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Hunting Down Fear

Reviewed by Kent Chadwick
Free Press staff writer


The Cure for Death by Lightning
by Gail Anderson-Dargatz
Houghton Mifflin Co., 1996
294 pages, $21.95


Beth Weeks is fifteen and about to come of age abruptly. Something unknown is roaring for her, tracking her out in the bush around her family's farm on the southern end of the Fraser Plateau in central British Columbia. She hears it moving through the grass; she can't see it except for footprints that appear then disappear; sometimes she sees a trail of blood. This fear has risen up just as her life has become unstable. Her father has turned violent and unpredictable. Because of her father's public outbursts, her family is now shunned by the town. Her brother Dan is anxious to leave their father behind and enlist in the army to fight that "scary little clown" Hitler. A classmate has been killed in a grisly animal attack. And the local hermit, Coyote Jack, is watching her surreptitiously.
Can Beth hunt down her fear before it brings her to ground? Can she find her way in the midst of her family's collapse? Those are the bones of the story that Gail Anderson-Dargatz of Vancouver Island, B.C. tells in her fine first novel, The Cure for Death by Lightning.
Her supernatural suspense story is fleshed out in a richly textured and realistic evocation of farm life and work in western Canada in the 1940s. "Everyone who milks has her own way and her own rhythm. At home I could tell who was milking just by listening to the rhythm of the squirt into the galvanized steel pails. My father's rhythm was too fast, without a steadiness to it; he rarely milked the cows because when he did, they kicked him.... Mostly it was my mother and I, milking to the rhythms of our own heartbeats, so close sometimes that the milk squirted into the pails in unison, like an iambic heartbeat."
Anderson-Dargatz's exacting attention to detail give The Cure for Death by Lightning a compelling sensuousness, whether she's describing the hesitant tenderness of young lovers sharing plums, or the simultaneous beauty and heartbreak of a windstorm destroying her family's flax field then raining the torn violet flowers back down onto the earth, or the horror of horses and a buggy crushing their way over a phalanx of migrating painted turtles on Blood Road.
The linchpin of Anderson-Dargatz's plot and style is Beth's mother's fragrant scrapbook of homemade paper, memories, admonitions, news, recipes and remedies. As Mexican author Laura Esquivel did in her bestseller Like Water for Chocolate, Anderson-Dargatz includes recipes in her text, for delights like beet wine, snapdragons, honey cake, as well as for charms, potions, cures, and scents, such as the one Beth uses to trap coyotes. The scrapbook is Beth's mother's sanctuary of feelings and secrets; she tries to keep Beth from reading or even touching it, which of course leads Beth to covet it even more.
Beth comes to realize how much her mother lived to serve - to serve food, to serve her father, to serve her brother and herself. She met John, Beth's father, when she was a nurse in London during World War I and he was one of her patients, suffering from a head wound. Her mother was completely submerged in her family. Emblematic of that submersion, her first name is mentioned only once in the novel, in a climactic admission by John that the extravagant gift of nylons was not for her. "They weren't for Maud," he said. They were for Beth. Beth reacts in anger followed by a long despondency because she knows what that means, because she knows why her own father had given nylons to her and not her mother.
Beth's crises quickly surpass her mother's ability to help; she has to look elsewhere, away from town, where she is humiliated, and towards the Turtle Creek First Nation Reserve and Bertha Moses' household of women. Underneath Beth's fear, is the less powerful but more deadly reality of the male violence around her. Bertha, who first married when she was Beth's age, helps her to understand that reality. First she tells Beth, "Did you know your ancestors, you white people, came from Coyote? You are his children. That's why you act like that. Always greedy. Got to have everything for yourselves. Always got your mouths open, yipping and yapping. Always chasing your tail, round and round. Rush, rush. Always telling fibs." Over time, Bertha also gives Beth a decidedly feminist interpretation of the Coyote stories that keeps The Cure for Death by Lightning from becoming too much of an Indian wannabe novel. "... The old men on the reserve, they don't like me talking either," Bertha says, "They say I'm making fun of what's sacred. Coyote's like a god, eh? But the things Coyote does, well, he does us women no good."
Two of Bertha Moses' grandchildren - Nora, the girl with the bell necklace, and Filthy Billy, who suffers from Tourette's syndrome, cursing and apologizing with every other word - both fall in love with Beth, and she sees that her way to adulthood is through those two different loves. Nora and Billy both hunt their fears to the edge of self-destruction. Beth follows suit, takes up her rifle and lays traps for Coyote.
And what is the cure for death by lightning? Telling you won't spoil the suspense, just as long as I don't say why it might be needed. In fact, Anderson-Dargatz begins the novel with that quixotic remedy: "Dunk the dead by lightning in a cold water bath for two hours and if still dead, add vinegar and soak for an hour more." Next to that in her scrapbook Beth's mother wrote "Ha! Ha!"






John Muir: Apostle of Nature

by Robert C. Pavlik
Free Press Contributor


John Muir: Apostle of Nature
by Thurman Wilkins
University of Oklahoma Press, 1995
302 pages, $24.95


Every American should be familiar with the life and work of John Muir. Born in Scotland, raised on a farm in Wisconsin, and trained as a master mechanic, Muir became the nation's preeminent naturalist. The advent of the civil war and an unfortunate industrial accident banished him from the factories of the midwest to the wilds of the world.
Following a self-imposed exile to Canada and a thousand mile walk to the Gulf of Mexico, Muir headed west. He arrived in San Francisco in 1868 and immediately departed for Yosemite via a flower-filled Pacheco Pass. Muir worked for a time as a watchman for a shepherd and his flock, witnessing firsthand the destruction of the high country meadows by the "hoofed locusts." Later he worked as a sawyer for Yosemite Valley hosteler James M. Hutchings. It was during these seven years that Muir came to national prominence as a nature guide for numerous scientists and philosophers (including Ralph Waldo Emerson). Muir's studies of glaciers, giant Sequoias, and Sierran forests and wildflowers (along with his remarkable mountaineering exploits) were published in numerous newspapers and magazines. Following his marriage in 1880 to Louie Strentzel and his subsequent success as a farmer and merchant, he continued his natural history study and travels.
Muir ventured to Alaska seven times, to South America and Africa, the South Pacific (including Australia and New Zealand), and Europe and Russia, effectively circumnavigating the globe. He championed the creation of several national parks, including Mt. Rainier in 1899 and Crater Lake in 1902. His last (and most famous) battle over the damming of the Hetch Hetchy Valley in Yosemite National Park still makes for compelling reading. His death a year later at the age of 76 can be attributed, in part, to the drowning of this once magnificent valley.
Author Thurman Wilkins has produced a highly readable and vastly enjoyable biography of Muir from a vast array of primary and secondary sources. His bibliographical essay is as interesting as the narrative itself. Wilkins brings the book to a close with an insightful chapter entitled "Lore of a Literary Naturalist," a critique of Muir's natural history studies and his voluminous writings, and an epilogue that examines Muir's philosophy regarding religion and the natural world (hence the subtitle). As Volume 8 in the Oklahoma Western Biographies series, John Muir: Apostle of Nature is a worthwhile contribution to that series, and to the vast literature on John Muir.

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Contents on this page were published in the November/December, 1996 edition of the Washington Free Press.
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