The Years of the Forest

This is the kind of gentle, soothing read needed these days. Writer Helen Hoover and her artist husband, Ade, moved to the far-remote Minnesota woods across a lake from Canada. This book covers over a decade of their time there in the 1950s and 1960s, where they dealt with severe poverty to start, making-do without a car and even getting scurvy due to malnutrition. They are there to live in harmony with nature, as much as they can; the mice in the cabin are named and fed, and the deer and groundhogs are regular companions. They resist electricity and indoor plumbing, but the ways of man encroach on them, with deer hunting season an especially dangerous time for the two of them and the deer they love.

This is an intimate portrait of a show more time and place and two people trying to find peace in a turbulent world. show less

I love Ms. Hoover because she appreciates animals the way I do. I envy her because she had the stamina to live in the north woods of Minnesota for years, rarely heading to even the tiny town near the cabin she and her husband shared. I can hardly put my computer down, but she spent hours watching and feeding the animals who lived near her.

Most impressively, she and her husband refused to take power or telephone hookups, because it would mean clearing trees, and though the land technically belonged to them, they knew it belonged to the animals who lived there.

I find her writing a bit rough - though the descriptions are lovely, sometimes I have a hard time keeping track of how much time has passed, and there are times when I have to show more re-read a paragraph to figure out what she means. It's always worth it, though, to picture the deer and squirrels and other animals who entertained Ms. Hoover and her husband for years. show less