Deborah L. Wolter

Ash Davidson, in her first novel, Damnation Spring, wove a tapestry between old growth redwood trees and the small logging community among them in the late 1970s. Herbicides had been sprayed for decades. The environmental and human degradation were evident all along, especially in the form of mudslides, vanished salmon, and a significant cluster of miscarriages. Yet, stoicism and an unwillingness to listen threatened to unravel and divide a town, families, and marriages in order to hold on to jobs and a way of life in the timber industry.

You listened to her when I wouldn’t…

I’m not proud of that.  (p. 387)

Rich admitted to not listening to his beloved wife, but I also saw it as a metaphor for not listening to Mother Earth.