Light in the Trees

"From the book"

At the end of our visit in the big snow, I hiked the mountain behind Dad s house with my brother, stepping into his size 13 footprints. With trail signposts long buried, we kept to the main road, a route once used for logging. Although almost every trip home included this steep climb, I d never hiked it in two feet of snow. The muffled whiteness made it difficult to tell how far we d come, how much farther we had to go. More than once I sat on a log saying I d stay there and wait for Ken, whose long strides made it look easy, to go up without me. Each time I did this, he stopped, waited, and told me we were almost there, although I suspected we weren t.

A memoir of home, nature, and change in the American West," Light in the Trees" makes cultural and environmental topics personal through a narrator s travels between past and present, rural and urban. Growing up on a mountain foothill in western Washington, Gail Folkins offers a small-town viewpoint of the Pacific Northwest. Sasquatch myths and serial killer realities, a runaway Appaloosa, and turbulent volcanoes beneath serene mountaintops help chronicle a coming of age for both a narrator and a place. Later, a move to the Southwest expands Folkins s view of the West. From this new perspective paired with frequent journeys to the Northwest, she explores challenges of the natural world, from wildlife habitat and water quality to a changeable climate and wildfires, navigating new versions of home and self along the way.

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