Tag: trauma

38. Rob Cowen, The North Road

When I read a review of Rob Cowen’s The North Road in The Guardian last winter, I knew I had to read it. A study of a highway? On foot? Yes! Of course I was interested. My first book, Walking the Bypass: Notes on Place from the Side of the Road, covers similar ground (forgive the pun). I immediately ordered a copy, and in July, I finally got down to reading it. I’m happy I did.

The North Road isn’t, as I had imagined, a book about a 400-mile walk following the path of “the North Road,” a historical highway (now the A1 and its variants) which runs from London to Edinburgh and beyond. Cowen isn’t wedded to the idea of walking, although the first half of the book tells the story of a long walk from London to Nottinghamshire, partly alone and partly with a friend, an active-duty soldier, known only as A, who joins Cowen when he is on leave. The rest of the book follows the highway by car. The pandemic is one reason for that change; another is that Cowen journeys at times with very different companion, his mother. That shift in the means of travel didn’t affect my interest in the book (which is a surprise, because I can be rigid about these things), and it becomes the occasion for Cowen’s experiments in genre, which add so much to the book.

Cowen begins with a day spent volunteering at an archaeological site uncovered by an expansion of the A1 in Yorkshire. It’s impossible, he suggests, to dig anywhere in England without uncovering evidence of its history. Roman, neolithic, Bronze Age, modern–it doesn’t matter: bodies, pottery, coins, weapons, the remains of structures (particularly henges) are everywhere. The way people lived, their technologies and burial practices, means they left many traces. That’s true here as well, or at least it was. The areas of native grassland that remain unploughed are full of tipi rings, farmers often collected hundreds of arrow heads and other knapped flint objects, former buffalo jumps were the sites of centuries of bones. The difference, perhaps, is that when the grassland became fields of wheat, the tipi rings and medicine wheels were destroyed, and the bones of the buffalo were shipped away to be turned into china and fertilizer. The arrowheads often end up in boxes in local museums, separated from their context by the plough and their first settler collectors. Similar vandalism happened in England, of course. Victorian archaeologists broke into tombs; many of the stones at Avebury were deliberately shattered by clergymen who believed they were evidence of Satanic worship. But more tangible evidence of the past seems to remain in England, even before those blue medallions began to be installed on any old building where something somewhat interesting took place.

But this book isn’t just about artifacts or material culture. It’s about stories. Like me (and like other walking writers, from Matthew Anderson to Iain Sinclair), Cowen looks for evidence of the past in the pedestrian present, while also learning everything he can about the history and geography of the places he visits. While walking, he keeps an eye out for old coaching inns, since the North Road was, for much of the 18th century, a busy coach route. He tells us when he sees evidence of the road’s earlier Roman incarnation. He tracks the rise and fall of towns and villages as the road was moved or the railway passed (or didn’t pass) them by. But the stories are what make this book come alive: stories about people who grew up or lived or met their endings alongside the North Road, including Margaret Thatcher, the prizefighter Tom Molineaux, the poet John Clare, the murder victim John Barugh. And stories from Cowen’s own life, his struggle to overcome childhood trauma, and stories about his family, who lived in Doncaster (right on the road) before moving down to London. That complex, layered mix of memoir, biography, history, geography, and attention to place, as well as the stories of the difficulties of a long walk, make this book a must-read for anyone interested in such things.

And that leads to Cowen’s shifts in genre, from nonfiction to fiction, where historical evidence is missing or where he wants to get inside those stories. There are two long chapters of fiction here: one about a contemporary (more or less) travelling IT support person, leading a lonely life in hotels and on the motorway, and the other about a woman trying to escape William the Conqueror’s soldiers during the Harrying of the North, a scorched-earth campaign against the Danes and Anglo-Saxons, mostly in Yorkshire, who were rebelling against his rule after the Norman Conquest. To call that campaign “ethnic cleansing” might be anachronistic, but from Cowen’s account, it seems accurate. I don’t know how much his fictional version of events stacks up against the historical record, or if there is much of a historical record of what it was like to be a victim of the Harrying, since a) few of those people could write and b) any documents would’ve been burned along with their homes, but the narrative is so engaging that it doesn’t matter. In that way, The North Road asks us to think about the way fiction and nonfiction blur together, the way that our knowledge is partial, the way that our memories are constructions.

I was amazed by The North Road, and I’m looking forward to reading Cowen’s other books (nonfiction and poetry). I’m not tempted, though, to follow in his footsteps and try to walk from London to Doncaster (or wherever he stopped), mostly because I don’t have the courage for that much trespassing and wild camping (walking beside highways in the UK is more than unpleasant–it’s suicidal, since there are no shoulders). I’m glad he did it, though, and delighted that he wrote this book.

35. Jenna Butler, Revery: A Year of Bees

I read Jenna Butler’s 2020 book Revery: A Year of Bees several years ago, and I was impressed by it—so much, in fact, that when I decided to teach a course on place writing this summer, I decided to include it on the reading list. It’s a sort of sequel to her earlier book of essays, A Profession of Hope: Farming on the Edge of the Grizzly Trail—the same farm, more or less, but this time, the focus is on those tiny domesticated creatures, honeybees, and the wonders they give us: sweet honey and wax for candles and balms. The book, which was nominated for a Governor General’s Award and longlisted for the CBC’s Canada Readscompetition, goes beyond honeybees, though; it thinks about the way we might connect with place through what the anthropologist Tim Ingold calls a “taskscape”—through labour, care, and attention—and the challenges inherent in attempts to make that kind of connection.

Revery: A Year of Bees has two structuring principles. As its subtitle suggests, it follows Butler through the annual cycle of work involved in stewarding a small organic farm and bee yard on the edge of the boreal forest in northern Alberta. At the same time, though, it’s also an excellent example of what writers call a “braided essay”—or, perhaps, more accurately, it’s a braided book of braided essays. The text moves back and forth between personal writing about Butler’s experience and informative writing about beekeeping. As Nicole Walker explains in an essay on braided forms of creative nonfiction, that continual shift in perspective sets up a “tension between two unlike things working against each other” which, through repetition, presses out meaning. Revery: A Year of Bees does exactly that by moving between Butler’s experience and its broader context. As Butler herself has argued in an essay on braided forms of creative nonfiction, that kind of writing allows writers “to tell stories at length that may be crushingly hard, balancing that sustained, clear, and factual telling with moments of beauty or humour.” In fact, towards the end of the book, when Butler explains how working with bees has helped her with the lasting effects of violence and trauma, readers come to see the value in the braided structure she has constructed; it allows us to understand the ways in which personal experience, past and present, affects our work and our relationships, and the ways in which that labour and connection change us. Her description of that trauma, by the way, is both bluntly honest and tactful, something many of us who want to write about our difficult experiences might want to learn from. I certainly could.

Before my students read Revery: A Year of Bees, I asked them to read Robert Macfarlane’s essay “A Counter-Desecration Phrasebook,” published in a collection of poems and essays, Towards Re-Enchantment: Place and Its Meanings, edited by Gareth Evans and Di Robson. There, Macfarlane argues, among other things, that having a specific language of place allows us to see what is valuable and important in the world around us, as well as our connections or relationships to that world, things that modernity, according to Max Weber and Martin Heidegger, has taught us to ignore. Instead of seeing a forest as something special, even enchanted, an ecosystem or a place we might get to know but never fully understand, for instance, Heidegger contends that we now see that forest as a “standing-reserve,” as so many board feet of lumber or tons of fibre for paper or disposable diapers. The forest becomes fungible: we think we translate it from one thing, a living place, to something else, economic activity and profit, without losing anything worth saving. Seeing places in a different way—as something rather than nothing—might help us to avoid destroying or “desecrating” them (note the overtones of the sacred in Macfarlane’s use of that word). Writing like Butler’s encourages us to think the way Macfarlane advocates: to consider our relationships to place and land, to wonder at the ways they exceed our knowledge and understanding, to approach them with respect and awe. That’s part of what makes her writing worth paying attention to.

But that’s not the only reason I admire Revery: A Year of Bees. Butler’s account of how the bees she works with pick up on her emotions, how they respond to her when she’s overwhelmed by her nearly unspeakable emotional and physical traumas, is fascinating. Like horses and dogs, bees sense the moods of the people around them. On her bad days, she can’t approach the bees, which feel threatened by her “cloud of energy.” It’s yet more evidence of our deep connections to the world and its inhabitants, and a sign of the way that forming relationships with the land can heal us. We need to learn those lessons, and Revery: A Year of Bees is a kind and gentle teacher.