In her new essay collection, Sarah Fawn Montgomery begins with “Excavation,” in which each section ties the mining of the narrator’s childhood memories and finding buried treasure with ruminations on the acts of burial. From the outset, Montgomery’s rich, lyrical prose explores the spaces between what has been excavated, removed, damaged and destroyed and the possibility of what might one day be connected, restored, made whole and at home — be it a human body, our planet or memory itself.
Whether her essays are set in the central California coast of her childhood, the Nebraska plains of her grad school years or the New England acres of her adulthood chosen home, these essays stitch together the rootless angst and sufferings of her traumatic childhood with the broader reality of a planet irreparably harmed by an anxious and indifferent human species.
As the title suggests, many of these essays explore Montgomery’s lifelong search for a sense of home. This search draws connections to the narrator’s unpacking the traumatic experiences of her childhood: alcohol, violence, her parents’ haphazard approach to fostering other children, poverty, food insecurity and the consummate stress of constantly moving and feeling unsafe. Following the instability of childhood, Montgomery’s becomes an upwardly mobile college professor moving from California to Nebraska to Massachusetts, yet her childhood haunts her, making it difficult for any new place to truly feel like home, compounded by her growing awareness that climate change is making more and more places inhospitable.
Whereas Dillard could tell her memoirs as if all simply returns to the land, Montgomery writes plainly that we are “nostalgic for a time that will no return.”
Throughout the book, Montgomery underscores the various connections between her restlessness of spirit and her rootlessness of place. Prior generations might have prescribed staying in one place as a way to feel connected. But what if those places are no longer safe or inhabitable either due to external changes in the environment, personal trauma of the individual or — increasingly — both?
This sense of rootlessness is on display most in essays about her grad school years in Nebraska, and this relatively brief stay in the Midwest is one of the book’s few weaknesses –these essays lack the depth, nuance and humanity of the California and Massachusetts essays. Nebraska may have invited her to “be part of it rather than observer,” but to paraphrase Wendell Berry, she didn’t stick around long enough to even become disillusioned.
Out of 18 essays in the book, only two are not devoted to living on one of the coasts. In the essays about her time in Nebraska, she seems only able to skim the surface of what makes the Midwest appealing to the millions who call it home. “What I found was that it wasn’t hard to love the Midwest; it isn’t hard to love any space if you are mindful.” While this is a nice sentiment, it could be applied to any place.
Montgomery journals her cross-country drive to Lincoln in an essay about cartography. The essay is a well-researched study of cartography paired with great insights into the follies of mapmaking, of lands and human life alike. Reflecting on Lewis and Clark’s maps, she writes, “Read their journals and you’ll find the daily accounts of men looking to write the world onto a foldable space.”
While the Nebraska essays don’t carry the same power and weight as the rest of the book, Montgomery does describe well some aspects of the Midwestern landscape that can’t be found on the coasts or in the mountains: “Physical maps promise flatland, leave the page smooth and unblemished. In doing so, they neglect the Midwestern sky, which is as fierce and terrifying during a summer storm as it is awesome when calm, the way it domes across the expanse of space, curves higher and further than it could anywhere else in the country.”
Nature writers and memoirists of previous generations shared some level of privilege in writing about humanity’s relationship to the earth through more romantic or utopian lenses. As someone in the same generation as Montgomery, I found myself wondering if her approach to reckoning with these connections is the only option remaining for those of us whose life memories are necessarily clouded by the reality of a warming planet.
In “Descendent,” for example, Montgomery explores her family’s generational connections to the work of mining. She writes, “Trace our family tree back far enough and you’ll find generation after generation dead from mining America, mining England, scooping out the land and leaving it — and with it, ourselves — empty.”
I couldn’t help but remember the opening pages of Annie Dillard’s masterful 1987 memoir, An American Childhood, and the way Dillard suggests that if everything else fell away from her memory, she believes what would remain is the topography of her childhood Pennsylvania — the way the land is, was and always shall be. As much as I hold Dillard in high regard, I wonder now if it is another generational divide in which those in my parents’ and Dillard’s generation can believe fully in the resiliency of humanity and the earth itself, while my generation and those who follow can only strive to honestly process our memories in the context of broad-scale suffering, an altered planet and uncertain future. Whereas Dillard could tell her memoirs as if all simply returns to the land, Montgomery writes plainly that we are “nostalgic for a time that will not return.”
