Roaming & Reading Issue 13  September 10th 2023

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Read to Roam Book for September: Vaster Wilds by Lauren Groff.

In grade school, most of us learned a kind of shorthand mythology of the settlement at Jamestown: English settlers arrive in Virginia, times are tough, the Indians save them, John Rolfe marries Pocahantas, happier times ensue.

Lauren Groff's new novel, set in 1609 in Jamestown, introduces us to a young girl who decides to flee the colony in it's winter of deepest privation, poverty and disease. She has left behind, "everything she had, her roof, her home, her country, her language, the only family she had known."

And so she embarks on an ordeal and yes, a remarkable adventure, out to the wilderness of a largely un-mapped and untouched America.

As she travels, she finds nourishment in berries, fish and insects and evades a swarm of bees to plunder their honey. She glories in the sight of waterfalls and wildflowers.

She shelters in trees and caves, hiding at times from Powhatan scouts who glimpse her in the forest and from a malevolent woodsman dressed in the skins of animals.

And she runs and runs and runs, succumbing to a kind of ecstatic exhaustion. Lauren Groff told me that she was inspired by her forty-one year old sister who still competes in Iron man triathlons.

She said her sister describes the exhaustion of the body and mind as "entering the pain cave" and has learned how to anticipate it and take comfort in it.

Here's a scene from "The Vaster Wilds":

"And yet even in the vision, she found herself yearning for another soul to have spent her life with. Against the resistance of other minds, one's thoughts are pulled out of their comfortable shapes, and true thinking begins.
And to have another body to minister to her body's needs and take in turn her loving ministrations. A hand to hold, a face to love. Humans were never meant to live alone."