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| (photo: Carol B. Hagen) | |
Ash Davidson lives in Flagstaff, Ariz. She attended the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and her work has been supported by the Arizona Commission on the Arts and MacDowell. Her fiction has appeared in various journals, including Copper Nickel and Nashville Review. Damnation Spring (Scribner, August 3, 2021) is her debut novel about a logging community whose livelihood may be endangering its citizens.
Before writing Damnation Spring, you'd known little about how herbicides negatively affected timber country. Why was this a story you needed to tell?
Growing up, my parents told this story about a timber company representative coming by our cabin. We relied on a nearby creek for drinking water, and that creek ran downhill through timberlands, similar to Rich and Colleen's setup in the book. The rep had a bottle of herbicide with him and poured some on his wrist to prove it was safe. My parents had previously signed a petition against chemical sprays; he wanted them to take their names off it. My family left Klamath when I was three, but I always wondered about that bottle, and what was in it.
Your fictionalized version of Klamath, a Pacific Northwest location known for logging, is populated by characters so real, it's almost like you met them rather than wrote them. How did these characters come to you?
They just showed up. I made two research trips to Klamath, in 2014 and 2016, to speak with locals and to interview men who'd logged or worked in the mills. There are scenes in the book inspired by those conversations and by my parents' stories. But with the exception of Lark, who is partly an amalgam of my grandfathers plus a bawdy great-uncle--all foul-mouthed, none of them loggers--the rest of the characters are pure inventions.
In a way, the story revolves around one massive tree, the 24-7, and Rich's hope that he might finally accomplish what previous Gundersen men only dreamed of doing: fell it. What is behind his determination to succeed where they failed, even when it means the herbicide spraying will continue?
Rich lost his father young. One of his only memories of him is of walking up to visit the 24-7 tree. I think Rich internalized his father's dream of felling that tree as a way to hold on to that closeness. The tree is a living tie to his father; it's the same tree his father touched, and his grandfather. He could draw you a map of every nub in its bark. The irony is that fulfilling the family dream would mean destroying the tree, and severing the bond it represents.
Colleen is grieving over her and Rich's recent miscarriage but also over the other seven pregnancies she's lost. Is her belief that she gets only "one miracle"--her son, Chub--simply how she convinces herself she doesn't deserve more?
Colleen so desperately wants another baby. At the same time, she's fending off this shame, this frustration with her own body, for wanting something that is, ultimately, beyond her control. I think Colleen vacillates between the guilt of knowing she should be grateful for the child she has, and her desire for another, which feels greedy to her on some level. The taboos around miscarriage and pregnancy loss have made those experiences deeply lonely for her--it's a very private grief. I suspect that's still true for many women and their partners today.
How did you settle on including chapters from Chub's point of view?
Damnation Spring started out as a first-person novel in Rich's voice. But I kept running into walls--things he couldn't know or wouldn't notice. Even after I added Colleen, they were both so quiet. I needed Chub. He's curious. He's lower to the ground. He's five at the beginning of the book. I'd worked as a nanny, so I had some experience with children that age. They're observant, but not judgmental, and still fully alive to the magic of the world, from birds' nests to Bigfoot.
Why, only when a character who relocated outside Klamath returns, is any attention paid to the herbicides?
Everyone else is focused on making ends meet, on paying the next electric bill. And then there's the psychic toll of confronting the idea that your livelihood could be poisoning the people you love most--thinking about it would upend their lives.
But in real life, there were grassroots efforts in Klamath to stop the sprays. And if you look to true stories about herbicide poisoning, like A Bitter Fog, it was farm wives and schoolteachers, people who grew gardens and picked berries, who put two and two together and organized until 2,4,5-T was taken off the market. Still today, you'll find 2,4-D--the other ingredient in Agent Orange--in lawncare products, and people who live in the forests of the Pacific Northwest are fighting to protect their families from poisons sprayed on them from the air.
Daniel, a member of the local Yurok Tribe, is villainized by the loggers for his theory that the water is causing miscarriages. What was your thought process behind choosing a member of an already ostracized group in town to present this ugly truth?
The events in the novel are fictional, but public concern about herbicides in the 1970s was real. 2,4-D was sprayed on the National Mall to control dandelions before the National Park Service banned it. 2,4,5-T was sprayed on rice crops. In Klamath, it was Yurok people who led efforts to stop chemical sprays and I wanted to honor that. Yurok people have lived along the Klamath River since time immemorial; they didn't need an epidemiological study to know something wasn't right. When you know a place intimately, you notice changes in plant and animal life, the way you'd notice if a person you loved wasn't breathing normally. I thought a lot about Daniel--it's not my culture; getting it wrong could do a lot of harm. But removing him would have felt like an act of erasure. Genocidal America tried to wipe Indigenous people from the map, but the Yurok Tribe is still here, working to get more water in the Klamath, to restore salmon. Across this country, Native people are leading efforts to protect water, from the Dakota Access Pipeline to the White Mesa uranium mill.
Rich won't have sex for fear of losing another baby, is unwilling to kill spiders that wander inside, and serves his son milk when questions arise about the water. Why does he struggle to extend these sensitivities to the ecosystem affected by logging?
Rich recognizes the destruction of the forest around him and his role in it. He's mourning it in his own way. That's why he takes Chub to visit Damnation Grove before the harvest, and to witness the salmon return to Damnation Creek for what will be the last time. But he has to compartmentalize. He quit school at 15; logging is the only life he knows. He's in his 50s; he's the sole breadwinner. If he doesn't log, his family doesn't eat.
It's easy to assume that loggers don't care about the environment, but the line, "You won't find a guy that loves the woods more than a logger," suggests that's not the case. Do you think both passions are mutually exclusive?
Going in, I assumed loggers didn't care about the consequences of their industry. Sitting down with men who'd harvested ancient redwood groves helped me see that, of course, the truth is more complicated. At the end of the day, everyone wants clean water.
I work in conservation--Rich would call me a "tree hugger." I can't speak for logging communities, but I did my best to listen. Bits of dialogue in Damnation Spring are taken from public hearings on mining and forestry projects I attended in Utah and Arizona. The concerns people bring to those meetings--providing for your family, making a life in a rural place--are real. And there are roadmaps for the industry to support environmental efforts, like the Four Forest Restoration Initiative, where loggers are thinning overgrown forests to prevent megafires. --Samantha Zaboski