Two Reviews: I Never Met A Rattlesnake I Didn't Like: A Memoir by David Carpenter, and Danceland Diary, by Dee Hobsbawn-Smith

“I Never Met A Rattlesnake I Didn’t Like: A Memoir”

Written by David Carpenter

Published by Thistledown Press

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$24.95  ISBN 978-1-77187-227-0

  

When I discovered that Saskatoon’s David Carpenter was releasing a new memoir, I Never Met A Rattlesnake I Didn’t Like, I immediately wanted to review it. I knew it would be illuminating, well-written and downright fun, because this is what I’ve come to expect of Carpenter’s work, whether fiction or nonfiction, and this latest title’s cleared the bar. Carpenter’s a bonafide storyteller and a “rabid conservationist,” and his entertaining stories and mind-broadening research into “this ancient cafeteria called nature”—and who and what threaten it—is an epiphanic read.   

The memoir’s an homage to “creatures with Fangs, Claws, and Other Pointy Things,” from mosquitos, snakes and weasels to the apex predators: wolves, cougars and bears. Over eighteen mostly short chapters that “follow the chain of predation,” we learn about Carpenter’s lifelong passion and reverence for the winged, finned and four-legged. “I seem to have a thing for predatory animals,” he writes. “My journals are full of them.” He’s been keeping field notes for fifty years re: his “sightings of and adventures with predacious creatures,” from boyhood memories of fishing on Lake Wabamun, Alberta to adult interactions with rattlesnakes in Arizona and black bears in Saskatchewan.   

Carpenter’s an avid fly fisherman, and his beloved brown trout get copious attention, too, as does Little Bear Lake, where in 1997 he and his wife, Honor Kever, bought a ramshackle cabin and transformed it into an idyllic retreat (difficult septic tank notwithstanding), where fish and friends are never far away, Kever’s planted trees and bushes, and “Eagles and ospreys patrol the skies.”

Expect offbeat, like Carpenter’s rescue of a drowning dragonfly (“a biplane with enormous opalescent eyes”), and his desire to see alligators and rattlesnakes in the wild (missions accomplished in the US). When it seems the author’s had fun writing, the reader has fun too.

Expect an education. I learned much, including the differences between weasels, pine martens, fishers, badgers and wolverines. “In the hockey game of nature, [wolverines] deserve a lot of time in the penalty box.” And until recently, mosquitoes (“draculating fiends”) killed “more than a million people annually,” but “Malaria-bearing mosquitoes certainly delayed the destruction of the Amazon rainforests,” too. Carpenter’s merging of anecdote and fact works.

There’s also much here I personally relate to, ie: the “near-galvanic pain” of a black widow bite (I was bitten in Sooke, BC) and the “burgeoning” presence of wild pigs (I found a skull near Middle Lake, SK). Cougars roam my current neighbourhood. Though long thought to be loners, Carpenter’s enlightened me: sometimes cougar do “socialize in diverse groups.” This book: terrific conversation starter.

Where did our fear of apex predators begin? Perhaps with the Goldilocks story: entitled girl breaks into bears’ home. “[Goldilocks] reminds us all too well of who runs the show in our present day Anthropocene. The bears’ habitat is her playground. The Goldilocks story sums up what human beings have done to the terrestrial wilderness, the ocean, the atmosphere, and now the climate.” Maybe, Carpenter posits, “Goldilocks is us.”

THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE OR FROM THE SASKATCHEWAN PUBLISHERS GROUP WWW.SKBOOKS.COM

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“Danceland Diary”

By Dee Hobsbawn-Smith

Published by Radiant Press

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$22.900  ISBN 9-781989-274828

   

‘Tis a wondrous thing to watch a writer’s oeuvre grow. I’ve had the pleasure of following Saskatchewan’s Dee Hobsbawn-Smith evolution as she’s published enviable books of poetry, short fiction and nonfiction—including the scrumptious Bread & Water: Essays—and now this hard-working writer’s earned another literary moniker: novelist. Danceland Diary, the award-winning author’s premiere novel, is saturated with poetic imagery, a juicy plot, and longing.  

First-person narrator Luka Dekker’s been born into an off-colony Hutterite family that harbours dark secrets—indeed, keeping secrets seems an intergenerational trait for these “gypsy Hutterites,” and Luka’s got a dandy of her own. It’s been twenty-two years since Luka’s unstable mother, Lark, abandoned Luka and her sister, Connie, and moved to the west coast. The girls were raised by their grandmother, the matriarch Anky, and never saw Lark again. At eighteen Luka left her rural Saskatchewan life to attempt to find her beautiful and elusive mother in Vancouver. The timing of Lark’s disappearance eerily lines up with Robert Pickton’s murders of women from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. Is there a connection?   

Luka’s thirty when the novel begins. She has horticulture and botany degrees, and a seven-year-old son, Jordan. Anky’s dying, and Connie’s called Luka back to Saskatchewan to help care for her. Luka and her son are “just staying until Anky kicks her clogs.” Every generation of this family’s plagued by the secrets they’ve held close, but when Luka finds Anky’s journals and learns what happened to her grandmother at Manitou Beach’s Danceland on a fateful day in June 1943, the narrator starts snapping puzzle pieces together.

The novel’s part mystery and part history­—Luka “want[s] to know who [she] is”—and a quiet love story’s percolating on the side. Readers will root for Luka, who’s lifelong search for her mother parallels a perennial desire for happiness. 

Fittingly, considering Luka’s education and dream of operating a market garden, Hobsbawn-Smith pays keen attention to what grows in prairie gardens and fields. Even her similes demonstrate this attention to flora, ie: at an old-time threshing demonstration, farmers’ wives are “relegated to the edge of the field like poppies,” a yellow lady’s slipper is a leitmotif, and at twelve, Luka “cut off [her] braids with the garden secateurs.” Food, too, gets spotlighting: these folks eat a lot of kuchen, and there’s the usual “sliced ham and coleslaw and homemade buns and squares and colourful jellied salads” at Anky’s funeral at the “old Hutterite country church” near the farm. I clearly see old Reverend Waldman at the service, “a faded, narrow-gauge man in a freight train of a tweed jacket two sizes too wide,” his voice “dissipating into the air like a spent train whistle.”

And what’s a proper prairie novel without descriptions of winter? “Hoarfrost like jewelry on tree branches. Smell of woodsmoke. Stars, the northern lights. The coyotes’ songs echoing like glass about to crack.” Fabulous.   

My favourite scene concerns Anky’s wedding night consummation at the Bessborough Hotel. I read it and howled. Bet you will, too.   

THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE OR FROM WWW.SKBOOKS.COM