Maine emerges as ‘Unexpected’ setting

A forest – or rather 1,000 seedling trees – is inadvertently left outside of a suburban Connecticut home. This multitude of seedlings just happens to arrive at the time when the home’s owner, Horace Woodruff, an attorney at a local hospital, has been laid off. One door closes; another opens.

Like a magical puzzle box, doors close and open as misery begets opportunity and opportunity expands into awareness in “An Unexpected Forest,” a first novel by Peaks Island resident Eleanor Lincoln Morse. Like many a novel connected to this state, awareness eventually becomes synonymous with Maine.

The book opens with the firing. Horace, “pigeon-toed, overweight, nearsighted, inclined toward indigestion,” is also a somewhat unconscious man. He has gone to his office daily, but doesn’t seem to have given his heart to anything – well, we’ve been told he’s in love with his wife, Beverly, but it has become more comfort and acceptance, we find, than great passion. And he and Beverly have no children. Years earlier, they had almost adopted a child, but Horace balked, and life went on.

Beverly is a painter, sufficiently successful that she can paint without the angst most artists feel about their work. Her longings instead tend toward the child that never was born and the adoptee that found another home.

Horace is more inscrutable. Just before he is fired, he runs into a cancer patient who escapes from her ward to the administrative wing of the hospital. It is, he realizes, one last effort to prove she was alive. As Horace helps her back to the cancer wing, she tells him, “I’m not afraid. It’s like being in a new country. Do you understand?”

Moments later, the fearful, armored Horace is fired, and thus set loose into his own new country, which takes the shape of this family of a thousand newborn trees. While Horace researches the habitat and needs of these orphan black spruce trees, Beverly is asked to take over for an artist who has been teaching in the local prison.

As the bumbling Horace finds homes for his trees in Maine’s swampy North Woods, Beverly takes on her own orphans – the inmates in the local jail. Both experiences prove to be transforming. The natural world forces Horace to confront his nameless fears – and quite a few named ones, such as bears and black flies.

In the prison, Beverly, too, confronts fears, and thereby meets the man who will provide a grandchild for this childless couple.

Morse is a vivid writer. She is especially strong when writing about Maine, whether it is the unworldly appeal of the bogs and lakes of northern Maine, undercut by mud so deep it seeps into the top of boots and flies so thick they are breathed into mouth and eyes, or the tidal power of Maine’s coastal waters, surprising even the strongest of men.

The only quarrel I have with this lovely book, pairing the childless older couple with a rootless younger duo, is that for change to be fully understood, the reader needs a strong understanding of history. We know the history of the younger pair: Oz and Lucy; of Howard and Beverly, we see mostly a life of such complacent comfort that it’s hard not to wonder where the need that suddenly surfaces within each of them had been previously residing.

The real gift of “An Unexpected Forest” is the way Morse subtly weaves an increasingly greater awareness of nature into the lives of these suburbanites, until – not totally unexpectedly – the forest, and the ocean that surrounds it, becomes an inseparable part of their lives.

Donna Gold, director of public relations at College of the Atlantic, is also a writer and oral historian who helps families and communities record their stories.