“Only connect!” This commandment, famously written by British novelist E.M. Forster, applies to art and life, passion and love.
In Above The Waterfall, author Ron Rash connects. Les is a small-town sheriff in today’s Western North Carolina. Nearing retirement, he finds himself caught up in a series of dangerous intrigues involving a meth dealer, an old-timer named Gerald Blackwelder, a boyhood friend, and the powerful owner of a local resort.
Meanwhile, Les also struggles to define his relationship with Becky Shytle, a park ranger with a bleak past. As a girl, Becky witnessed a school shooting and suffered mental abuse from her parents. As a young woman, she once loved an eco-terrorist who died violently. Becky is also close to Gerald, and when the hotel magnate accuses the old man of launching a fish kill on his property, Becky joins Les in a hunt for the truth.
In addition to his five other novels, Rash is well known for his poetry and short stories, and he brings both talents to Above The Waterfall. In alternating chapters, Becky and Les give their takes on events and people. The contrast in characters comes out in their narration: Les speaks directly and bluntly to the reader, as we might expect from a man who has spent most of his life in law enforcement, while Becky is a poet.
Becky’s voice and her love for nature have the power of Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim At Tinker Creek. Listen to her as she goes for a short hike after talking to a group of school children about trout:
“I close my eyes. Wash away, I whisper. Wash away, wash away. I walk down the loop trail, pass foxglove past bloom. Midsummer their flowers dangle like soft yellow bells. I’d wish them a breeze so they might silently ring. The same yellow as Van Gogh’s flowers. Vincent’s thick paint, like Hopkins’s thick sounds. Such grace-giving from supposed failed priests. I think of reading Hopkins in those days after Richard was killed. A failed priest saved my soul.”
The Hopkins to whom Becky refers often throughout the novel is Gerard Manly Hopkins, a poet and Jesuit priest who for much of his short life felt cut off from family and friends because of his conversion to Catholicism. In poems like “The Windhover” and “Pied Beauty,” and in the circumstances in which he lived, Hopkins brings to Becky, as he has brought to others, a way of returning to the world after the brutalities of her younger days. His poetry and life offer her the grace of redemption.
In addition to Becky’s love for the natural world, Rash also directs our attention to nature—and perhaps toward God—through the words of a local preacher. In a sermon, the preacher says:
“Ponder a pretty sunset or the dogwoods all ablossom. Every time you see such it’s the hem of the robe of glory. Brothers and sisters, how do you expect to see what you don’t seek? Some claim heaven has streets of gold, and all such things, but I hold a different notion. When we’re there, we’ll say to the angels, why a lot of heaven’s glory was in the place we come from. And you know what them angels will say? They’ll say yes, pilgrim, and how often did you notice? What did you seek?”
But as Les says, after hearing this sermon claiming that we can see heaven all around us, “Mist Creek Valley would soon confirm that the same was true of hell.”
Rash offers us one part of this hell in a character named Darby, a local meth addict and dealer. Here we see the underbelly of nature’s paradise: the men and women who spend some nights under bridges, who steal or sell their bodies for one more day with drugs and a pipe.
Above The Waterfall also tells a story of love and redemption, and of the triumph of justice. Les follows the law, but he also has an acute and wise sense of fair play. His final dealings with Darby, his commitment and aid to his friend C.J., and his loyalty to Becky all bespeak a man who is bigger than his badge. Becky may be the poet in the novel, but Les is the sage, combining his lawman’s instincts with a real feeling for others.
So there it is, a novel that reads at times like a beautiful poem and a story that celebrates the natural world while looking simultaneously into the vagaries of the human heart. In this grand setting that Rash has created, characters breathe on the page and make deep connections.