The day before the smoke from Eastern Oregon’s wildfires smudged the Eugene sky, I saw the moon in the morning, on the wane in its unglamerous phase between full and half, known as gibbous. That Latin word isn’t the one I’d have chosen. If I were the boss of English, it would be the belly moon, a friendly, funny, relaxed word, a word that invites you to settle in.
I love the daytime moon almost as much as the nighttime one. When it was full last week, while we were camping, it was so bright you didn’t need a flashlight to find your way. It cast sharp, long shadows of the pines up around Waldo Lake. Night shadows and moonlight, what a pair.
Today, hidden in our region by smoke from horrific wildfires, it’s officially this moon’s last quarter. Tomorrow it’ll be waning crescent. Knowing it’s there, always there whether I see it or not, is an anchor I hold onto regardless of what’s happening on the noisy, fraught and sometimes perilous ground.
A horse named Raven pulled me deep into this story, a historical tale set in Puritan-era New England where a woman named Silence is punished for expressing outsized emotions and must endure a year of not speaking.
Of course I would gravitate to author Julia Park Tracey’s book. A while ago, I took up that subject myself in a fantasy short story titled The Exile’s Tale and published in the collection Imagination Fully Dilated. In my story, the women of a village are forbidden from speaking once they pass their child-bearing years. It’s not the wisest limitation, denying half of the most experienced community members their ability to share their wisdom.
As in Tracey’s powerful rendering, at some point the men want the silenced women to speak up.
Of course the women don’t. Not in my version. Not in Tracey’s.
Tracey’s book captured me in a way that always delights me when it happens. I start reading, and the story is fine, the writing is good, and I continue because I want to know what happens. But a phone call, a knock on the door, a remembered task — any of those things can pull me away from a book that is simply good.
In the best books, a turn happens. It could be anything, an ingenious plot twist, a surprising character development, a beguiling landscape. A shift occurs. Everyday reality drops away, sparking an intimacy between me and the text. At that point, it’s hard to put the book down.
In the case of Silence, it happened for me on page 142. Don’t mistake me. I was fully enjoying the book before page 142. Then the character Silence takes a moment to stroke the face of the horse. She tickles Raven’s blaze, brushes back the forelock. Raven nickers and tries to nibble her sleeve. Then this sentence: “I lean down to pluck some grass to palm for her, and she takes it with whiskery lips and a saucy nodding of her head.”
At that sentence, I quietly fell inside, and didn’t fully emerge until the last page.
I’ve stopped trying to explain these moments to myself or others. I’m ensnared, not only by the tale, but also by the skill in the telling, where a small, arguably inconsequential moment is given its due by an author for whom there are, perhaps, no inconsequential moments.
This book is rich in the daily-life moments of constrained women. Its plot engine runs on power dynamics in the era where witchery accusations could still be a death sentence, religious tolerance itself a sin. But, to turn an old phrase upside down, its angels are in its details.
We stumbled on Stan Peterson’s work by accident, when a road trip we planned didn’t pan out and we needed a new destination.
So. We’re lying on a blanket under a shady tree in Spokane’s Riverfront Park (wonderful, surprising, must-be-visited). We’re bummed because we can’t proceed to Canada (a passport left-behind issue). And because we dig on the stoics, and the stoics advise going with the flow rather than getting all het up, we revise our plans as we listen to the Spokane River tumble over waterfalls nearby.
Inevitably, we wind up the next day 300 miles away at the Maryhill Museum on the Washington side of the Columbia River, not far from Goldendale. If you don’t know the Maryhill, I both feel sad for your not-knowing and envy you the upcoming pleasure of discovery. Walking into the Maryhill for the first time is like reading a new and about-to-be beloved book. You’ll read it many times, but that first time is magical.
And that’s where we found Portland artist Stan Peterson tinkering with his show titled Horse Play. We came upon the wood carvings with their muted color washings in the best possible way. You come around a corner and you see the horses in the little boat and you immediately think of singer Lyle Lovett’s If I Had a Boatsong, with the delightful line: “Kiss my ass, I bought a boat and I’m going out to sea.” It’s amazing how often that is the correct response to life.
Peterson’s carvings are whimsical, but muscled. The work feels certain of itself, completed. And it’s grounded in place: horses, river barges, pelicans, sturgeons, bluebirds. I fell in love right away. And then I checked his website and now, well, I’m a new fan.
It’s instructive to meet the actual artist, and I’m glad we did. But I only remember one thing he said. Despite being a lifelong artist whose work sells in galleries, the Maryhill show is his first at an actual museum. He was excited as he said this — eyes bright, big smile. Like a kid at play.
You can meet him, too. Peterson is giving a walk-through chat at 3 p.m. on Saturday Aug. 29. The museum cafe will be open and serving fresh salmon. (RSVP at the museum website). Since this is the closing walk-through it’ll be the last chance to see his work at the Maryhill.
Susan Palmer's Exquisite Now 