REVIEW: Ghosts of Distant Trees by Erica Watson

Reviewed by Elizabeth Austin

There are books that understand something fundamental about place, not just as backdrop or setting, but as a living force that shapes us. Erica Watson’s debut essay collection, Ghosts of Distant Trees (Porphyry Press; November 2025), is one of those books.

Watson arrived in Denali National Park at twenty, selling postcards of mountains to tourists while her real life waited somewhere offstage. What begins as a summer job becomes a decades-long reckoning with what it means to live at the edge of wilderness and at the edge of the stories we tell ourselves about it.

The opening essay, “The Postcard Days,” sets the tone. Watson’s job included drawing the day’s view of Denali on a poster-sized calendar. On foggy days, visitors photographed the postcards themselves, “to prove they’d been there.” It’s a perfect metaphor for the entire collection: Watson refuses the easy postcard version of Alaska, excavating the complicated reality underneath.

What strikes me most about Ghosts of Distant Trees is Watson’s fierce commitment to looking at what usually gets cropped out of the frame. She writes about gravel pits with the same attention she gives to sweeping mountain vistas. She examines road maintenance politics, housing shortages, and the mundane labor that keeps a national park running. In “The Road Is a Word,” she quotes Wendell Berry: “If, like Berry says, a road is laid in the wound prepared for it, is damage to a road an act of healing or further injury?” These are the questions Watson asks: questions that resist easy answers, that sit with discomfort.

The essay “Cordillera” traces Watson’s relationship with maps, from childhood puzzles of the United States to the rigid boundaries that define national park land. She grew up in an NPS family, the daughter of a career park ranger, and she’s brutally honest about the privilege that came with being “the boss’s kids.” She and her brother played a game called “visitoring,” belly-crawling through drainage ditches to spy on tourists undetected. It’s a moment of uncomfortable self-awareness: Watson sees her younger self clearly, that sense of ownership over land that was never hers to claim, built on systems that displaced Indigenous peoples.

Throughout the collection, Watson circles back to this tension. She writes about loving a place deeply while knowing her presence is part of a larger colonial project. She grapples with calling Denali home as a white woman on Dene lands, working for an institution built on narratives that centered “heroic exploits of prospectors, mountaineers” rather than the “quiet reverence” shown by those who’ve lived there for generations.

The collection’s structure mirrors the way memory works: non-linear, recursive, returning again and again to certain images and moments. A stolen rock from the Toklat River becomes a talisman Watson carries for years, a physical manifestation of her attachment to place. The essays accumulate detail the way sediment builds up in a glacial river, each layer adding texture and depth.

Watson is a sharp observer of both landscape and the people who move through it. Her descriptions of Alaska are luminous without being precious. When she writes about standing on the Toklat River bar at midnight, feeling “a boundless energy I haven’t felt since, something unique to the liminality of being twenty on a glacial river bar in the middle of the night,” I’m right there with her, feeling that particular wildness that comes from being young and far from home.

But Watson never lets herself — or us — off the hook. The essays consistently interrogate easy narratives about the American West, about conservation, about who gets to live in and love wild places. She asks hard questions about climate change, declining infrastructure, and the real costs of tourism-dependent economies.

Ghosts of Distant Trees is a book about learning to see what’s really there, not what the postcard tells you to look for. It’s about the slow, difficult work of building a life in a place while acknowledging the systems that made that possible. Watson has written a love story to a place that doesn’t shy away from complexity, that holds both beauty and complicity in the same frame.