Mosquitoes and blackflies plagued him, and the sun was hot, and he grew thirsty, but still he sat. A wind came up, and the grass bent. The wind died, and the grass grew still. A couple of turkey vultures circled on the thermals above him, spiraling upward until they were like small ashes against that great hearth in which the sun burned.There's a lot going on in Stephen's life, as we know because his father is detective Cork O'Connor, and this is Tamarack County, 13th book in the series by William Kent Krueger. Stephen is deeply involved with his girlfriend Marlee whose family has been targeted by a stalker who killed her dog; his dad is looking for a missing woman, wife of a retired judge; and the two cases may be related to a prisoner's wrongful conviction brought to light by another prisoner who happens to be Marlee's uncle. Add to all this that Stephen's sister Annie, a nun-in-training, has come home from college angry, depressed, and determined to leave the Church. Stephen is conflicted about something he learns when Annie's college friend Skye appears at the family home in Minnesota.
Stephen may be the most compelling of all Krueger's continuing characters, if only because we've watched him grow from a needy little boy to a courageous young man, through family love and conflict, physical danger, and loss. This memory of the day in the meadow, coming in the middle of this exciting book, seems to be an important step in his growth. Krueger, whose descriptions of nature often bend into poetry, continues:
Because he didn't know the reason he was there, had no purpose that he could understand, his mind was filled with a flood of debris -- pieces of thoughts, drifting images, half-formed questions.Near the end of the day, his eyelids grew heavy and his mind grew quiet and he saw something he had not seen before. He saw that he was no longer sitting in the place he'd sat that morning. He hadn't moved, yet nothing around him was the same. He realized it had been that way all day. In every moment, everything had abandoned what it had been in the moment before and had become something new. He was looking at a different meadow, a different lake, a different sky. These things were very familiar to him, and yet they were not. He was keenly aware of each scent as if he'd never smelled it before, each new sound, new breath or wind, new ripple in this new universe. (128-9)
By coincidence, the morning after I read that page, I came across this passage from a collection of essays called Living in the World as if It were Home (1999) by Canadian poet Tim Lilburn:
Look at a meadow long enough and your bearings vanish. The world seen deeply eludes all names; it is not like anything; it is not the sign of something else. It is itself. It is a towering strangeness.
That's Stephen's experience, right there!
The excerpt appears among poems and prose in the anthology Home (2021), edited by Christian Wiman. The context is Lilburn's critique of "some contemplative writers" whose vision of nature "travels into the world only far enough to grasp the presence it anticipates." Quick to draw conclusions and connections to their own worldviews, they miss the world.
Lilburn and Krueger might be writing directly to me. Whatever else happens in Tamarack County, I'm already taking away something to keep in my heart. I recommend the novel and the anthology by Wiman. I may have to look into the works of Lilburn, too.
Addendum: I finished the book yesterday. The story builds to an action-packed hunt and a cathartic confrontation that draws together strong emotions, a moral dilemma, and a (temporary) resolution of spiritual conflicts in the story. Cork's circle of loved ones seems to be growing wider. Today I bought the next three novels in the series.
[See my responses to other Krueger books]
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