Earthblog

In The River Gods Brian Kiteley sifts time to touch the nature of our relationship to place. Brief, lithe glimpses of Kiteley’s childhood home, Northampton, Massachusetts, come through fictionalized versions of Kiteley’s own family, Massasoit Indians, colonial settlers caught up in Puritan religious fervor, the cast of the 1966 film version of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, President Calvin Coolidge, Sylvia Plath, Sojourner Truth, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and other less well-known inhabitants and visitors. Each voice offers a specific way of seeing a precise moment in the history of the town. Subtle, quick scenes, rarely over two pages pass by quickly. These scenes allow Kiteley to wonder at questions I often ask on walks through town: What must this place have looked like to someone hundreds of years ago? What drew people here? What does it mean to live here now, or to be from here or of here? The questions become reciprocal exploring in one instant how we, human culture as whole, shape the land, and how this same land, changed by our activities, changes us.

Kiteley gives the reader a nonlinear collection of diverse perspectives. We get nostalgic and charming scenes of childhood in lush, leafy forests and on streets lined with old houses. One chapter is largely just a list of street names. The town, and the reader, bear witness to a wide range of human experience: Kiteley’s own brother dies of AIDS. Women are put on trial for witchcraft. Adolescents explore sex. Death lingers. Nixon is President.

Finishing the book in Old Town, Fort Collins, CO, I feel deep resonances. Northampton is an old town, and a college town. It has a history of activism, and of experimental, communal-living rooted in the mid 1800s. Just as Fort Collins has its connection to Disney, Northampton served as the backdrop for several big films. Perhaps most simply, Northampton, like Fort Collins, has, at its heart, a river.

The River Gods is a challenging book. Composed of short scenes cut loose in time, the work of the book occurs in the reader during the space between chapters. The effect is like sedimentation along a riverbed, each layer adds to our understanding but only if we pause to consider what we have just read. It is easy to overlook that all these visions come from Kiteley himself. The choice of who, and what they see is his, and this defines the nature of the portrait. Take for example these two excerpts, which sit side-by-side in the book, one from a visitor to the town and one from Kiteley’s own grandfather:

From May 1985, Eric Kiteley, 82

“Geoff sits with his back to the table, legs kicked out from the bench. The river gurgles and swirls and swells. The leaves are only just budding. I study the sandwich for sometime, perhaps trying to retrieve a story from my memory, or maybe I’m worrying over my wife, whose memory is clearly failing.”

From June 1944, William Carlos Williams, 62

“The great poet Wallace Stevens and I walked halfway across the Coolidge Bridge over the Connecticut River, in Northampton, Massachusetts. It was a happy coincidence we were both in this handsome, dying mill town, he on business, me to meet my publisher in Cummington, a few miles up into the Berkshires. A white fog floated over the river. The steeples of Northampton flitted in and out of the moonlit mist.”

The gaze of the speaker, the touch of the writer, and the depth of subject, the work of time, and the risks of writing in this form are all hinted at here. You will most likely know twenty-five pages in if this book, and what it asks of the reader, are for you. For myself, with my specific way of thinking and at this precise moment in time, I couldn’t have asked for a more thought-provoking way of thinking about place.