"Down by Shuttlecock Bog"

Book Review dept.

By now it’s rare enough to run to into someone who hasn’t read Treehouse Nixon’s “Down by Shuttlecock Bog” that it’s hard to be sure you have your own opinions about it.

I always had suspicions about Cara Shindley’s motives for coming to Shuttlecock Bog, but so many have weighed in on the thing that you start to question your own feelings and notions.

Or when Kelman Whelmsley bursts in during the Festival of the Seven Gasps, and shouts, “Is there, then, no utterance in Fenster free from calumny?” At first I took this as evidence of Whelmsley’s probity, but Pelwood Skoellbroek, in the Danish Review of Books (“Anmelse af Boeger”), makes a convincing case that Whelmsley is being sardonic, insofar as his shirt collar is stained a dark red, hiding a ghastly secret.

“Coal, coal powder, let the coal powder rain on us twelve fortnights!” cries Collindra at a crucial moment when Shuttlecock Bog is threatened by a mutant dust storm. As Skoellbroek cleverly argues, twelve fortnights would be a period of six months, which is half a year—two seasons—in this case, the seasons of winter and spring. The nod to spring can thus be understood as a ray of hope in Collindra’s otherwise dark vision.

My favorite part of “Down by Shuttlecock Bog” comes during the period, near the book’s end, when everything has been resolved and there is finally some peace and quiet. The Hendletons pack up their supplies and return to Rwanda. The mysterious Mr. Kiffle turns out to be a librarian after all. Zelzah and Rickshah decide to pursue the trapeze act which had eluded them for so long. And Cara Shindley finally puts down first-month-and last-month and rents the old Greeler place. It is here that Treehouse Nixon is finally free from the bonds of plot and character and can do what she does best and, probably most happily—craft some of the finest nature prose that has ever been set down in Wyoming.

Clara “Treehouse” Nixon

While “Down at Shuttlecock Bog” cannot be said to be unflawed—I don’t for a minute believe that Jimmie survives three years on Skick Island on only whale blubber—it is a welcome and worthy addition to Treehouse Nixon’s oeuvre. While “Down by Shuttlecock Bog” cannot, let’s be fair, compare with Nixon’s immortal “I Nearly Died at Shetland Point,” it ought, one feels, be received for what it is—a gift.

A literary gift. And that, in our time, or any time, must be treasured.

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Here’s the theme from the film adaptation of “Down by Shuttlecock Bog,” directed by Mervyn “Wink” Handler, Windbag Productions, due out in June: