One of my favorite books as a child was The Bears on Hemlock Mountain. I still have my copy, a small, thin book with a dusky blue cover showing a boy in a yellow-brown coat climbing a white mountain, his shoulders hunched, his mittened hands in his pockets, his eyes swiveling to look over his shoulder. The story was written by Alice Dalgliesh, and the illustrations, which look like woodcuts, are by Helen Sewell. I say it was a favorite of mine, but I can’t think of a book from my childhood that wasn’t a favorite: I loved them all.
A reader of my column recently complimented me on my sense of story, to which I replied that I had my mother to thank because she read to me and my brother all through our childhood. That’s true, despite her being absent for much of it: “The kids stay,” my dad told her when she left. And we did. It was never a question. After our parents divorced, my mother moved back east, while my brother and I stayed with our dad, in our same home, going to our same schools in our same town, in most ways everything pretty much as before. On leaving, my mother took very little in the way of household items, but she took the reading. How could she not? Like a gauzy scarf floating over a shoulder or a scent in the air when someone is near, the reading was practically an extension of herself.
Whenever we visited our mother, she always had a book picked out to read aloud. Even now, discussing what to read together during my summer visits to her is part of the planning for the trip. Sometimes, for old times’ sake, we dip into one of the several children’s books she has on her bookshelves, usually new copies of books she read to us as kids. These books are like snapshots, full of the aura of my childhood. Mary Poppins, The Little White Horse. The books we haven’t read are like travel brochures, full of promise of new pleasures. Sometimes, however, with a book she has purchased or a title she’s remembered, she isn’t sure if she read it to us kids or not, so she’ll ask me. “I don’t know,” I answer, because though the title is familiar, I have no memory of the story. It’s the same thing that can happen with some vacation spots. Did we ever go there, you wonder, or only think about it? Titles, places, plans, promises—what a hodgepodge! Some trips from before the divorce, some from after, some both: summer camping trips to Wisconsin, the Café du Monde, the duck pond at our grandmother’s house in Athens, the Watts Bar Dam, Sewanee, Gatlinburg, Fancher’s Falls, the Lincoln Park Zoo, Houston. And the books? The Princess and the Goblin, The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, Tom Sawyer, The Wheel on the School. And David Copperfield. The Wonderful Adventures of Nils and Brighty of the Grand Canyon. And The Hobbit and The Green Knowe books. Adam of the Road. And The Mouse and His Son. The Chronicles of Narnia. Oh—there were so many more! Half Magic! The Secret Garden! What a happy swirl of travel and adventure, family and fun, looking and listening, all in a decade and a half. There was time. Summers lasted forever. Life was good.
The Bears on Hemlock Mountain won a Newbury Honor award in 1952. My copy, however, is the 1962 British edition, not more authentic but more exotic than the one my mother could have picked up across town. How did she end up with a book from the United Kingdom? I asked her, but she doesn’t remember—not any more than you would recall why you took State Highway 30 instead of U.S. 11 to get from one town to the next during a road trip years ago.
Before I resorted to digging out my edition of The Bears, I tried to borrow a copy from the Internet Archive, but it was not available. My search, however, revealed some responses to the book. One reader complained about its lack of detail. That was when I decided to find my copy.
Lack of detail? Nonsense. It’s full of wonderful detail. Today, 50-some years after I snuggled close to my mother as she read the book, and more than 20 years since my own two children snuggled close to me to hear the same story, I finally wonder about the inspiration of the author. Bears! I have just read Jill Lepore’s New Yorker article on bears, read the two letters to the editor printed in response, and sat back to ponder bears in Asturias, two of which, Paca and Moli, live in a preserve an hour’s drive from me and can often be viewed at feeding time. What do I think about bears?
I don’t. Not in any focused way. Instead, I wonder what my mother and I will plan to read this summer. On these visits, we never read an entire book. Rather, we sample from a variety of titles, some fiction, some biography, some something else. We flit about, we dip into one or another for a day or for two. We are dabblers now, not the eager, committed consumers of the past but people in no hurry to get on. We are still on vacation, but without endless summer before us.
