Sometimes I finish a book, go right back to the beginning and start reading it again. This doesn’t happen often, but it happened with Driftless by David Rhodes. The book was recommended by an old friend, so it’s a word-of-mouth read, the best kind. It didn’t disappoint. Driftless tells the interlinked stories of the residents of Words, Wisconsin. One day Pastor Winifred Smith has a spiritual encounter with the Divine. Here’s how she tries to explain it to another character, a pivotal one, July Montgomery:
“Words are meaningless,” she said. “The truth dies before it fits into them. Language lacks the capacity to hold anything real. It serves an utterly different master. What’s really real is a home words can’t get into or out of.”
Reading the book for the second time, I realize how significant these lines are, because they apply not just to words themselves but to the town of Words, a “tiny town, which sits at the dead end of a steep valley.”
One of the things I like about the book is that it isn’t afraid to tackle the big topics — a belief in the beyond, why we live where we live, how impossibly lovely it is when one soul touches another. Many modern books shy away from these topics, take a much narrower slice of the pie. Rhodes cuts off a great big hunk of it. But he does it through Words, a place few people go. “State maps no longer include Words, and though Q [county trunk road and the only way into the town] is often pictured, the curving black line simply ends like a snipped-off black thread in a spot of empty white space. Even in [the nearby town of] Grange, most people don’t know where Words is.” Read this book, though, and Words will always be with you.
