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Reviews
Visible Bones: Journeys across Time in the Columbia River Country
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By Jack Nisbet
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Sasquatch Books, Seattle, Washington, 2003. 256 pages. $23.95 paper.
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Reviewed by William D. Layman
Wenatchee, Washington
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| The natural wonders and rich history of the Pacific Northwest offer an endless array of subjects to those of us with a penchant to ponder our corner of the world. A number of handsomely illustrated publications have portrayed the remarkable lives of this region's indigenous people while showcasing its spectacular mountains, fascinating flora and fauna, glorious rivers, and coastlines. Yet, tucked within these splendid natural and cultural histories are relatively unnoticed treasures. To appreciate them, we need only someone to direct us, to draw our attention to that captivating thing found just under our feet or hiding in a sage bush on an August day. It helps if this person is a skilled researcher who is able to extract observations from the recesses of a nineteenth-century botanist's journal or from a tantalizing small-town newspaper byline that opens us to imagining ancient beasts in our midst. Trusting such stories to a gifted writer who can easily guide us from one layered nuance of meaning to the next makes the reader's journey yet more pleasant. |
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Jack Nisbet's recent book, Visible Bones, is great fare for the inquisitive. Within its pages, readers will learn about a host of topics, beginning with fossilized trilobites and ending with the bones and relics of an early fur trader. Between these bookends, Nisbet creates narratives that on the surface seem unrelated but that fit together quite nicely in the end. |
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Much of the natural world that Nisbet describes remains intact. Readers learn the remarkable ways that the oft-neglected muskrat has entered our history and lore. In another piece, the author shares a lovely exchange between himself and a class of schoolchildren in the watery environs of water dogs (long-toed salamanders). Further along, the author and environmental educator explores the desert and describes the lives of sheep moths that go from "pearly sage-green eggs" to caterpillars to pupae encapsulated into an amber gel before they emerge as moths on the branches of sage. In each of the essays, Nisbet draws from far and wide. He is as likely to consult fur dealers on the merits of muskrat pelts as the journals of Thomas Nutall, who supplied Audubon with sheep moth specimens that found their way into his paintings of kingbirds. |
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Alongside stories of the living, Nisbet tells stories of beings gone from the Northwest scene. Readers learn of both the secret lives of trilobites and the not-so-secret life of a wooly mammoth whose bones are displayed in the Chicago Field Museum. While many of us now know of Lewis and Clark's sightings of condors along the Columbia, Nisbet shares far more about the story of this ungainly bird's life north of the California border. I was surprised to learn that one of the last confirmed condor sightings in Washington state occurred in 1897 near Coulee City. |
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Particularly haunting is an essay that deals with Coffin Island on the lower Columbia, which was used by Chinook Indians as a burial island at the time of first contact. Using paintings and entries from the Lewis and Clark journals, Nesbit chronicles the island's hallowed past and its tragic demise as it was broken up and used as fill downstream. This sad story gives readers pause to reflect not only on its small place in history but also on the river's many places now gone from our view. More difficult yet is a chapter devoted to detailing the ways that smallpox decimated Native populations. It is one thing to know that smallpox killed off a huge percentage of village inhabitants, but it is another to read these eyewitness accounts that document the horror of this "dreaded disease." |
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As a historian interested in combining oral history and drama, I find that the success of a given dramatic event has to do with the range of emotions that the telling of a good story evokes. In reading this book, I found myself holding many different feelings at the same time. At one moment I could soar with the possibility of a condor's return to the wild and, in the next, feel sadness at the long, steady decline of this bird's presence in the Northwest. |
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In part, the book succeeds because of the author's circular writing style. Observations introduced in the beginning of an essay are likely to go underground for a time only to resurface within that essay or further into the book. Rather than setting out in a straight line, Nisbet casts the threads of his story in all directions, often picking up loose ends and weaving them back into a larger narrative. |
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While I have no question as to Nisbet's scholarship, I would have appreciated references or endnotes that would enable readers to consult the original sources from which he so richly draws. This being said, I am confident that Invisible Bones will find its way into the homes of many who will appreciate its easy flow. Given an opportunity to go into the field with Nisbet, I suspect most of us would eagerly await his observations on just about any object he finds on the ground or sees in the trees. |
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