In 1967, Harry Lynch — a tall, gawky 20-year-old who
seemed very much out of his element — walked into Ruth Carson’s
writing class at a community college in Oakland, Calif., fulfilled
an in-class assignment by writing a poem, and became an enduring,
persistently enigmatic figure in his teacher’s life.
Years later, Ruth, watching television on 9/11, “sees” Harry among
the people fleeing the World Trade Center. Harry had vanished from
her life; he dropped in on Berkeley, dropped out, reappeared for a
short but disastrous stay in 1989 and then faded back into the
landscape he had come from. That was Butte, Mont., home of the
infamous Berkeley Pit, an abandoned open-pit copper mine slowly
filling with contaminated water that threatens to permanently
pollute the underlying aquifer.
By focusing on Harry’s
comings and goings, novelist Dorothy Bryant intertwines the stories
of the two different Berkeleys: the California college town, where
the counterculture evolved over four decades, and the Montana open
pit mine.
The book gains its unique character from
Bryant’s portrayal of Ruth, whose unwavering belief that people are
acting from the best — or at least from comprehensible — motives
helps her analyze the complex social environment of Berkeley and
the multifaceted people within it. Here is Ruth describing a
student in her writing class: “At forty-six, (Marsha) was almost as
pretty as she must have been at twenty – petite, delicate, with a
round, innocent face framed by blond hair becomingly streaked with
silver. Yet, if Marsha was more fortunate and accomplished than my
other students of her age, she seemed more bitter and frustrated
than any of them.”
The Berkeley Pit is
a nuanced description of the 1960s from someone who is neither a
critic nor a cheerleader. This is a novel that celebrates the
decade for its innocence, its commitment to political change, the
value it placed on nature and other people. At the same time, it
clearly depicts the decade’s staggering disappointments, the loss
of young people to drugs, to political activism that morphed into
fanaticism, and to the weight of a battle that couldn’t be won.
Bryant, now in her 70s, still has a powerful voice and a rare
ability to see between the lines of history with perception and
compassion.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Loves, losses and utter disasters.
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
