Visible Bones: Journeys Across Time in the Columbia River Country

People who have read my reviews of other books by Jack Nisbet know that I consider him a very fine writer. "Visible Bones" is both archeological history and a nature book. It is subtitled "Journeys Across Time in the Columbia River Country" and is a series of essays on a variety of topics. The book is a combination of nature, history, people and reflection. Nisbet has a great deal of respect for Native Americans and that shows through in most of the stories. The book starts with fossils and salamanders. It ends with Jaco Finley who was a confederate of David Thompson, an early explorer in Canada and the United States. In between we hear stories of a rock in the Columbia River that has been ground into gravel and the natural history of a mountain that ended up in the Hanford Nuclear Reservation. Always, the stories lead to people. Nisbet tells of how smallpox ravaged the native tribes and he describes a trip to gather roots with a Salish woman. Each new story brings a different facet of life in the Columbia River Basin. Each one is gentle but leads the reader into a new avenue of thought. I read the book aloud to my wife while we drove through Washington and Oregon. It flows naturally and smooth like the water where the Musquash swims.

This impressive survey of the Columbia River country concerns the journey of a fossil trilobite, the disappearance of condors, and other altered landscapes of the America Northwest. Author Jack Nisbet's intention in Visible Bones is to show how varied relics of the past have been altered over time: geology and changes blend with human records of change, taken from ship logs, field journals and news accounts, to make for a strong portrait of a dynamic, changing landscape.

The sub-title of this book, "Journeys across Time in the Columbia River Country" gives you some idea of the scope of it. The writer, in twelve gentle essays, explores aspects of the natural and human history of the region. Combining the vast sweep of time with the wide range of ecology of such a large region is a huge undertaking. I'm in awe of a mind that can conceptualize such a topic, never mind bring it to fruition in book form. Of course 248 pages can't do the topic justice, but ten times or one hundred times the number of pages wouldn't do it justice either. The writer can only choose minute representative aspects of the whole and offer more information and a fresh lens through which to view it.To take the dimension of history first. The writer starts out with a personal tale of hunting for trilobites in a creek swollen with snow melt. Trilobites are the tiny fossilized creatures whose massed bodies helped to create the land in this western corner of the U.S. But this is not a Geology 101 text. It places the 250 million year old fossil in the human scale of things - part of human history, part of the writer's experience. And that is the magic of this book - it takes a vast store of history, geology, nature and human nature and blends it into an understanding of how the Columbia River country used to be and how it came to be the way it is now.The writer presents the natural history also. He shares with us the "water dog" (actually a salamander), the sheep moth and buzzards. We see muskrats through the eyes of native hunters and we discover Indian tobacco. We watch as the river changes with the coming of fur traders, dam builders and the presence of nuclear material.The writer uses a rather circuitous approach to present a wide view of individual species and actions that are representative of eras and world views. This is a book rich with ideas, embracing a gentle all encompassing philosophy. I enjoyed this book because of the writer's understanding and appreciation of the land. On the practical side, however, the presentation of the book left something to be desired. For the reader trying to follow along, the map was inadequate. I would have appreciated a more detailed map showing historical names and places. More illustrations would have enriched the book, too.