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398 pages, Hardcover
First published July 11, 2020
In the beginning, there were twenty. Officially, these twenty were in the Wilderness State as part of an experiment to see how people interacted with nature, because, with all land now being used for resources—oil, gas, minerals, water, wood, food—or storage—trash, servers, toxic waste—such interactions had become lost to history.
. walking ahead of the Community, Agnes felt proud to be leading, just another kind of creature on a mass migration … finding water the way all creatures must. It wasn’t that she didn’t always feel this way each day they’d been out here. .... But there was something about the scope of what she could see now. . ….. Looking across the vast plain and seeing all the animals moving as one, in one direction, with the same needs, she felt a part of the place in a way she hadn’t before. She’d never realized she felt apart from it. But she guessed she had in some unknowable way. It was their reliance on the water spigots. On the maps. On the fact that they checked in with Rangers. They were never fully living on their own. Not like these animals were every day. Not until now. And she was leading. ….. When they left the City, her mother hadn’t called it a trip, or an adventure, or something temporary. She had said, “This is our new home.” … She felt like that small girl again, listless and coughing, turning a handkerchief red …. But that was no longer her. She was no longer that small girl, curiously watching from a distance, from behind her mother or behind Glen. …. She was a part of it all. It all depended on her.
When she becomes obstinate. When she becomes different from me. What will we share if we can’t share this? Will we be nothing but strangers? I want to grab her in these moments, squeeze her too hard, growl into her hair, never let her go. But she always wriggles free, unfazed, or maybe with a small eye roll. She knows she has everything I can give her. I think of my mother in these moments. She was someone who never did what I expected her to. When she looked at me, I didn’t understand what her look meant. She looked at me sharp-eyed, her mouth twisting and pained. As though looking at me hurt her sometimes. I didn’t understand it until I had the chance to care for this little Fern and I looked at her and saw all that came before and all that would come after and all its potential awfulness and certain beauty and it was too much for me to bear. I looked away, scared, disgusted, overcome with love, on the verge of crying and laughing, and finally, finally, finally I began to know my mother.