Into The Forest

I hardly ever buy novels and hardly ever purchase books through the Book-of-the-Month Club but when I read the blurbed advertisement, I became hooked. And because the book was based on the premise that electricity had been shut down and that gasoline was being black marketed, I wanted to read what a new novelist had to say about a potential future scenario. And since I seem to see inevitable collapse wherever I look and see both hope and despair dancing amok, I checked the box and mailed the card into BOMC.

With that in mind I plunged into the book not minding that it was a memoir of a young teenage girl living in the woods near a small town in Northern California. [Another memoir by a young teenage girl!? My Ishmael by Daniel Quinn is a memoir of a 16 year old girl reminiscing her student days with Ishmael when she was 12. And then there is Octavia E. Butler's Hugo-Award winning dystopia, The Parable of the Sower, also a memoir by a 15 year old girl fleeing the catastrophe of LA in the year 2015.] The fictional memoir is a genre that draws the reader into the storyline quite quickly. Hegland's story is realistic. Electricity gradually dies out even though people are idly waiting for it to come back on. Our memoir writer, Nell, realizes the inevitability of it when she no longer habitually reaches out for the light switch on the wall.

We witness a family of 4: Mom homeschooling her 2 daughters; Dad working around the large forested property always fixing things or spending hours looking for things that should have been there; Nell spending time on the Internet studying for her Harvard Achievement Tests while her sister Eva spends most of her time dancing to an ongoing river of CD's. When electricity dies, their lives are suspended. Dancing with no music just doesn't make it; Nell resorts to reading the encyclopedia while Mom and Dad eke it out with their piddly savings (no more gasoline, all the appliances, washer, dryer, TV, computer... all useless).

The memoir entries are crafted beautifully. Hegland takes us on their journey of survival, of change and then more change. During a time when the canned vegetables are dwindling and the garden is not doing all that well, Nell starts exploring the forest with her handy Native Plants book at her side. In one entry she writes: "Before, I was Nell and the forest was trees and flowers and bushes. Now, the forest is toyon, manzanita, wax myrtle, big leafed maple, California buckeye... and I am just a human, another creature in its midst." Once a place to play and hide in, the forest magically transforms into a vast and real source of food, herbs, medicinals, and meat.

I usually read about 6 books at a time testing them to see which one will win my attention. I returned to Into The Forest everyday. I even got so excited about certain passages that relate to this issue of Growing Food that I sought out the author and chatted with her. When she wasn't homeschooling her three children and caretaking with her husband the 55 acres of second-growth forest (in Northern California) she answered my questions as she continued washing the dishes. She told me the brief story of how her book, published in 1996 by a small Oregon feminist publisher, was being juggled in a bidding war among New York publishers where Bantam eventually won the rights.

Hegland's strength is her subtlety. We do not face the major collapse with inevitable horrorific scenes of violence, hysteria and heroics. It all happens beyond their farm house and we only get glimmers of what is happening, e.g., rumor has it that Boston has power so people are "walking to Boston" from California to "get jobs." It's not that Nell and Eva accept the changes passively but they are slowly changing because they have to. As Nell writes: "Gradually the forest I walk through is becoming mine, not because I own it, but because I'm coming to know it." The changes grow slowly as the forest grows slowly, but intentionally. And we face death, heart breaks, painful memories, rape, birth, rebirth, destruction, betrayal, jealousy, competition... and love.

She often disturbs us, shocks us and yet tenderly takes our hands and guides us into the next change, the next adventure... This is the kind of book that stays with you night and day as it settles into your bones. Into the Forest certainly makes one look at today's world with all its technology and rapid speed with a fragility that it deserves.