All tagged history of logging

Damnation Spring

Some books zoom in on a place and its local culture, bound to the setting both in terms of geography and time in ways that pull the reader in. Ash Davidson’s debut novel Damnation Spring (2021) does just that. Readers cozy up with the book firmly in the 21st-century, but within sentences Davidson’s prose transports them to 1977 amid the coastal redwoods and gritty logging families of Northern California. As anyone with knowledge of 1970s logging communities knows, this book deals with some very difficult themes (things like premature death, poverty, miscarriage, and adultery to name a few). Rural towns like the one readers come to know intimately in Damnation Spring, witnessed major cultural upheaval during the 1970s. Growing public environmentalist sentiment and dwindling old growth logging opportunities led to heated conflicts which often pitted neighbor against neighbor. It is a conflict that continues to play out in logging

Barkskins

When I picked up Barkskins (2016) by Annie Proulx, I expected a book about trees. And trees there most certainly are growing among its pages, although not in the Richard Powers’ The Overstory sort of way; trees are not characters and the tree-inspired figurative constructs with which Proulx crafts her novel differ greatly from Powers’. What I found was something more than trees but certainly relating to them both as a subject and a metaphor. Proulx’s multi-generational story spans the course three and half centuries. In that sense, it is tree-like; many arboreal species live much longer than that. Spread over so much time, this hefty novel (it exceeds 700 pages) comes to life with a large cast of characters, so large that the family trees at the book’s end are useful, even necessary. At the heart of all their stories is a familial link to trees.