Sawbill: A Search for Place
by Jennifer Case

University of New Mexico Press, 2018

Reviewed by JENNA GERSIE

There is a memory that Jennifer Case clings to: stopping in a parking lot, walking with her father toward a dense forest, and looking to a place where a lodge once stood and where decomposing cabins blend with the trees. Sawbill: A Search for Place is Case’s exploration of that memory, of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area in northern Minnesota, and of Sawbill Lodge, where her father spent a few years of his childhood. Driven by deeply happy memories of family camping and backpacking trips, Case explores her family’s history in that place and that place’s claim on her.

Through her search for information about place, family, and history, Case shares with her readers the loneliness associated with being away from family and places you have loved, and the power of the connections to those people and places. Living in Nebraska and then in New York, and with family in various other places, Case’s longing is for Minnesota’s North Shore, of which she writes, “The land was the most beautiful I’d seen: red rocks, overlooks where Lake Superior, the largest of the Great Lakes, appeared like a glimmer on the horizon, past the rolling landscape of deep, green trees” (4). Though her grandparents only lived at Sawbill Lodge for four years, when Case’s father was a boy, Case’s memory of seeing the remains of the lodge and the way her father looked at those remains gives her a sense of belonging, and an urge to always return.

Throughout the book, Case draws from memories of place, research on Sawbill and its various owners, her narrative of creating home and family far away from Minnesota, and stories of several trips to the Boundary Waters. In an apartment in New York, she hangs a map of Sawbill Lake and its surrounding area on the wall, spreads photographs on her office floor, reads and re-reads an email from her grandmother with memories of Sawbill Lodge. “When I think of Sawbill,” Case writes, “it is an air bubble in my throat. It is a family heirloom that we have lost from neglect or thievery, but something I want to reclaim” (119). Her family’s ownership of the lodge was short relative to its history, but the place itself is one that Case associates with home. She must grapple, then, with homesickness, where home is both landscape and family, but these aren’t found in the same place. She writes: “There’s an emptiness to my longing that I don’t associate with me but with something larger. When we uproot ourselves, our memories are suddenly isolated. We carry them with us still, but they are not mirrored in the land we see around us: the kinds of clouds in the sky, the trees, and the dirt” (61). Authors have often written about place while living elsewhere. Case, writing from upstate New York, brings the Boundary Waters to life as she communicates her longing to be in place, to feel settled.

Case’s infatuation with Sawbill brings her back, where she visits the relocated lodge and its owners, and tries to find the foundation she remembers her father pointing out to her. The parking lot is different than she remembers it, and she doesn’t find the foundation of the lodge as she hopes to. Regardless, she knows that the memory of staring into that forest is a part of her:

“. . . I see myself in the trees and the roads, the mist on the shore, the lake water lapping against purple and red boulders, blackened with cold. I love who I am here, in my sandals and cap, my gray fleece that has somehow picked up an orange stain on the sleeve, my blue socks that are bleached on the soles. I am cool air and quilts. The smell of pine needles dampened by rain and by mist. I am the daughter who remembers stopping in a parking lot with her father—a man in a brown ranger’s hat, a hand shading his eyes. A man who willingly traded his work suits for leather hiking sandals, zip-off hiking pants, and old T-shirts. A man who stared into the darkness, into the fire pit, into the sky and the lake and the fog and was happy there.

And perhaps that is the crux of it—the reason I cling to these memories now that my family has left, trading family camping trips for long-distance phone calls. Here, in this landscape, I am my father’s daughter—most fully and in the only way I know how to be.” (204-205)

Case’s story, while specific to her own family’s history and migrations, is one that anyone who has ever loved and left a place can connect to, one that anyone who has ever searched for or made a home can understand.