book review: Ecology of a Cracker Childhood.

i began meeting, today, one of my goals for the summer: to read this stack of books i've collected for pleasure and some emotional, spirtual, and intellectual growth... not sure which category this falls under... all of them i think... today i finished Ecology of a Cracker Childhood by Janisse Ray.

the new york times says "The forests of the Southeast find their Rachel Carson." now, i'm not a huge fan of rachel carson (but i've only read silent spring) so i can't really agree with this personally, but i do acknowledge, on a cultural level, that rachel carson is a cornerstone of american environmental history, and so comparisons are made. janisse ray, a poor white girl from the backwoods, intersperses chapters of her personal story with chapters of the species and the ecology of the space that formed her, where God attached her spirit to the land. she weaves family details into the lifecycle of a single bird and connects the scale of southern poverty to the scale of southern forest degradation. her title is slightly decieving, potentially because i don't have associations with the word "cracker" outside of the black culture of my high school - can't blame her for my inexperience though, can i?

her story of material poverty and spiritual abundance is reassuring, uplifting, and romantic. she relates her and her brothers' days rambling over rusty metal in her father's junkyard - it's a romance i am easily taken in by: dirty faces and bare feet traversing their own habitat, growing strong, sinewy bodies and resilient, stalwart, knowledgable, sensitive souls. i force to mind tetanus, splinters, mold spores, lead poisoning, mosquito larvae in old tires, nails in the soles of soft shoeless feet, and try to keep the romantic image of the childhood of the past at bay. my efforts at cynicism are thwarted, however, by ray's exquisite description of her mother's love which does, in many standard ways and a few extraordinary ones, conquer all.

ecologically, i'm reminded of my own days tramping across sandhill pine savannah in dr. bill's ornithology class praying to see a red-cockaded woodpecker. we did. scolded by fox squirrels and avoiding delicate venus fly traps in the swamps, we marched on in janisse ray's footsteps.

what ray does best in her writing is put into words the intricate connection of her land, her people, her soul, her past, and her future. the last chapters of the book are a testament to nature's vital role in ray's life. without interacting with it as she did and does, she would not have become the woman God intended her to be. her expectations for nature's renewal are purist; she chooses hernando de soto's time as a restoration goal (for all restorers must choose a time; an ever-changing landscape is not to be tied down), but her father's junkyard became a part of the natural landscape in a way that is not accepted anymore. it both rolled with the land and imposed itself upon it making ecologists of the ray children and forming the backdrop of a heart-felt autobiography of knowing respect for the land.