By Catherine Reid. $24.99; Beacon Press; 184 pages.
Catherine Reid's essays, at their highest, hearken back to Leopold, Emerson and Thoreau.
Her celebration of a life slowed and tied to the seasons of rural Massachusetts feels like something missing from the modern-day canon. Even as wetlands turn into strip malls and global temperatures creep up by degrees, very few books fill the niche that Falling Into Place, her new essay collection, tries to fill: of how one is placed in their environment, be that family, an ecosystem or a tradition.
These essays are not experiences collected into arguments, just expressions of that experience, tidbits that yearn to be shared. The best pieces are sensual—when Reid writes of learning bird calls in the isolation of tape recording only to hear them weeks later in the wild; of the mudbank where otters slide and the desire to abandon herself like they do. And she's got the right mix of science and history to fascinate: how one oddly placed beaver dam saved a river from a chemical spill, how mantises mate, how 19th-century women entomologists and mountaineers committed to their discipline.
The essay "Thoreau Alone Won't Do" is a must-read for anyone looking for new female heroes of science and adventure. And "How To Become a Generalist" will strike a chord with any curious woman who's channeled that curiosity in all sorts of disparate directions just so she could do things herself. Falling Into Place celebrates the woman, which isn't to say that men can't enjoy it, they just might not value it as much.
Oddly, the weakest essay is likely what casual city readers will connect to most readily. When Reid, in her essay "Hitched, Massachusetts, 2004" ventures into the bureaucracy behind her marriage to her partner, Holly ( heightened by the fact that Massachusetts was the first state to legalize same-sex marriage ), somehow the pleasure is lost. By all rights this could be the book's most personal essay ( it even has Reid and her wife in a doctor's office ), but compared to moments like hearing the click of the Virginia rail's call in the woods, it reads like a newspaper article written days after the marriage, in a time where states weren't collapsing into equality. Honestly, I'd prefer a return to the woods, where Reid's lushness and lyricism are strongest.
While the collection resolves nicely, there's the sense that the essays themselves don't fall into place, perhaps because of the number of subjects and the fact that a lot of pieces take place in the turbulent early aughts that sowed the seeded of now. Environmentalism, feminism and equality are not unlikely bedfellows, and it's not Reid's skill as a writer that fails to unite them—her quest to find herself in the ecosystem is relentless and wide-ranging. Some essays are forgettable, some have too little of Reid and others too much and, taken together, there isn't one whole picture that emerges. Still Reid's successes are genuine, and Falling into Place has much to teach and observe.
