Do we belong to the Earth or does the Earth belong to us? The question
raised by Chief Seathl almost two centuries ago continues to be the
defining quandary of the wet, wild rainforests along the shores of the
Pacific Northwest. It seethes below the tides of the fictional town of
Good River Harbor, a little village pressed against the
mountains--homeland to bears, whales, and a few weather-worn families.
In Piano Tide, the debut novel by award-winning naturalist,
philosopher, activist and author Kathleen Dean Moore, we are introduced
to town father Axel Hagerman, who has made a killing in this remote
Alaskan harbor by selling off the spruce, the cedar, the herring and
halibut. But when he decides to export the water from a salmon stream,
he runs head-long into young Nora Montgomery, just arrived on the ferry
with her piano and her dog. Nora has burned her bridges in the lower 48,
and she aims to disappear into this new homeland, with her piano as her
anchor. But when Axel's next business proposition, a bear pit, turns
lethal, Nora has to act. The clash, when it comes, is a spectacular and
transformative act of resistance.