Synopsis

In 1984, Melody Baumann’s future is set—a summer trip to Europe, UC-Davis in the fall. She hopes to become a veterinarian like her father. But while abroad, she falls in love with British artist Michael Henley, then receives news that shatters everything: her father is dead.

Back home, grief and years of tension with her alcoholic mother bring Melody to the breaking point. Clinging to a promise her father made long ago, she sets out for Washington State, seeking something she can’t yet name. Then, on a rural highway, far away from home, her car breaks down and fate intervenes.

Amid the rugged beauty of the Olympic Peninsula, Melody is forced to reckon with loss, longing, and an uncertain future. What begins as an escape becomes a journey that will bring about profound change and open the door to a life she never imagined.

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Excerpt

The day she would learn that her daughter had died, Melody Baumann sat on her back deck, a cup of coffee in hand to wake the blood and mind and trained her ears on a pocket of trees to the east. A soft breeze rose up from the sea, swept over the basalt cliffs at shore’s edge and across a gently sloping meadow below the house where thousands of Oxeye daisies waved in the first bands of sunlight. For days, she had been listening and waiting for a distinct birdsong to emerge from the woods.

That morning her long-awaited joy arrived.

She went to retrieve her journal from the kitchen; smiled to herself as she began to write—May 23, 2003—6:20 a.m. The first song of the Swainson’s thrush!

Melody had long been enchanted by birds, grateful that she lived in the wake of their annual migrations, a vast assortment of colors and shapes and wingbeats set against the temperate, salted air of the northern Washington coast. Identifying various species and interpreting their sounds was her gift. Any serious birder could attest that experience and patience were key to spotting the more reclusive species. Melody had come to realize that for every creature she could get eyes on, the voices of a dozen more called from the periphery. She had learned to bird by ear, to listen for specific tones and patterns. A chip-chip-chip for warning. A long melodic song for attracting a mate. She could discern between the drumming of the regional woodpeckers—the Hairy or the Downy or the Red-breasted sapsucker—the Hairy being the fastest with its dry, rapid rat-a-tat-tat. Melody treasured the orchestrations of all birds but especially, and most personally, the flute-like whistle of the Swainson’s thrush. Its song, performed by males, usually at dawn and in the evenings of late spring, carried a wistful and vaporous quality with notes swirling upward then fading away.

She kept journals and had been recording daily bird sightings and their sounds all of her adult life. Her notebooks included thousands of entries in which she had detailed the dates and weather patterns, often with speculations on behavior: a single bird’s motivations and idiosyncrasies; the way a flock worked together to find food or warn of predators. She never tired of observing them and was endlessly photographing, a skill she had taken up as a child. The walls of her home were covered with photographs: a Bald eagle flying over the water; Red-breasted nuthatches hanging from the willowy branches of the ocean spray that grew on the perimeters of her land; a Rufous hummingbird hovering, wings transparent. From her latest notebook, #11:

March 6. At 12:30, six or seven Evening grosbeaks showed up at one of the feeders. Most were males with their distinctive yellow mask. They devoured seed like they were starving, though I should know better, they are grosbeaks after all! I took some close-ups of a male staring at me with a seed hanging from its beak.

April 15. The swallows have returned! I heard their familiar “tsip-tsip” and noticed the first pair of violet-greens overhead around 11:00 a.m. Today was clear and I could see their long-pointed and iridescent wings flashing in the sky. Others soon followed. I am smiling!

May 13. Dozens of Pine siskins arrived with a flock of Goldfinches. They went berserk feeding on my thistle, a dozen or so at a time. I’ve also noticed the siskins hanging from the flowers in the madrone trees…

The fifteen acres on which Melody lived or, rather, had come to by chance, sat upon high cliffs lifted from lava flows of the Eocene along the Strait of Juan de Fuca, the ribbon of saltwater marking the international division between the U.S. and Canada and a major waterway of the great Salish Sea. Here, the cliffs projected from the water as walls of gray basalt and stood in fortress-like fashion some 100 feet high, revealing at lower tides a series of folds and clefts smoothed from eons of saltwater flows.

Melody had studied the nuances of her narrow window of coastline, its many moods, observing, for instance, how patterns of mist converged above the water to trick the mind with an endless employ of visual effects—the way a cargo ship seemed to glide over a cloud, or how a group of kayakers could morph into brightly colored arrows shooting across the sky. On days of heavy fog, there seemed to be no water or sky. So much of life revolved around weather patterns: If her marigolds failed to open before breakfast, rain was surely coming. How the swallows returned each year, always mid-morning on a sunny April day. She loved the transmutability of nature, often noting in her journal entries alongside her birds, the unique characteristics of the seasons—the audacity of a spring rain or the balm of a late summer evening. Wind especially fascinated her, particularly in the fall when gusts could rise unseen and turn wild, buckling against the house in the night and be stilled by morning.

About the Author

Ranae LaFerney grew up in the Pacific Northwest, where rugged mountains and rain-swept coastlines first sparked her imagination as a storyteller. A self-described late bloomer, she spent several years in corporate marketing before finding her true calling as a writer. Her fiction explores the complicated inner lives of ordinary people and the emotional depths beneath the surface. Readers drawn to richly developed characters and emotional honesty will feel right at home in her stories.

An enthusiastic birder by ear and lifelong naturalist, Ranae can often be found hiking wooded trails, fly fishing a local stream, or tending vegetables in her garden. She lives with her husband on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State.

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