In the Wilderness (31 page)

So it is that I have chosen to remain here, above the Idaho river whose feeding brooks once ran beneath my window, whose waters I drank from my hands. All that I am and have ever been the river has known. It is the map I follow back to understand what has shaped me: my family, the camps, the church; the preacher’s son whose initials I carved into the spongy bark; his family I believed loved me—back past the dam and into what remains of the forest, to where my father’s voice once rose in laughter, back to that place where I sang with the soul of a child.

Kim Barnes’s stories and poems have appeared in numerous journals, including
The Georgia Review
and
Shenandoah
. She coedited, along with Mary Clearman Blew,
Circle of Women: An Anthology of Western Women Writers
. She lives with her husband and children above the Clearwater River in Idaho.

HUNGRY FOR THE WORLD

On the day of Kim Barnes’s 1976 high school graduation in Lewiston, Idaho, after a disagreement with her father—a logger by lifelong trade, and a fervent adherent of the Pentecostal Christian faith—she gathered her few belongings and struck out on her own. Alone for the first time, she sought to make a life for herself—without skills, without funds, with barely a shred of knowledge of the world outside the insulated confines of her family.

Hungry for the World
is the story of how an intelligent and passionate young woman, thirsting for experience of what lay out there, rejected the patriarchal domination of family and church and tried to find her way, only to be all but undone at the hands of a man whose dominance was of an altogether different sort. It is a classic story of the search for knowledge and the consequences, both dire and beautiful, of that search. Barnes’s story breaks the code of silence imposed by shame and maps a trail of hope through the swamp of human failure and survival.

Memoir/0-385-72044-0

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