Heartwood

Valerie is one of the novel’s protagonists and the subject of Bev’s search-and-rescue mission. A 42-year-old nurse still reeling from the COVID-19 pandemic, Valerie undertook a thru-hike of the Appalachian Trail to retreat and reflect. She is an empathetic individual, noting, “I became a nurse to fix things” (83). Her work is meaningful to her and affords her the opportunity to help people heal. She brings that same empathy to her personal relationships: She helped her husband, Gregory, get sober and remains closely bonded to him even after choosing to end their marriage. She even treats Daniel Means, her kidnapper, with empathy and respect, knowing that he needs psychiatric help.

Due to her kindness, Valerie made friends easily along the trail. She bonded especially closely with Santo, but everyone she met remembers her kind, warm-hearted spirit. Valerie is also a self-reflective character. She thinks deeply and critically about her own life and the world around her and understands the connection between nature, solitude, and reflection, making her point-of-view chapters key to the novel’s treatment of Nature as Both Sanctuary and Adversary. She also has a deep well of inner strength and manages to stay alive while lost in the woods in part because she does not give up on the idea of being rescued. Ultimately, she views her ordeal as an opportunity to focus and feels that even the worst days were beneficial to her in the end. This attitude shows circumspection, wisdom, and perspective, and she embodies the theme of The Deep Roots of Resilience and Survival more overtly than any other character.

Lena is one of the novel’s three protagonists and a complex, round character first characterized by her intellect and her interest in nature. She “is a reader” and “has been reading for most of the 76 years of her life” (47). Lena has a wide array of interests, but her passion for plant identification and foraging drives her arc by forming the basis for her relationships with others. The few friendships she has are based on a shared interest in plants; her connections with other people are mostly rooted in shared interests rather than emotional bonds.

Exposition through Lena’s point-of-view chapters slowly reveals the reasons for her current isolation. Lena was a child prodigy but struggled against the backdrop of a fractured family and her preference for being alone. As an adult, she remained isolated from most of the people around her, particularly after a difficult marriage ended with her raising her daughter, Christine, as a single mother. More interested in observing Christine’s development than forming a typical relationship with her, she left Christine with emotional scars, and the two ultimately became estranged. However, Lena undergoes a critical transformation over the course of the narrative and is a changed character by its end. She reaches out to her daughter, forges a relationship with her grandson, becomes closer to her friend Warren, helps solve the Valerie Gillis case, and even reaches out to her fellow community members. Recognizing that her withdrawal from the world has been an attempt at self-protection (and not, ultimately, an effective one), she opens herself up to both the joy and pain of human connection.

Ruben, a secondary character who goes by the trail name “Santo,” was Valerie’s closest friend on the hike. The two ended up hiking together because of their shared slow pace but found a genuine connection and became lifelong friends. Santo is a kind, caring person who worries about Valerie after her disappearance and begins calling Warden Cody just to talk, partially to calm his nervous mind and partially because the two bonded during Santo’s interview.

Santo is the son of Dominican immigrants and grew up in New York City. Like many of the characters in this novel, he has a difficult relationship with his family. His father prized traditional masculinity and was hyper-critical of his son for not being “macho” enough: He was disappointed in Santo’s interest in the outdoors and unkind to him about his weight. Despite this, Santo does his best to embrace his large size. He knows that most hikers are not overweight, but he views hiking as an activity that everyone should be able to enjoy, and he hopes to become an example for other hikers like him. He is kind to everyone he meets, although this is partly a survival mechanism: Santo is aware, at all times, of his race, knowing that some people will unfairly perceive his Blackness as threatening. This racism has bothered him over time, so he seeks out people, like Valerie, who judge him for who he is rather than how he looks. Santo’s character thus engages with public discourse surrounding diversity in the world of outdoor sports, even giving voice to the real-life catchphrase “the woods are for everyone” (198).

Gregory is a secondary character and Valerie’s husband. Figured early in the narrative as a potential suspect, Gregory is initially characterized by his intractability. He dislikes law enforcement and, in his first interview with the search team, informs them that he supports defunding the police. He is often hostile in his interactions with various game wardens, especially when asked about his whereabouts when Valerie went missing. The officers form a negative opinion of him, and when questioned, Santo also notes his complicated feelings for Gregory: He characterizes Gregory as unlikeable but doubts that he would have harmed Valerie.

Ultimately, the wardens also come to this conclusion. Gregory, although standoffish, deeply loves Valerie. He has completed her entire hike with her, driving from one checkpoint to the next and sleeping in hotels so that he could provide her with supplies. He is dedicated to her because of their many years of marriage but also because she helped him get sober. Without her, he eventually admits, he doubts that he would have recovered from his addiction. Gregory is a complex, circumspect character who displays empathy and understanding in his reaction to the news that Valerie no longer loves him as she once did: He agrees to let her go but vows to remain friends with her. Gregory is open to changing the nature of their relationship not only because he is a kind man but also because he is non-traditional in his relationship beliefs. He and Valerie do not use the term “spouse,” and since he does not believe in the utility of traditional marriage, he does not need to define his relationship with Valerie using state-sanctioned terms. In his free-thinking, anti-establishment views, he provides a counterpoint to Daniel, whose beliefs, though similar, are treated as intertwined with mental illness.

TerribleSilence is Daniel’s screen name. He is both Lena’s online friend and Valerie’s kidnapper, as well as a complex, multi-faceted character. As TerribleSilence, he is initially presented as an expert forager and woodsman—one of the few people Lena has encountered whose knowledge of plant species matches her own. He can locate and identify nearly all the plants in his area, and he has his mind set on moving off the grid, relying only on what he can hunt and gather. A “sovereign-citizen type” (276), Daniel is anti-establishment and anti-government. He tells Lena, for example, “I’m furious that my tax dollars are sponsoring a torture school” (155).

While it is evident that Daniel’s anti-society stance is a key facet of his identity, the novel also associates it with paranoia and psychosis. At 21 years old, Daniel has a long history of both mental health conditions and run-ins with the law, and he kidnapped Valerie because he truly believed that the government was trying to hunt them both down. Daniel is not, however, a true antagonist. Under psychiatric care, he willingly cooperates with the police, helping them find Valerie.

Mike is a retired warden who maintains close contact with law enforcement even though he is no longer on the job. Mike has a big, bold personality; Bev wryly observes that he is “loud and his jokes have grown moldy” (23). He always has a smile at the ready and meets even difficult situations with humor. At the same time, he is a capable and competent officer who is willing to step back into his old role when the search-and-rescue operation requires additional staff.

Mike’s most important quality is the support that he has always provided to Bev. She notes that even when she was a new hire, he “believed in [her]” (299). This is critical given how much misogyny Bev has encountered as a game warden. Many of her colleagues and superiors treated her dismissively, but Mike took a more liberal view of gender roles than others in his generation. He recognized Bev’s potential and treated her with the same deference that he would a male officer. For this reason, in particular, his death, which the novel’s final chapter notes is imminent, lends a bittersweet mood to the work’s conclusion.

Cody, Tanya, and Rob are Bev’s colleagues. Although they are not fully developed characters, they play an important secondary role within the narrative. Rob is the officer with whom Bev has the most contact. She describes him as a “plainspoken, unexcitable Mainer” (16). As this description suggests, Rob is firmly rooted in his community and, as a local, is seen as more trustworthy than Bev, who grew up out of state. Rob is also a kindhearted family man whose empathy is evident at multiple points during the narrative, as well as a male officer who treats Bev with dignity and respect.

Cody is also an empathetic officer, characterized mostly through his interactions with Santo. Cody treats Santo with respect, listening to him carefully during their interviews but also developing a rapport with him during Santo’s informal phone calls. Santo shares personal details about his fraught family relationships, and Cody becomes emotional as the two talk. In much the same way that Mike and Rob embody the potential for male officers to treat their female colleagues respectfully, Cody embodies the potential for white officers to treat people of color with dignity and humanity.

Tanya is framed largely through her work. Like Bev, she is a female officer in a male-dominated field. She is portrayed as competent, job focused, and thorough; it is Tanya’s interview that ultimately cracks the case. Additionally, her assessment of Gregory proves accurate, demonstrating her keen interpersonal skills and emotional intelligence. Tanya’s role, like Bev’s, is to depict the strength, expertise, and work ethic of women in law enforcement, showing that they are just as effective in their careers as their male counterparts.