She Walks These Hills, by Sharyn McCrumb

Sharyn McCrumb

 She Walks These Hills, by Sharyn McCrumb, captured my imagination through a second reading. I first read this book in preparation for McCrumb's appearance at my town's Literary Arts Festival several years ago. Hers was one of the better-attended author sessions we've ever had, although she talked mostly about her NASCAR book, St. Dale, and we wanted to hear about her Appalachian books. And, she chastised us for saying "App-a-LAY-shuh" instead of "App-a-LATCH-ya," and pretty much accused us of not being authentically part of the region. It's lucky we liked her books so much. We were forgiving and forebearing.

And, lord, she is a wonderful writer, a loom-worker, threading up a dozen strands of yarn and then warping and woofing them into an amazing carpet of intricacy and color and strength. She Walks These Hills takes place in the Appalachians and her characters take many routes through the region, crisscrossing and paralleling ancient buffalo trails, Indian trails, the Appalachian trail, old logging roads, state highways, all of them travelling in time as well as space. Inexorably, the disparate journeys wind and climb to a common end point--a particular cove where stories past and present overlap, intertwine, and, finally, resolve. The significance of this cove goes far beyond the decaying old trailer that is the sole remaining occupant.

I was intrigued by the McCrumb's retelling of old stories, reliving and exploration of old stories, being brought to bear on the current action and then that these stories were being created as well as being retold. One of the characters is an escaped convict who has been in prison for 30 years. He is walking his way across the mountains to that one particular mountain that he thinks of as home. He is suffering from Karsikoff's syndrome, a brain disease in which memories are lost almost as soon as they are formed. He does, however, retain boyhood awareness of the land and its plants and ways. He is a master storyteller as he reinvents his own story minute by minute and also he is a story--the story of old Harm, wrongly accused, escaped, on the run, on the way home. His story parallels a story from the 1700s of a Tennessee woman kidnapped by Indians and taken to Ohio. She, too, is wrongly imprisoned, escapes, and walks across the mountains to home.

The plot of this book is so richly detailed that I am not going to go further into a description of it. Read it for yourself. I will, however, discuss some key interactions in the book. The one that I most loved was the interaction of people with the landscape, the importance of geology and geological history and its influence on the people who came and went from Appalachia. The original inhabitants, native American people, were displaced by immigrants from mountainous places--especially the Scots. Today, the mountain whites are the ones dying out, being forced off the land, moving (often against their will) off ancestral lands.

Headstone of my great aunt and uncle at McCune Cemetery
in Limerick, Ohio, about 30 miles from my current home.

This blood-borne tie to the land is so hard to understand. Most of us think of home as where our house is, where our stuff is. We live a turtle life with heavier and heavier shells to move around. We don't take root. I have returned to the lands of my people, as it were--my grandparents, great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents are all buried within about 30 miles of my home. But I still don't feel that I am one with this land, this place. I feel privileged to be here and cautious of my impact. Only a few times have I felt, truly, that I am as at home here in the Appalachian hills as the deer and turkeys and maples and morels. I have a lifetime of education and affectation that runs contrary to a tie to the land.

Hold on a minute. I'm going to go outside right now and look around. I'm going to see the trees and sky and the slope of my property as it tilts toward marsh and stream. I'm going to smell its smells for a few minutes.

OK, I'm back. It's beautiful out there. This morning I met a friend for breakfast at Lake Hope Lodge in Zaleski, Ohio. I left early, but barely made it to the lodge on time--I kept driving slower and slower because all of nature was alive and pushing at me and I knew how similar the landscape was to the places in McCrumb's book. I was driving slow enough to name the trees. I was grokking the hundred shades of green. But, I was a bit embarrassed as I finally pulled into the parking lot, only to find that my friend had just gotten there--she had done the same thing. The trees are amazing right now, but it's the wildflowers that pull at me--natives and non-natives--Queen Anne's lace, bull thistle, chickory, black-eyed susans, the first goldenrod. Like old friends, indomitable, strong and cheerful, drawing life from the very soil, the very earth of our place.

The Physician by Noah Gordon

Lots of adventures. Exotic locations. Peril and salvation. That about sums up Noah Gordon's 1986 epic The Physican. The book is about 600 pages long and is not a quick read...but the process of discovery kept me going back into the book time and again. Finally, I had a Sunday afternoon with nothing going on, raining outside, still and quiet, and I finished it off. I was sorry that the story resolved and all was well, because that meant I had to go home, home to homely McArthur, Ohio, home to my own dirty dishes and unfed pets, home to a Cincinnati Reds defeat, home to a basement nicknamed "a river runs through it." I had to return to 2013 A.D. from 1043 A.D.

I would like to thank my wonderful friend Jeannie Graetz for recommending this book to me, even though she grabbed it to reread, leaving me stranded in Chapter 3.

The Physician is about a man named Rob whose life becomes a journey of discovery from the time he is orphaned in Middle Ages London. I know "Middle Ages" is considered a more appropriate label, but in the context of this book, Dark Ages would be more fitting. There is little hint of Renaissance in England at this time. Rob is taken up by a barber/surgeon who travels around in a painted cart putting on shows, selling alcohol as medicine, and treating illnesses and injuries (like Professor Marvel in Wizard of Oz). Barber (the barber is called Barber) was trained by a master who took him in at an early age and also has learned much through his own observations and practice. He teaches Rob to juggle, sing, and do magic tricks as well as to have his own "office hours" beside the wagon. They travel together for many years.

Rob has a special gift--the ability to sense impending death in a person by holding his or her hands. He becomes skilled as a medical practitioner, combining his gift with observation, trial and error, and instinct. His frustration grows, however, as he sees the limitations of his education. He wants to know more. He wants to be able to heal a wider range of illnesses, to ease suffering in more people. It becomes a driving force in him.

Eventually, Barber dies and Rob travels on his own. He meets up by accident with a physician--one who has actually been trained as a doctor at a madrassa in Persia. Rob determines that he will travel to Persia and seek out this training for himself. To do so, he must travel across ocean, mountain, and desert and travel first as a Christian merchant, but as soon as possible to disguise himself as Jew. The madrassa will not accept Christians. Fortunately, conveniently, and in the least plausible and most important detail of the book, Rob was circumcised at birth because of a "wen" (basically, a big dick zit!). This gives him a leg up in Judaism.

Every part of Rob's journey is fascinating...from his father's involvement with a construction guild to his journeys with Barber, to his travels across Europe, to the camel caravan across western Asia, and to his life and perils in Persia. Many aspects of ninth century life are explored and illuminated. Most interesting is the contrast between the status of healing in England (Church persecutes physicians) and in Persia (a scientific approach). I enjoyed following Rob's process as he discovered things we know today...he was particularly interested in appendicitis, which had no known cause but almost always proved fatal. Dissection was forbidden, so on inferences had to suffice.

The roles of women were traditional and culturally constrained, especially in Persia, where women had to be veiled and were seldom seen. Jewish women had to keep their hair covered but were more free to circulate and make things happen. Rob had the obligatory romance with a beautiful woman, which is treated sweetly, but it was too predictable to be engaging. It would have been more interesting if Rob had been attracted seriously to an unsuitable woman--a real (not disguised) Jew or a Muslim woman who was more than a sex toy. I think the author copped out on this one! (It would have been hard to imagine anything but a double beheading as an outcome of such a romance.)

I am so tempted to give away plot points. So much juicy stuff happened. Rob explores Judaism, Islam, alternative governments, habits and practices of many cultures, and meets up with elephants, camel racing, and tantric sex. You'll have to take my word for it that a treasure trove of experiences await you if you read The Physician. It is the first book of a trilogy, so there will be more to come.

This is a good book, but I don't think it is a great book. It lacks tension because I always knew that the hero would survive. It's like character and plot were excuses for this amazing book of history and travel. It worked, but I never related to the main character. It all came too easy for him and the implausibilities became burdensome. My emotions were not engaged, but I feel a lot smarter and I feel like I've been on a cool journey. A friend of mine asked on Facebook today if anybody had discounts or freebies for Disney World to share. I, of course, had none, but I offered her my imagination, for free. The Physician was free and took me on a journey much richer than Disney World.

It strikes me that medicine is still pretty voodoo-oriented. I take so many medicines for rheumatoid arthritis and most of them are prescribed correlationally--it was found that when RA patients were taking a drug for something else that it seemed to help their RA symptoms. But there is virtually no real understanding of how or why these drugs work. Each patient ends up with her own cocktail of whatever worked that day, that month. "Well, if this doesn't work, let's try that. It sometimes helps." Doctors have said this to me. Science seems like a smoke screen sometimes, like the curtains between Rob and the Barber when they treated patients. I guess there's nothing really wrong with correlational treatment, but let's not delude ourselves about it. It's America. If it works, we'll do it.