What could have happened to Valerie?

Because I have been lost in thick woods (at night!) and because I have hiked some of the Appalachian Trail, I came to Amity Gaige's novel Heartwood with more than a passing interest. Basically, it's the story of a middle-aged, married nurse, Valerie Gillis, who leaves the AT in Maine briefly to pee and becomes lost. When she doesn't meet her husband at the next check point, the Maine Warden Service (a real organization) mobilizes to find her.

If it were only the report of how the Maine Warden Service mobilizes to find a lost hiker, hunter, or child it might make an interesting article. Because Gaige has published four novels, Heartwood is interesting and engaging and holds the reader's attention for the length of a book.

We read the notes that Valerie writes to her mother when she is lost. We follow the activities of game warden Lt. Beverly Miller who directs the search for Valerie. We read the Bronx interview with "Santo," a large Black man who hiked with Valerie. We see Valerie's husband George who has been acting as her support, driving north, paralleling the AT. We meet Lena Kucharski, an elderly woman with a computer living in a Connecticut assisted living facility; Lena has an online friend, /u/TerribleSilence, who tells her about the missing woman. We read the useless or misleading calls and emails that come in to the tip line the Warden Service has set up. 

And running through the entire novel is the knowledge that often, if a missing person does not turn up within the first 48 hours of being reported, the odds of being found alive decline from possibly to probably to certainly dead. Depending on the individual's condition, one can survive about three days without water, a couple weeks without food. The Maine woods are full of water but Valerie has no idea what of the vegetation will feed her and what will kill her.

Indeed, aside from leaving the trail to find some privacy, Valarie has made a number of decision that made a bad situation worse. She gave her husband her geo-location device because the AT is so well marked and she wanted to save weight. She has matches but does not know how to build a fire. She doesn't know how to travel in a straight direction in un-blazed woods. When she realizes she's lost, she continues to move.

(Safety tip: Always tell someone where you are hiking and if you become lost, stop. Save your strength, water, food, matches. Panic makes you stupid.)

Because no one element is very long—some are only a page or two—the reader has no opportunity to become bored and part of Heartwood's pleasure is watching Gaige fit the pieces together. You don't have to have hiked the AT to enjoy the novel.