Grads

Margret Richard’s (MALS’85) latest book, Power And Tender, was published by Outskirts Press in 2011. She wrote it as Margret Russell, which is her given name.

It is a fascinating work of historical fiction, and I highly recommend it to anyone who enjoys learning details about another time and place while having a really good reading experience with characters it is easy to care for deeply. The story is set on Virginia’s eastern shore in the first half of the 20th century. Ben Alton is the main character. With his wife and twin daughters he lives and works on his father’s farm. The farm is an easy boat ride from Chesapeake Bay; and waterways, watermen and boats form important elements of the story.

Margret’s incredible descriptions of the farm, marsh, creek and vegetation, animals, waterfowl, fish and shellfish that live there give the book a distinct and very strong sense of place. Concern about the weather is always present. There is constant awareness of barom- eter readings, phases of the moon, tides, winds, rain, drought and tropical storms moving up the coast. Margret explores all sides of this life on the Eastern Shore, where people are so insular that anyone from across the bay is considered a “foreigner.”

There are several tensions between Ben and his father Arthur. The first is Ben’s love for the water and his boyhood dream to become a U.S. coastal pilot. Ben is an only child, and someday the farm will belong to him. Arthur has accepted the harsh and unrelenting demands of farming but needs more help as he ages and expects Ben to spend less time tinkering with boats and hunt- ing in the marsh. Ben’s hopes to be a pilot are crushed when he makes a perfect score on the written exam for a federal appointment but fails his physical. This is because of a bad leg caused by a “big fever” when he was a child.

As Ben resigns himself to life as a farmer, another point of contention with Arthur is Ben’s desire to try different farming methods and make changes to help the farm be more productive. Ben is very skilled with anything mechanical. When he needs something, he tries to make it. He also realizes that farming no longer provides a comfortable living. Arthur is driven to take out a mortgage from a neighbor whose experience has taught him that all he needs to do is wait for the inevitable default, and the land will be his. The mortgage hangs over the Altons for many more years than Arthur anticipated. One of Ben’s early ideas for improvement is a failure when he convinces Arthur to install tiles for drainage when they keep losing crops from too much rain. This is followed by the drought and depression of the 1930s.

A more successful project was to expand their usable farmland by cutting and selling some of their timber. Ben then uses the timber money to buy a boat that he uses for another source of income by setting up a business to provide fish- ing parties for paying customers. He finally was able to add to their income by doing something he enjoyed.

Margret herself grew up on the Eastern Shore on her grandparent’s farm. Or, as she describes it, “with one leg in Chesapeake Bay.” She became a surgical nurse and settled in New England. Her MALS program thesis, “Change in the Weather,” is about changing her lifework from nursing to writing. Margret is a tireless researcher and, combined with her writing skills, this results in a remarkable book.

175 Greensboro Road, Hanover, NH 03755; (603) 643-3789; m.jane.welsh.gr@ dartmouth.edu