Book Review: Damnation Spring (Timberrrr!)

Damnation Spring, A Novel, by Ash Davidson (Scribner, 2021, 464 pp, 14$)

Best. Book. Ever.

One year we named the "Book of the Year" early - in August. This year we may have found it in February - Damnation Spring it is! May I say it just may be the very best book I have ever read! Bar none.

If Norman Rockwell or Robert Frost were to write a book, this would be it. A marvelous storyteller, Ash Davidson has created a family saga with a slow environmental crisis that appeals to the heart. Sort of like an Aesop's Fable or a biblical parable, the lesson, obvious from the beginning, is couched within the story of a marriage and a family of generations and of the lumber industry in California (though I pretended it was in Washington or Idaho). And you may just take away some of the family's traditions - three squeezes of a hand ( I. Love. You.) or asking your young child, "Where did you get those dimples?" "At the dimple store." or "Where did you get those beautiful eyes?" "At the beautiful eye store."

Rhythmic Style

With lyrical writing, Davidson weaves for us one year (1977) in the lives of hard-working people who live off the earth, some, coarsely so. Like the range wars of a century ago between the farmers and the ranchers, Damnation's wars are between hippies and lumbermen: hippies who are tree-huggers, including a native boy from the neighborhood who becomes a tree doctor (PhD) and returns for a year of research and meeting up with an old flame, and loggers who grow old physically before their time - or die young, from accidents. ". . . Not a lot of second chances in the woods, . . . ." (p. 157) 

And Some Bad Stuff

Nosebleeds and numerous miscarriages - our protagonist has had eight - and babies that die at birth of birth defects. Could it be the herbicides?

And old-growth trees that take with them, the jobs, when they are gone. But when the hippies plant a skull (or do they?) and the state takes its time deciding to shut down the clear-cutting, no work is to be had. On top of winter rains stopping all work for a few months, it's a hard life and makes some people hard. They take chances and the reader smells the smells and sees the fog and feels the rain that permeates your bones.

Premonitions

The premonitions are all present from the very beginning but we read on because we are invested in the characters' lives and their loves and want to know who the winners will be, if any. There are good, good people and then there are others who may be family but family by birth not family by choice.

Even though I could foresee much of what would happen, I wanted to read it faster and faster and then, lo and behold - a surprise!

Chapters are titled "Rich," "Colleen" (his wife), "Chub" (their young son) but not written by them - just about them and a bit from their point of view, sometimes a chapter from each on the same day. Chapters are also titled with the month and day (we already know the year).

What I Would Do Differently

It is a long book that reads so quickly I can't imagine it needing to be abridged. But perhaps change the title and put a photograph of a forest on the cover, rather than the lovely painting. You might disagree. But you will agree that this is a gem of a novel!

(And yes, there are dogs: a debarked old dog and a nondescript Scout, both of whom are outdoor dogs on chains when not with their boy or with Rich walking through the woods.)