North Dakota
Suggested by: SFPL
Traveled: December 21-26

I knew there was a reason I was so diligent in jotting down written mile markers just after I closed the books in the first half of this trip. I wanted to avoid the frustration I face now: the fading colors of a world I remember vividly enjoying, the snips of voices just out of my range of hearing. The people in Erdrich’s world were thoroughly charming; I wish I had taken the time just after meeting them to do them justice.

Here is the gift they have given me that has withstood a month or two of life getting in the way: the miraculous in the everyday. It struck me then and stays with me now. I don’t mean the miracle of the kindness of strangers or true love, I mean the mystical, almost circus-like events that were woven indistinguishably into these people’s ordinary stories. Spills on the ice create the likeness of Christ, a mother gets into a demonstration plane at a fair and never returns, a beautiful woman feels herself sinking beneath her lawn from her patio furniture is too pointy in the soft dirt.

It was a seemingly ordinary story with Alice-in-Wonderland rules. And yet Erdrich creates her characters with such honesty and compassion that their lives seem true and wholly realistic. The little tickles of the fantastic aren’t out of place in small-town North Dakota. They are necessary to capture the magic of being alive together for years. Of scrubbing a butcher-block clean for decades with your mean-spirited cousin and good-hearted friend in the next room. Of living in a small town when the world makes big changes. Of having children before you want them, of having a child nobody understands. Magic actually makes life more real. It does the wonder of it all justice.

Montana
Suggested by: SF Public Library
Traveled: Nov. 15-17

Here is the part where I apologize for the three month hiatus from my road trip. I know my adoring fans (read: mostly my mom) have missed me. I was on a pit stop, backlogging books through the holidays and focusing my reflective efforts on my own story unfolding back in California. But here I am, ready to share some brief thoughts on Norman McLean’s short story of fly-fishing and brotherly love.

The thought that has lingered with me since I met McLean last November is one of knowing how to help. The narrator of the story feels throughout his life a difficulty in reaching out to his brother in a way that he will hear. Norman knows his little brother needs some sort of help, but is thrown by the times when his younger sibling seems much more capable than Norman himself, a strange reversal in the guardian role he feels. More than just knowing how, the story asks us to reflect on who can offer help when those around us need it. Perhaps those who want to help the most are the ones too close to reach out.

Norman ends the story saying he is haunted by rivers. Was there an angle he missed under the rushing waters and above the calm surfaces? Was there a way he could have acted, words he could have said, to throw a life-saving line to his brother? Or was it enough to simply stand with him, focusing on a flick of the wrist that had bound them together since boyhood?

I think we are haunted by the idea of what we could have done. And that’s natural, and an understandable urge. But I think sometimes our idea of what we could have done was never possible in the first place. We cannot save just by wanting to save. We don’t always have what that takes. We aren’t always the person who that needs to come from. Haunting indeed.