Fireworks and acorns, magic, adventures and a labor of love

I have a friend, who, when invited to any event involving fireworks –- the Fourth of July, for instance –- will politely decline, explaining that since she has already seen the best fireworks the world has to offer, there’s really no point, as any subsequent pyrotechnic display would only be a disappointment.

I thought of her the other day, when contemplating “Peace Like a River,” a novel by Leif Enger, which is so excellent it is almost hard to move on to anything else. It’s like, if you’ve ever flown first class, you know it is a lovely, refreshing experience. But the problem is, it’s really hard to go back to regular old steerage once you’ve tasted that legroom, that service, that early boarding, those warmed nuts.

I almost didn’t read this novel when my sister handed it to me back in March because it looked to me like a book I had read before. The cover, the title, even the author’s name, seemed vaguely familiar. Perhaps a bygone book group pick? But then, one day, perhaps for lack of any other unread book on my shelf, I gave it a try.

And I am here to report that it is extraordinary.

“Peace Like a River” is narrated by 11-year-old Reuben Land, who would not have lived to tell any tale at all had not his father intervened early on. While Reuben’s mother lay “dazed, propped against soggy pillows, unable to comprehend what Dr. Animas Nokes was telling her,” Reuben’s lungs were “refusing to kick in.” The doctor later said he had “never seen a child with such swampy lungs.”

Surely young Reuben would, probably should, have died had not Reuben’s dad, who was outside the hospital restlessly pacing and praying in the damp September wind, come running into the room, having had an intuition that something was up. Though it had been 12 breathless minutes for the newborn boy, Jeremiah wrapped the near-dead baby in a canvas coat and said, “Reuben Land, in the name of the living God I am telling you to breathe.”

So, begins Reuben’s life and tale.

The Lands’ life appears calm and settled at the outset of the book. But then Reuben’s extraordinary father (janitor at the local school) stops two town bullies from attacking his eldest son’s girlfriend. The bullies then retaliate by kidnapping Reuben’s sister Swede (who one reviewer said may be literature’s most unforgettable little girl since Scout in “To Kill a Mockingbird”) and then breaking into the Lands house, which impels Davy, whose girlfriend was savaged by the bullies in the first place, to shoot them dead. Things go on from there. That’s just the beginning.

Apparently Enger wrote this novel to amuse his family, taking story suggestions from his children and giving the lead character, Reuben, asthma to encourage one of his sons, who also has asthma.

Born in 1961 to two teachers, Enger grew up in Minnesota, and for 20 years worked as a reporter and producer for Minnesota Public Radio. “Peace Like a River” is Enger’s first of four novels. In 2001, it was voted one of Time magazine’s top five novels of the year.

All told, this book is a lot of bang for the buck. Gorgeously written, with an almost Twain-like humor and sensibility, it is thoughtful, deep and understatedly magical, with well-rendered, interesting characters. I highly recommend it.

Another book that was also handed to me, this time by a neighbor, is Ethan Tapper’s “How to Love a Forest.” Superstar environmentalist Bill McKibben praises it as “beautifully written, full of scenes those of us who live in and love the forests of the northeast will recognize immediately.”

Now, I love trees. All trees. But I don’t know anything, really, about them. I can tell a maple from an oak, a weeping willow from an apple tree, but my knowledge doesn’t go much deeper or broader than that. Having read this book, I now know a good deal more.

But “How to Love a Forest” is not merely about trees. It’s about the “living threads that stitch” forests together.” The community that is a forest. “The insects and the ephemerals, the fungi of the soil, the creatures of the rhizosphere and the necrosphere, the birds and the bats — these things are not simply a byproduct of a healthy forest. They are fingers on the same hand, branches on the same tree, as integral to the health and the function of this forest, as an organ is to my body.”

“As I reimagine this forest and what it means to care for it,” writes Tapper, “I know that I cannot love and protect it without loving and protecting all the native species that call it home.”

A little bit Lewis Thomas, a little bit Edward Abbey, a little bit Genesis, chapter one, this book is a gem, unique unto itself. It is poetic and accessible, inspiring, convincing and transformative.

In it, Tapper tells a bit about his own life, which begins “in a small town in southeastern Vermont, surrounded by mountains, forests and rivers.”

“Though forests were ever-present in my life,” he writes,” it never occurred to me that they were my calling — that I would someday become a forester.”

But then, one day in early March, Tapper and a few friends were carrying their skis up a steep mountain highway when they passed “a washed-out gravel road, a rusted cable with a worn Keep-Out sign pulled across its entrance.” Tapper never guessed that day that this would be a place he would give his life to — “a place that would teach me what it means to love a forest, a place that I would someday call Bear Island.”

Tapper walks the reader through his journey with this piece of land, introducing them to wolf trees and chestnut trees and a beech that “lies in the snow like a queen in her coffin.” He talks about bear and moose and beavers and deer and butterflies, pileated woodpeckers, minnows and tree frogs. He tells us that we who don’t understand the experience of forests suffer from “shifting baseline syndrome”: “the belief that the things we are used to are normal.”

“In fact,” Tapper writes, “the forest on the mountain and the forests of our world are aberrations, oddities, unprecedented and unfamiliar; shining replicas standing in place of ancient relics.”

Invasive plants and trees, logging, the extinction and overpopulation of certain animal species, etc. have degraded our forests, says Tapper. “And human beings have arisen from ecosystems to become a force as primal and earthshaking as a glacier, shaping this planet physically, biologically, chemically, climatically. We have sent the biosphere that sustains us into a profound reorganization. We teeter on an unsteady foundation, moving into an uncertain future together.”

Tapper’s writing is incredible. He frequently spins off into abstract, beautifully phrased commentary about the world, forests, species, humans, evolution, change, responsibility, etc. But all this is grounded in a dirt-real endeavor: his calling to restore a 175-acre piece of land to a healthy, vibrant forest — “a forest that is alive and glorious with change.” It is a Herculean task. A labor of love. We witness Tapper singlehandedly attack destructive invasive species such as barberry and fell diseased trees to open up areas in the forest for pioneer species to thrive. We watch him hunt deer; we watch him plant seeds.

This book whetted my appetite to learn more about forests and what we can do to help them. And though the world is a mess, and humans have done a ton of damage, Tapper’s words never stop ringing of energy and hope.

“We owe too much to the future to be imprisoned by the past,” he says, then ends with this: “Sometimes this life feels like autumn: the exhausted end of a boundless summer. Today I choose to live in a world in which spring is just breaking, impossible and inevitable — a world that is just awakening, just beginning to discover what it truly is. I look toward the broken ridge of the mountain and feel a powerful nostalgia, not for the past but for the future. High about the storm, the light is swelling, calling everything upward, toward a world that is just beginning. I am trying.

“I bend and plant another acorn.”