Crossing Wildcat Ridge: A Memoir of Nature and Healing - Hardcover

Williams, Philip Lee

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0820320900 ISBN 13: 9780820320908

Publisher: University of Georgia Press, 1999

Synopsis

I am a country man, raised in the fields and woods of north-central Georgia. I do not care for cities, and so I live in the forest on a ridge over Wildcat Creek, a bold stream that flows, half a mile away, into the Oconee River. . . . Our house is halfway down the ridge, just before it plummets sharply to the creek. I have found archaic chert scrapers on our property, more recent potsherds with intricate decorations. I say that we own these seven acres, but we’re really just passing through.

With his opening lines Philip Lee Williams defines the territory of this intricate and lyrical memoir: life with his young family on the ridge, his coming of age, and the legacy of his southern family. That legacy, which includes a love of literature, a passion for music, and an insatiable curiosity about the natural world, also includes a defective heart valve.

Crossing Wildcat Ridge combines the drama of Williams’s open-heart surgery with contemplative essays on the natural world. The gentle counterpoint between the two elements illuminates both in remarkable and profound ways. Confronting his mortality, the author struggles to determine his place in the world. His sober consideration of things left undone is juxtaposed with the contemplation of a mound of fire ants: “There is no uncertainty in that world; each knows his job, doesn’t know why, can’t ask. None knows he will die.” As the author slips into depression during his postoperative recovery, he studies the flora and fauna of the ridge, its lights and shadows, the dunes beneath the waters of the creek. With poetic imagery, he shares not only his crystalline observations of nature but also their healing effects―how he learns to receive the gift of a mockingbird’s song, how the tracks of elusive woodland creatures bolster his faith in the existence of things we cannot see, how sensory memories reconnect him to the boy he was and the man he hopes to be.

All thinking, feeling adults search for the right path to self-discovery. Philip Lee Williams’s luminous account of his journey is one satisfying and effective road map.

About this title

About the Author

PHILIP LEE WILLIAMS is the author of eleven books, including The True and Authentic History of Jenny Dorset and Crossing Wildcat Ridge. His novel A Distant Flame is winner of the Michael Shaara Award for Excellence in Civil War Fiction. Williams lives with his family near Athens, Georgia.

Reviews

Williams's dread at the slow realization that he inherited the same heart-disease gene that has killed other members of his family is frighteningAparticularly so because he does indeed need very serious surgery. Anyone who has ever spent time in the hospital will recognize the intricately built scenes of clean surface, routine efficiency and medical mannerism that lead to the loneliness and quiet fear of the hospital bed. The author is more successful at evoking such scenes involving people and civilization than he is in the alternating chapters, in which he tells of tramping about in his beloved Georgia woods lost in introspection. Despite some lovely images ("rain falls as straight as harp strings" or "the low thunk of bullfrogs"), the glitter does not mask banal insights, informing readers, for instance, that most spiders are harmless or "when someone is killed in a wreck or dies of a heart attackAthat sudden wrenching event stains us for years, if not forever." Much of Williams's writing is marked by that strange self-satisfaction of those who think themselves closer to nature than others. "Writer at Work" signs appear too often, and there is an over-reliance on long sequences of musing questions to indicate the author's appreciation of the deep mysteries of nature. An accomplished and experienced writer, Williams for an instant seems to catch himself: "I suspect those of us who flee to nature have more megalomania than humility." Such moments of honesty redeem the book and make its best parts worthwhile.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Novelist Williams (Blue Crystal, 1993, etc.) presents twined, elemental stories on the havoc of a heart operation and the random, filigreed thoughts of an amateur naturalist exploring his home patch. His family has a history of bum tickers, so it didn't come as a surprise to Williams when he learned he had Barlow's Syndrome, a faulty valve. But that was 15 years ago. In the meantime he married, had two children, wrote a few books, bought a house in deeply rural north-central Georgia on a forested ridge above tumbling Wildcat Creek, and steadily approached his dreaded 43rd birthday, an age at which the heart-poor in his family uniformly bowed out. Sure enough, that year he gets news he will need surgery; his valve is shot. He starts to be more attentive, in particular to the land and creatures around his home. His observations are presented as little ruminative comfortings and explorations of the wildflowers, the pink light of stormy weather, the winding sand dunes in the flow of the creek, scrappy blue jays and mesmerizing raptors, earthworms and spiders and honeysuckle. They slowly accrete for him into something more than sense of place and less than the music of the spheres, something deep and mortally inclusive, wherein he endeavors, humbly for the most part, to find a niche. Braided to this curious naturalist is the heart patient, scared and angry, who details the visits to the doctor, the surgery, and the recovery, a process in which he is flayed emotionally and cracked open physically, and vice versa. Depression settles in and moves on only after a prolonged pharmaceutical tithing. Gradually, out of the pain and shadow emerge his family and homestead, and they never looked so good. Williamss story has a keen immediacy to it, an unmulled flavor. It is all very real and unenviable and touched with the small gestureshis father's protective shoulder to cry upon, a daughter's delight in his returnthat encourage survival. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0820320900
• ISBN 13: 9780820320908
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 240