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Heart Spring Mountain, by Robin MacArthur (Ecco, 368 pages)
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When Hurricane Katrina struck in 2005, it was supposed to be a once-in-a-lifetime storm. Nevertheless, instances of extreme weather have only increased during the last decade and they are ravaging Americans’ homes. Just last year Hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria quickly became three of the costliest storms in U.S. history, and the affected communities are still rebuilding well into 2018. The physical and emotional damage wrought by these storms inevitably brings people together as they support each other during their time of need. The indelible mark of meteorological tragedy and the importance of home are central themes to Robin MacArthur’s debut novel. Heart Spring Mountain tells the story of three generations of Vermont women who live on the titular mountain at various points in time. MacArthur flits through half a dozen characters’ perspectives across 60 years to illustrate how each generation relates to its secluded surroundings in different ways. Our first protagonist is Vale, who left her heroin-addicted mother Bonnie and their Vermont town eight years prior. She blames their isolation for her mother’s vice. However, when her aunt Deb tells her that Bonnie has gone missing during the 2011 Tropical Storm Irene, Vale knows she has to return home to look for Bonnie. Vale has been tending bar in New Orleans for the last few years, and she sees how Hurricane Katrina still haunts her friends and coworkers. Some lost siblings and parents. Others lost their homes. But regret runs deep in everybody who thought they could have done more to help others. Vale doesn’t know if she’ll be able to find her estranged mother, but she has to try. We glimpse Bonnie’s perspective briefly before she goes missing, and then MacArthur rotates through Vale, aunt Deb, and sisters Lena and Hazel to see Vermont through their eyes. Back in 1974, Deb’s friends are dying in Vietnam so she seeks out a commune in rural Vermont, hoping to find an idyllic home away from society. She embraces a self-reliant hippie lifestyle to become closer to the earth. She cherishes nature and can’t stand to see it plundered by pointless war. But her mother-in-law Hazel considers Deb an intruder, thinking that she “wanted to take this place and Hazel’s son in her slender fist and turn it into some kind of fantasy, walk the hillsides in a poetic reverie. But what did she really know about any of it? Of who made those beautiful, now crumbling walls, of the blood and sweat and work that went into these now
overgrowing fields?” Hazel’s great-great-grandfather had settled their family on this hillside in 1803, and she and her sister Lena know all of its secrets. By contrasting Deb’s new appreciation for Heart Spring Mountain and Hazel’s profound love of her ancestral homeland, MacArthur raises the question: when do you get to call someplace home? The truth is that the area where Hazel’s family settled doesn’t belong to them any more than it belongs to Deb. Vermont used to be the home of the Abenaki tribe, so MacArthur threads in some details to hint at the atrocities white settlers committed against Native Americans to steal their land. One minor character is an Abenaki woman who was forcibly sterilized alongside other women in her tribe so the Abenaki lineage couldn’t continue. Vale also discovers that one of her distant grandmothers could have belonged to the Abenaki tribe. Throughout Vale’s childhood, Bonnie had proudly claimed that their family had Native American heritage, but Vale had always thought Bonnie was appropriating Native American culture. Now that Bonnie’s Abenaki lineage turns out to be true, Vale suddenly feels drawn to the hills, the trees and the creek that she had hated as a child. It feels distasteful for a mostly white character to suddenly appreciate nature because her many-greats-grandmother may have been Abenaki, when in reality most of her relatives would have driven the tribe from their own homeland. Although MacArthur’s attempt to incorporate this Native American history feels a little clumsy, it is commendable for her to try to ensure it lives on. There are many generations who have called this place home, and not all of them have voices anymore. MacArthur manages to juggle the different perspectives with ease so you don’t lose sight of each character’s goals and shortcomings, despite the time-hopping. She threads the decades together by taking stock of the other tropical storms, extreme weather events and natural disasters that were happening around the world during each time period. This forces the characters to then take stock of their own lives and gain their own unique appreciation for Heart Spring Mountain. Hazel is born with her appreciation, Deb seeks hers out, and Vale finds hers along the way. Perhaps they smooth over some interpersonal relationships that they otherwise wouldn’t have tried to repair. MacArthur’s message is clear — let bygones be bygones, because when tragedy strikes, the support from the people in our communities is how we survive. B — Katherine Ouellette