High Tide in Tucson

Kingsolver leaves the United States for the Canary Islands under the guise of learning fluent Spanish. In reality, she hopes to escape the political climate surrounding the Gulf War. She and her daughter settle in a small apartment on the island of Tenerife. Kingsolver quickly finds that the Spanish colony is not fully an escape from imperialism: Her street is even named after General Franco.

One weekend, while her daughter is staying with a friend, she travels to the most remote Canary Island, La Gomera. It is sparsely populated but steeped in colonial history, being the place where Christopher Columbus made his final departure for the New World. Local legend holds that he almost remained on the island, as he had fallen in love with a local wealthy widow. Although the anniversary of the voyage is happening soon, the island is not preparing to celebrate it. Kingsolver has heard rumors that there are still traces of the Guanche people, Indigenous Canarians who were completely wiped out by early colonization. Kingsolver hopes to find traces of the culture, such as their distinctive red pottery and whistled language. She eventually finds out about a tiny village, not marked on maps, where pottery in the Guanche style is still produced. She travels to the village, where two families still make the pottery, but the residents cannot or will not tell her about their connection to Guanche history.

After leaving the village, Kingsolver travels to the remote national park at the heart of the island. She has been warned to watch for rats falling from the treetops; they run to the top of trees to eat intoxicating leaves and then fall to the ground in a drug-addled stupor. She walks through the forest to the top of a mountain but doesn’t see any rats. Once she is at the highest point, she can see the coastline of Africa in the distance. She notes that while Spain may have claimed the Canary Islands for thousands of years, geography dictates that they belong to Africa. She reflects on the time she spent in Africa as a young child. She writes,

The Guanches have survived to whistle a secret life among drug-addicted woodrats. And but for a sneeze of history, Columbus might have stayed forever in the boudoir of Beatriz de Bobadilla. There was nothing at all for me to do about history but write down the wonders that passed over (119).

Shortly after returning from the Canary Islands, Kingsolver becomes the keyboardist for a literary rock band, alongside other writers like Stephen King, Dave Barry, and Amy Tan. The band is the brainchild of a media escort named Kathi, who has listened to all of these writers talk about their former dreams of being in bands. Unfortunately, none of them has developed much musical talent in the intervening years, and Kingsolver, despite reporting that she is never afraid of public speaking on book tours, is terrified to perform in public. To add to her panic, Kingsolver’s debut as a rock goddess is happening during her complicated divorce and her move back to her home country after a year abroad.

The band, called the Rock Bottom Ramblers, decide to go on tour after a few small, successful shows. As they perform, they develop stage presence, find songs that they enjoy singing, and devise tricks for when things go wrong. For example, Stephen King, who loves teenage death songs, proudly announces that he has figured out that he can just not strum his guitar when he can’t remember the chords. Kingsolver, who mostly manages to escape the spotlight due to the immobility of the keyboard, eventually decides to challenge herself, volunteering to sing the Otis Redding song “Dock of the Bay.” Although she is scared of embarrassing herself and wasting the audience’s time and ticket money, she eventually decides to embrace her time as rock goddess to escape from the difficulties in the rest of her life. After all, she began college as a music major and has done many unrelated jobs throughout her life.

The essay ends with Kingsolver vowing to embrace her many passions rather than hide them away in the face of societal pressure to only pursue one thing seriously. As the band emerges to a cheering audience, they forget about the small mistakes they might make and embrace the fact that they are having fun and creating noise that people enjoy, even if it might not be perfect.

As a recently divorced mother, Kingsolver criticizes using the term “broken” to describe families that do not consist of a married mom and dad with children. While the concept that a family should have two parents of opposite gender has long been touted as the norm in conservative circles, Kingsolver believes that society should embrace all types of families, such as blended families, those with gay parents, and those with only one parent.

Kingsolver reflects on the way she was treated during her divorce. While she felt that she was faced with an impossible choice and was deeply grieving, many others treated her as if she simply hadn’t worked hard enough to save the marriage. She compares divorce to amputating an infected leg: Both options are horrific, but she chose the one that would save her life, despite constant worries that she was damaging her child by doing so. However, her daughter loves having divorced parents and a stepfather. Camille has a home in the desert and one in the city, and she has three sets of grandparents.

The end of the essay discusses the politics of family life in the United States. Conservative lawmakers constantly tout the importance of the family but seek to restrict the rights of all families except for those with two married heterosexual parents. They claim to idealize the “traditional” family, but Kingsolver points out that there is nothing longstanding about isolated nuclear families: This type of family structure has really only been the norm for a narrow slice of American history. Kingsolver wishes for a society like in the folk story “Stone Soup,” in which a poor town combines each person’s meager scraps into a stew that can feed everyone: “Any family is a big empty pot, save for what gets thrown in. Each stew turns out different. Generosity, a resolve to turn bad luck into good, and respect for variety—these things will nourish a nation of children” (145).

When her daughter is five, Kingsolver takes her to Phoenix to visit the Heard Museum, an institution dedicated to Indigenous American artifacts. On the way, she asks her daughter if she knows anything about Indigenous Americans, and the child states that they are “People that lived a long time ago” (147). Kingsolver is disappointed but not surprised by this response; even though they are driving through reservation land and her daughter has Indigenous friends at school, American kids are usually taught, both at school and in pop culture, that Indigenous culture is a thing of the distant past. She hopes that her daughter will not see Indigenous people as irrelevant relics but also observes a new type of benevolent racism disguised as reverence, “the sweat-lodge suburbanites who borrow the material trappings of native ceremonies as a spiritual quickie to offset the stresses of corporate life” (148).

Kingsolver enjoys the Heard Museum. Unlike other museums, it blends interactive exhibits with displays and truly attempts to characterize Indigenous life as current and dynamic, with a long past and hopeful future. Kingsolver and Camille are especially taken with the reconstructed houses in the museum, which visitors can enter. The houses remind Kingsolver that all of the artifacts are remnants of real lives lived in a specific area. A quote by a man from Taos Pueblo is emblazoned on the entrance, reflecting his community’s long history. Unlike any other group in North America, the Pueblo people have continuously inhabited the same land, maintaining their ancient dwellings through the colonial period and into the modern day.

In the second half of the essay, Kingsolver compares staging a museum to writing; both kinds of work exist in multicultural space. As someone who writes about many different topics, and often about cultures outside her own, she has often been told that she should avoid talking about anything she cannot claim as her own. Kingsolver disagrees. On one hand, she knows she cannot write about experiences that are completely outside her frame of reference, like growing up male or on a reservation. However, she believes that it is possible, and important, to create characters with experiences and backgrounds different from her own. Rather than pretending to know what it is like to be someone who is not white, or someone who has a disability, she looks to her personal relationships with people in these categories for reference. She is particularly drawn to write about the spaces between cultures, and the times when different kinds of people interact in unexpected ways. That, in Kingsolver’s mind, is the reality of the world. No culture is static—everyone from every background is a human with a dynamic, multifaceted life.