Thank you Mary for hosting us with an extensive and delicious pot luck. Lots of good conversation among friends. And thanks also for our book selection this month - "Deep River" by Karl Marlantes. I know you were concerned about the length of this book - 700+ pages - but we all enjoyed the journey. Going back to the 1800's and early 1900's to the beginnings of logging along the Columbia.
This book had many moments of poetic writing. Judy B and I agreed that the Prologue is the most beautiful description of the Columbia River: "The majestic westward-flowing river went without a name for millions of years...ocean storms that move ever eastward until they collide with the mountains and transform into the steady rain that nurses the rivulets, causing them to grow like sprawling children, until they are born again in the great river that cycles, cycles...time, like the salmon that every year returned without fail, cycled, cycled...And the large ships came back for more and cycled, cycled..."
The Finnish immigrants had sisu; stoic determination, grit, resilience, courage in the face of adversity. This backbone of their culture made it possible for them to persevere and prosper. This book dealt with politics (not much has changed from 1800's to today: "...it was dangerous to let a group of fools make important decisions - and it got more dangerous the more fools there were.") and religion along with descriptions of life and the dangerous process of cutting the huge trees. "Timber was wealth that grew every day." Even local Brief was mentioned when log drivers left millions of board feet of log floating in the (Entiat) river during a work strike April 16, 1917. "It's called work because we don't do it for fun." Progress and technology changed rapidly reflecting the new syncopated beat of American rag music which "moved just like the country: forward."
