The Interconnectedness of Us All: Renata Golden’s Mountain Time: A Field Guide to Astonishment – Terrain.org

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Mountain Time: A Field Guide to Astonishment
By Renata Golden
Columbus State University Press | 2024 | 198 pages

  
With a potential mouse infestation threatening, Renata Golden sets a series of mouse traps around her home’s perimeter in southeastern Arizona. Yet when a pack rat traps itself instead—wearing the trap like a “dunce cap” and refusing to die—Golden confronts both a practical and ethical question. Practically, what, if anything, ought to be done to free the creature from its torment? And ethically, “Who do I become,” the author ponders, “when I pray for the death of an innocent creature?”

It’s one of many soul-probing questions Golden poses throughout her debut essay collection, Mountain Time: A Field Guide to Astonishment, which, though marketed as a “field guide,” subverts the field guide model. You read it not for its matter-of-fact guidance but for its complexity instead. Rather than tell you what to do, it asks you to think: about history, people, and the natural world—and humankind’s collisions among them all.

In “Bought and Sold: A History of Lies and Broken Promises,” Golden explores the story of her parents’ ill-fated purchase of a pair of “Deming Ranchettes” land parcels in southwestern New Mexico. Marketed as a Western paradise, the land soon proves to be more of a pipe dream, instead, the development of the parcels a scam. The story spectacularly widens as Golden examines the many unexpected intersection points that sprung forth from the region: from the fraught and exploitative history of Western land ownership to race riots and the Indian Wars. “The injustice that shapes the West haunts the unmarked graves and burial places of the people—Apache and military, rancher and farmer, settler and miner—who lost their lives here,” Golden writes. These intertwined histories prompt Golden to reevaluate her understanding of history itself, which she defines as “not a compendium of facts of things that happened” but as a subject “alive with change as new truths are uncovered…”

Golden does some of this uncovering herself, writing about the natural world and our place within it from her then-home in the Chiricahua Mountains, 50 miles north of the Mexican border. While the landscape offers no shortage of encounters with wildlife (from bluebirds to rattlesnakes to prairie dogs), it also provides moments of cultural exchange, as depicted in “How Much Can A Bag Hold?” When a pair of Honduran border crossers enter her property, asking for food and water, Golden assists. She fills a bag with food (fruit, granola bars, V-8 juice, and more), then watches as the men continue their journey in search of jobs and better lives. “Nothing in my history would motivate me to trudge along desert mountain trails at night for three months,” Golden writes, “but I have never known the kind of misery that drives men and increasingly more women with children to leave behind everything familiar.” Such introspection is a hallmark of Golden’s work, which transcends the self while also speaking to our own complicity. The scene serves as the opening salvo for Golden’s wider exploration of U.S. immigration policy, her grandparents’ immigration from Ireland, and, most empathetic of all, stories from ranchers that humanize the migrants and their plight. “One rancher told me about coming home to find a note in Spanish listing all the things taken from the house—pan, queso, agua—” Golden reports, “and a few centavos on the table, with an apology.” As the men walk toward the mountains, Golden wonders how her less-welcoming neighbors might view her hospitality. “How can it be a crime to give a hungry man some food?”

In “What Bluebirds Taught Me About Motherhood,” Golden finds herself in a different backyard drama after a move from Arizona to Santa Fe. When a five-foot-long red coachwhip snake slithers toward the bluebird box, preparing to devour the nestlings within, Golden joins the parent bluebirds in their counterattack. Reaching for the hose, she sprays the snake and guards the box for over an hour until the threat recedes. “I was only doing what every other privileged human has been doing on the planet for millennia—” she writes, “playing God, deciding who deserves to live and who should go hungry….” As Golden bears witness to the perils of the bluebird family, she reflects on her own decision not to be a mother. The convergence of these stories—Golden’s anger toward the bluebird parents’ perceived failures to support their nestlings, as well as her choice of a career over motherhood (“I didn’t have the resources to help me juggle both…”)—provides clarity to both experiences. With full-throated empathy, Golden concludes, “We all find success in our own ways.”

The primary tension in Golden’s essays often centers on a question of agency: to act or not to act? Do we carry the weight of our history? Grant mercy to the pack rat? Feed the hungry migrant? Save a bluebird at the expense of a snake? While Golden examines her role in all these encounters, the central questions posed to the reader are more philosophical. In the opening essay, “Mountain Time,” she asks: “How long must we survive in a place before we can say we belong there? How much time passes after we leave a land before it forgets us?” In this essay, Golden returns to her home in the Chiricahua Mountains a decade after leaving, where she finds the mountains buzzing “with the murmurs of past inhabitants of this valley.” Of which she is now one. This dislocation parallels her grandparents’ decision to leave Ireland for America over a century before, which, in some ways, sets into motion everything that follows: Golden’s parents’ purchase of the Deming Ranchettes, as well as the author’s run-ins with the pack rat, the migrants, the bluebirds, and the snake. All of which brings us back to the rat, and Golden’s decision to free the animal from the trap, despite what it might mean for her property. “Perhaps the answer was not buying into a hierarchy of orders of life,” Golden writes, “but reaching an insight of interconnectedness—even with a rat.” That the rat dies despite her grace only adds to the complexity. Even doing the “right” thing at the “wrong” time can lead to consequences—ethically, environmentally, and personally, too.

Such a humble approach to being human is sure to astonish us all.