"Where the Crawdads Sing"

[fiefoe]

Delia Owens' runaway hit / 出圈爆款 is the fourth book written by a female biologist that I've read. (Previously, "Lab Girl", "Braiding Sweetgrass", "Under the Sea Wind".) It's hard not to like the story of a lone self-taught genius aided by kindness from other socially marginalized characters, but Kya's romantic entanglements are just a bit too cliched, and took up too much space. I'm okay with the main relevation in the last pages of the book, but why also a secret poet. 

• Marsh is not swamp. Marsh is a space of light, where grass grows in water, and water flows into the sky. Slow-moving creeks wander, carrying the orb of the sun with them to the sea, and long-legged birds lift with unexpected grace—as though not built to fly—against the roar of a thousand snow geese.
• Then within the marsh, here and there, true swamp crawls into low-lying bogs, hidden in clammy forests. Swamp water is still and dark, having swallowed the light in its muddy throat. Even night crawlers are diurnal in this lair. There are sounds, of course, but compared to the marsh, the swamp is quiet because decomposition is cellular work. Life decays and reeks and returns to the rotted duff; a poignant wallow of death begetting life.
• On the morning of October 30, 1969, the body of Chase Andrews lay in the swamp, which would have absorbed it silently, routinely. Hiding it for good. A swamp knows all about death, and doesn’t necessarily define it as tragedy, certainly not a sin.
• The marsh was guarded by a torn shoreline, labeled by early explorers as the “Graveyard of the Atlantic” because riptides, furious winds, and shallow shoals wrecked ships like paper hats along what would become the North Carolina coast.
• Just like their whiskey, the marsh dwellers bootlegged their own laws—not like those burned onto stone tablets or inscribed on documents, but deeper ones, stamped in their genes. Ancient and natural, like those hatched from hawks and doves. When cornered, desperate, or isolated, man reverts to those instincts that aim straight at survival. Quick and just. They will always be the trump cards because they are passed on more frequently from one generation to the next than the gentler genes. It is not a morality, but simple math. Among themselves, doves fight as often as hawks.
• When she still didn’t speak, he said good-bye and strode across the beach to the woods. Just before he stepped into the trees, she finally turned and watched him walk away.
  “This little piggy stayed home,” she said to the waves.
• “Ya don’t know much as a cur-dawg. Useless as tits on a boar hog."
• Over the next few days, Kya learned from the mistakes of the others, and perhaps more from the minnows, how to live with him. Just keep out of the way, don’t let him see you, dart from sunspots to shadows.
• For more than two hundred years, sharp salty winds had weathered the cedar-shingled buildings to the color of rust, and the window frames, most painted white or blue, had flaked and cracked. Mostly, the village seemed tired of arguing with the elements, and simply sagged.
• Sometimes she heard night-sounds she didn’t know or jumped from lightning too close, but whenever she stumbled, it was the land that caught her. Until at last, at some unclaimed moment, the heart-pain seeped away like water into sand. Still there, but deep. Kya laid her hand upon the breathing, wet earth, and the marsh became her mother.
• Tate found a poem by Thomas Moore:
  . . . she’s gone to the Lake of the Dismal Swamp,
  Where, all night long, by a fire-fly lamp,
  She paddles her white canoe.
  
  And her fire-fly lamp I soon shall see,
  And her paddle I soon shall hear;
  Long and loving our life shall be,
  And I’ll hide the maid in a cypress tree,
  When the footstep of death is near.
• Kya had to watch a distant string of pelicans, study the cloud forms, anything but look into dying fish eyes staring at a world without water, wide mouth sucking worthless air. But what it cost her and what it cost that fish was worth it to have this little shred of family. Perhaps not for the fish, but still.
• She sat at the table, the peas still singing in the pot, and stared at the little mound. “Ma touched these. Maybe Pa’ll tell me what she wrote. Don’t be stupid—that’s as likely as snow fallin’ in the swamp.”
  Even the postmark was gone. Now she’d never know where Ma was. She put the ashes in a little bottle and kept it in her cigar box next to her bed.
• Pa never took her fishing again. Those warm days were just a thrown-in season. Low clouds parting, the sun splashing her world briefly, then closing up dark and tight-fisted again.
• But she knew it was extraordinary for it was the “eyebrow” of a great blue heron, the feather that bows gracefully above the eye, extending back beyond her elegant head. One of the most exquisite fragments of the coastal marsh, right here.
• A great blue heron is the color of gray mist reflecting in blue water. And like mist, she can fade into the backdrop, all of her disappearing except the concentric circles of her lock-and-load eyes. She is a patient, solitary hunter, standing alone as long as it takes to snatch her prey. Or, eyeing her catch, she will stride forward one slow step at a time, like a predacious bridesmaid.
• And yet here was an extra spark plug, to be set aside until needed. A surplus. Her heart filled up. The same feeling as having a full tank of gas or seeing the sunset under a paint-brushed sky.
• For days, Tate didn’t return for the reading lessons. Before the feather game, loneliness had become a natural appendage to Kya, like an arm. Now it grew roots inside her and pressed against her chest.
  Late one afternoon, she struck out in her boat. “I cain’t just sit ’round waitin’.”
• Slowly, she unraveled each word of the sentence: “‘There are some who can live without wild things, and some who cannot.’”
  “Oh,” she said. “Oh.”
  “You can read, Kya. There will never be a time again when you can’t read.”
  “It ain’t just that.” She spoke almost in a whisper. “I wadn’t aware that words could hold so much. I didn’t know a sentence could be so full.”
  He smiled. “That’s a very good sentence. Not all words hold that much.”
• Kya didn’t ask if he had more family, now gone. His ma must have left him, too. Part of her longed to touch his hand, a strange wanting, but her fingers wouldn’t do it. Instead she memorized the bluish veins on the inside of his wrist, as intricate as those sketched on the wings of wasps.
• Aldo Leopold taught her that floodplains are living extensions of the rivers, which will claim them back any time they choose. Anyone living on a floodplain is just waiting in the river’s wings. She learned where the geese go in winter, and the meaning of their music. His soft words, sounding almost like poetry, taught her that soil is packed with life and one of the most precious riches on Earth; that draining wetlands dries the land for miles beyond, killing plants and animals along with the water. Some of the seeds lie dormant in the desiccated earth for decades, waiting, and when the water finally comes home again, they burst through the soil, unfolding their faces. Wonders and real-life knowledge she would’ve never learned in school. Truths everyone should know, yet somehow, even  though they lay exposed all around, seemed to lie in secret like the seeds.
• And just at that second, the wind picked up, and thousands upon thousands of yellow sycamore leaves broke from their life support and streamed across the sky. Autumn leaves don’t fall; they fly. They take their time and wander on this, their only chance to soar.
• “Former athlete. And anyhow, lots of ’em get tangled up in drugs. When the grand days of hero dry up, they gotta get a high from somewheres else. Or maybe he had a woman out there.”
• Kya watched others. The females got what they wanted—first a mate, then a meal—just by changing their signals.
  Kya knew judgment had no place here. Evil was not in play, just life pulsing on, even at the expense of some of the players. Biology sees right and wrong as the same color in different light.
• Listless, she wondered what she had done to send everyone away. Her own ma. Her sisters. Her whole family. Jodie. And now Tate. Her most poignant memories were unknown dates of family members disappearing down the lane. The last of a white scarf trailing through the leaves. A pile of socks left on a floor mattress.
• But this was too abrupt—picnic, then mate the Marsh Girl. Even male birds woo the females for a while, flashing brilliant feathers, building bowers, staging magnificent dances and love songs. Yes, Chase had laid out a banquet, but she was worth more than fried chicken. And “Dixie” didn’t count as a love song. She should’ve known it would be like this. Only time male mammals hover is when they’re in the rut.
• Kya remembered, those many years ago, Ma warning her older sisters about young men who overrevved their rusted-out pickups or drove jalopies around with radios blaring. “Unworthy boys make a lot of noise,” Ma had said.
• Kya dropped the journal on her lap, her mind drifting with the clouds. Some female insects eat their mates, overstressed mammal mothers abandon their young, many males design risky or shifty ways to outsperm their competitors. Nothing seemed too indecorous as long as the tick and the tock of life carried on. She knew this was not a dark side to Nature, just inventive ways to endure against all odds. Surely for humans there was more.
• But each time she resisted his advances, he stopped. Images of does or turkey hens alone with their demanding young, the males long gone to other females, weighed solid in her mind.
• Tate lifted the painting of the feather—a profusion of hundreds of the thinnest brushstrokes of rich colors culminating into a deep black so reflective it seemed sunlight was touching the canvas. The detail of a slight tear in the shaft was so distinctive that both Tate and Kya realized at the same second that this was a painting of the very first feather he’d gifted her in the forest.
• But she’d never headed straight into the deeper currents, some of them stirred by the Gulf Stream, which gushes four billion cubic feet of water every second, more power than all the land rivers on Earth combined—all streaming just beyond North Carolina’s outstretched arms. The surge produces cruel backcurrents, fisted eddies, and reverse circulations that swirl with coastal riptides, birthing one of the nastiest snake pits of the planet’s seas.
• She knew it wasn’t Chase she mourned, but a life defined by rejections. As the sky and clouds struggled overhead, she said out loud, “I have to do life alone. But I knew this. I’ve known a long time that people don’t stay.”
• “Looks like it’ll be ’bout eight hundr’d dollars total—put the land free and clear.”
  Kya walked out of the courthouse with a full deed in her name for three hundred ten acres of lush lagoons, sparkling marsh, oak forests, and a long private beach on the North Carolina coastline. “Wasteland cateegory. Murky swamp.”
• No wonder her mind buried the scene; no wonder Ma had left. Hit by a poker across the chest. Kya saw those rubbed-out stains on the flowered sundress as blood again.
• In a whisper, she asked, “Who’s who?”
  “What?”
  “There were never any photographs. I don’t know them. Who’s who?”
  “Oh.” He couldn’t breathe, then finally said, “Well, this is Missy, the oldest. Then Murph. Mandy. Of course, this little cutie is me. And that’s you.”
• Before him was an astonishingly colorful oil of two children squatting in swirls of green grass and wild flowers. The girl was only a toddler, perhaps three years old, her straight black hair falling over her shoulders. The boy, a bit older, with golden curls, pointed to a monarch butterfly, its black-and-yellow wings spread across a daisy. His hand was on the girl’s arm.
  “I think that’s Tate Walker,” Jodie said. “And you.”
• She looked at the painting—so pastel, so peaceful. Somehow Ma’s mind had pulled beauty from lunacy.
• It happens in humans, too. Some behaviors that seem harsh to us now ensured the survival of early man in whatever swamp he was in at the time. Without them, we wouldn’t be here. We still store those instincts in our genes, and they express themselves when certain circumstances prevail. Some parts of us will always be what we were, what we had to be to survive—way back yonder.
  I guess some things can’t be explained, only forgiven or not.
• The red spot on a herring gull’s bill, Kya knew, was more than decoration. Only when the chicks pecked at the spot with their bills would the parent release the captured food for them. If the red spot was obscured so that the chicks didn’t tap it, the parent wouldn’t feed them and they would die. Even in nature, parenthood is a thinner line than one might think.
• “Sunsets are never simple. / Twilight is refracted and reflected / But never true. /Eventide is a disguise / Covering tracks, / Covering lies.
• Judge Sims called for a lunch recess until 1:00 P.M. The diner would bring over tuna fish, chicken salad, and ham sandwiches for the jurors, who would eat in the deliberation room. To be fair to the town’s two eating establishments, the Dog-Gone Beer Hall would deliver hot dogs, chili, and shrimp po’boys on alternative days. They always brought something for the cat, too.
• Kya leaned over gently, as if to kiss a baby. The microscope’s light reflected in her dark pupils, and she drew in a breath as a Mardi Gras of costumed players pirouetted and careened into view. Unimaginable headdresses adorned astonishing bodies so eager for more life, they frolicked as though caught in a circus tent, not a single bead of water.
• (Sunday Justice the cat:) He looked at her. Gently she touched his head, then scratched his neck. A loud purr erupted like a current. She closed her eyes at such easy acceptance. A deep pause in a lifetime of longing.
• Folks had made a stir when they walked in with Tate and sat downstairs in the “white area.” But when the bailiff reported this to Judge Sims, still in his chambers, the judge told him to announce that anybody of any color or creed could sit anywhere they wanted in his courtroom, and if somebody didn’t like it, they were free to leave. In fact, he’d make sure they did.
  On seeing Jumpin’ and Mabel, Kya felt a smidge of strength, and her back straightened slightly.
• but the correspondence, written so often in biological phrases blended with poetic descriptions, had become a bond welded in its own language. She wanted to meet this person on the other end of the mail line, who knew how ordinary light is shattered by microscopic prisms in the feathers of hummingbirds, creating the iridescence of its golden-red throat. And how to say it in words as startling as the colors.
• She scanned cattails and egrets, pines and ponds flashing past. Craned her neck to watch two beavers paddling. Like a migrating tern who has flown ten thousand miles to her natal shore, her mind pounded with the longing and expectation of home;