Jennifer Kabat's mesmerizing Nightshining: A Memoir in Four Foods could have been a few different books. It could have been a straightforward presentation of her research into the true story of General Electric, brothers Kurt and Bernie Vonnegut, scientist Vince Schaeffer, a weather machine, floods, and the intersection of scientific passion and Cold War secret weapons. It could have been a memoir about Kabat's memories of her late father and his passion for electrical co-ops, and her personal experiences with flooding in Margaretville, NY, where she lives with her husband David and volunteers for her local fire department. It could have been any number of books, and any would have been interesting on their own. But all of these worlds intersect, and fortunately for us, Jennifer Kabat's follow-up to Eighth Moon: A Memoir of Belonging and Rebellion is a dizzying narrative that follows thread after thread of seemingly disconnected themes, only for Kabat to discover their relationship and weave them together in a way few other writers could or would.
The book opens in the summer of 2020 atop Vrooman's Nose in Middleburgh, with the line "You and I are with Iris and her baby on a cliff edge in the Catskills." Kabat (and we) are there because she's been chasing the story of Vince Schaefer, a General Electric scientist who, in the early morning of June 24, 1942, tested a fog-making machine below the overlook, from the former location of a Mohawk village. "Within ten minutes, a spectacular fog forms, hiding the apple orchards, barns, houses, and everything else…" he wrote after the experiment. Roughly 50,000 of Schaefer's fog machines were manufactured and eventually used by the U.S. military to obscure troops during the Second World War. Throughout Nightshining, Kabat almost mischievously unveils regional histories behind sites and locations we are so accustomed to seeing that we hardly think about their past, Vrooman's Nose being but one of many. Schaefer's work at GE spins into the saga of brothers Bernard and Kurt Vonnegut, and Vince's work with Bernie on cloud-seeding experiments that, in 1950, led to a flood in the Catskills. "The storms spread across the Catskills and our town is destroyed," writes Kabat of the "Rainmakers Flood." It would sound even crazier if it weren't true.
Like her previous book, Eighth Moon, which explored the history of the regional Anti-Rent Wars, Nightshining is also a personal story that explores her upbringing. "Both of my books were really thinking about my parents' lives, and they're kind of nested stories." In Nightshining, Kabat's father's work and legacy come into focus. "For me, I love my parents really deeply, and they really worked to build a world that they thought would be a better place." Kabat's father, a manager of a rural electric co-op, worked tirelessly for little pay to keep hydropower from the St. Lawrence region in public hands. "And this is why people who are served by rural electric co-ops in upstate New York still have cheap energy: it's thanks to my dad." But this progress was not without its issues.
"They stole indigenous land, and there has been no recompense," says Kabat. The state also planned to give discounted power to big corporations like GM and Reynolds Aluminum, a plan her father opposed. "That poisoned the water directly going to the Akwesasne, so there are real harms," says Kabat. Reckoning with that legacy drives much of Kabat's narrative. "Everything that I have as a person. My entire inheritance, intellectually, living in the modernist house, all of these things, comes from the fact that my parents moved to DC, then my dad got a good job, and they had a house, and then I could have a wedding…All of these things about how wealth kind of passes down. It's not entirely innocent. He was also a person who believed he was doing the right thing." Allowing herself to live within the contradictions and complex legacies is part of what makes Nightshining such an inclusive experience for the reader; she does not pretend to have all the answers. "Asking the question of what debts we owe other people and what it means to live with those debts is not a bad thing. It doesn't make us weaker. It makes us more mindful of who we are and who we're in relationship with."
From the opening sentence ("You and I are with Iris…"), Kabat brings us along on her wild journey of discovery. That choice gives Nightshining a layer of suspense uncommon in history books or memoirs. We care enough to feel the thrill of discovery with her, and her confusion as she navigates the twists and turns. "The only way to tell this story was to sort of narrate its unfolding," explains Kabat. "For me, telling my process is how I tell how I know something or how I learned something. This is a quest story."
Jennifer Kabat will be reading from Eighth Moon and Nightshining, together for the first time, on October 6 as part of SUNY Oneonta's fall reading series starting at 7:00 pm in the Martin-Muller Art Gallery in the Fine Arts Building. On October 17, she'll be reading from Nightshining and "talking about the 1950 Rainmaker's Flood, Cold War dreams, Bernard Vonnegut, weather modification, and sharing the book's research, including the voices of community elders" as part of the Pine Hill Memorial Library's series "Drought and Flood" at 3:00 pm in the Morton Memorial Library, 22 Elm St, Pine Hill, NY. For more information, including how to order the books, visit www.jenniferkabat.com.
Kabat does have one last thing to say to our readers: "Tell the Mountain Eagle readers to volunteer for their local fire departments!"
Photo Credit: CJ Harvey
