Coming August 15, 2024
Praise for Moon Over Humboldt
“Jimbo, I used to like you, but now that you’ve managed to make me get all choked up and cry, I’m not so sure about that.”
“I’ve never read fiction about the 12 steps that didn’t sound like bullshit. This is no bullshit—100% on the money.”
“I was a forest defender for years in the Pacific Northwest. Jim Hight gets both the excitement and dysfunction of our movement right, and he depicts timber workers with grace and insight.”
“This is a beautiful book about how men love each other—and how they hurt and misunderstand each other. Bill and Jonah are both men we’d like to stereotype, yet Jim Hight does a magnificent job bringing them to life.”
“An emotional tale full of love, anger, regret, and the other things that make us human. The story brought me to tears.”
“A Stunning heart-tugging debut—Hight paints a setting reminiscent of Richard Powers’ The Overstory while weaving a tale of addiction as crushing as David Sheff’s Beautiful Boy!”
How this book came to be
I first envisioned Bill and Jonah while riding the bus from Eureka to Arcata. It was a wet and gloomy day during one of those Humboldt winters when it’s easy to forget what sunshine looks like.
This was before smartphones were in everyone’s hands, so strangers on a bus were more likely to talk. And I heard two men—one about 50, the other maybe 25—talking about the rain. The younger guy was new to the North Coast, and as he spoke of his dismay at how wet the place was, the older guy told a story.
With a tone that was half “you ain’t seen nothin’” and half “it’ll be okay, kid,” he told of a flood where he and his family were trapped in their house for several days. I’d seen floods like that in my Arcata neighborhood, and worse in the valleys near the coast. And I had interviewed and written about people who’d lived through the 1955 and 1964 floods.
So, my imagination took over and as I started writing later, these two men became Bill and Jonah, sitting in a coffee shop, talking about the rain. And Bill, the redneck logger, had a story that touched Jonah, the forest-dwelling activist, in ways that would prove fateful and lead to the soul adventures that I hope you enjoy in Moon Over Humboldt.
-- Jim Hight