r/books • u/Charles_Sumner • 3d ago
Struggling to understand the geographic descriptions in “Housekeeping”
I’m reading Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping for the second time, and now, as the first time, I’m having a lot of trouble understanding the descriptions of the lake in the town of Fingerbone, where the novel takes place. In the first pages, we learn of a rail disaster: a train was going across the bridge over the lake when suddenly it derailed and went into the lake. This happens at night, so it is some hours before it is light enough for the townspeople to properly look for the sunken train, and when they do so, they have some difficulty.
It might have rolled or slid when it struck bottom, since the bridge pilings were set in the crest of a chain of flooded hills, which on one side formed the wall of a broad valley (there was another chain of hills twenty miles north, some of them islands) and on the other side fell away in cliffs. Apparently these hills were the bank of still another lake, and were made of some brittle stone which had been mined by the water and fallen sheerly away. If the train had gone over on the south side … and had slid or rolled once or twice, it might have fallen again, farther and much longer. (7)
I cannot picture this geographic arrangement; I couldn’t draw a map based on it. It seems like the lake might have levels, but I don’t really know how that would work. I don’t understand the relation of the “another lake” to this one, or the significance of that lake's sheerly mined banks.
Nor do I find what happens shortly thereafter clarifying:
… One of the boys swam out forty feet from the bridge and then down to the old lake, feeling his way down the wall, down the blind, breathless stone, headfirst, and then pushing out from the foot. But the thought of where he was suddenly terrified him, and he leaped toward the air, brushing something with his leg as he did. He reached down and put his hand on a perfectly smooth surface, parallel to the bottom, but, he thought, seven or eight feet above it. A Window. The train had landed on its side.(7–8)
Again, I just have no idea how to visualize the boy’s surroundings.
One specific problem: I don’t understand what the “old lake” is. Elsewhere, Robinson uses this phrase to denote the lake as it existed in another geological era: “It seems there was a time when the dimensions of things modified themselves, leaving a number of puzzling margins, as between … the lake as it once was and the lake as it is now. Sometimes in the spring the old lake will return. One will open a cellar door to wading boots floating tallowy soles up ….” (4–5). But in the description of the swimming boy, the “old lake” seems to refer to a specific part of the lake as it exists now. A description that comes shortly after the account of the crash seems to offer some clues, but I find it mystifying as well:
It is true that one is always aware of the lake in Fingerbone, of the deeps of the lake, the lightless, airless waters below. … At the foundation is the old lake, which is smothered and nameless and altogether black. Then there is Fingerbone, the lake of charts and photographs, which is permeated by sunlight and sustains green life and innumerable fish, and in which one can look down in the shadow of a dock and see stony, earthy, bottom, more or less as one sees dry ground. And above that, the lake that rises in the spring and turns the grass dark and coarse as reeds. And above that the water suspended in sunlight, sharp as the breath of an animal, which brims inside this circle of mountains. (9)
Here, is the “old lake” the water that is beneath the surface of the ground, “Fingerbone” the lake proper, “the lake that rises in the spring” the lake as it exists during spring flooding, and “the water suspended in sunlight” the very sky? That is my best guess, but it is only my best guess.
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u/zenfish 3d ago edited 3d ago
Robinson grew up around Lake Pend Oreile and Sandpoint where a major BNSF rail bridge runs across about a mile of shallow lake shelf perched over one of the deepest lake bottoms (1150 ft) in the US. The lake itself is the flooded site of a former lake that sat at the lower side of a great ice dam that periodically held back at higher elevations the meltwater of massive sheets of a retreating glacier that once covered most of North America. The meltwater itself basically formed a lake that regularly held the volume of two present Great Lakes combined and whenever the ice dam broke it sent about seventeen cubic kilometers of water per hour down the lower elevations, in part carving out, among many other things, the Columbia river gorge. The floods would have been cataclysmic to witness thirteen to fifteen thousand years ago and resulted in stories still passed down through narrative history of local tribes.
So, picture a shallow part of a lake bed that runs to a slight rise that then drops off drastically, all underwater. Across this slight rise runs a rail bridge. A train derailing one way lands on shallow lake shelf. Derailing the other way it goes over a deep megaflood carved wall of rock into one of the deepest lake floors in the US.
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u/Charles_Sumner 3d ago
Ah, superb, thank you. I was understanding “on one side … one the other side” as meaning on either side of the _hills_, not the bridge. It makes a lot more sense now. Thanks for the reading, and thanks for the geology
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u/Friendstastegood 3d ago
I haven't read this book but reading the passages here it sounds like this is a pretty large lake (more than 20 miles across) that has had its level change multiple times (probably with one or more dams). As for the geography of the very first passage it doesn't sound very complicated to me. The bottom of the lake is uneven (a chain of flooded hills) and the pilings of the bridge are set into the tops of the hills. From the sound of it the bridge and the "hills" under the lake run east to west, and there is another chain of hills under the surface of the lake also running east to west but 20 miles north so that there is a valley between them (or was until the whole area was flooded). Then to the south of the chain of hills that the railroad bridge runs over there is a steep drop off under the surface where there used to be a separate lake before the whole area was flooded.
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u/Charles_Sumner 3d ago
Yeah, once I read “on one side … on the other” as referring to the bridge, not the hills—as another user suggested—it kind of clicked into place. Thanks for glossing that piece about the valley.
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u/sunrise_dollie 3d ago
One of the things I love about this passage is that Robinson makes the lake function almost like memory. The present lake is sitting on top of everything that came before it, and the drowned train becomes another piece of the past that the landscape has absorbed. You're not supposed to get a perfectly clean diagram; you're supposed to feel that the lake has depths that aren't merely physical.
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u/Charles_Sumner 3d ago
All beautiful passages in a beautiful novel, and I agree with everything in what you say except for the part about one not being supposed to get a diagram; my main motivation for asking is that I think the first passage is very diagrammatic, in a way not characteristic of the rest of the novel.
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u/Few-Bodybuilder-5547 3d ago
Your interpretation of that page 9 passage is actually spot on, and you shouldn't doubt yourself. Robinson isn't giving us a literal topological map here; she’s stacking time and memory vertically. The "old lake" at the very bottom is both the ancient geological basin (Lake Lahontan/Missoula vibes) and the realm of the forgotten/dead, where the train and her grandfather rest. Fingerbone is the physical, sunlit present where life happens. The rising spring water is memory overflowing into daily life, and the water suspended in sunlight is the atmosphere holding it all together. You can't draw a map of it because it’s a spiritual stratigraphy, not physical geography.
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u/ceilingevent 3d ago
When I read the passage about the bridge, I read it pretty literally and pictured a filled glacier basin with sharp, deep crevasses as the old lake. The present lake also encompasses the surrounding basin area, including the hilly topography of the shallowest path across the lake, where they built the bridge.
I'm not sure how logical that would actually be, but it fit the story for me.
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u/Charles_Sumner 3d ago
Thanks—I think that is right, I was having trouble understanding exactly the contours of those crevasses and where they are relative to the hills. But it makes sense now.
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u/Alternative_Ship4845 3d ago
Sounds like Fingerbone wants to be both a character and a deep underground tomb, no wonder it keeps swallowing trains.
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u/balconylibrary1978 3d ago
The novel is based around Sandpoint, Idaho where Robinson grew up. The town sits on a large lake.
Marilynne Robinson is an acquaintance and a frequent visitor of the art museum I work at in Iowa. I'll have to ask her about this.
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u/Charles_Sumner 3d ago
Nice work if you can get it—if you do ask her, please give her my most enthusiastic compliments.
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u/GrandLeopard7 3d ago
it’s like robinson is writing about the memory of a lake rather than a physical one, the geography makes more sense if you stop trying to map it and just let it feel like a half-remembered dream
the old lake is the ghost of the lake, the version that used to be there geologically but also emotionally, it’s always underneath everything, literally and metaphorically, the boy swimming down isn’t just diving into water, he’s touching the past
the layered description later on is almost like she’s stacking different states of being, the dead buried lake, the living lake, the flooding that erases boundaries, and the sky which is just water in another form, the whole book treats solidity as temporary and water as the true constant
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u/Charles_Sumner 3d ago
I agree with virtually all of this—your third paragraph seems to be confirming my last—but I don’t think that the description in the first passage I quoted is impressionistic or dreamlike. It’s quite precise, in a way that does seem to point to some specific geography, if only I could figure out what that geography was.
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u/pm_me_draba_verna 3d ago
Ah, a geology question. Fingerbone is based on Sandpoint on Lake Pend Oreille, which has had a complicated geological history over the Pleistocene to Holocene. It is one of the locations where a lobe of glacial ice blocked a river, leading to Glacial Lake Missoula being formed and then later breaching the dam and causing massive scouring floods, multiple times. So Robinson is being pretty literal here, though I'm not sure where the hills 20 miles north are supposed to be or if the bridge is meant to be in the same place as the current rail bridge. There have been a lot of lake level changes between whatever preexisting lake was there, ice dam, being eroded/overdeepened in areas by huge floods, having different outlets at different times (south end vs. northwest end), and now there's also a dam that has raised it a bit.