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A Steep, Wild, Rocky Place
A Stone Bridge North:
Reflections in a New Life
by Kate Maloy
Counterpoint, 2002. 315 pages.
Reviewed by Pamela Johnson
When I turned fifty my husband and I bought a flower farm in the middle of bluff country and left our city home of twenty years. There’s something about turning fifty that clears your eyesight. Suddenly what looked confusing and impossible becomes obvious -- and urgent. You leap off the edge, or as Kate Maloy says, you trust that a bridge from here to there is forming right under your feet.
I did not know Kate Maloy before picking up this spiritual memoir of her family’s first year in the woods of Vermont. I did not know her, but after reading only two pages I knew I was about to meet someone whose open-hearted reflections on her own life would profoundly influence mine.
This is one of those books I read with a pencil because I wanted to scribble notes in the margins, make bold exclamation points mid-sentence, and underline something on almost every page. Kate Maloy’s careful telling of the ordinary and the personal quietly reveals the extraordinary and the universal.
“A Stone Bridge North tells of miracles found and fears allayed. It is a record of my reconfigured family’s first year in the woods of central Vermont, an account of our move, our challenges, and the joys of being in this steep, wild, rocky place -- a new state and a new state of being,” says the author in the prologue.
Interwoven into that record is the story of two divorces, the birth of a son in her forties, marriage to a soul-mate, and the forming and reforming of a faith that is rooted in Quaker silence. Kate Maloy has patience with the cycles of knowing and not knowing and she has a strong conviction that we all cross life’s dangerous waters on the rock-solid “stone bridge made invisible by its perfect blending with the walls of the chasm.”
Time and again this invisible, but ever-present, stone bridge makes a way in Maloy’s life. We have choices, she says. We can choose love or we can choose fear.
To know what I can say -- about God, human dealings, good, evil, politics, action, and anything else for which I might seek guidance -- I need to chose deliberately between love and fear. Through much of my life I have been guided by fear, a shape shifter that has come as shyness, self-doubt, a desire for security, anxiety over the opinions of others, a too-trusting naïveté, an inability to stand up to exploitation or insult -- in short, a thousand forms of powerlessness and retreat.
In recent years, without quite realizing it, I have more often pushed through fear to choose love -- of life, self, Adam, Alan, nature, God, truth. Fear doesn’t permit much truth to enter. Abandoning fear means stepping off the edge of the abyss, and that takes faith.
We live in an enormously distracting society. We are so busy that we don’t see what is killing us and what gives us life. Running and busyness, Maloy says, distracted her from what was right in front of her. It confused her. “Being in love with language, I easily mistook my own and that of others for something real; I easily fell in love with the words of another and confused that with love of the person.” That’s a powerful insight into what is real, what makes for a full and rich life; not words but relationship, not the abstract but the tangible, the human, the ordinary.
Perhaps it was moving twelve times in her childhood and even more as an adult that makes sitting still in the woods so nourishing, so sacred. I have not moved that often but I have been equally consumed by busyness, by uncertainty. I will miss spending time each day with Kate Maloy. She made me sit down. She offered me pieces of her own life is such a direct and reflective way that it evoked my own direct and reflective thought. Writing this book, she says, has formed and informed her faith again and again. Reading this book has done the same for me.
Pamela Johnson lives at Still Point Farm in Winona, Minnesota where in the summer she and her husband raise 53 varieties of cut flowers. In the winter they read and write about water, and soil, and faith, and life being enough.
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