In the Shadow of the Lonely Tree: A Memoir of Home, History and Madness

By Cameron Clifford (West Hartford, VT: The Clifford Archive, 2024, pp. 244, paper $20.00).

Every book is an adventure; its title a seduction. Readers usually meet key characters in the first few pages and the arc of the narrative emerges slowly as the reader becomes familiar with each. But what if the reader encounters dozens of characters in the first hundred pages?

At the outset, I didn’t understand whether I was reading a personal memoir, an autobiography, or a work of fiction. After a while, I gave up trying to keep track of the myriad characters introduced and decided to just follow the author wherever he took me. At times I felt lost in a sea of fascinating but not fully-fledged native Vermont characters. Then I realized that all the people I was being introduced to had a higher purpose. Each was a reflection both of the narrator’s interest in them but also an endless feedback loop of his sense of his own insignificance and ongoing failures… though he could never know why.

Slowly I came to understand that the underpinning of this novel was not at all what I had thought.

The narrator’s life force lies in his fascination with the people with whom he grows up, the people he meets in his adult life, and vicariously in the diaries, town and family archives he collects obsessively.

The power of this unusual but absorbing novel lies in the pace at which it reveals the narrator’s quest to understand his own youthful insignificance. Though confused at the outset, I never lost interest in his character’s ruminations, even as I struggled to retain all the fleeting glimpses of the family and neighbors who inhabited his world and, in time, his archive.

Midpoint in the novel, in his effort to understand his own spiraling sense of failure, he seeks psychiatric help, resulting in his being prescribed a course of medication that temporarily alleviates symptoms but does nothing to bring to light the underlying causes.

Whenever I was depressed, I never recognized my situation in clinical terms. I had no idea what that could mean for me. My problem was the recognition of my lack of worth. It was there for everyone to participate in. All they had to do was to look at me, speak to me, or hear me. I could do nothing right. I couldn’t sleep” (p. 99).

Further on, the author buys into a belief that he is a sexual deviant. His awakening sexuality elicits behaviors he judges not normal, though they are perfectly normal for many.

Later on, based on his love and appreciation for the innocence and joy of children, he’s deemed by neighbors and his few friends to be a deviant, though he isn’t. He knows himself so poorly and judges himself so harshly that whatever negative gossip he hears about himself becomes his reality.

Much of the sheer power of this memoir lies in the fact that it isn’t what it seems at the start. In The Shadow of the Lonely Tree slowly unravels–for author and reader– the genesis and reason for the protagonist’s sense of failure.

At its core, it’s a fascinating exposition of the destructive power of unremediated intergenerational trauma, which has given rise to the relatively new science of epigenetics – how environment and behavior affect the way genes work in passing on the physiological impact of emotional trauma to succeeding generations.

As the story unwinds, the author seeks out and ultimately discovers both his own genetic history and the sources of his trauma and comes to understand his belief in his own enduring failure.

The image of a “lonely tree” standing high on a hill looking down on open fields, buffeted by natural elements and the annual loss of its life-sustaining leaves, becomes the narrator’s journey to self-understanding. And the tree persists.

To one who grew up in Lamoille County and lived among hill farmers and merchants in his early years, the vast array of characters and names tolled like church bells at dusk: Bushways, Hazens, Gadways, Newtons, Doubledays, Kenyons. I could match a real person to each.

Though unconventional in architecture, this is a very powerful book. My interest never waned as, with no idea of where I was being led, I followed the narrator’s tale to the final epiphany that explains why his sense of himself is never allowed to bloom.

Today, Cameron Clifford is a major archivist of the culture that many of us grew up in. His durable fascination with preserving, organizing, and making available to us all the habits, material details, and family trees of those with whom he grew up enlightens and enriches both the narrative and the reader.

A 2020 Woodstock Community Television interview (https://archive.org/details/wctvvt-20200208_Cameron_Clifford) with Clifford gives us a personal account of his fascination with and commitment to preserving the details of his Vermont neighbors.

And if you, like me, find yourself following the author through a dark and confusing wood, stay the course. What you will learn is very much worth it. I recommend In the Shadow of the Lonely Tree. It is the story of a real person among us today with a deep love of rural people and their communities.  For me, it brought to light some of the root causes of humanity’s struggle to achieve a sense of wellbeing.

– Bill Schubart