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parents and five siblings still live. We learn about the surround-
ing countryside, its rivers and valleys, and about the Wetlands
Birds Project, for which Reid is a volunteer. The essays recount
Reid’s day-to-day treks and meet-ups with local fauna and de-
scribe their habitats. Her writing is detailed without being dull, in-
formative but not pedantic. Reid is a published poet, and images
abound—visual ones, like “a circle of fire-lit snow,” and aural
ones, like the bird names that punctuate the text, such as rose-
breasted grosbeaks, marsh wrens, mergansers, ivory-billed wood-
peckers, greves, waxwings, wood ducks, poor wills, and king
rails, among many others.
Reid’s enthusiasm brings to mind the works of poet John
Clare and essayist Henry David Thoreau. Like theirs, her obser-
vations are carefully rendered, as, for example, in these com-
ments about a beaver lodge she stumbles upon while out walking
with an old friend: “Such a foolish place to build! ... This will
never be that marshy place made for ducks and frogs and great
blue herons, for dragonflies and sleep turtles. This valley is too
steep and rugged, the river too violent. ... These may be teenaged
beavers, kits kicked out by a new brood’s arrival, too naïve to
know they can’t slow a river. ... Or perhaps all the good brooks
were already taken and this was where winter, not desire, made
them stop.”
Falling into Place
abounds in descriptions of Reid’s explo-
rations during every season in the Berkshire outdoors. At the
same time, a few core essays pull the reader back indoors, to the
human settings in which change happens, and to matters of the
heart. Even as the couple is settling in, for example, Reid’s father
is found to require immediate surgery for a life-threatening heart
condition. We see how that crisis affects father and daughter, as
the writer skillfully depicts their earlier, profound estrangement
and also the possibility of reconciliation. As she and Holly are
leaving her father toward the end of his recovery, Reid tells us, he
looks at them both, saying, “Take care of each other,” and in his
words she hears newfound support for their life together.
“Hitched, Massachusetts, 2004” further explores the topic of
family, recounting the story of Reid and Holly’s wedding just
after the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts ruled that
same-sex couples have the right to marry. The piece is ample,
and tough. Far from feeling starry-eyed at the prospect of getting
legally married, the author says, she found herself weighing the
downside risks of making such an open declaration, fears based
on her experience as a lesbian woman. One real fear was that of
being physically or emotionally targeted.
We learn about the death at age 101 of Reid’s grandmother, a
woman from whom she learned the skills of birdwatcher and nat-
uralist. This same grandmother, however, did not want to hear
about Reid’s life with another woman, an attitude that greatly
pained her granddaughter. This essay is exemplary in its reti-
cence. No dramatic last words, no deathbed conversion. But in
the old woman’s dying calls for her granddaughter, the author
comes to find a kind of sufficiency.
One way we make peace with losses in nature, and with our
own human failings, Reid decides, is to look for a balance be-
tween “reckless solo acts” and making choices “with a commu-
nity in mind.” After several years in the Berkshires, Holly longs
to be living closer to her three grown children. With sadness, but
realizing she has probably found what she came for, Reid agrees
to move to North Carolina. What was revealed in her Berkshires
stay? Poet Merrill Gilfillan has described landscape writing as a
kind of “fundamental noticing.” Reid’s book offers three models
of women who were good at paying attention: a 17th-century ex-
plorer and naturalist, a climber who was the first woman to as-
cend the Matterhorn, and an early 20th-century photographer of
birds. These three women, all of them passionately focused on
the natural world, experienced failure, but they refused to give
in, persisting and at length prevailing in fraught and risky places.
Like their stories,
Falling into Place
shows a successful quest for
elusive, hard-won goals, on natural territory.
March–April 2014
41
No Geese This Evening
No geese this evening.
No point in coming.
For them.
When the tide’s not right,
When the water pancakes out
Taking the current down with it,
Leaving nothing but dreg shallows
And the pleasure barges which
Like selling their Hampton Court shuttle as a trip
Down the Mississippi, with Huck Finn himself
crewing,
Are forced to say no to the punters,
The geese cancel too.
Why the river has flatlined and will not permit
The short, lovely glide to the bank
Opposite their grazing ground, where
Just before shore, a bounce
Built of wake always kicks in
Tipping them over the wire fence
Onto dry land
Is and isn’t clear.
But the lead will not open his troop
To the perils of formation flying.
This is not a species that does
One single thing on whim.
Not when life means limb.
Birds are ambitious.
By the end of the day
They want to live through it.
The lead has scrubbed tonight’s crossing.
Tonight the Thames is all out of tides.
H
ELENA
K
AMINSKI