The other day, on a tip from another book, I picked up The Fields by Conrad Richter. I wanted to read Richter’s depiction of frontier life — not the frontier of buttes and canyons and wagon trains, but the “new lands” of what was then Ohio territory, a closer and older frontier.

I’m only about halfway through the book, but I already have a feel for the place that was long-ago Ohio. It was dark, smokey and unrelievedly claustrophobic. The thick woods that blanketed much of the eastern United States must have seemed impossible to tame. I try to imagine a life without clearings and openness, the sky a distant square of light. It is gloomy, all right. But the people who live there are what make it bearable. To each other and to the reader. They are funny and wise and strong beyond imagining.

There are three books in this series: The Trees, The Fields and The Town (which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1951). I hope to read them all.