Weathering The Storm

A review of Ann Pancake's Strange As This Weather Has Been by Erin O'Hara

Pancake, Ann. Strange As This Weather Has Been. Berkeley: Counterpoint Press, 2007. 360 pp., paper, $23.95

Imagine you’re in your kitchen, and you hear it. The rumble, low and distant at first. Thunder? No. It gets louder, dishes shake and then shatter, you hear tress snapping and crashing, and you look out your window just in time to see a black wall of water crash into your house. This was the unfathomable reality for the people of the Buffalo Creek Hollow in West Virginia in 1972, and the looming possibility that haunts the characters of Ann Pancake’s endlessly powerful debut novel Strange As This Weather Has Been.

The inhabitants of the mountain hollow of Yellowroot, West Virginia, deep in the heart of Appalachia, are not as simple as they may initially seem. Written largely in Appalachian dialect, Pancake proves her mastery of language in the very first pages, when the character whose voice we hear, Lace, is “Stunned golden inside with the dream and the crave and the new of that boy.” While some have criticized her use of vernacular, obsessing over noun suffixes, her language immediately absorbs you into the mountain lives of the novel’s main characters, a family of six trying to maintain their life and livelihood while their surroundings are being destroyed by mountaintop removal mining.

The book’s chapters switch points of view, allowing us to see ever-deeply into the minds of these people suffering the same loss differently together. The perspectives of different characters, mainly Lace, the mother, and the three of her four children, Bant Carey, and Dane, are woven together in a somewhat irregular manner – sometimes connecting clearly through space, time and relationships, and other times branching away from the rest of the characters and the timeframe of the coal mining, like when Lace recollects the time before the children were born, or when we hear from Avery about the tragedy he survived in Buffalo Creek decades earlier. Nevertheless, the narrative always makes its way back to a unified core. The book takes on the structure of a braided river: intertwined, just loosely in some parts, while completely whole in others.

Still, despite the diverse weaving, one theme persists: the hold and the power and the subsistence of the land. Bant, a fifteen-year-old girl and perhaps the novel’s most touching and perceptive character, constantly retreated to “Those places where if you sat quiet, the space dropped away between you and the land”, her grandmother’s voice perpetually in her head, reminding her to appreciate and respect the land. Lace insisted,

“…you’d have to come up in these hills to understand what I meant. Grow up shouldered in them, them forever around your ribs, your hips, how they hold you, sit astraddle, giving you always, for good or for bad, the sense of being held. It had something to do with that hold.”

Another character, Mogey, who only receives one chapter all his own, sums up his connection to the land:

“So when I’d first walk into the woods, I’d say to myself, ‘Look here what God’s give us.’ Bust just about as fast as I could have that thought, this second one would come from deeper: ‘This is God.’ And then, from under that thought, from deeper yet, another thought would come, saying, ‘I go here. This is where I go.’ And last of all, the most certain thought, but also the most dangerous: ‘This is me. This, all this, is me.’”

The heartbreaking tale does have its light-hearted moments, mostly fulfilled by Corey, a rambunctious ten-year-old constantly seeking attention and adventure, thrilled by the treasures the flood has delivered into the creek that runs through the hollow, and his six-year-old brother Tommy who follows him like a shadow. Corey tells himself, “Be patient. Like the time they found the baby possum, and it didn’t want much to do with them at first, either. Then finally it let them pet it. Then, true. It died. Well, just be patient.”

While the switching of characters and context can be frustrating at times, having to shift focus at the author’s whim and often abruptly at the most thrilling parts, we ultimately bond with them irreversibly. The plot picks up near the end, with a shocking and unexpected climax, giving the rest of the story an added resonance. But what we are left with at the tale’s close is not the plot or even the individual characters that we have come to respect and admire. We are left with the shock and disgust that the devastation these characters face is not fiction but reality, the overwhelming desire to know more, to do something, and the awareness that “what we’re doing to this land is not only murder. It is suicide.”