Secret Wisdom of the Earth (Scotton)

The Secret Wisdom of the Earth
Christopher Scotton, 2015
Grand Central
480 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781455551927


Summary
After witnessing the death of his younger brother in a terrible home accident, 14-year-old Kevin and his grieving mother are sent for the summer to live with Kevin's grandfather. In this peeled-paint coal town deep in Appalachia, Kevin quickly falls in with a half-wild hollow kid named Buzzy Fink who schools him in the mysteries and magnificence of the woods. The events of this fateful summer will affect the entire town of Medgar, Kentucky.

Medgar is beset by a massive Mountaintop Removal operation that is blowing up the hills and back filling the hollows. Kevin's grandfather and others in town attempt to rally the citizens against the 'company' and its powerful owner to stop the plunder of their mountain heritage. When Buzzy witnesses the brutal murder of the opposition leader, a sequence is set in play which tests Buzzy and Kevin to their absolute limits in an epic struggle for survival in the Kentucky mountains.

Redemptive and emotionally resonant, The Secret Wisdom of the Earth is narrated by an adult Kevin looking back on the summer when he sloughed the coverings of a boy and took his first faltering steps as a man among a rich cast of characters and an ambitious effort to reclaim a once great community. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1961
• Rasied—Maryland surburb of Washington, D.C., USA
• Education—B.A., McDaniel College
• Currently—lives in Annapolis, Maryland


In his words
I grew up about 30 miles outside of Washington, D.C. in what was then undeveloped country. It was a place of cornfields and tree houses, dammed-up creeks and secret swimming holes. In the summers, my brothers and I would dash out around 8:00 am for wherever and return just in time for dinner in the evening. It was a magical place to be a kid and I wanted to recapture that wonder of discovery as fourteen year-old Kevin explores his new surroundings in my debut novel The Secret Wisdom of the Earth.

When I was about Kevin’s age, developers bought up most of the land and the idyllic bounds of my childhood became one big construction site—creeks were backfilled and swimming holes ran to mud. All of us neighborhood hellions felt a great sense of loss at the destruction of our woods—one we couldn’t quite understand or articulate, but it hung over us that summer like a fogged-in field.

By the time I went off to college, the countryside of my youth was solidly suburban. It was in college that I first fell in love with Appalachia. Initially for her music—the spinning lilt of a fiddle reel; the compact fury of a mandolin run; the plaintive harmonies—then, for her beauty, as I came to know the region in my twenties with little but a backpack and a camp stove.

About that time, I met a good friend’s mother for the first time—she was an incredibly beautiful woman who seemed to carry with her a deep-set sadness. I asked my friend about it and he told me the story of how his three-year-old brother died in the most horrific accident at home you could possible imagine. I carried the story of this child’s death with me for many years and knew that I had to write a novel about its effect on a family. I also knew that Appalachia, a region I’d come to loved so well, would be a perfect setting for this nascent coming-of-age novel.

But as the years unspooled—I graduated from college, began a career, moved to London, got married, had kids—I discovered innumerable reasons not to write. In fact, I perfected the art of excuse-making. On and on, month after month, year-to-year.

And as I stared down forty, I realized that this great bright dream of being a novelist was in danger of becoming my single biggest regret. I began writing The Secret Wisdom of the Earth the very next day, with the awful death of my friend’s young brother as the tragedy that sets the story in motion.

It was slow-going, to be sure—I’d rise at 5:00 a.m. each morning, write in the quiet hours before work, then revise and edit in the evenings after putting my boys to bed. But it was in this routine of early rising and evening editing that the main characters, Kevin, Buzzy, Pops, Tilroy and Paul, began to take shape.

I completed about half of the novel in London—fleshing out those characters, their relationships and the loss each of them suffers—but something was clearly missing from the story. The various plot paths I needed to tie everything together turned out to be nub ends. I moved back to the States and immediately went down to eastern Kentucky in hopes of breaking this narrative logjam. It was on this trip that I saw my first Mountaintop Removal operation.

The horrific gray scar of that mine brought back the sense of sickening loss I’d had at fourteen when the pristine woods I’d grown up in were cut down, hauled away and replaced with tract housing. I knew then, looking out over this massive, denuded landscape in Kentucky, that the eradication of these proud ancient mountains was a fitting allegory for a loss that all of the main characters suffer. Once I connected these themes, the rest of the story began to bubble forth.

My trips to Kentucky, talking with folks and listening to their stories, showed me that the apologue of Mountaintop Removal is a complicated one—one that can’t be reduced to simply good vs. evil or rich vs. poor. I tried to portray this hard-bought paradox and lay it alongside Kevin’s story in a compelling way. (From the author's website.)

Book Reviews
Scotton’s accomplished debut is the story of Kevin Gillooly, a 14-year-old boy who moves to coal country and learns about courage and violence, beauty and danger, from his wise, weathered grandfather and a best friend well versed in backwoods survival.... Neither the first portrait of mining country nor the most original, Scotton’s novel nonetheless makes for compelling reading.
Publishers Weekly


(Starred review.) Debut author Scotton sets a captivating modern morality tale in Kentucky's coal country, 1985.With the small-town aura of To Kill a Mockingbird, a man reflects on the summer he learned that tradition, greed, class, race and sexual orientation can make for murder.... A powerful epic of people and place, loss and love, reconciliation and redemption.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. How did your view of what happened to Joshua (and, subsequently, what happened to Kevin and the rest of his family) change as it was gradually revealed exactly how he died and how his death affected each member of the family?

2. Kevin is withdrawn, angry and wracked with guilt when he arrives in Medgar. How does Pops make Kevin feel comfortable in his home away from home? How does Pops’ influence in particular change Kevin as a person?

3. Describe Buzzy’s relationship with Cleo. How did each brother view the other? What were the different ways that each of them were tested, and how did they each end up ultimately?

4. Pops works with animals and grew up on the land he continued to live on, while Buzzy knows all about the forest and the ways its inhabitants can help humans. How are their relationships with nature different from Kevin’s? How is Kevin’s understanding of land and nature changed by the end?

5. Is it possible for Joshua’s accident to have been Kevin’s fault, even partially? How would you feel in Kevin’s place? In his parents’ place?

6. How did Kevin’s grandmother Sarah affect Medgar? Pops? Kevin?

7. Why was Paul’s reveal of his homosexuality—a fact that almost everyone knew—such a shock at the town meeting?

8. Pops describes the Budget family as "different." What role do they play in the community of Medgar? How does Tilroy fit in with his family at the beginning of the novel, and how does his death change the family in the end?

9. How do class and financial status shape the different inhabitants of Medgar? Discuss the meaning of quotes such as the following one from Pops about Buzzy’s family: "The Finks are poor, but they’re proud poor. Esmer runs the Hollow hard. Kids stay in school, they truck their garbage out once a week. These are solid people."

10. Compare the attitude toward Paul and Paitsel at the meeting the night before Paul’s beating ("We can’t be havin this kinda sick, Satan devil cancer in our town") and the conversations Kevin heard from all different townspeople regarding Paul days later ("Uncommon generous. No better man in town, I say"). How do those two different perspectives get pulled back and forth, both in the town and in Kevin’s mind?

11. Pops physically punished Bubba Boyd for speaking ill of Sarah: "The fury that exploded and the speed with which it arrived frightened m—it was as if a raging magma, held down for so long by rearing and position ruptured its vessel and spewed forth in an overpowering surge." How does this capacity to become enraged fit with the rest of Pops’ character?

12. Describe the turmoil that Buzzy suffered between when he witnessed the attack on Paul and when he finally confessed to Kevin. What would you have done in his place?

13. When Buzzy got an A in school, his father’s reaction was surprising to Kevin: "Buzzy the Brain, gonna live above his rearin." Why would a parent react like that? What did that statement make Kevin realize about the truth of living in the hollow?

14. "It’s like you own the universe." Why did Tilroy attack Paul?

15. Pops tells the boys about the magic and power he felt after climbing Red Cloud, a feeling he compares to theirs upon climbing Old Blue on their tramp, and Kevin feels he understands the new knowledge: "Yesterday was the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life. The whole day was a test. I know I can do harder things, now." What other experiences in the story brought out similar reactions in Kevin and Buzzy? Do you think that the "magic" of Red Cloud or the white stag can really exist?

16. How did the difficult and daring rescue of Pops help Kevin (and Buzzy) complete his summer transformation from boy to man?

17. Kevin finds a moment of connection and empathy when he considers Tilroy’s body for a final time: "I stayed for just a moment more and thought about my own father; how I still wanted his approval, still craved his love, still drank up drops of attention. I considered the shell of Tilroy one last time and pondered the certainty of rearing; the inevitability of desire; and the turn life takes when the two are set hard against." How was he able to call up understanding for this troubled young man who violently killed a good man and shot Kevin’s own grandfather and friend? How would you have felt in Kevin’s place?

18. Considering what happened by the end of the summer to all the different characters—Kevin and his family, Buzzy and his, Tilroy and his, Paul and Paitsel—do you find everyone’s transformations (or lack of) satisfying? Why or why not?

19. Kevin and Buzzy have changed since they became fast friends the summer that Kevin moved to Medgar. Buzzy expresses his envy of Kevin and the life he always knew Kevin would have, even when they were young. What kept the boys so close together during their teenage years, and why have they grown up to have such dissimilar lives? Do you think either of them could have done anything to maintain their close relationship?

20. The lingering effects of violence are an important theme in the novel. How does the violence done to the mountains serve as an allegory for the violence perpetrated by and done to characters in the novel?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)

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