What We're Reading
by Aaron, July 28, 2006 2:41 PM
Whenever the weather gets good, and the winter clouds start to dissolve beneath the gathering strength of the spring sun, my mind turns to Arizona. Southeastern Arizona. The spot where crooked Mexican oaks, pungent sycamores and wild raspberries are. Where roads are more often dirt than paved. Where Cochise fought to stave the onslaught of invasive Federal troops. Where I spent some of the best years of my life camping. Some people would like to think all parts of Arizona are the same ? central, southwestern, southeastern ? all flat, all sandy, all hot. But that's not true. There are peaks and pines, lakes with trout, hundreds of black bear. And despite what stereotypes might have taught you, the only sand dunes in the whole state are on the extreme southwestern corner on the state border, and most of that dune field lies in California. We even get snow down there ? really, same white stuff they get in Maine and Colorado, just, thankfully, less of it. See? I'm in one of those homesick moods right now, rambling and fantasizing and selling you on its properties like some dealer on a used car lot. But just because I'm currently drunk on Arizona doesn't mean I can visit anytime soon. I've got bank accounts as empty as Death Valley, vacation time to save up. So, like most literate Portlanders without cars or cable, I use books to treat my travel virus. And when it comes to Arizona books, the shelves are filled with 'em. 1) A Beautiful, Cruel Country This is the detailed memoir of an octogenarian who spent her girlhood in frontier southeastern Arizona's Arivaca Valley. Granddaughter of a Harvard-educated physician who came to Arizona Territory in the 1860s, Eva was the firstborn child of a Mexican mother and Anglo father who instilled in her an appreciation for both cultures at a time when this semi-desert corner was homesteaded by both Anglo and Mexican settlers. Little Toña learned firsthand the responsibilities of ranching ? an education usually reserved for boys ? and also experienced the racial hostility that occurred during those final years before the Papago Indians were confined to a reservation. Begun as a reminiscence to tell younger family members about their "rawhide tough and lonely" life at the turn of the century, Mrs. Wilbur-Cruce's book is rich with imagery and dialogue that brings the Arivaca area to life. Her story is built around the annual cycle of ranch life ? its spring and fall round-ups, planting and harvesting ? and features a cavalcade of border characters, anecdotes about folk medicine, and recollections of events that were most meaningful in a young girl's life. Eva Wilbur-Cruce describes memories as far back as when she was three, and her account constitutes a valuable primary source from a region about which nothing similar has been previously published. The reader has the added benefit of increasing his or her Spanish vocabulary that reflects the lifestyle in which Eva was raised. 2) Gila For 60 million years, the Gila River, longer than the Hudson and the Delaware combined, has shaped the ecology of the Southwest from its source in New Mexico to its confluence with the Colorado River in Arizona. This richly documented history of the Gila from its geological origins to the present fills a gap in the regional literature by caputring the winding essence of one of the Southwest's most important rivers. 3) Lazy B: Growing Up on a Cattle Ranch in the American Southwest This is Sandra Day O'Connor's endearing memoir of growing up on the Lazy B ranch in southeastern Arizona. Sandra, the first female justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, and one of the most powerful women in America, matured among leather-skinned cowboys in the prickly Peloncillo Mountains along the Arizona-New Mexico border. This fascinating glimpse of life in the Southwest in the last century recounts an important time in American history, and a vanished American way of life, and provides an enduring portrait of an independent young woman on the brink of becoming one of our country's most prominent figures. Sandra and her brother, H. Alan Day, have taken all the themes of the conventional Western narrative ? the roundup, the wild horses, the cattle and cattle stampedes, the rattlesnakes, the natural disasters like flash floods, and the colorful figures of cowboys ? and transposed them from the usual narrative of the isolated, rootless male figure of the Western into the story of three generations of a family and their relationship to an arid and beautiful land. Laced throughout these stories are the lessons Sandra and Alan learned about the world, self-reliance, and survival, and how the land, people, and values of the Lazy B shaped them and what it takes to survive under extremes of drought and distance. Best of all: we learn that Sandra was never able to ditch the childhood habit, even decades later in Washington DC, of checking her shoes every morning for scorpions. 4) Going Back to Bisbee Author of such revered poetry books as The Bus to Veracruz, The Tattooed Desert, and Hohokam, this is Richard Shelton's first full-length prose work, and it won the 1992 Western States Book Award for Creative Nonfiction. Shelton, one of America's most distinguished poets, first came to southeastern Arizona in the 1950s as a soldier stationed at Fort Huachuca. He soon fell in love with the region and upon his discharge found a job as a schoolteacher in nearby Bisbee. Now a university professor and respected poet living in Tucson, still in love with the Southwestern deserts, Shelton sets off for Bisbee on a not-uncommon day trip. Along the way, he reflects on the history of the area, on the beauty of the landscape, and on his own life. Couched within the narrative of his journey are passages revealing Shelton's deep familiarity with the region's natural and human history. Whether conveying the mystique of tarantulas or describing the mountain-studded topography, he brings a poet's eye to this seemingly desolate country. His observations on human habitation touch on Tombstone, "the town too tough to die," on ghost towns that perhaps weren't as tough, and on Bisbee itself, a once prosperous mining town now an outpost for the arts and a destination for tourists. What he finds there is both a broad view of his past and a glimpse of that city's possible future. Going Back to Bisbee explores a part of America with which many readers may not be familiar. A rich store of information embedded in splendid prose, Shelton's hundred mile trip through the basin and range shows that there are more than miles on the road to Bisbee. In this powerful annal of place, Shelton imbues landscapes, flora and fauna with resonance, imprinting themes of memory, history and human nature in the reader's mind. The opening description of a Sonoran monsoon is a masterful evocation of weather, vibrant and violent. Shelton's tour of the desert includes descriptions of a six-foot snake that rescued him from the local squirrels who were infiltrating his house; his disastrous attempt to harvest a yucca as a native Christmas tree; an attack by raging bulls on the
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What We're Reading
by Aaron, June 20, 2006 5:16 PM
Charles Bowden is a Tucson journalist whose work appears regularly in such national publications as Harper's, Esquire, and GQ. A friend of the late Edward Abbey, Bowden has written over eleven books of nonfiction, including Blood Orchid and Blues for Cannibals. Winner of the 1996 Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction and an outspoken advocate for the American desert since the 1970s, he writes about life in America in loose, winding narratives held together with an intense drive to understand the roots of evil and despair, often as seen through the lives of Southwestern drug traffickers, edge-dwellers, and land developers. While his recent books have garnered him more recognition than his earlier books, it's the early ones that I've read, so I'll focus on those. The book he initially became known for is Killing the Hidden Waters. First published in 1977, this is Bowden's classic study of water's use and misuse, and what can be considered his first effort to awaken people to the costs and limits of using natural resources. Told in clean, compelling prose, Bowden's thesis is that resource problems are cultural problems whose solutions also lie in the larger culture, and the book drives home the point that years of droughts, rationing, and even water wars have done nothing to slake the insatiable consumption of water in the American West. Killing the Hidden Waters remains, in Edward Abbey's words, "the best all-around summary I've read yet, anywhere, of how our greed-driven, ever-expanding urban-industrial empire is consuming, wasting, poisoning, and destroying not only the resource basis of its own existence, but also the vital, sustaining basis of life everywhere." Now presented in a new edition, Bowden writes that he thought the book would provide a harsh physical lesson that would lead Americans to understand the merits of conserving water, fossil fuels, minerals, and all our resources: "I did not foresee a world where my own culture...would cheerfully pay the price of a 1977 house simply for a car as the new millennium creaks along." Another early book that captured readers' and critics' attention is the loosly linked essay collection Blue Desert. Here Bowden presents a view of the Southwest that seeks to measure how rapid growth has taken its toll on the land. Writing with a reporter's objectivity and a desert rat's passion, Bowden takes us into the streets as well as the desert to depict not a fragile environment but the unavoidable reality of abuse, exploitation, and human cruelty. Blue Desert shows us the Sunbelt's darker side as it has developed in recent times and defies us to ignore it. As Bowden says in the forward, much of this books material came from his three-year stint at the Tucson Citizen, an afternoon daily newspaper, where some of the material appeared in a different form. Inferno, Bowden's photo-essay book, was written as an antibiotic during the time he was lobbying the government to create the Sonoran Desert National Monument, and it repudiates both the propaganda and lyricism of contemporary nature writing. In this deeply personal book, he brings the Sonoran Desert alive, not as a place where well-meaning people can go to enjoy nature, but as a raw reality that defies bureaucratic and even literary attempts to define it, a land that can only be experienced through the senses. Bowden persuades us that we need these places not to remember our better selves or our natural selves or our spiritual selves. We need these places to taste what we fear and devour what we are. We need these places to be animals because unless we are animals we are nothing at all. Red Line, published in 1989, portrays the arid Southwest in a Kerouac-esque odyssey, betokening the death of the American frontier spirit in a landscape of broken dreams, violence, uprooted lives, and fallen idols. When Nacho, a brutal drug dealer and hitman, is murdered in Tucson, Bowden, joined by a retired narcotics cop, wanders the US-Mexico border in search of the forces that created Nacho ? forces that lie in the poverty and desperation of the border region. We meet real estate developers, sullen Indians, assorted castoffs, a Vietnam vet, a rogue archeologist, and, through historical flashbacks, gold-crazed '49ers. Miles distant from tourist-poster images of the Sunbelt, this vista of narrow greed, diminished expectations, and ecological despoliation sizzles with the harsh, unrelenting glare of a hyperrealist painting. Bowden's obsessive, detective-like quest seems at least partly an evasion of personal problems ? he'd just fathered a baby out of wedlock ? and he incorporates his own trials and fears into the reporting of Southwestern places and persons. If you're looking for a start, middle, and end, Red Line is not the book for you. This is a voyeur's ride-along where the journey is more important than any conclusions. And it's a dark, harrowing ride. In his next book, Desierto: Memories of the Future, Bowden probes the spiritual decadence of those arid lands that knife into Mexico from southern Arizona, the desierto. What Bowden shows is a harsh land repeatedly exploited by a greedy white culture that is now ruled by drug lords and land barons. He focuses on the victims living in fearful and impoverished Sonoran villages, shifting his gaze at times to the exploiters, like Phoenix developer Charles Keating and a Tucson drug trafficker identified only as Mr. Tombstone. (Bowden's fascination with predators also informs his observations on another local kingpin, the mountain lion.) The pages brim with gore, lust, and folly. With insight and an eye for detail, he captures the simple beauty of this harsh landscape and transcends the traditional view of the desert as merely a place to survive or exploit. Although his narrative is sparse, Bowden shares his love for the region and its peoples but seems better able to accept the changes wrought by modern society as inevitable if not always desirable. Ultimately, by humanizing the complicated problems facing the region he allows the reader to decide if these developments are acceptable or inherently evil. Lust and gore. Despoliation and greed. These are Bowden's subjects. The desert's just a
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What We're Reading
by Aaron, June 12, 2006 4:35 PM
Ed Abbey would laugh if he knew I'd first discovered him inside a mall. No, maybe he would sigh then crack open a beer and shoot a television. Either way, it's an ironic introduction. Abbey, champion of wilderness, spokesman for wordless nature, wanderer of the Southwestern desert, and I meet him in the center of suburbia: the Inland Center Mall in San Bernardino, California. No, I couldn't even find him in Arizona, my own home state and his adopted one. But that's what caught my eye that night in California: the cholla cactus in the book's cover photo and the leathery geezer standing among them. Wow, I thought, what's this, a book about Arizona?
Even more ironic was that, at the time, I was living in Tucson, Ed's home base. What rock was I living under not to find him there, you ask? Well, during that period of my life I was spending most of my time cutting trails through the wild mountains and deserts of Arizona and Southern California, not sitting on couches or the artificially lit aisles of bookstores reading. In fact, I only visited that San Bernardino bookstore because I was sleeping in my truck during a three-day roadtrip; I hadn't come there to find books, I was killing time. While car-camping, the more nighttime hours I could pass somewhere like a Denny's or a bookstore, the less time I had to spend lying on my back in my truck's camper shell trying to avoid notice and waiting for that magic moment when, at about eleven o'clock, my body felt ready for sleep. By the time the clerks that night started pulling the rattly metal security screen closed and announced that the store would be closing in five minutes, I had stopped in my tracks, turned around, and was staring like a perv at the book's cover. Why couldn't I have stumbled onto this when I'd first come, I thought, instead of wasting all my time on the same boring articles in Sierra and National Park magazines? The Serpents of Paradise, the book was called, A Reader. The cover featured an older man standing smugly in a bright flat between tall, spiky, backlit chollas. Bearded with a fur thick enough to suit any Gold Rush panhandler, the man wore a pearl-button Western shirt, had his taut, veiny hands wrapped around a walking stick and skin that, even in that black and white photo, was clearly as tan as mine ? like leather. Ed Abbey, the spine said. I raced to the register and snatched a bookmark to scribble the author's name and book title on, then folded it into my dirty hiking shorts as I slunk out the door. I'd never considered malls fertile ground for epiphanies, but that moment at Inland Center was probably the moment in my life when I discovered the joys of being indoors, reading. Age twenty, and up until that point ? all through high school and into college ? reading essays and fiction had been a chore; if a book wasn't assigned, I didn't read it. I preferred scratching my legs while bushwacking to sitting on my ass reading. And that's what I did through most of college: hacked through dense cactus forests webbed with thorny palo verde and mesquite trees; woke on Saturdays with the sun to impersonate John Muir in trackless desert canyons; slept for whole weekends in the Pinaleño and Santa Catalina Mountains in my truck. And sadly, I did it alone. Despite the fact that Tucson was surrounded by Coronado National Forest, Saguaro National Park, and numerous wilderness areas, the University of Arizona's student body was composed mostly of beer-guzzling co-ed chasers and serious biological science geeks, the latter of which at least spoke my language but preferred labs to the outdoors. Not exactly my freakish kin. The few friends who were vaguely interested in the slice-and-dice strain of bushwhacking lived back in Phoenix or Flagstaff, hours away. So I hiked alone. And I felt alone, like a freak, cut from abnormal cloth, never to be understood. Ed changed all that. That night in the mall was the moment when I first realized that there were other people in this world whose primary focus was wilderness, other people who loved hikes more than sitcoms, who believed many places were better off roadless, inaccessible, and who searched endlessly for glimpses of cougars and shards of Hohokam pottery and the mysteries of the universe ? other desert obsessives. It was a bizarre life: running around the wilds alone, turning over rocks in search of scorpions, crouching in gulches to watch passing deer and in trees to watch hummingbirds, all as my skin tanned to shades of Mississippi mud and my sideburns grew repulsively long, thick as the oleander windbreaks on some Palm Springs golf courses. Ed legitimized all that, made me see that I was not a complete freak and that I was not alone in my passion. His life and writing were proof that, although I hadn't yet personally met anyone who shared my eccentric interests, those people were out there. They even lived in town. Ed's writing was more than a comfort. After our introduction, I started spending great deals of time ? hours upon hours, blocks previously spent outdoors ? in Tucson's numerous (and now closed) independent used bookstores. I read every one of Abbey's works of desert nonfiction that year ? Down the River, Abbey's Road, One Life at a Time, Please, The Journey Home ? often at the expense of school assignments. Definitely at the expense of socializing. Granted, I was still a loner, but now I had a bookshelf of dog-eared books to show for it rather than just dirty fingernails and bruised shin bones. Ed Abbey got me so deep into reading that I now actually work at a goddamn bookstore. The same way I wouldn't eat salad as a teen no matter how much bacon was sprinkled on it, you couldn't drag me to a bookstore as a kid, even if you had me on a short leash. It's nuts. Now at age thirty-one I love salad and books ? never saw that one coming. Thanks to my six years at Powell's, I own nice hardcover copies of all of Ed's nonfiction and half his fiction, my favorite Abbey books, first editions mostly, not all in ideal shape, but with dust jackets crisp and unfaded enough to display proudly on my shelves. (Though I did keep my old, bent, and torn paperbacks because their pages and back covers are covered with my adolescent scribblings and travelogues ? translation: rambling, Thoreauvian, existential B.S.) - - - By the time I found him in the Inland Center Mall, Ed had been dead for eight years, so I couldn't write him an enthusiastic letter about his influence. And even though I was schooled at the university where he'd once taught and where his journals are now kept, we never met. Randy, a coworker at Powell's, once had a run-in with him, though. While working at San Francisco's famous Cody's Books in the '70s, Randy, reclining o
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What We're Reading
by Aaron, May 19, 2006 1:29 PM
I've spent years traveling the state of California, hiking Nature Conservancy preserves and camping state parks, but in certain places like the San Joaquin and Sacramento valleys, all that is left to explore are postage stamp remnants, scraps no larger than Wal-Mart parking lots, that have been poorly protected from boaters' beer cans, hunters' rifle reports, and the onslaught of nonnative weeds and grasses. To be exact, only 1% of those valleys are left untilled or unpaved. The Cosumnes Preserve, Paine Wildflower Preserve, Woodson Bridge and Kern National Wildlife Refuge ? despite the extent of my travels, I need to see more of those valleys than even hiking can offer, to not only visualize and comprehend their original landscape, but to feel it somehow, and for that I have returned again and again to Up and Down California, a glimpse of the state's pre-suburbia splendor through the lens of William Henry Brewer. Brewer's account has been a wormhole to another time, my teacher and transporter and standby for ten years. Admittedly, I am geography obsessed: I often fall in love with a particular locale upon first visiting it, be it southeastern Arizona, coastal British Columbia, or the Delta South, and read everything I can on the subject, feverishly, like a gambler burning through all his dough. So maybe Brewer's articulate detailing of that early California landscape appeals to the freak scholar in me, but as Journal of the West noted, the book "seems to contain information for everyone regardless of one's interests." William Henry Brewer, born in 1828 in Poughkeepsie, New York, grew up on a farm in Enfield, New York. In 1848 he attended Yale and later studied natural science in Europe, and in 1860, shortly after the death of his wife and newborn son, Brewer was invited by Josiah D. Whitney to become the chief botanist of the California Geological Survey. The Survey, intended to produce a full and scientific description of the state's rocks, fossils, soils, and minerals, was one of the most ambitious geological surveys ever attempted and yielded a vast amount of previously unknown information, including the first description of Kings Canyon. No matter, the Survey can hardly be said to have fulfilled its the original purposes. Much was learned about the mining regions and the nature of the auriferous gravels; the topography of the state was fairly well mapped; and great progress was made toward an understanding of the geological history of the country. Save for the maps, however, it is doubtful whether any immediate economic advantages can be traced to Whitney's work. Certainly no new mineral fields were discovered and no direction was given to the mining industry; on the other hand, it was during that trip, that he wrote the letters that would be his greatest contribution to Western science writing. Brewer was with the survey in California for four years, from 1860 -1864, when Los Angeles had 4,000 inhabitants. He traveled 14,000 miles by foot, steamship, and horseback, from the eastern deserts through the soggy salt-crusted Central Valley and up to the wet, forested coast, documenting what he saw the entire way. Strangely, Brewer didn't set out to write a complete book or expedition journal; he was just filling his leisure hours ? those times off the trail, resting his saddle sores by a campfire ? writing affectionate, dryly humorous, and graphic letters to his brother back East. It is these notes and letters, 570-pages worth, that were eventually published as his "journal" by Yale University Press in 1930 as Up and Down California. Kept in print by the University of California Press, Up and Down California has the feel of an adventure story. The expedition party sleeps outdoors in this vast wild territory in fine and foul weather; their horses sink hip-deep in muck, and one dies; the men walk into thick sandstorms, get tailed by curious Indians, encounter cattle thieves, outlaws, and murderous drunks. Yet one of the few times Brewer gets sick is when he spends a couple of nights in a hotel room. Each place and incident is described so thoroughly and so clearly in Brewer's letters that there is no need for amplification or for summary. After the death of his wife and newborn son, California provided a rebound from Brewer's earlier misfortune. "He reacted with much the same delight that tourists, from then down to the present, have felt when traveling the byroads and trails of the Pacific Slope. His jottings convey a sense of wonder evoked by magnificent scenery and the grand variety of land forms and vegetation" (Choice). If you're an outdoor nut with a lust for wild landscapes like me, the chapter headings alone will wet your whistle: Tejon ? Tehachapi ? Walker's Pass; "The Diablo Range South"; "West and East of the Sacramento [River]." It's manna for the armchair traveler who dreams of exploring landscapes that no longer truly exist. Because of the limiting nature of letters, Brewer's writing had to be compact, but like a good haiku, there is great nuance, passion, and information packed into each entry, grand portraits contained within single sentences. I've read the book at least ten times, taking notes as I go, cruising my finger up maps to visualize the course of his travels. In fact, I keep a color-coded map of the state's original vegetation beside me when I read it, so I can see what he saw, understand the extent of the tule marshes that once stretched for miles outside Bakersfield and the riparian jungles of grapevine and oak that once threaded waterways outside Fresno; that way I can grasp the ecological diversity of the sunshine state and understand the grand scale of ecological changes that modern agriculture and urbanization have inflicted. Beyond ecology, the book also serves as a sort of social record. Brewer stayed with a few families on his travels, some in the burgeoning Bay Area, others on hot, dusty ranches like the San Emigdio Ranch and one below Pacheco Pass, and he provides descriptions of life on such isolated homesteads and the social, agricultural, and economic life of the state. His descriptions of the rural properties, however brief, inspired me to dig up historic photos and maps of these old Spanish and Mexican ranches so I could see the desolation the people were living in when Brewer stopped by their home for food and rest. Maybe this is the TV-watcher in me, but the only problem I've encountered with the book is visual: old editions don't include a map of Brewer's travels. I had to find a map online, print it out, and tape it to the inside cover. Fortunately, there's a 2003 edition that comes complete with maps that trace Brewer's route. Brewer's contribution is unique, on par with William Bartram and John James Audubon. Where some scientists preserved now extinct birds and rare plants, and others lent their names to previously unknown species, Brewer preserved a whole state's landscape in words. His journal is the formaldehyde that the old California remains in, pickled and slightly faded, but still here, living on, like Walt Disney's head, for all curious modern onlookers to
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