Rivers of Memory in Nightshining https://ift.tt/k49xauX
Jennifer Kabat’s scintillating new memoir, Nightshining: A Memoir in Four Floods (Milkweed), is a feast of words, echoing, and in many ways, surpassing her previous work, The Eighth Moon, which I have previously reviewed for this publication. Kabat’s finely wrought text is an exploration of geography as well as parenthood, as her father and his work running energy co-ops during her childhood is at the center of the many narratives running like overflowing streams throughout the book.
As the title suggests, this is a book about floods. The author experiences two floods within a few years in her tiny upstate New York town of Margaretville. She details the crashing of the rocks; the rogue oil drum floating down the Bull Run River, exacerbating the water build up in her basement; the asphalt shifting like tectonic plates. She also writes of the flood of emotions, of donations, of support from community members. Linked to the floods that Kabat lives through are those she learns about; the flood of 1955 which created the Pepacton Reservoir; the post-war Rainmaker’s Flood, sponsored by GE, inspired by the work of Johannes Kepler. As much as this memoir explores the way water floods, it illustrates the power of memory to flood our consciousness.
Central to Nightshining is Kabat’s father. His recent death and connection to Central New York and water work has inspired her to learn more about him. She introduces him to the reader in Chapter 3, including a series of old black and white film stills of her father, as a toddler, jumping off a dock into a lake. She reflects on other moments her father has jumped into water as well as the beauty of seeing this shining child leap into the water — ”I want to hold onto that moment. He is just a blur. He disappears into the lake.” This sentiment captures the tenor of her exploration throughout the memoir. In writing, Kabat seeks to understand her father, to hold onto him.
The narrative is not linear. On the first page of the text, Kabat tells us that during the pandemic, sharing space feels “both transgressive and transcendent,” the use of the prefix trans- a foreshadowing to the way Kabat will cross time and space, traversing decades sometimes in a single paragraph, in an effort to understand water, her father, history. For example, Kabat writes,
Blue smoke, fog, the speed of sound, the sound of country music over my shoulder, the view of the valley. The virus comes in microns. Sunlight glints off the line of cars at the farm below. I hold my breath and hold the baby. I exhale, and time here collapses. History circles around: May 19, 1780 (44).
Later, Kabat is at a writer’s residency, thinking about her dying mother, remarking “it feels as I am with her as I write, the distance, the geography, collapsing on the page” (151). Crossing time and space creates a complexity missing from much of modern nonfiction.
The love Kabat lavishes on language is revelatory. She is a writer’s writer. On the first page, she tells us “The sun has burned off the fog, and the sky is a cerulean so bright, language fails it” (3), and yet, here is Kabat, wielding her words so masterfully that I have notes in almost every margin. Even as Kabat explores the engineering to flood science, she shares the language of hydrology. She tells the history of the “rainmakers,” who, desperate for water, tried “cloudseeding.” Later in the book, she discusses not only the origin of a placename, but how to pronounce the word, writing,
Below here was a place called Pepacton. Originally pronounced paw-pacton, it was a Munsee community, then the name is said as pee-packton by white settlers, with the accent on the “pee.” Now the village is gone but it is still the reservior’s name, said with a sigh, puh, like a puff of air (145).
It seems like every page is a lesson in craft.
So many memoirs, good ones even, give us the writer’s life events as an example of perseverance through exceptional circumstances. Jennifer Kabat’s Nightshining is a model of where I hope many memoirs are moving. It poses the question: What are the tools that help us make sense of our lives, our families? And as the writer learns about science, innovation, technology, we learn that the wonders of this world are not just models of “progress,” but they can be metaphorical paths to our own inner peace and understanding.
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