In the Wild Light

“As we came to know each other, I began to see something in Delaney that I’d never seen in another person. I can’t name the thing. Maybe it has no name, the way fire has no shape.”

Cash’s relationship, defined at his delicate adolescent threshold age, is beyond his understanding at this point. At age 17, he is unsure where the line between friend and girlfriend, between like and love, should be drawn, and he navigates these boundaries awkwardly before finally hitting his stride. As he comes into his own as a master of words, he is ironically often frustrated by the failure of language to adequately articulate life’s more complex moments.

“I’ve spent much of my life feeling unsafe, unsteady, and insecure. Sitting on Papaw’s porch with him was always my fortress against the world.”

Cash’s journey out of Sawyer is as much physical as it is emotional and ultimately psychological. Since the trauma of finding his mother dead in the bathroom of their trailer, Cash has sought in his grandfather’s home a safe and secure place. The prospect of losing that protected space is a key hurdle that he must overcome in order to truly embrace the necessary changes and path to maturity that he will undergo during his time at Middleford.

“I spent two hours in a tomb with my mama.”

This moment shatters Cash’s childhood and sends him reeling into a dark place. For this endless span of time, he feels frozen, unable to call 911 because of his mother’s involvement with illegal drugs. He is trapped with the dead weight—both literal and philosophical—of his mother. This moment marks the burial of Cash’s childhood, and from here, the novel charts his long and difficult movement toward resurrection with the help of Delaney, Papaw, Dr. Atkins, and the transformative power of poetry.

“When you grow up with ugliness and corruption, you surrender to beauty whenever and wherever you find it. You let it save you, if only for the time it takes a snowflake to melt on your tongue.”

Long before he meets Dr. Atkins, Cash reveals the soul of a poet despite his assumption that poetry is not a viable interest. This observation marks his innate use of imagery to articulate life’s most ineffable concepts, displaying an appreciation for the power inherent in objects both ordinary and beautiful, as Dr. Atkins will show him much later. A poet is thus a person upon whom nothing is lost.

“You never regret a decision more than the one you make out of fear.”

With this admonition, Cash’s aunt, whose son was lost in a terrible mishap, cautions her nephew not to see life’s harrowing tragedies as a reason to avoid living fully. At this point in the story, Cash struggles with his decision about leaving Sawyer and as his best reason to stay, he offers only his fear that his grandfather will die while he is gone. Go forward, his aunt tells him, always go forward.

“I’ve seen that life is filled with unimaginable horror. But it’s also threaded through with unimaginable wonder. Live through enough of the one, maybe you’re due some of the other.”

Poetry will provide Cash with the opportunity to put into words his complicated vision of the world. His mother’s death, his father abandonment, his feelings of isolation from his friends at school, his grandfather’s health problems: each crisis is balanced with the beauty of Tennessee, the easy conversations with his Papaw, and of course, his friendship with Delaney.

“So stop acting like you shouldn’t be here.”

With this comment, Delaney cuts to the core of Cash’s emotional crisis: his low self-esteem. He is the victim of a mother who chose drugs over him and a father who left before he ever bothered to get to know Cash. Delaney needs her friend to have confidence in himself and to allow Middleford the chance to shape his future. Stop, she says, with the whining. It is time to grow up.

“Ep thar.”

Tripp’s shocking show of insensitivity as he mocks Papaw’s Southern drawl (specifically his way of saying “up there”) after Cash hangs up on their Zoom call reveals the prejudices of the privileged world that Cash must now navigate. In his casual cruelty, Tripp nonetheless provides Cash with hard lessons in how ignorant people can be, and this creates an important balance with the positivity of his budding friendships with Vi and Alex.

“A large orange-white fish—some sort of decorative carp, I’m guessing—has swum into the shallows, where it sits nearly motionless, lazily sculling to stay in place. It seems to luminesce in the silver moonlight.”

Cash takes the first of what will be many meandering walks with Vi. Here along the campus’s lake, Cash, ever the budding poet, notices this striking image: a singular fish sitting motionless in the shallows. That the fish could symbolize Cash’s own dilemma in the new school reveals Cash’s intuitive sense of how a poet interacts with a world waiting to reveal itself.

“Memory is a tether. Sometimes you get some slack ibn the line and you can play it out for a while. You forget and think you’re free. But you’ll always get to the end and realize it’s still there, binding you.”

Connecticut cannot be for Cash yet another dodge, another escape like his grandfather’s front porch or the banks of the Pigeon River. Just when he begins to feel as if he belongs in Middleford, he recalls his past, his dysfunctional family, his mediocre academic performance, his lack of direction and purpose. He is still trying not to be Cash. He has much to learn.

“But I learn quickly, as do my teammates, and we fall into a rhythm.”

Cash’s experience with the crew team reveals an important lesson not lost on him as he tries to fit in to life at Middleford: that everything works better with a team. Out on the river, pulling together in a quiet but sturdy rhythm, the crew shows Cash the importance of working with others and accepting the help and support of friends.

“Pay attention. Patch a few words together. Don’t try to make them elaborate.”

Dr. Atkins tries here to deflate Cash’s grandiose sense of what a poet does. Drawing on the poetry of Mary Oliver, Dr. Atkins assures Cash that authentic poetry starts with honesty and courage, not language skills or clever rhythms and rhymes. She urges him to react, reflect, and record.

“That small contact feels like the thrill of crossing an empty highway at night and pausing in the middle—something forbidden and delicious.”

Cash’s relationship with Vi alerts him to a range of feelings that are new and exciting. Delaney has been his friend since his mother’s death, but Vi—with her name that Portuguese for “life”—represents something different. This moment of casual contact electrifies Cash. He will sort through this attraction before he realizes this is not love.

“I ain’t really got the words for it. But when it was done, I’d feel pretty darn satisfied.”

Papaw is Cash’s mentor and his spiritual guide to the mysteries of life. Here Papaw, a veteran wood carver, tries to put into words for Cash exactly how he feels whenever he completes a carving. It is as difficult for him to explain that process and that feeling as it is for Cash to explain why keeping his poetry notebook makes him feel secure, empowered, and deeply satisfied.

“How do geese know where they’re going when they fly south?”

They don’t. That’s the point. As he makes his way into adulthood, Cash struggles to come to terms with one basic reality: that life is a precarious journey full of decisions made for all the right reasons that bring a person to places they never thought they would be, despite all their best efforts at planning otherwise. Embracing that precariousness is the lesson he comes to accept.

“I pull off my shirt and press it to my face in the dark, searching like a sailor, nose to the wind, for some hint of as green shore ahead.”

Here Cash indulges in a moment when he smothers himself with his shirt because it is redolent of Vi’s perfume, engaging in immature behavior typical of the classic teenage crush, an exercise in the exploration of physical attraction and the implosion of carnal fantasies. It is Delaney he loves, while Vi is only a momentary desire.

“As cures for pain go, poetry is better than most.”

Initially Cash sees his poetry notebook as a method of escape. He parallels it to his grandfather’s porch, the inlets and caves of the Pigeon River, the drugs that destroy his mother, and even his father’s hasty retreat to the oil fields of Louisiana when his family got too complicated. However, despite this cynical view, Cash will come to see that poetry is not an artful dodge but is instead a complex engagement with—even a celebration of—the tragedies and joys of a life well-lived.

“While I sleep, he passes into the night of nights, drawing his final breath with no more ceremony than a leaf falling.”

Papaw’s death actually happens off stage—during the night as Cash sleeps fitfully. In the image of the falling leaf, Cash reveals his emergence as a poet. He sees in the natural world he loves a symbol for his grandfather’s death that provides him both insight and comfort.

“Papaw’s existence was quiet and small, and it was a life defined by the love he gave and got.”

In death, Papaw teaches Cash the most important lesson. Here Cash defines what, we assume, will emerge as his life’s credo. Unlike Delaney, who is poised at the edge of a career as a microbiologist and researcher, Cash would be content to live small but deep, finding emotional and spiritual satisfaction in the lives he touches and that touch his.

“Now that I think a lot on words, I realize how poorly they represent absence. We should have a language of loss that we keep in a black-velvet box and only get out when we most need it. Instead, we have Dead.”

Cash reels from the death of his grandfather. He fears he is alone now without his guardian, his mentor, and his friend. Although emerging as a poet, he is pitched into a crisis as words seem unable to capture this loneliness and trauma. He will come to see that putting that trauma into words is how language consoles.

“This is when I realize I’m not alone.”

When Cash rescues the student about to be sexually assaulted by Tripp and accepts the comfort of his friends during his subsequent hospitalization, he is finally convinced that he belongs at Middleford. As his friends surround his hospital bed, their words of support and praise convince him that their friendship—not grades or even victories with the crew team—define success for him now.

“There are secret fires you wall off because you fear what they’ll burn if you lose them. Because you choose caution over possibility. But at the first crack in the wall, you feel their warmth and decide you’ll gladly risk the burning.”

At last, Cash makes his peace with risk. In describing how carefully he has protected himself from his feelings for Delaney, he comes to terms with the reward of risk. Using his poetic gift for metaphor, he compares trying to resist his most urgent feelings to walling off a fire that, when finally released, provides comfort and warmth.

“This is when I tell her about my mama. About my broken life. Because this sacred and memoryless place seems a worthy location for unburdening.”

It takes a tremendous amount of courage for Cash to break down this final wall. His infatuation with Vi prevents him from sharing this darkest and most complicated secret about himself. There at the ocean’s edge, he finally shares with Vi the story of his mother, a process that becomes less about unburdening and more about sharing.