Book Report: Surfacing

11. Kathleen Jamie, Surfacing (2019) (2/25/21)

This book of twelve essays explores, with depth of spirit and an observant eye, memory, meaning, and the reach of time, as well as landscape as place and home, not just of humans but of all life. Jamie (who is Scottish) is also a poet, and it shows in the exquisite details and descriptions she renders. 

The collection includes two longer essays, both dealing with archeological sites—one, about 500 years old, in Arctic Alaska (which I wrote a bit about here), the other 5,000 years old, on an island in Orkney. I found the first, "In Quinhagak," especially beautiful, for her musings and her noticings—there was something about the huge tundra landscape on the edge of the Bering Sea that seemed to blow her heart wide open—but the second, "Links of Noltland," was also lovely for tapping into our common humanity with people thousands of years gone. 

Being on site often left me freighted with thoughts about time, how it seems to expand and contract. I kept having to remind myself of the ages that passed during what we call the Neolithic or the Bronze Age. How those people's days were as long and vital as ours.
     I tried to picture that pioneer generation, landing on a lonely shore with provisions stowed and live animals tethered in the bottom of their boats. Sheep under a net, seed corn and tools, the transforming "Neolithic package" that had been pushing across Europe for a couple of thousand years before it reached here. It was a way of life that bound you inescapably.
     But does it matter, how it began? What Link reveals is the long and various "middles," the daily getting on with it that most of us inhabit, if we're fortunate enough to live in times of peace.

In the third-longest piece, "The Wind Horse," she recounts a journey she took as a young woman to a city on the China-Tibet border, which happened to coincide with the student protests and martial law of June 1989. Although the details here are as beautifully related as in the longer pieces, this essay was more "travelogue," in that she was observing, but she was not so much a participant in the "actual" life of the place. There was less at stake—until the very end, perhaps, when, back in the present, she reflects on the meaning to her of those events and of the various people (all fellow travelers) she met.

All the other pieces are very short, sometimes just two or three pages. Often an experience in the present sends her imagining back into the past—to nineteenth-century whaling voyages, to the days of Paleolithic hunters. She also reflects on her grown daughter heading into her own life, and on her father's quiet death sitting at home in his easy chair. In "A Tibetan Dog," a dream conjures an event in China—a dog bite—that returns many years later when she is met with a cancer diagnosis. As she falls fitfully to sleep in the hospital after a biopsy, full of worry, the dog comes to her, and reassures her that all will be okay:

It was the same Tibetan mutt, utterly forgotten until now, twenty-five years later. The dream-nip was the very sensation I felt then, in the same place. How funny, to think my subconscious must have waited till I'd fallen asleep, then gone rummaging through a million long-lost memories to find an image it could craft into a message I would wake from and understand. And what had it come up with, so triumphantly? That little dog, and its teeth.
     Now that it's all over, it pleases me to imagine that the lama-dog knew what it was doing back in 1989, that it was laying down an act of kindness, and that I'd regret the stone-throwing and cast a blessing after its memory instead. I'd thank it for becoming that dream-metaphor trawled up to reassure me in my hour of need.

I enjoyed this beautiful book, and am glad to know there are two more books by Jamie waiting for me: Findings (2005) and Sightlines (2012).