At the Arches

Two thousand miles and a trail report to catch you up.

Hello Loves,

There is a picture of Andy and me, taken just about a month ago, standing far from the camera, under the huge, orange form of a sandstone formation in Arches National Park.

Andy had never been to this park. I had as a college student. But as we stood there, we were two days from the moment when we left Dex at his new college.

We look happy. We look grief-stricken. We look gob-smacked by beauty. We look like we are in the teeth of a change we can’t quite wrap our heads around. It is morning, the sun is tucked behind the stone. The small gully in which we stand is shaded and cool-looking, and it holds us, lightly, like the travelers we are.

By the time we made it from that moment on camera to the trail we planned our day around, it was full sun, high noon, and we layered up with hats and shirts and piled extra water in our packs and secured emergency snacks and walked into a slot canyon filled with other tourists. There were a lot of us, people of every age and race and style of hiking, a cross-section of America and her visitors.

I’d been driving across the country for almost ten days at that point, my second cross-country drive this summer, meaning I’d driven from Chicago to the east coast and back, and then from Chicago to the west coast and back between July and September, something like 5,000 miles behind the wheel if I’m doing my math right, and I probably am not.

I haven’t had energy to do that kind of traveling in years. It felt like a miracle that my body was up to it. But also, it felt significant to be doing it during an election year. Nothing reminds you how wild a place this is to govern like going from ocean to ocean in the space of a few months. We’re big. We’re unruly. We’re wildly kind and complicated.

Driving through forest fires and flood-ravaged small towns was an exercise in real-time collapse. Sitting in a hot springs pool with a Vietnam Vet sheep rancher was a reminder that labels like that can’t tell you a thing about someone’s politics or personality or position on the environment.

I took the summer off from writing you these letters. I didn’t really announce it, or plan it, but the summer came and suddenly I wanted and needed to go inward, into the change in our family—the transition Dex was making to a college far from home, the transition Andy was making to grad school, the transition I was making to my books entering the world. I have never been so public as I will be this year. I have never had so much of my story, or so many of my words, reach so many people. It is humbling, and surreal, and I am trying to stay as much in the moment as I am able, because change is really not my favorite thing at all.

I thought a lot about how I would come back to these letters, and when. I had big ideas about how I was going to use this place as I begin the run-up to the launch of both of my books this year. I had ideas that I would make it a weekly roundup of some of the animals that didn’t make it into my bestiary. I had ideas that I would make it a weekly roundup of some of the facts about museums and museum keepers that didn’t make it into my novel set in the American Museum of Natural History. Those were good ideas! But all of them felt like writing another book, and I’m already writing two new ones.

Instead, I want to sit with you every once in a while, and tell you about what it is like when I take myself away from the writing desk, the book tour, the audio booth, the university guest lecture, and walk, simply walk, slowly and not very far, into the wild places that surround me wherever I am.

I love the trail. I love it in ways that have made me seek it out, weekly at least, for my whole life. I loved the hill behind my house as a child. I loved the conservation areas of the college town where I went to high school. I loved the parks outside of the city where I went to college. I loved the forest preserves of the city I now call home. I loved the state and national parks I can now reach by car. I love them still.

So, I am going to take you on a trail report when I show up here. I am remembering that the title of this letter, is not only a reference to the Queen song and the cover of that song by Neko Case. It is an admonition, a warning, and an invitation all in one. I try very hard, especially when I am afraid for her, to never turn my back on Mother Earth. Walking is part of that practice. And as my knee continues to slowly heal, walking is also my way back into my body.

In my novel, All the Water in the World, the narrator, Nonie, reveals that when she was unable to sleep as a child—her family of climate refugees stuck on the roof of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City—her mother would try to help her settle by telling a hike. Her mother had experienced a world changing but not yet collapsed in the face of climate disaster, and she’d been places and walked trails that Nonie would never see. Hearing the narrative of those trails calmed Nonie and helped her settle into rest.

This story, like so much of the book, is based on something I used to do when Dex couldn’t sleep. I must have re-walked the trails of my youth a thousand times in late-night narrations, a slowly calming child in my arms. Nonie needed those hikes, Dex did too, and so do I. I hope you will as well.

I hope that you can see yourself in my stories of them, the fact that I am chronically ill, and that my knee was horribly broken in an accident, and that my goals for being in the woods have nothing to do with trail length or elevation gained (though sometimes I check those just to remind myself that I am capable of things I forgot I could do). I am not a completionist or someone narrating overnight treks. I am a middle-aged mom and author who cannot leave the woods and prairies, sea cliffs and pine forests and lakeshores alone.

So, let’s go for a walk.

It was wild to walk that trail in Arches, over hard earth and sand, past canyons and arches and the saturated repetition of orange, red, yellow, gold, cream, tan laid up against a clear, vibrant blue sky. It isn’t my landscape. I don’t understand it. I love it like a stranger, even though it is part of my country. It feels otherworldly to me, no matter when I encounter it. The quiet, the dryness, the dun-colored rattlesnakes, the way the land seems to vibrate with power. Walking through it, I wished that we’d come at dawn, when the shadows were long and the quiet was holy and the people were fewer and more prone to silence.

But I left those feelings behind, as much as I could, and leaned into making friends with the people in their sandals and travel-wear, the quartet of Indian-American women in sun hats and sundresses who handed us their phones and stood in the glory of that land as we took pictures of all of them together, so happy to be there, and told us jokes while we all laughed together on the trail.

I’ve been watching the book birthday of by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson’s What if We Get it Right?: Visions of Climate Futures which is about the possibilities to heal through the ecocollapse all around us. I haven’t read it yet, full disclosure, but it is in my virtual TBR pile, waiting for me with messages I’ll need when I am afraid or low or despairing, because those times still come.

In the meantime, I’ve been canvassing for the Harris/Walz ticket, remembering that I am working very hard right now—and so are thousands and thousands of people in this country I love with my whole heart—to make things safer for us in the big fights about the heating world that lie ahead. As I knock on doors, I find that my neighbors, my fellow citizens, are as afraid and resolute and hopeful and eager to talk as I am. It is a balm, let me tell you. Get out and do it yourself if you are feeling low. We really are the kindest people at heart.

I fell in love with us Americans and our visitors on the trail in Arches—the Midwestern couple who gave us advice about the empty nest, the solo German hiker who took our picture in the morning, those lovely women, the old Asian ladies lapping me as they trudged along holding bottled water and mopping their faces with kerchiefs.

When I tired and my knee got sore, Andy went along the trail to the arch that was the star of the trail. I waited for him to bring me back pictures and his report, sitting on the big limb of a juniper tree that became my friend and lent me her shade. Hidden there, I could hear people walking past, all exclaiming the same words at the sight before them, the glory of it, the gratitude that we all belonged there together, loving the world and the country, and making sure we don’t forget.

I’ll write soon.

Love,

Eiren

PS.

Reviews are coming in! Library Journal called the novel incandescent! Publisher’s Weekly said that the memoir deserves wide readership!

And You can come launch my first book with me! And you can pre-order both books now! And you can pre-order both audiobooks! Just think of all of that action you can take to support me and get my work into the world!

In case you don’t have book funds right now, you can help me enormously by asking your local library to get the book! Tell them about the great reviews! They’ll be excited!

Here’s the stuff to read:

A starred review of The Mourner’s Bestiary in Publisher’s Weekly!

A review of The Mourner’s Bestiary in Shelf Awareness!

The Mourner’s Bestiary in a roundup of survival memoirs on BookTrib!

A starred reviwew of All the Water in the World in Library Journal!

Here’s where to see me soon:

BOOK LAUNCH at Women and Children First in Chicago on October 17 with Megan Steilstra! Register for free tickets!

Here’s where to pre-order the books:

The Mourner’s Bestiary on Bookshop!

All the Water in the World on Bookshop!

All the Water in the World on Audible!