Frances Hunter
blog of the author To the Ends of the Earth
Frances Hunter's Journal
February 2006
February 13, 2006: Out West
Before he became one of the leading authorities on Lewis & Clark and co-produced the great PBS documentary with Ken Burns, Dayton Duncan took a trip Out West. His interesting travelogue, first published in the 1980s, is still fun to read today.
Duncan did what many L&C enthusiasts dream of doing: headed out from St. Louis in an old VW van and retraced as much of the Lewis & Clark trail as humanly possible, taking all summer to do it. Along the way, he dispenses well-chosen bits of history and L&C journal entries, but most of the narrative focuses on his adventures along the trail and the people he meets there. The best sections of Out West tell about ordinary folks: bootmakers, cowboys, Native American park rangers, and local history enthusiasts of every stripe. I especially loved the section where Duncan went on a mountainous ride through the Bitterroots, saw the sunset, and weathered the embarrassment of a runaway horse named Sugar Lips.
Out West has two downsides. One is simply its age. A good portion of the journey takes place in the farm belt, where many of the people were suffering through the severe contraction of the agricultural sector that was such a big issue in the 1980s. This has now played itself out, so the focus on the farm crisis dates the book a bit. The other is the cynicism that often creeps in to even the best travelogues. Here Duncan says of the modern-day descendants of the Oregon Trail pioneers:
Their favored outlet for restlessness is a cheap airfare to a vacation spot on the Mexican coast, or maybe a trip to Yellowstone to watch the bears feed at the garbage dumps.
That's the kind of sweeping statement that gets easy to make after spending weeks on the road, spending only a day or so in each place. I suspect the characterization wouldn't hold up to much scrutiny.
Fortunately, Duncan doesn't spend too much time being grumpy. Most of Out West is written with good humor and sensitivity. A passage that he wrote about Lewis & Clark's rush from the Clearwater to the Cascades holds great insight into L&C. But it also struck me as deeply meaningful for anyone (like me) immersed in a great all-consuming project.
Because of their rush to reach the sea and the disquietingly strange river life they encountered, no feeling of either exhilaration or comfortable satisfaction radiates from the journal entries for this section of their westerly quest. Instead, uneasiness, annoyance, an almost irritated sense of being hurried and harried mark the pages.
A hundred miles past the Cascades, they would at last see ocean swells lapping the shores, breathe salt air, and feel some satisfaction at their accomplishment. Here, though, their experience was a disturbing mixture of newness and the already known, a distortion of the familar, as if seen through a prism or backward in a faulty mirror, and not quite right.
February 9, 2006: The Widow of the South
I recently picked up Robert Hicks' debut novel, The Widow of the South. Based on real people and events, the book centers around the Carnton plantation house in Franklin, Tennessee, which served as a hospital during the horrific battle that took place there in November 1864. The title character is the mistress of the house, Carrie McGavock. McGavock not only ministered to the wounded soldiers who filled her home for weeks following the battle, she spent the rest of her life tending the graves of 1,500 Confederate soldiers who were buried on her property. McGavock was famous in the South during her lifetime; in his 1882 visit to the United States, Oscar Wilde made a special point to go to Carnton and see the "high priestess of the temple of dead boys."
There is certainly a good story here, and Hicks jumps in with lively writing that immediately creates a Southern gothic atmosphere. As the book opens in 1894, Carrie McGavock is making her morbid daily rounds at the cemetery with her erstwhile slave, Mariah. Then an old soldier shows up ... and thereby hangs a tale.
Not a very compelling one, unfortunately. As a longtime Civil War buff, I really wanted to like this novel. But it left me cold, for the same reason that infects most "literary" fiction today -- meaning, it's a story about weird characters doing weird things for weird reasons. As portrayed in this book, Carrie McGavock has already made a fetish of mourning before the Civil War ever came to Carnton; she spends her days drifting in a laudanum-induced haze, lamenting the deaths of three of her children while ignoring the family she has left and the life outside Carnton's doors. Inevitably, the world crashes in with a bang as the Union and Confederate forces clash in the bloody Battle of Franklin, leaving 9,200 dead and wounded on her doorstep. Hicks' descriptions of the battle and the eternal scars it leaves on the town are some of the strongest scenes in the novel.
Carrie comes out of her haze to care for the wounded, and takes an interest in one soldier in particular, the down-to-earth Arkansan Zachariah Cashwell. Their strange romance is the central thread of the book, but there is no chemistry between the two characters. The canny Cashwell seems too smart to get involved with a woman as melancholy and disturbed as Carrie, and at one point their relationship takes a bizarre and violent turn that defies credibility. If I were Cashwell, I would've headed for the hills, one leg and all.
I hoped Widow would turn out to be the story of a person turning away from death and toward life, and for a while it looks like Carrie might shake off her funk and get on with living. However, her calculated nobility means her relationship with Cashwell can never be consummated. The final part of the book focuses on her battle with a neighbor who plans to plow over the graves on his field. With the help of Cashwell and her long-suffering husband, Carrie removes the dead to Carnton and constructs her own private cemetery. She spends the rest of her life tending the graves, corresponding with relatives, and obsessively checking her book of the dead.
As someone who brought comfort to the dying and honor to the dead during her lifetime, I wanted to admire Carrie McGavock, but the character Hicks creates is so closed-off and self-absorbed that I never warmed up to her. By the end of the novel, I wasn't sure whether to think Carrie McGavock was a secular saint or a monstrously selfish woman who preferred to spend her time grieving over the dead because it was easier than facing the sorrows and challenges of living.