The Appalachian Trail is America’s secular version of the Camino de Santiago but more than twice as long. In Amity Gaige’s Heartwood, Valerie Gillis is a 42-year-old nurse and experienced trail-walker who nonetheless vanishes one day in the northern stretch, in Maine, the wildest of the New England states.
Heading the search for her is Beverly Miller, a senior game warden, who stands out among her colleagues because she is 6ft, female and not a native Mainer. As the days go by, and despite the impressive number of volunteers looking for Gillis, the chances of finding her alive diminish. Miller, a veteran of similar searches, has to continue to motivate her teams, even as her own appraisal of the situation grows gloomy.
Miles to the south of the search, Lena Kucharski is a 76-year-old resident of a retirement community in Connecticut. A keen birdwatcher, she keeps her distance from her fellows, using her confinement in a wheelchair to dodge the unwanted attentions of a male suitor. She spends much of her day online, exchanging information and foraging reports with a young male naturalist who happens to have an intimate knowledge of the woods in the area where Gillis was last spotted. When this online friend starts spouting conspiracy theories about a Department of Defense training facility bordering the woods, Lena suppresses her initial scepticism and pursues a link to the missing woman that proves instrumental to the book’s resolution.
The three female narrators are each deftly drawn and the mechanics of the search operations are particularly absorbing. The sheer number of volunteers helping is extraordinary – but, as Miller remarks: ‘Like the Amish raise their barns, Mainers search for each other in the woods.’
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