The long season that begins with the dismantling of Christmas trees and ends with the appearance of daffodils has me feeling wanly vegetal. I am as blank and white and solid as a cauliflower. I am the limp forgotten celery; the greening potato on the counter. But I am reading, anyway, to pull myself out of the crisper drawer of gloom.
First, a tale of chosen solitude: Starting in the 1960s, Tove Jansson (of Moomin renown) and the artist Tuulikki (Tooti) Pietilä spent 26 summers on the rocky outcropping of Klovharun in the Gulf of Finland, a solitary island they claimed for their own after Jansson's plan to live in the lighthouse at Kummelskär fell through. With the help of a seaman Brunström, they blasted away a massive boulder to create a cellar and built a cabin. Notes from An Island compiles bits of Jansson's diaries, Brunström's log, and Pietilä's watercolor and aquatint sketches of the land and sea into a piecemeal record of their time there, mostly concentrated on the building of the cabin, with one marvelous interlude describing the year that the two women went to the island early to watch the sea ice break up. I spent a happy-ish hour or so reading it (there's a sizable excerpt here), beguiled by the bracing charm of Jansson's unsentimental and keen observations of life in such a special place even as part of me winced at the hubris and logistics of humans barging in to a remote wild place. It reminded me of Tomi Ungerer's illustrated journal of live in Nova Scotia—Far Out Isn't Far Enough: Life in the Back of Beyond, another book by a writer of idiosyncratic works for children that made plain that to live with nature is not easy or pretty, even if it looks fun in photos.
It was customary for expedition leaders to publish memoirs upon their return. This was in large part how they made their money, how they paid off creditors, and how they financed future expeditions. In absence of easily accessible natural resources to exploit, stories were what polar explorers extracted from these barren ices capes. And the best stories weren't the ones in which everything went well.In Madhouse at the End of the Earth, Julian Sancton carefully traces the story of this wild expedition aboard the Belgica (think mutiny, teeming rats, creeping scurvy, a leader who steered straight into the ice without telling the crew that they will be stuck through at least one Antarctic winter, and a crackpot plan to saw a ship out of the ice pack) and the people on board (which included the young Roald Amundsen, already formidably strong and plotting polar glory, and the admirably resilient and resourceful Dr. Frederick Cook, who had accompanied the charlatan Peary on expeditions to the Arctic, probably kept everyone on board the Belgica alive, and who would eventually be sent to prison for perpetuating a Ponzi scheme). Unsurprisingly, enduring the long dark of an Antarctic winter in a smallish wooden boat with fractious companions who do not all speak the same language, lacking warm clothes, eating wretched canned food, and occasionally inhaling poisonous gasses is not a recipe for mental or bodily wellness. Sancton later quotes an an official report of the Belgica expedition written in 1904: "One sailor had fits of hysteria which bereft him of reason. Another, witnessing the pressure of the ice, was smitten with terror and went mad at the spectacle of the weird sublime and in dread of pursuing fate."
Dread of a pursuing fate and the mixed consolations of the weird sublime animate Cal Flyn's Islands of Abandonment, a book describing the afterlives of places "where the worst has already happened ... landscapes wracked by war, nuclear meltdown, natural disaster, desertification, toxification, irradiation, and economic collapse." Her project is one of redemption—"how the most polluted spots on earth—suffocated by oil spills, blasted by bombs, contaminated by nuclear fallout, or scraped clean of their natural resources—can be rehabilitated through ecological processes." Parts of this informative book were elating—rapt descriptions of the glorious rewinding of giant Scottish spoil heaps created by mining; accounts of the unlooked-for biological diversity in the abandoned areas of Chernobyl, Cypress, and the Korean Demilitarized Zone; the peculiar story of a herd of cattle slowly becoming wild again on the Scottish island of Swona. But when Flynn turned the focus to humans living on the margins and the book increasingly became a mix of tortured consolations and appeals to hope, my elation curdled into skepticism. It is clear Flyn wants the reader to feel better about the shitty world we have made for ourselves, to come away thinking that humanity is not bad, rampaging as we do over all, to have hope. This strikes me as a sad and probably useless goal, because if we are relying on "feelings" to motivate change, I think we are doomed.
Feelings are a fool's game. Every damn day, people are being led by their "feelings" to ban books and skip vaccines and "protect" children from historical facts and ignore global warming and drive trucks on to bridges and support idiocies of every flavor. And even if you can manipulate people into feeling certain ways, how many actually act on those feelings, particularly when the thing that needs doing is hard, uncomfortable, or unpleasant? Of course, I am just a potato. I have no answers for anything. And who am I to judge what people need to cope with the poisoned future we've set in motion? Let them eat beans and drive Teslas and feel better if they can; let Dumbo have his feather if that's what he thinks he needs to fly.
Flyn's book make me consider the denuded place I call home. Before white settlers came, Ohio was vast ancient forest. People say that a squirrel could swing from tree to tree from Cleveland to Cincinnati. In a blink, the massive trees were nearly all felled or killed by blights, and the wild things were methodically hunted to extirpation and extinction. White-tailed deer were gone by 1904; they only came back due to re-introduction programs in the 1930s and '40s, surging in time to host disease-bearing ticks and coronavirus. And of course almost all of the people who made their home here were pushed out or killed. I think about lost Ohio every time I take a walk outside, the thorough goneness of it. What I experience as homey and familiar is a scarred shadow of what was, and most people here seem happily oblivious to the fact we live in a landscape of loss. They don't have any sense that anything is missing or wrong or weird here.
Maybe these frustrations are part of why I so enjoyed Joy Williams's Harrow. What a mercy to encounter a merciless mind in a merciless time.
I was honored at an environmental conference there, their last one. Loss was the theme. Reflections on loss. Ways to navigate loss. The opportunities in loss. How to make loss work for you...What a bunch of fruitcakes.It's funny, grim novel set in a near-future of ecological collapse, mostly about a small group of old people gathered on the shores of a dead black lake to plot acts of retributive ecoterrorism: "a gabby seditious lot, in the worst of health but with kamikaze hearts, an army of the aged and ill, determined to refresh, through crackpot violence, a plundered earth." They are outliers; the general populace has turned against nature: "Let this fucking land that has turned against us burn, that is the prevailing sentiment."
Reading it is like visiting a surreal Golden Corral serving up a glorious buffet of sentences sharp as glass pitilessly articulating the ample absurdities and horrors of self-centered humanity's various ecological cruelties and delusions. There is an acute awareness of the magnitude of loss thrumming through without any attempt at consolation or mitigation, as well as a teen girl adrift, a ten-year-old jurist presiding over a Kafkaesque court of sins, and a nihilistic EMT. (For an actually wise, insightful review of the book, this is good.) I wasn't sure I'd have the stomach to read it (damn feelings!) but it turned out to be restorative, like drinking a glass of water when you don't realize you're thirsty. Truth is bracing, wherever you find it–and much more fortifying than foggy consolations.
I also waded through the thick Scottish dialect and maddening railway timetables of Dorothy L. Sayer's Five Red Herrings; enjoyable enough, but it did not touch her four greats—The Nine Tailors, Murder Must Advertise, Gaudy Night, and Busman's Honeymoon.
Alf Linden: Tove Jansson and Tuulikki Pietilä fishing near their summer island retreat.
Frederick Cook's photographs of the sailors from the Belgica after surviving the Antarctic winter, from his book, Through the First Antarctic Night, 1900.
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Images:
George Baxter, after sketches by John Macgregor: The Glacier du Tacconay from The Ascent of Mont-Blanc, 1855.Alf Linden: Tove Jansson and Tuulikki Pietilä fishing near their summer island retreat.
Frederick Cook's photographs of the sailors from the Belgica after surviving the Antarctic winter, from his book, Through the First Antarctic Night, 1900.
Feral cattle on Swona, ca. 1985.
Illustration of the Great Hinckley Hunt of December 24, 1818, from Henry Howe's Historical Collection of Ohio, 1907.Farmers in the area of Medina County saw the wildlife as a natural enemy to the safety of not only their families but their crops as well. It was decided that four lines would be formed by over 500 men from around the township of Hinckley, who would then proceed to hunt towards township's center. In one day of hunting, the men killed three hundred deer, seventeen wolves, twenty-one bears, and countless small game. Only one man was injured.
