Healing from the ground up

In the summer of 2020, like so many other people, I took up camping and meeting with friends at state parks. Soon I was reading about the sites I was visiting—along South Carolina’s coast, in the mountains, and in the Piedmont. Then I found myself reading books that engage with the outdoors more broadly: Justin Farrell’s Billionaire Wilderness (which shows how ultra-wealthy people have made the western United States inaccessible), Clarence Jefferson Hall’s A Prison in the Woods (a critique of prisons built on publicly owned lands in New York), and The Earth Will Appear as the Garden of Eden (a collection of essays about Mormon traditions and environmental stewardship edited by Jedediah Rogers and Matthew Godfrey). I discovered that well-researched memoirs, such as Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass, can open windows to my academic research on the intersection of religious practices and mineral extraction.

Lore Ferguson Wilbert’s new book touches on many of these same topics: the appeal of the outdoors, the ways her experience of a beautiful region of the United States comes at a cost, the influence her family of origin has on her experience of a particular place, and how the organisms and ecosystems that exist on the forest floor shape what grows above. The setting for these reflections is the Adirondacks in northeast New York State, where Wilbert grew up and—after many, many moves—where she returned as an adult. The Understory is similar to Kimmerer’s work in that it blends together personal experience and scientific commentary.

Upon first reading, Wilbert’s book feels like a disjointed collection of memories, where one paragraph is implicitly rather than explicitly linked to the next. However, the seemingly disjointed nature of the prose mimics the way human memory works: we think of things and how they relate to other things, and then sometimes we come back around to the original idea. It is typical for our minds to wander as we go on a walk or a hike, and Wilbert describes many hikes in The Understory. This circular and indirect communication pattern makes her work of discussing serious topics easy for readers to enter, like sharing insights gleaned from a conversation while hiking with longtime friends.