Then I read a hiking book
that absolutely nailed it. Wow. The only problem with books this
good is that they end too quickly, and this one is short to begin
with. Halfway to the Sky by
Kimberly Brubaker-Bradley is a hiking book, but I bet people in the
multiple sclerosis community think it's an MS book with a hiking
bent. I keep complaining about books where people go hiking because
they have Problems and Pain and Tragedy and Loss, but Halfway
to the Sky makes it work. (I
may not be complaining about those books in my blog because I always throw
them against the wall after one chapter, Cheryl Strayed.) The
twelve-year-old protagonist Dani, short for Katahdin, is young enough
not to know better than to walk two thousand miles to solve her
problems, while still being smart enough to do her hiking homework.
Dani's brother died and her parents divorced and everything is
horrible and she's twelve, and she's such a damn twelve-year-old in
the book, but she pulls it together. A twelve-year-old can research,
and train, and buy boots. A twelve-year-old can choose a camp stove and forget matches.
Dani
leaves a message for her mom saying that she's going to her dad's
house and gets herself to Springer Mountain, start of the Appalachian Trail.
She's twelve. People give her funny looks. She tells a
seventeen-year-old that her parents gave her permission to hike the
Trail alone, of course she does. He's young enough not to question,
and they hike together until in the shelter on the third night
Dani's mom wakes her up with a flashlight beam in the face and says,
"What the hell do you think you're doing?"
Katahdin
and her deceased brother Springer are products of thru-hiking parents
who met and married on the Trail, but in recent years have become
boring. Dani responds to her mom's, "Why are you hiking the
Trail?" with a, "You hiked it." Dani can
hike the Trail but she's
under-prepared, twelve, and formerly alone. She begs and whines and
invokes her brother's death and acts like a stubborn toad, and her
mother agrees that they can hike on twenty miles to the next town.
They do, mom in tennis shoes and jeans, sleeping in one bag with her
mom's coat thrown over the gap where the zipper can't close. Dani is
unsatisfied in her little twelve-year-old heart, but she also
understands, and her mom reiterates, that she was terrible for
running away in the first place and they can't go farther. At
Suches, Dani's furious dad picks them up and gives Dani a piece of
his mind, though she's entitled to be as angry as she is with him
because he left her mom and has just remarried a now-pregnant woman
she doesn't much care for. And mom says, "I've been thinking."
Mom's
job at the bank allows sabbaticals of up to three months. Mom takes
two; it's asking a lot considering that she already took off stacks
of time for Springer, and for the funeral, but Dani can have two
months. They can go to Catawba but that's it.
Nothing
earth shattering happens on the hike, of course. If it did, we would have a
rescue book, not a hiking book. Dani and her mom mostly keep to
themselves. There's a dearth of over-forties and under-eighteens on
the Trail. Dani and her mom hang around with Vivi, a retired breast cancer
survivor, and Trailhead, who's taking a year off from teaching. They
meet when Dani is hanging the food at a campsite.
"'I'll
have to take your photograph," he said. "I teach high
school English and a self-sufficient adolescent is something of a
miracle to me." He bugged me, and I guess mom could tell.
'Self-sufficiency
is made, not born,' she said."
But
Trailhead sticks to them. When he blows his ACL, Dani helps carry
him down the mountain and knows his loss: he won't make it to
Katahdin and she won't either.
Dani
and her mom get into the trail routine. The "eat some oatmeal,
witness the miracle of God's creation, tape a blister, eat some
peanut butter" of hiking, and then they start having time to
talk about Dani's brother who died that winter. Vivi helps. Sullen
Dani isn't wandering around sharing the tragedy of her life with
strangers but mom is. Vivi says, "I'm having trouble getting a
sense of Springer as a person." Dani resents her mom because she
works too much, because she hasn't been there, because her dad left,
because her brother is dead. There's an insane only-in-America
conversations about health insurance. When Dani and Springer were
younger, mom got a job at the bank just to bring in some extra money
while they were saving up for the house, and the bank had better
insurance so the family switched. Then Springer was diagnosed with
muscular dystrophy. You can't buy insurance for a terminally ill
child, so mom kept working. Dani makes peace, and with Springer not
watching her soccer games. She says, "Why wouldn't you let him
go to my soccer games?" and mom says, "He didn't want to
go. He was embarrassed. He hated it when people stared at him."
When
they meet some local kids camping at a shelter, Dani's flattered that
they're impressed because they're doing a seven hundred mile segment.
They do. They make it. Dani counts herself as one of the AT hiker
drop-outs for now, but she has years. She'll go back. Meanwhile,
her dad's new child is named Harper and she and her take time to breathe. I don't know if I've done justice
to how splendid this book is, but I can't name a truer book about
hiking. Even Bill Bryson's classic
A Walk in the Woods
doesn't pull you into the act of hiking like Halfway to the Sky. Feet,
boots, stoves, water, trees, wind, pack weight, blisters.
Unless
you want to stay home and get married. Amelia Alderson Opie wrote
Adeline Mowbray in
1804, partly inspired by her friend Mary Wollstonecraft's
extra-marital union with a minor radical. The subtitle The
Mother and the Daughter
references Adeline's submission to and rejection by her mother, which
takes up less page space than the scandal but weighs on Adeline's
soul. Mrs. Mowbray is a self-educated woman of no discretion: "For
her, history, biography, poetry, and discoveries in natural
philosophy, had few attractions, while she pored with still
unsatisfied delight over abstruse systems of morals and metaphysics,
or new theories in politics." Her daughter Adeline is early
inducted into the theories of these radical new men, and, taking the
season in Bath, the mother-daughter pair meet one of the authors they
so admire, a Mr. Glenmurray, who at nineteen penned a tract against
marriage which has rumbled him out so that he leads a lonely
existence on the margins of high society while trying to recover from
consumption. Adeline's mother, being socially obnoxious and out of
touch, visits Mr. Glenmurray and allows Adeline to socialize with
him, shocking though it is to the better inhabitants of the town.
They also make the acquaintance of Sir Patrick, a scoundrel, and it
is in this company that Adeline announces that she agrees with Mr.
Glenmurray: Marriage is wrong. A tumult of events follow: Sir
Patrick says dishonorable things, he and Glenmurray duel even though
Glenmurray wrote a tract against dueling, Mrs. Mowbray marries Sir
Patrick, Sir Patrick assaults Adeline, Adeline runs away and into
Glenmurray's arms, Mrs. Mowbray disowns Adeline, and Sir Patrick dies
on a boat. So Adeline and Glenmurray are together, friendless, in a
town by the sea waiting to make the crossing to France, when, walking
in the park, they run into Glenmurray's old school friend and his
wife and sister. The school friend is charmed by Glenmurray's dear
wife, and shocked when Glenmurray writes him a letter explaining
that Adeline is not his wife at all and that they have fled in the night.
This happens again in France and the friend who has met Glenmurray
and Adeline walking together feels so deeply that allowing his
sisters to meet Glenmurray's mistress has besmirched their
honor
that he wants to fight a duel with Glenmurray, but Adeline and
Glenmurray have fled again. Adeline's maidservant quits and can't
find a new position because her old mistress is a mistress. A Quaker
woman agrees to hire the maidservant and tells Adeline about the wages of
sin at the same time. These passages made me take an inventory all
the dishonorable women I know, because speaking or otherwise associating with a dishonorable woman dishonors even the most honorable woman. Fornication, of course, is not
limited to the marital, as it were, act, but includes the suspicion
of such an act, or similar acts, or letting a
certainly-not-a-gentleman-friend sleep over because he respects
boundaries. I know who's been doing that lately. The shame! From now on I can
only talk to fifteen-year-olds, and Laura because she's
married to a girl.
Glenmurray
dies willing to marry Adeline, but Adeline believes in Glenmurray's
principles and won't call his bluff. On his deathbed, he implores
her to marry his cousin Douchemurray and she concedes for his sake. The marriage is
an unhappy one, as husbandface has jerky habits that Glenmurray never
noticed at Thanksgiving. He doesn't respect Adeline and Adeline,
rather than realizing that she was right all along and 1804 marriage
is a ridiculous institution, takes her husband's treatment as
punishment for her former sin. Their daughter is born and he's
disappointed. When business calls him to Jamaica, Adeline realizes
the ideal of a "protector" six months away by sailboat and lets him go. But worsening health and a series of
mix-ups cause Adeline to lie dying penniless in a cottage near the
estate where her mother lives. When the Quaker woman is careening
down the road in a runaway oxcart quite nearby, Mrs. Mowbray grabs
the reigns. Finding that they are concerned with the same wayward
woman, Adeline's mother having long forgiven her, they search for
Adeline and find her in time to watch her die. Because that's what
happens when you break the rules: you die.
Adeline
Mowbray
expands and contracts randomly. Big events happen in tiny
paragraphs, minutes of conversation take pages. Sir Patrick dies
mysteriously on a boat and one assumes he'll be back for a final
sword fight, but he stays gone. Despite that, and the crazy moral
backwardness, Adeline
Mowbray
was a good read. How often does one get any insight into the life of
a free-thinking woman in 1804? The author refused to articulate
Adeline's arguments against marriage, and arguments against marriage
are different nowadays, but Adeline's arguments for marriage at the
end of the book translate to problems of our time. Marriage for
protection and control is a terrible thing and one weeps at the
hardship Adeline went through because she did not succumb to a
half-hour ceremony mandated by the Church of England to happen before
breakfast. A few hundred years before, marriage was contracted
between two individuals and the church had nothing to do with it.
Adeline has legal autonomy as an heiress, but none as a wife.
Because she was one man's life partner, every man she meets thinks
she is sexually available. In that kind of world, one understands
why marriage is mandatory and cursed. For a better analysis of Adeline
Mowbray, please
read the Evening All Afternoon blog
(http://www.eveningallafternoon.com/2010/11/adeline-mowbray.html).
I
have a theory that will blow English literature wide open. Remember
when the Quaker woman was careening down the road in an oxcart and
Mrs. Mowbray caught the reigns? Adeline's only two friends in the
world? What are the chances of that happening? Remember when
Nicholas Nickleby overheard those blokes talking about his sister?
Remember when the Indian gentleman found Sara Crewe next door?
Remember when Darcy and Elizabeth turned up at the same country
house? Remember how quickly Sherlock Holmes solved those crimes?
How likely is any of that to happen in a normal country full of
people? Not very, huh? But, I've figured it out: England only had
five hundred people living there during the nineteenth century. Some
scholars will argue seven hundred, maybe even one thousand, but the
population must have been tiny for coincidences like that to happen
with such regularity. And how else did England manage to colonize
Arabia, Australia, the Bahamas, Bahrain, Barbados, Belize, Borneo,
Botswana, British Guiana, Brunei, Canada, Egypt, the Falklands,
Gambia, Ghana, Hong Kong, India, Ireland, Jamaica, Kenya, Kuwait,
Malawi, Malaysia, Malta, Minorca, Namibia, New Zealand, Nigeria,
Palestine, Rhodesia, Samoa, Sierra Leone, Singapore, South Africa,
Sudan, Tanzania, Uganda, and the Virgin Islands and leave that many
people at home? As long as the colonial population was sending money
and letters, they wouldn't be missed. The middle 97% must have gone
abroad, leaving the top one and bottom two percents at home to do the
things that people do in nineteenth century British novels. Am I
right or are Opie, Hodgson Burnett, Conan Doyle, Austen, Dickens and
countless others ineffably lazy authors?
