Damnation Spring

Damnation Spring’s lush setting is a huge part of the novel, and it is clear Davidson is as awestruck by the towering redwoods. Davidson grew up in redwood country, but only because the fights she depicts in her novel were won by the conservationists her loggers deride as “hippies,” “tree huggers,” and “longhairs.” Otherwise, those stunning trees, “…redwoods older than the United States of America, saplings when Christ was born” (20), would have been lost to rapacious logging companies like Sanderson. Davidson puts readers in the middle of the struggle to preserve America’s natural heritage and protect its biodiversity. While she grants the issue its due complexity, depicting the trade-off between protecting the environment and providing a community jobs, she leads readers to a point where the fabled 24-7 Ridge appears to be in safe hands. Chub is a different breed than his father, and Davidson hints that he will not simply grow up a logger and chop down the redwoods. When Rich asks him what he would like to be when he grows up, Chub answers, “A carver” (407). His relationship to the forest is different and augurs well for the trees he and Colleen inherit.

Looking to the future is an important theme in Davidson’s novel, even if she is writing about the past. The choice to do so might be born of frustration over the fact that a fight to protect the environment is still necessary, but Davidson’s novel can also be instructional and inspirational, as humans seek to avoid catastrophic climate change. It is noteworthy that Davidson does not write simply about the redwoods but more widely about climate events. Throughout the story, for example, her characters think back to the floods that have hit the area. Colleen notices “the One and Only Tavern with its white line painted above the door: the high-water mark from ’64, the Christmas flood, when ankle creeks ran muddy to the waist and whole ridges slid out and buried roads” (96). It is easy to imagine how that white line that might be surpassed in the near future as sea levels rise and flooding becomes more prevalent. The redwoods might have been saved since 1977, but the specter of wider environmental upheaval haunts the book nonetheless.

Davidson points to the activism necessary to prevent such upheaval foremost with a character like Daniel. In an age where Greta Thunberg is a global icon, readers are more accustomed to environmental activists. Daniel, however, may as well arrive in Klamath as an extraterrestrial. He was an outsider when he left, as a bullied but bright Yurok teen, but he returns even more different, with a scientific and cultural education at odds with the exploitation of the forests. A sub-theme of Davidson’s story might be the cost of activism; Daniel’s obsession causes him blind spots that can hamper his cause, and he ends up estranged and on the run from death threats. But it is vital to portray these pioneering protesters, flaws and all, to show what might be necessary if people want to keep the planet hospitable to human life.