Echo Mountain

“I myself was two opposite things at the same time. One: I was now an excellent woods-girl who could hunt and trap and fish and harvest as if I’d been born into it. Two: I was an echo-girl. When I clubbed a fish to death, my own head ached and shuddered. When I snared a rabbit, I knew what it meant to be trapped. And when I pulled a carrot from the sheath of its earth, I, too, missed the darkness. There were times when this two-ness made me feel as if I were being stretched east and west, my bones creaking and crying as they strained back toward one.”

One of the novel’s central themes is The Duality in All Things, and Ellie refers to this concept frequently. She herself feels as if she is split between two worlds and two selves. The first is the girl who quickly found her place on the mountain, enthusiastically learning what it had to teach. The other is the girl who feels empathy for everything around her, and her need to survive and help her family survive by utilizing nature often conflicts with her visceral experiences of empathy.

“The prospect of giving my father pain made me hurt, too. But the flame that lit my way felt true to me. And brave. That’s what my father needed me to be. That’s what I needed me to be, too. So that’s what I would be.”

Fire and flames are a recurring symbol in the novel that represents Ellie’s passion, drive, and persistence. When she feels the flame igniting in her chest, she knows that she must follow it. After Ellie revives the puppy she names Quiet by plunging him in cold water, she wonders if she can revive her father in a similar way. She attempts several things, including a snake, bee stings, and a brew she creates. Many of these do stir him slightly, but he does not wake until he hears his wife play her mandolin.

“If I learned anything from the mountain—and from my father—it was that I felt stronger and happier if I was able to do a hard thing and do it well.”

After the accident, Ellie takes the blame, despite knowing that it was her younger brother Samuel who first dashed out under the falling tree, chasing a rabbit. Ellie loves her brother dearly and feels protective of him, so she does not want him to live with the knowledge that he had a part in it. Ellie takes pride in knowing that she is strong enough to take the blame for the accident, but with the help of her father and Cate, she gradually learns that she does not need to do so.

“I wanted to tell her the truth: that I was not a good town girl trying hard to tame the mountain like she was. Like Esther was. That I had work to do. Honey to harvest. A hag to save. A father to save. And more besides.”

Ellie feels like her world is split in two. Her mother and sister seem to keep themselves as distant from the mountain as possible, whereas she, her brother, and her father adapt to mountain life, learning to love it. Ellie goes to find Samuel, who has gone missing, and at the same time trade a fish for eggs with a neighbor. She becomes curious and decides to go up the mountain instead, meeting Cate and finding her badly wounded. Ellie feels as if she must now save both Cate and her father, but she knows that Cate’s wound is more urgent. Ellie is slowly becoming the healer that Cate and her mother see in her.

“The thin, soft skin of his eyelid felt like a curtain to another world. I could see stars there. Bright points in the darkness. But no sun rising. No waking yet.”

Ellie regularly checks on her father and makes attempts to revive him. After preparing her healing brew, she sneaks into his room to feed it to him. As she gazes at her father, she draws on a metaphor of sun and stars in the darkness of space. Ellie feels as though her father is still in there, his spirit intact, but sees no sign of him waking up to her reality and the world around him yet. These small, passing metaphors are used on almost every page of the novel to describe how Ellie feels and views the world.

“We would need something else to bind us back to whole. All of us. To make them want to be where they were. To wake my father. To make me understand how I could be theirs and they mine and yet none of us the same, me least of all. For all that, we would need another else. And that was another else I meant to find.”

Ellie knows that she is different from her mother and sister, and that they would rather be living in town than on the mountain. They see their life there as temporary, and Ellie wants them to feel as at home there as she does. She understands that being different from them is fine, but she wants to feel united with them like she did before her father’s accident. She spends most of the novel searching for a way to heal her father and her family.

“I never thought about being a doctor—that wasn’t the word that had ever come to mind—but doing the work to wake my father and mend Cate had made me feel so very good that I wanted to be more like that girl. The one who tried to make people well.”

Ellie’s mother mentions that it is too bad she is not male, as she would have made a fine doctor. In the 1930s, women could be nurses but usually not doctors; however, Ellie has never really considered either. She knows that she gets a strong sense of fulfillment and purpose from helping others heal, but she feels that she may fit a different mold than the usual doctor or nurse—one that is all her own.

“So I made up my mind to listen to the flame in my chest, which sighed and roared and sighed again like a long piece of music I knew by heart but still seemed to be hearing fresh.”

Ellie once again feels the flame inside her chest roaring. This symbol of Ellie’s drive helps her Persist in the Face of Great Obstacles and be willing to endlessly try until she gets her desired results. Ellie feels deeply connected to nature and looks to it for signs about how she should act or which direction she should go next. She observes the birds being birds and the trees being trees, and she knows that she too must be exactly who she is. Despite her mother’s threats, she returns up the mountain once again to see Cate.

“I imagined his father waking the memory of wind and rain and sun and snow and starlight from wood otherwise mute. I thought of my mother sitting by the fire, playing her mandolin, releasing all that rain and snow and sun and starlight. The thought made my bones hum.”

This beautiful, evocative passage exemplifies Ellie’s perspective on the world. She sees the power in the work of Larkin’s father, who transforms wood into instruments that can convey the beauty of all the natural elements that the tree once experienced. Her description shows her ability to make connections between the natural world and the world of humans; her insight is that human culture springs from and is inspired by nature.

“I mean my husband, who built this cabin and made these clothes we’re wearing and cut a notch in this mountain for our garden there and a great deal more.”

These words, spoken by Ellie’s mother, represent a turning point for her character. Until this moment, Ellie has observed her mother always seeming to retreat from the mountain life that has been forced upon her. However, when Larkin’s mother comes to the cabin and insults Ellie’s family as outsiders, Ellie’s mother taps into her pride for the life her husband has built for the family.

“She had not said that I couldn’t go back up to Cate’s. She had not said anything about locking me in the woodshed. She had not said that I was entirely too wild and willful. Something was changing. I could feel it.”

Ellie notices that her mother is changing and no longer resists the idea of Ellie going up to visit Cate. This also means that her mother is adjusting to life on the mountain and to the idea of Ellie being more wild than tame. This tiny glimpse of change gives Ellie hope and helps her persist in helping Cate. This moment also foreshadows Ellie’s mother’s full acceptance of Cate and of who her daughter is.

“I wondered if my mother would well up with the same kind of darkness if, years from now, my daddy still hadn’t come back to us or, worse, left us altogether.”

After Ellie knows more about Larkin’s mother, who has a darkness about her after her husband died, she wonders if the same fate might befall her own mother one day should her father never wake up. Although Larkin’s and Ellie’s families are juxtaposed with one another as stark opposites, they share in common the pain of grief and uncertainty, as well as their mutual love of music and mandolins.

“I had wanted her with me. To meet Cate. To look into those blue eyes and realize everything I’d realized, and maybe more. But I wanted Esther to know just as much. As it turned out, I had plenty more to learn, too.”

When Ellie goes up the mountain after explaining everything about Cate and Larkin to her mother and sister, her mother offers to go with her. Ellie relishes the idea of her mother getting to meet Cate, but Esther fears being left at the cabin alone and offers to go instead. This shocks Ellie, who perceives Esther as a very clean and proper girl who stays inside as much as possible. She nevertheless is happy to have her sister go along. Ellie also foreshadows the fact that Cate will be revealed to be Mrs. Cleary, the nurse who treated Esther as a child.

“Blame comes from the Greek for ‘curse’ […] A curse. Against the sacred. Which is what sisters are. Or should be. To each other.”

Cate watches Ellie and her sister interact with one another and notices that there is a great distance between them. Esther reveals that she blames Ellie for the accident, and Cate scolds Esther and Ellie both for not honoring their relationship as sisters. She wishes that Ellie would tell the truth and that Esther would choose to see it. Esther does slowly learn to forgive and to understand what happened that day, but it takes time; fortunately, Ellie is patient.

“As it turned out a boy like Larkin was a fine antidote to bee venom.”

Ellie and Larkin bond quickly after they meet, as if they already understand one another. When Ellie and Larkin go back to the hive to get honey for Cate’s wound, it is an experience that builds their relationship. Ellie knows she will be stung several times, just like last time, but she feels a deeper pain than that. Because Ellie has deep empathy for all living things, she carries guilt over killing bees to get honey. When Ellie is in tears after collecting the honey, Larkin hugs her, surrounding her with comfort.

“Bee venom, even in a bee-sized dose, was a sharp and painful business, more shocking than a burn or a hard slap. But it also infused, in me, a good kind of sharpness. A keenness. As if the poison were medicine as well, brewed from the best the mountain had to offer: something ancient and pure and perfect.”

Ellie draws on metaphor and figurative language to describe the impact that being stung by the bees has on her. Although it is a painful experience, it makes her feel alive and like she is truly connecting with the mountain she now calls her home. It also makes her feel connected to the past, as if the honey she collects is a treasure from ancient times.

“I thought about how it had felt to find them, one by one, and to think that they were meant for me. To think that someone understood what they would mean to me. To think that someone understood me.”

Ellie thinks back on all the carvings she found, gifted by Larkin before they knew each other. She is grateful that someone in the world understands her for who she is and knows exactly what will make her smile. Larkin’s carvings sent Ellie on both literal and mental adventures, igniting her curiosity and making her feel valued during the hardest time of her life.

“I hated the way his skin pulled hard across the bones of his face, as if someone were making him into a drum. As if he were hollow. As if someone was supposed to hit him to make any music at all.”

Days before Ellie’s father wakes up, she can see that he is thinning from the inside out. She uses simile to compare the texture and tightness of his skin to that of a drum, lamenting the fact that he has been silent and asleep for so long. Throughout the novel, Ellie’s primary motivation has been to heal her father and her family, and to help Cate along the way. It is just before her father wakes that he is at his worst, but Ellie never loses hope and persists through it.

“Step by step. That’s the way out of something hard.”

Cate often speaks words of advice, and after spending time near Ellie’s sleeping father, she knows that Ellie is right to keep trying. Much like the slow healing of Ellie’s father, Cate’s wound takes several attempts, time, and patience to heal. In Ellie’s final act of healing for Cate, she creates a glue dam around the wound and slowly drips vinegar into it. Like Cate, Ellie is full of patience, and she is eventually rewarded when her father wakes and Cate’s wound begins to heal.

“Life is a matter of moments, strung together like rain. To try to touch just one drop at a time, to try to count them or order them or reckon their worth—each by each—was impossible. To stand in the rain was the thing. To be in it. Which I would do.”

After the past few weeks of trying to heal her father, visiting and healing Cate, getting to know Larkin, and watching her family slowly come back together, Ellie comes to her anagnorisis—a moment when she recognizes a crucial truth. She realizes that life is comprised of tiny moments that combine to create a sort of constant chaos. Ellie may not be able to predict how her father will be when he wakes, or how her mother and sister will treat her in the future, but she can embrace the unknown and live in it fully, bravely taking on any challenge that comes her way.

“I’ve come to help Ellie. Who is also a hag, you know.”

Ellie and Larkin bring Cate down to Ellie’s home to help her one last time. Cate explains who she is and seems to fully accept that people view her as a hag. Furthermore, she does not view this as a negative thing. Instead, to Cate a hag is someone who lives wild and free in nature and who knows how to utilize nature to her advantage. Since Ellie has learned a great deal about natural healing methods—and has grown wild and bonded with the mountain—Cate feels a kinship with Ellie.

“It seems to me that what I do for one thing is what I do for everything.”

Since the novel’s exposition, Ellie has had a sense that her actions affect the world in ways she cannot always see or predict. She has persisted in trying to revive her father and made it her mission to get to know Cate and Larkin, even though her mother initially warned her not to visit there. Ellie sees that there is a connection between her family, the mountain, and Cate’s family; she feels that if she can heal Cate, perhaps it will start some sort of chain reaction and her father will be healed as well.

“I watched as my mother began to play. Something I couldn’t name and hadn’t heard in a long, long time. Something sweet, and sad, and wonderful that made Captan croon and tremble. Made us all smile like children, which some of us were. Which all of us were in that moment.”

After weeks of persisting through the novel’s rising action and complications, Ellie’s father finally awakes when he hears the sound of his wife’s mandolin. Ellie’s mother has not played the mandolin since the accident, and her paralysis symbolizes the family’s brokenness and pain. When Ellie’s mother picks up her instrument again, she is reviving her mandolin as a symbol of healing and connection.