The word “relic” conjures up a host of
connotations, from human remains to a historic souvenir. It can
denote a custom from the past, the remnants of an ancient language,
or a fragment of a whole. It can represent the last of a dying
species, or an indefatigable survivor.
>
—Jack Nisbet
Northwestern writer Jack Nisbet brings to the
tired tomes of American history the unadulterated wonder of a child
who takes delight in everything he sees. His award-winning book,
Sources of the River, described the life of
David Thompson, an explorer and fur trader who was the first to map
the Columbia River from its headwaters to the sea. Now, in
Nisbet’s latest book, Visible Bones: Journeys Across
Time in the Columbia River Country, he examines a variety
of everyday artifacts — a promontory beside the river, a
fossil, a native plant — and uses each to tell the story of
the country around the Columbia River across time.
By
tracing the journey of a trilobite from its birth in the sea
hundreds of millions of years ago to its ascension into the Rocky
Mountains as a fossil and eventual inclusion in an American
Indian’s personal kit, he provides a look at the history of
the Columbia River region on a time scale not often appreciated. In
another chapter, the story of a native tobacco plant takes him to
the very edge of the most private and essential heart of
traditional Indian culture as it exists to this day.
Whether he’s recounting how astonished farmers near Spokane
fished mammoth bones out of their spring in the late 1800s, or
showing how the lowly muskrat has gone its web-footed way through
centuries of change, he ties together varied threads and provides a
long view of the Columbia River country. The perspective Nisbet
shares encourages a wiser way forward into our shared future, and
helps to renew our own sense of wonder at the landscape around us.
Visible Bones: Journeys Across Time in the
Columbia River Country
Jack Nisbet
246 pages, hardcover $23.95.
Sasquatch Books, 2003.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Everyday objects and extraordinary journeys.
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
