A Father and an Island: Reflections on Loss (review)

It may be that Oscar Wilde's sad words to the effect that "each man kills the thing he loves" apply nowhere more appropriately than to our love of the special place. Alan Weltzien, professor of English at the University of Montana Western, in Dillon, offers in his memoir a eulogy to his father, who died a dozen years ago, and to the family's summer cabin on Camano Island in Puget Sound, about sixty miles north of Seattle. He writes a memoir, then, of a beloved father and a beloved place, which he sees "transformed utterly," to cite another poet, by development and over-population. Presumably the result will not culminate, as it did for Yeats, in the birth of a "terrible beauty." And Weltzien is thoroughly aware of the irony inherent in the fact that his presence, and that of his family, has contributed to the endangerment of the very beauty that he so loves.

Keenly aware, too, of Camano Island's commercial development and subsequent exploitation, Weltzien presents a carefully documented history of just how that process occurred, from the naively simple tourist brochures of the sort that attracted his parents in the 1950s to the more sophisticated and elaborate blandishments of recent promoters. Camano residents and summer visitors are likely to find the local history and lore of chapters (essays, in effect) such as "Camano Past and Present" and "Norwegian Heartwood" especially engaging. The developers were, and still are, selling the view—the "pleasure retreat" from Seattle and its suburbs, such as Bellevue, where Weltzien grew up and which he saw expand to urban magnitude (71). In All But the Waltz (1991), Mary Clearman Blew writes of how her great-grandfather, a surveyor for the Northern Pacific Railroad in Montana, managed "to convert landscape into property" (22). That may well be the history of the West in a nutshell.

Generally, Weltzien keeps his writing clear of anger and lament, but he allows himself some regrets. In particular, he threads a commentary on, sometimes a critique of, himself as a son and as the father of two boys, one by his first marriage, and a stepdaughter. He sees himself as having failed to teach them to love much of what he has loved, including the cabin on Camano, boating, and mountain climbing—the outdoors. Most readers will readily identify with scenes during which Weltzien reflects on recent summer visits fielding his sons' complaints of boredom. Will his children have any passionate investment in the family cabin? Memories draw him back to his own childhood visits and beyond to details pertaining to the island's settlement and persistently throughout to the last year of his father's life, 1996–1997, which may call to mind something of Terry Tempest Williams's technique in Refuge (1991). His chapters move fluidly in time but always in summer. "Camano spans my life," Weltzien writes, "but belongs to one season" (144).

Throughout the essays that comprise this book, Weltzien strews literary allusions to E. B. White's essay "Once More to the Lake," Walt Whitman's "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking," and Dylan Thomas's "Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night," but these do not obtrude. His professor-of-literature self is less apparent than his mountain-climber self. His deliberate, occasionally meditative prose rarely takes us on flights of metaphoric fancy. Weltzien is at his best when he openly asserts what is on his mind; for example, when he regrets the fact that "busyness, business is the ideal" of our society: "Food, berries, books, chores, beach, evening strolls and card games. I stay outside in summer at many altitudes and in many time zones, but my body's vocabulary grows from this core, just as Dad's had from a freshwater bay. My children lack this core" (161).