Readers and writers: Finding strength in nonfiction and a novel
A quiet week with nonfiction about a woman who found strength on Wisconsin’s Ice Age Trail, and a middle-grade novel about two girls living continents apart who bring change to a village in Kenya.
“Squatter”: by Yolanda DeLoach (Cornerstone Press, $23-$29 depending on place of purchase)
I walked the trail with a new purpose. The wishy-washy voice that so many times had said, ‘I don’t really want to be in this relationship anymore,’ transitioned to, ‘I won’t be in this relationship anymore.’ Overnight, the trail had gone from being an enjoyable pastime, to a necessity for curing my confusing addiction. The hours and days spent on the trail so far had given me the courage to let go for good. Now I needed it to keep me from going back. — from “Squatter”
There are many ways to end a toxic relationship, but debut author Yolanda DeLoach did it the hard way. She tried to make a relationship work until she realized she was being emotionally abused by a man who shamed her for having a “mediocre” high school education, accused her of looking at other men. On a camping trip he insisted she take down her drying underwear because a forest ranger might see it. She told him to go away, to leave her alone, but he was also charming and she kept going back even though she knew he was breaking her spirit.
To end her addiction to this man, DeLoach challenged herself to hike the Ice Age Trail that wanders through Wisconsin. She was only going to do the 400 miles from her home in Wausau, in the middle of Wisconsin, to the trail’s western terminus at St. Croix Falls on the Minnesota border. But when someone asked if she was hiking the entire trail, she heard herself saying she was.
To understand the dangers and wonders this 52-year-old grandmother with five children experienced, here’s a little background. The Ice Age Trail is a National Scenic Trail stretching 1,200 miles in Wisconsin. Coming from the west it crosses the northern part of the state, takes a sharp turn to the south, then northeast ending at Door Peninsula near the city of Sturgeon Bay.
DeLoach, a palliative care/hospice nurse, had little experience camping. It took her a year of hiking to become a Thousand Miler who completed the entire trail hike during the COVID shutdown of 2020 and into 2021. She dealt with boots so wet her feet felt frozen, sometimes traversed a field of unbroken snow up to her hips, and woke up in her tent in near-freezing weather. There were times she was so tired her bones ached. Her steady companion was her truck, named Fiona, that held her camping equipment and the 20-year-old Schwinn bike she used to go back and forth between sections she hiked. Some days she put in 18 miles, starting before sunrise to bike to the place she had ended the previous day. Hikers call this section hiking, defined by counties the trail runs through.
Since most everything was shut down because of the pandemic, DeLoach had most of the trail to herself. She enjoyed being alone, figuring things out such as how to pull Fiona out of the mud. She rarely planned where to stay when it was too cold to sleep in her little tent, but strangers who had been following her journey on social media opened their homes (and garages) to her. Others who contributed lodging and rides were members of the Ice Age Trial Alliance. (Her ability to miraculously find places to stay led to her tail nickname Squatter.)
Whether DeLoach is savoring the smell of crisp fall leaves or tiredly hiking the ups-and-downs of hilly sections, she is bombarded with emails from her former lover, trying to entice her back. But this time her commitment to her trail goal keeps her from responding.
DeLoach is a graceful writer whose voice on the page is friendly. She is unflinching in her honesty about why she stayed in a toxic relationship, her childhood during which she felt she should not have opinions, and even screw-ups that cost her miles of unnecessary hiking because she didn’t read the trail guide.
Readers will learn from this well-written book, whether you are interested in the Ice Age Trail, emotional abuse or the wonders/miseries of hiking and biking long distances. And you’ll wish you had a truck as faithful as Fiona, always waiting for her at the end of the trail.
“Fetching Dreams”: by Mary Bleckwehl (Immortal Works, $16.99)
Three weeks into the rainy season and not a drop of rain. It means more fetching, more missed school, and more lost dreams. If one of these organizations builds my village a well, I will talk to every family myself. I will teach them what you taught us. I will help them see that change is worth it if they want their children to survive. — from “Fetching Dreams”
Neyah is an 11-year-old living in a small, impoverished village in Kenya. She dreams of being a doctor, even though she hardly ever goes to school because the tribe’s tradition is that women and girls are responsible for carrying precious water. Sometimes they walk seven miles a day to fill cans from a polluted water hole that holds urine from people and animals, an occasional goat carcass and snakes. Many people in the village have died of cholera and most are sick, at least sometimes.
Stubborn and angry, Neyah questions why she and other girls have to fetch water when her four brothers run off to school in new uniforms. She wears a tattered dress to fetch from the distant river in the dry season, pulling 40-pound cans up a slippery bank. Neyah’s mother loves her daughter, and she knows the village girls make a dangerous journey to water because the path is a haven for bandits. But she has to make hard decisions about how to divvy up the precious liquid. Should it go to the cow to keep milk coming? To the garden for vegetables that provide much-needed nutrients? For cooking? If they want to survive, they must have water.
When Neyah can go to school she loves to study science. Her kind teacher, a former Peace Corps volunteer, lets the students look through a microscope at the bacteria in the pond water. They are aghast and Neyah vows to somehow get a well of clean water for her village, ending constant deaths and freeing girls to go to school and their mothers to work in the gardens.
Thanks to her teacher’s Peace Corps connections, Neyah is assigned a pen pal in the U.S. Smart, friendly Abby is from an upper-middle-class family, so different from Neyah’s circumstances. But they bond through letters, and the most touching parts of the book are how they learn about one another and share secrets. Neyah, for instance, doesn’t know what “sleep over” means or how water can come out of a pipe. Abby has never heard of girls not going to school.
Abby, who has a brain tumor, helps Neyah overcome her shyness and unwillingness to speak and urges her Kenyan friend to begin a letter-writing campaign to dozens of NGOs and the government of Kenya, begging for funding for a well.
Hovering over the story is Neyah’s father’s severe illness and his scorn for the idea that unseen bugs have anything to do with sickness. He loves his daughter, too, but he is head of the family, responsible for their well-being, and the only way he knows how to do this is to marry off Neyah in exchange for more cows. She can only hope her beloved paternal grandmother will not allow this.
This is a riveting story that would make a fine supplementary text for social studies classes.
Bleckwehl, who lives in Northfield, has written four picture books, five nonfiction books and “The Worry Knot,” a novel about a 12-year-old boy who’s responsible for his autistic brother at school, leading to his stomach constantly in a “worry knot”
We are blessed in Minnesota with so many fine middle-grade authors. Add Mary Bleckwehl to the list.
