddish brown where the bio-zone switches from fir-cottonwood to cedar-cottonwood. The first has sparse and evenly-spaced trees while the latter hangs with a thick canopy darkened above and sheltered underneath. I'm eye-level with the tip-tops of new growth fir and pine and I can see a third the way up gnarly old cottonwood right into the habitat holes. If I stand here long enough the squirrels will show up and put on a Cirque de Soleil show, but today is for seeing what the storm brought in or brought down or brought over and what it left behind.

Where the trail sign marks the junction, I go up along to the old flume where fir branches are broken and scattered on the ground from the wind. I reach down, grab and throw, grab and throw, at least a dozen times, winging the fallen ones into the underbrush. I cross over the big fir root that makes a step on the path then dips under the old flume on the far side. This mess of gnarled tin and wood is all that's left of what was once a water carrier for the apple orchards in the Lower Mission. It's corroded in some parts and the wooden frame that held it up at chest height is mostly on the ground and rotting. In a few places the half-hoops of galvanized steel that braced the whole thing from underneath are lying about and poking through dirt especially where the wooden frame and the metal half-pipe are mostly disintegrated. 

Next to this mangled mess of a flume sits the whole story of Father Pandosy, the mission priest who sailed to the “new” world to settle 'untamed' land. Father Pandosy planted food in rows and people in pews. He carved a path for Indian agents and land surveyors who would divide the place into parcels for grazing cattle and growing apples. The good Father and his flock missed the part where the land had no need of taming, the part where the effortless and obvious way in would have been to ask the people already here and thriving. The Syilx people have been in the Okanagan Valley for over ten thousand years, they could have been, and in the earliest times were, in easy partnership with European settlers. Father Pandosy did what new world priests do.  

Sometimes this crippled flume is a memento mori to the courage of the settlers and their child-like trust of the vision that inspired long and treacherous walks across barren lands. It was a certain ingenuity required to survive as they were accustomed to surviving. But on days like today, days after a storm and strange unheralded weather, I only have a desire to want to reverse what was done and untangle it from the mess. I want to clean it all up and supplant this settler mentality with a little grace in a world that once was new and make room for the efficacy to ask about how to be in this place from the ones that already knew. A simple task: ask.

My dad picks me up and sits me on the metal edge of the ship's railing. My mother has the baby and my other brothers and sisters are standing below on the wooden deck and waving. We're all waving. My mother, without turning toward him, asks my father if he can see the Hendersons. He finds them in the crowd and points out their position so my mother can wave in their direction. There are coloured streamers going from the boat to the wharf where a crowd has gathered and when the streamers run out the people on the pier throw toilet paper rolls all the way up onto the boat decks. It's a celebration and wall of grief all tucked into the leaving.

Where the metal and wood lie abandoned along the trail, broken and forgotten, are remnants of ice balls scattered about and melted puddle-dregs of a brutal sky-fall that was the storm. Ice balls and puddles, it goes from one to the other and I imagine it will eventually go all the way back up again, after it's saturated the earth. The plants will cast it off into the wind and the wind will deposit it into particles that will carry it to the sky and become cloud again where it will rain or hail next season. These are the cycles that live in the flume. 

I find a spot where the moisture has stayed well beyond the drift upward and it's here that moss grows luminescent green and glowing. The moss isn't a sign of the broken; it's a sign of the staying and reaping. There are teensy brown umbrella tops lurching out of cushioned pads, miniature capsules and splash cups all gathered into a Lilliputian garden to be savoured for those who venture to squat for the inspection. We don't get close enough sometimes. I want to see beyond the broken today, find the rich and nutritious in the cycles. Today I want hope and somewhere to pull back the tides and erase what keeps tugging at my midsection. 

There's a Maori troupe on deck and they begin to sing “Now Is The Hour” and my mother starts to cry. She is broken. She doesn't want to go on the boat like I do. I can see them both, my mother and my father, because I'm up on the metal railing. I look away and look down. The water below is a long way away and it's black and swirling like a whirlpool. I get scared all of a sudden that my dad is going to forget that he's holding me and if he does I'll drop into the water and be gone forever. I grab at his arm to remind him I'm there and see that he's crying too. A roll of toilet paper whizzes by our heads. The Hendersons have spotted us and they're waving and jumping about to make sure we've seen them in the crowd. The streamers and toilet paper rips and floats away into the whirlpool. The captain comes over the loudspeaker and tells us to cover our ears then the big horn sounds loud and long and low, a final bellow as our ship pulls away into the harbour.

There's always a time after a storm when the little things flourish. The battering of hail has fallen to silence and if my ears were like the deer or bear I'm sure I could hear water being sucked up through the dirt. I move along up the flume until I get to where I can cross over it safely and make my way to a fallen log that's been placed on the hillside for watchers. I come to this spot when I need to have a think. It's mid-March and these are days and nights when I spend time with my mother. Her birthday is March fifteenth, she died March thirteenth. 

As of today I've been a motherless daughter for 24 years. Seems like a long time when I think the words but it doesn't mean I can't still smell her. She would have loved this part of my life. She would have loved these days in Woodhaven at the in-between times of the season and she would have been here talking to the trees along with me. It doesn't matter how long ago something was, what matters is how much it mattered. Sometimes what mattered is the thing that purrs softly and cozies into a place in your heart that gets most remembered. Sometimes the most remembered is the unspoken agreements and all the un-saids that find a harbour in my midsection waiting it out for after a hail storm. March bites like that for me. It reminds me of the broken parts. 

***

Lori Mairs (1961- 2021) was born in New Zealand and lived most of her life in British Columbia, Canada. From 2002- 2017, she lived in the forest as the caretaker of the Woodhaven Nature Conservancy in Kelowna, British Columbia.  She completed her BFA and then an MFA in Interdisciplinary Studies at the University of British Columbia Okanagan. She was a sculptor and installation artist, using natural materials as well as fabric, metal and beeswax in her work.  She also participated as a lead artist in several eco art projects in Kelowna.  In the last few years of her life, she began writing essays and poetry.  In all her work, her primary concerns were the relationships we have with each other as humans and the deep and often reaching relationships humans have with the more-than-human world.  For many years she wrote a blog, “The Land of 7:30.”  She also practiced as a personal growth consultant until her untimely death.  She is greatly missed by her friends, family, clients and fellow artists, as well as the neighbors and other-than-human beings of Woodhaven where she wrote and made art for many years.