The Gay & Lesbian Review

parents and five siblings still live. We learn about the surround- ing countryside, its rivers and valleys, and about the Wetlands Birds Project, for which Reid is a volunteer. The essays recount Reid’s day-to-day treks and meet-ups with local fauna and de- scribe their habitats. Her writing is detailed without being dull, in- formative but not pedantic. Reid is a published poet, and images abound—visual ones, like “a circle of fire-lit snow,” and aural ones, like the bird names that punctuate the text, such as rose- breasted grosbeaks, marsh wrens, mergansers, ivory-billed wood- peckers, greves, waxwings, wood ducks, poor wills, and king rails, among many others. Reid’s enthusiasm brings to mind the works of poet John Clare and essayist Henry David Thoreau. Like theirs, her obser- vations are carefully rendered, as, for example, in these com- ments about a beaver lodge she stumbles upon while out walking with an old friend: “Such a foolish place to build! ... This will never be that marshy place made for ducks and frogs and great blue herons, for dragonflies and sleep turtles. This valley is too steep and rugged, the river too violent. ... These may be teenaged beavers, kits kicked out by a new brood’s arrival, too naïve to know they can’t slow a river. ... Or perhaps all the good brooks were already taken and this was where winter, not desire, made them stop.” Falling into Place abounds in descriptions of Reid’s explo- rations during every season in the Berkshire outdoors. At the same time, a few core essays pull the reader back indoors, to the human settings in which change happens, and to matters of the heart. Even as the couple is settling in, for example, Reid’s father is found to require immediate surgery for a life-threatening heart condition. We see how that crisis affects father and daughter, as the writer skillfully depicts their earlier, profound estrangement and also the possibility of reconciliation. As she and Holly are leaving her father toward the end of his recovery, Reid tells us, he looks at them both, saying, “Take care of each other,” and in his words she hears newfound support for their life together. “Hitched, Massachusetts, 2004” further explores the topic of family, recounting the story of Reid and Holly’s wedding just after the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts ruled that same-sex couples have the right to marry. The piece is ample, and tough. Far from feeling starry-eyed at the prospect of getting legally married, the author says, she found herself weighing the downside risks of making such an open declaration, fears based on her experience as a lesbian woman. One real fear was that of being physically or emotionally targeted. We learn about the death at age 101 of Reid’s grandmother, a woman from whom she learned the skills of birdwatcher and nat- uralist. This same grandmother, however, did not want to hear about Reid’s life with another woman, an attitude that greatly pained her granddaughter. This essay is exemplary in its reti- cence. No dramatic last words, no deathbed conversion. But in the old woman’s dying calls for her granddaughter, the author comes to find a kind of sufficiency. One way we make peace with losses in nature, and with our own human failings, Reid decides, is to look for a balance be- tween “reckless solo acts” and making choices “with a commu- nity in mind.” After several years in the Berkshires, Holly longs to be living closer to her three grown children. With sadness, but realizing she has probably found what she came for, Reid agrees to move to North Carolina. What was revealed in her Berkshires

No Geese This Evening No geese this evening. No point in coming. For them. When the tide’s not right,

When the water pancakes out Taking the current down with it, Leaving nothing but dreg shallows And the pleasure barges which

Like selling their Hampton Court shuttle as a trip Down the Mississippi, with Huck Finn himself crewing, Are forced to say no to the punters, The geese cancel too. Why the river has flatlined and will not permit

The short, lovely glide to the bank Opposite their grazing ground, where Just before shore, a bounce Built of wake always kicks in Tipping them over the wire fence Onto dry land Is and isn’t clear. But the lead will not open his troop To the perils of formation flying. This is not a species that does

One single thing on whim. Not when life means limb. Birds are ambitious. By the end of the day They want to live through it.

The lead has scrubbed tonight’s crossing. Tonight the Thames is all out of tides.

H ELENA K AMINSKI

stay? Poet Merrill Gilfillan has described landscape writing as a kind of “fundamental noticing.” Reid’s book offers three models of women who were good at paying attention: a 17th-century ex- plorer and naturalist, a climber who was the first woman to as- cend the Matterhorn, and an early 20th-century photographer of birds. These three women, all of them passionately focused on the natural world, experienced failure, but they refused to give in, persisting and at length prevailing in fraught and risky places. Like their stories, Falling into Place shows a successful quest for elusive, hard-won goals, on natural territory.

March–April 2014

41