Author’s new novel is set in Klamath in the late 1970s
Arcata-born author Ash Davidson has returned to her earliest roots for her debut novel. “Damnation Spring” is set in Klamath in the late 1970s and focuses on the fictional Gundersen family.
“‘Damnation Spring’ is the story of a logger, Rich Gundersen, his wife, Colleen, a homemaker and a midwife, and their 5-yearold son, Chub. Rich is obsessed with a redwood tree taller than the Statue of Liberty, and risks everything to buy the grove in which it stands,” Davidson said of her book.
“Meanwhile,” she said, “Colleen has an encounter with an old flame, now a biologist, who plants the idea in her mind that the anomalies she’s witnessed midwifing, and perhaps even her own miscarriages, might be related to herbicides the timber company uses. This is upsetting, because she’s been desperately trying to have a second child, and it’s a suspicion that gradually corrodes not just their family, but the entire community and its way of life.”
“Damnation Spring,” she said, is “a book about the natural world and man’s effect on it; it’s also a book about family and about love — for your spouse, for your children, for your siblings, even when you’re on opposite sides.”
Davidson, who now resides in Flagstaff, Arizona, says she’d long wanted to write a novel set in Klamath, where she spent the first three years of her life.
“My parents always said
Klamath was the most beautiful place they’d ever lived — and 35 years later they still carry such awe for the redwoods,” Davidson said. “… But my parents had also been wary of the spraying near our cabin, and (were) concerned about it getting into the creek we’d relied on for water. … I think, growing up listening to their stories of this beautiful, rugged, sometimes dangerous forest and all the people they knew and cared about in Klamath, some part of me always wanted to get back there, but of course I can’t get back to that time, and many of those people are gone. Writing a novel set here was the closest I could come to time travel.
“I think in some ways writing ‘Damnation Spring’ was my way of transporting myself back to a time I was too young to remember and a place I grew up loving, even though I barely remembered it. And because it’s a novel — and the people and the events are invented — it gave me the freedom to look beyond my family’s own experiences and to learn about the forest and logging, and the history of the place,” she said.
Davidson’s parents moved to Del Norte County, just north of Klamath in the mid-1970s and stayed there for eight years. Her mother taught at Margaret Keating Elementary School in Klamath and at Joe Hamilton Elementary School in Crescent City.
“My dad took odd jobs — mostly carpentry, took care of me, did a lot of work on our old cabin and chopped a lot of firewood,” said Davidson,
who was born at Mad River Community Hospital in Arcata.
Davidson’s family moved to the San Juan Islands in northwest Washington when she was 3.
“But my parents’ stories of Klamath came with us,” she said. “I guess I kept a file of them tucked away in my brain all these years. The writer Anthony Doerr has a beautiful line in
‘Memory Wall’ where he says, ‘You bury your childhood here and there. It waits for you, all your life, to come back and dig it up.’ My parents’ stories of Klamath were always there waiting for me, and I did use many of them as scaffolding for the book, initially, though most of their stories got stripped away in the 10 years I spent writing ‘Damnation Spring.’”
Davidson says she returned to Klamath and Humboldt County initially on a road trip in 2005, five years before she began writing the book. She made two research trips to the area while penning “Damnation Spring” — in 2014 and in 2016.
“I spent most of that time talking to people and hiking around Klamath and Requa,” she said. “The geography in ‘Damnation Spring’ is fictionalized — there are some real-place names, but things are jumbled around, and many creeks and ridges and drainages are invented. I suspect it might be a little frustrating for people who know the area well, but I felt strongly about fictionalizing the geography to protect the privacy of the place.”
While in the county doing research, Davidson said she took some time to hike in Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park, visit logged lands around Mill Creek in Del Norte Coast Redwoods State Park and revisit an old family picnic spot along the Smith River.
“We combed the woods where our old cabin, which was torn down in the 1980s, once stood,” she said. “I thought for sure we’d find a scrap of pipe or an old crumb of foundation, but the forest has pretty well taken over. It was sad in a way, because the only place that cabin exists now is in our memories, but also humbling, heartening on some level, to see how nature moves on without us.”
Davidson — who has just returned home after a brief stay in Humboldt County last week — says there are myriad people in Humboldt and Del Norte counties who helped her with the book, especially around Klamath and Requa.
“I’m extremely grateful to the brilliant Amy Cordalis, who read ‘Damnation Spring’ and patiently helped me understand the history of the Yurok people’s legal struggles to uphold their close relationship with the Klamath River. I’m very grateful to the former loggers and millworkers who shared their personal reminiscences with me, especially the late Robley Schwenk and Stacey Fisher. And to Jan and Anna and the crew at the Requa Inn.”
For more information about “Damnation Spring” (Scribner, $28), go to https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/damnation-spring/ash-davidson/9781982144401.