Lucy Bryan’s recent memoir In Between Places explores how nature allows us to linger in the uncertainty of life, even to feel comfortable doing so. In twelve chronological essays, as well as a lengthy land acknowledgement, Bryan uses the lens of nature to wrestle with the grief of death, divorce, and ecological decay. Even while acknowledging an uncertain ecological future, she contemplates and delights in the beauty and spiritual wonder of nature.

Bryan begins with the death of her first marriage in her midtwenties and concludes with the birth of her first child over a decade later. In between these two points lie many other key experiences. An environmental service trip with her college students to a Florida nature conservancy. Hunting for a lost cat on her in-laws’ Idaho homestead. A hiking trip with her younger brother, both siblings adrift after the death of their father and their respective moves from their hometown. Within these moments of reflection and growth, Bryan strengthens connections with her family, grapples with matters of faith and values, and discovers the beauty in the natural world. 

In “On Naming Women and Mountains,” for example, readers will follow Bryan as she attempts to reconcile the power of naming places and people. She writes about Lafayette Houghton Bunnell and other white explorers laying claim to various geological features in the Yosemite Valley by naming them and her own feelings about renaming herself following both her divorce and her second marriage. (Cheryl Strayed gets an honorable mention in the essay.) In reflecting on this conflict, Bryan writes, “To put your name on something, whether a woman or a mountain, signifies ownership and proclaims dominion.”

Of note, Bryan dedicates extensive time to acknowledging indigenous cultures’ long history in the various lands she writes about and inhabits during her research. Among other tribes, she recognizes the Ho-Chunk, Muscogee, Tacatacuru, Shawandasse Tula, Goshute, Susquehannock, and Ojibwe. She honors the various tribes’ roles as stewards of our natural resources, but also compels us to remember that indigenous cultures are not a monolith, nor an artifact of the past, but contemporary entities that we should learn from and work with. Nature is akin to a palimpsest, with each subsequent visitor’s life being written upon the land and the lives of those who came before. It would be irresponsible to compose a nature essay collection set in colonized land without recognizing this dark, un-erasable aspect of US history, and Bryan does so with great attention and care. 

In her essay “Trail Time,” Bryan writes about the experience of backpacking through the Sierra Nevadas with her second husband, Nate, who is a new yet willing participant in this kind of adventure. She longs to cultivate a positive experience for him, something she struggled to do with her first husband. Here and elsewhere, she offers profound insight on the importance of natural spaces in her life, as well as her growth as a person: “It’s impossible to fully grasp time on such a scale, to understand the unfolding of ages. We are that orange speck of a tent on the isthmus. No, we are drops of water in the lake – two provenances united, infinitesimally small but also a part of this place where destruction and creation, violence and stillness, rising and falling are one and the same. Together, we wade into this mystery. We plunge into the unfathomable deep.”

Bryan doesn’t idealize her relationship with nature, however. She is open about her frustrations, how she has been “the needy wife who expects her husband to solve the problem of her discomfort.” I found myself comforted with the reminder that I too can exist in nature as my authentic self, rather than attempting to embody the artificial, precisely crafted personas of the traditional nature-lovers, the Thoreaus and Emersons. Instead, we can be Lucy, simply ourselves.     

This book seeks to question life in nature, to make us okay with uncertainty, grey areas, and discomfort. What does it mean to be a wife, a woman, a writer, a mother? A deeply flawed yet passionate human? A lover of nature and yet someone who contributes in ways large and small to its destruction? Readers won’t find easy answers to these questions, but they will find a warm, honest exploration of how nature—even with its eternal cycle of change, loss, and growth— carries the stories of its people.