Even the biggest stories that make the most headlines can be just a blip in the larger news cycle, and public interest can move on long before a story is resolved. The curiosity about the rest of the story and its unseen players was the germ for Amity Gaige’s latest novel, Heartwood.
When Valerie Gillis doesn’t meet her husband for a night off the Appalachian Trail as planned, worry quickly sets in. Hours later, her husband’s worry has turned into a full-scale search in the Maine woods surrounding that northern part of the trail. In charge of the search is Lt. Bev, a career ranger whose expertise is only matched by her tenacity. Despite that and her fleet of experienced searchers and enthusiastic volunteers, she’s not sure she hasn’t met her match in the search for Valerie. One of Valerie’s old trail partners, Santos, provides some insight about the missing woman’s experience and level of preparedness, but no amount of protein bars can make up for the fickle weather, at turns cool and rainy and hot and dry as the days become weeks. Meanwhile, at a retirement home three hundred miles away, an elderly woman named Lena strikes up an odd friendship online that could help her figure out the location of the missing hiker that reminds her of her estranged daughter.
In an author’s note, Gaige writes the seed of an idea that became Heartwood came from the 2013 disappearance of another hiker on the AT, though fiction differs from real life dramatically in most ways but some of the bare facts of that incident. This isn’t, then, ripped from the headlines like some episode of a police procedural, but more like an imagined postmortem on what happens behind the scenes. It’s sensitively done, something that can be tricky to do when a subject could so easily lend itself to dramatics.
That doesn’t mean that easy potential for dramatics is ignored. Gaige wisely lets her characters feel the pull of someone else’s disaster, especially Lena, whose life in the senior living center has shrunk to a claustrophobic extent and for whom Valerie’s disappearance represents both distraction and the opportunity to play armchair detective. Bev, meanwhile, has to either sift through useless tips or battle accusations her team isn’t doing enough even as every one of them has been pushed to the breaking point. The wounds of the COVID-19 pandemic also can’t be escaped; it’s Valerie’s experience as a nurse in a hard-hit area that drove her to take to the trail in the first place. These elements of real life give credence to the story, making it feel that we, too, are behind the scenes of headline-making news.
Valerie may be the focus of the search, and the story, but her voice is the least heard within the pages of Heartwood. What we hear from Valerie is in the form of letters to her mother, which we learn are in fact written in a notebook from her pack to keep herself occupied and sane during her long isolation. Rather, this is a story about Bev, worried not about her career potentially coming to a close or her difficult mother’s last days but whether she missed any signs that could point to the missing hiker before her chances of survival grow too dim. It’s about the friendships you find upon the trail, and how a hiking self may or may not reflect the person someone is in society. It’s about finding kinship in people we might never have met were it not for the particular place (or cyberspace) that brought us together.
This is a strength in Heartwood. The novel has a focus and it rarely wavers from it. Although some aspects might feel familiar for readers of last year’s The God of the Woods (someone lost in the woods, the narrative revolving around the people who knew and/or are trying to find her), this is no thriller. Nor is it a mystery, really, though there are a few elements that show up later in the narrative. Ironically, I found that particular subplot to be the weakest part of Heartwood, as if man vs nature wasn’t enough conflict to keep readers reading.
This is not a story of tricky plot devices and big reveals. Instead, it’s a portrait of a search for a missing person, and how it takes a community of professionals and amateurs, friends and strangers, to locate them. No one type of strength will overcome the odds stacked against Valerie, and it’s heartening to see such a rendering of what happens behind the scenes of the lost and found.
Ring Reads 