∎ PDF The Land of Little Rain Mary Austin E Boyd Smith T M Pearce Books

The Land of Little Rain Mary Austin E Boyd Smith T M Pearce Books

Download As PDF : The Land of Little Rain Mary Austin E Boyd Smith T M Pearce Books

The Land of Little Rain Mary Austin E Boyd Smith T M Pearce Books

Mary Austin's 'The Land of Little Rain' is one of the classic works of American naturalist literature. A short collection of essays, the book basically describes, in vivid detail, the desert landscape and its influence on the people and animals that inhabit it. While America has produced some great writers of nature, Thoreau and Muir come to mind here, Mary Austin has no equal. Thoreau is writing more about himself than the land he explores; Muir is selling conservation, not fairly describing what he sees and experiences. Only Austin truly captures the land and describes its denizens in such copious (and exquisite) detail.

So why do literary critics, including Terry Williams in her forward to this book, have such a difficult time capturing the essence of Austin? I think the problem is that for the most part, you have to experience the desert to some degree before you can appreciate what Austin writes about it. And modern critics generally don't do that. They recognize (they think) some ideas in Austin that they sympathize with: environmentalism, early feminism, native American rights, etc, but they then try to interpret Austin along these lines and fail dramatically. Yes, you can quote mine Austin and find, as Williams does, some support for the 1994 Desert Protection Act. But Williams wants to make Austin a modern environmentalist (and incidentally excoriate congressman Jerry Lewis for opposing the act) and the truth of the matter is that Austin probably would not have liked what successors have done in her name. Her essay on the "pocket trapper," a hard rock miner always hoping to find a good strike, presupposes the opportunity for men (and women) to lose themselves chasing desert dreams, an opportunity the 1994 act explicitly forbids. But it is in losing oneself in the desert that one eventually finds meaning and new perspectives. The miner, Winnenap (Shoshone medicine man living, and dying in exile among the Paiutes), Seyavi (Paiute basket weaver), and a whole host of other characters who populate pages of these short essays all come to this understanding, aptly summarized in the conclusion of the title story: you are of no account in the world. Your very existence is effectively the result of grace. In the desert, you see and experience this reality more clearly than you can anywhere else.

Sadly, the desert Austin writes of is vanishing, largely at the hands of those who claim to be its protectors. "Liberal" "environmentalists" and "conservationists" are busy plowing it up to create the new "green" industries of tomorrow. Already much of the Mojave has been flattened to make way for solar energy plants, euphemistically called "farms." And while valley fever has risen proportionately with the destruction of the landscape, the California poppies, which used to put on a spectacular display every spring, have been increasingly displaced. Indeed, my wife who reveled in the poppy bloom every spring found nearly none this year. So it is with the plants and animals on the desert hills that have been leveled in regular plots and covered with roads for wind "farms." And nary a word is offered in protest of this desecration. But Austin does offer us some measure of hope. The desert, she says, changes men and not the other way around. Hopefully it will recover from the rapes of the last decade as those who work in it come to see their destruction for what it is. If not, all that will remain of the desert will be the words of Mary Austin, and few among her future readers will be able to understand them.


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The Land of Little Rain Mary Austin E Boyd Smith T M Pearce Books Reviews

Neither of the boxes labeled "Predictable', "Some twists" and "Full of surprises" is applicable to this book. There is no plot, therefore no development. The book, written in the early 1900's, is a love poem of the deserts and mountains of the West--the "Land of Little Rain". It is a beautiful, poetic description of the land, flora, fauna, and people of the region in which Mrs. Austin lived and traveled. The places are fictitious,and probably the people, but this does not detract from the beauty of the descriptions, the love of the land she exudes, or the love and respect of the people she knew and met. A wonderful love-song to the land, animals, plants and people and to a time gone by. If you have ever visited such regions of the West, it will mean even more.

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...you cannot go so far that life and death are not before you." Short, poignant book with descriptive phrases about a region I sorely want to visit one day, but absent the wonderful illustrations by E Boyd Smith that helped bring this book to life. Happy enough to own this portable copy on my kindle tho can also be read online free of charge with illustrations included by doing a title search preceded by the word "archive". Good book and I did enjoy.
I recently read Karen Surina Mulford's Trailblazers Twenty Amazing Western Women (Great American Women Series) which provided brief biographical sketches of the lives of twenty women of the American West. Regrettably, more than half I had never heard of before. And one was Mary Hunter Austin. Mulford's sketch contained profuse praise for Austin's classic historical, environmental and ethnological work, "The Land of Little Rain." The work is a result of Austin's insatiable curiosity and keen observations made during almost two decades of life in Independence, California, which is still a very small town of under a 1000 people. It is located in the Owens Valley, and lies between the mountains of the Sierra Nevada, and the very lowlands of Death Valley. As the title implies, it doesn't rain much there.

Austin's work was first published in 1903, and Penguin deserves kudos for keeping it in print. In part, it recalls the naturalist observations of Thoreau's Walden, but in a desert setting. She doesn't really say how she does it, or in what company, if any, but it was obvious that she did substantial hiking, long before the days of well-marked trails (or accurate weather forecasts). Thus we learn of the "streets of the mountains" written before the advent of the motor car. Her vocabulary is rich and dense, with the names of the plants and animals... and I did wonder how she learned them, prior to guide books. I still have difficulty knowing what a clematis is; it was simply different paths of knowledge in those pre-electronic days.

Of the 14 essays, several are devoted to the human inhabitants of this area. There were two impressive ones on the American Indians. It was tough to be a "medicine man" in the Paiutes tribe. If three patients died, the "medicine man" would be executed. The very real paperwork travails of modern day doctors pale into insignificance by comparison. In her essay entitled "The Basket Maker" Austin described how Seyavi, of the Paiutes, made baskets that were so tight that one could cook in them... by dropping in heated rocks. Another excellent essay, "The Pocket Hunter" was on one of the (white) miners/prospectors that provided the initial impetus for the settlement of California. The "pocket" being the "sweet spot" in an ore vein that contained the most concentrated amount of the mineral sought.

A few of her thoughts that resonated she was into the "travel light" mode before it was popularized - "And here is a hint if you would attempt the stateliest approaches; travel light, and as much as possible live off the land. Mulligatwany soup and tinned lobster will not bring you the favor of the woodlanders." Observing the natural world "What one has to get used to in flowers at high altitudes is he bleaching of the sun. Hardly do they hold their virgin color for a day, and this early fading before their function is performed gives them a pitiful appearance not according with their hardihood." In terms of settling the often contentious battles over water "rights," Austin reaches back to the classics "Jesus Montana...walked into five of Judson's bullets and his eternal possession on the same occasion. That was the Homeric age of settlement and passed into tradition."

Today the small village of Independence is just a spot on US 385 through which so many residents of Los Angeles have to slow down a bit in, as they race up towards Mammoth Lakes, the Muir Wilderness and the "back door" to Yosemite, and such more "scenic" places. A read of Austin's classic work might convince the traveler that they had arrived at their destination before they reached the more "scenic" ones. 5-stars.
Mary Austin's 'The Land of Little Rain' is one of the classic works of American naturalist literature. A short collection of essays, the book basically describes, in vivid detail, the desert landscape and its influence on the people and animals that inhabit it. While America has produced some great writers of nature, Thoreau and Muir come to mind here, Mary Austin has no equal. Thoreau is writing more about himself than the land he explores; Muir is selling conservation, not fairly describing what he sees and experiences. Only Austin truly captures the land and describes its denizens in such copious (and exquisite) detail.

So why do literary critics, including Terry Williams in her forward to this book, have such a difficult time capturing the essence of Austin? I think the problem is that for the most part, you have to experience the desert to some degree before you can appreciate what Austin writes about it. And modern critics generally don't do that. They recognize (they think) some ideas in Austin that they sympathize with environmentalism, early feminism, native American rights, etc, but they then try to interpret Austin along these lines and fail dramatically. Yes, you can quote mine Austin and find, as Williams does, some support for the 1994 Desert Protection Act. But Williams wants to make Austin a modern environmentalist (and incidentally excoriate congressman Jerry Lewis for opposing the act) and the truth of the matter is that Austin probably would not have liked what successors have done in her name. Her essay on the "pocket trapper," a hard rock miner always hoping to find a good strike, presupposes the opportunity for men (and women) to lose themselves chasing desert dreams, an opportunity the 1994 act explicitly forbids. But it is in losing oneself in the desert that one eventually finds meaning and new perspectives. The miner, Winnenap (Shoshone medicine man living, and dying in exile among the Paiutes), Seyavi (Paiute basket weaver), and a whole host of other characters who populate pages of these short essays all come to this understanding, aptly summarized in the conclusion of the title story you are of no account in the world. Your very existence is effectively the result of grace. In the desert, you see and experience this reality more clearly than you can anywhere else.

Sadly, the desert Austin writes of is vanishing, largely at the hands of those who claim to be its protectors. "Liberal" "environmentalists" and "conservationists" are busy plowing it up to create the new "green" industries of tomorrow. Already much of the Mojave has been flattened to make way for solar energy plants, euphemistically called "farms." And while valley fever has risen proportionately with the destruction of the landscape, the California poppies, which used to put on a spectacular display every spring, have been increasingly displaced. Indeed, my wife who reveled in the poppy bloom every spring found nearly none this year. So it is with the plants and animals on the desert hills that have been leveled in regular plots and covered with roads for wind "farms." And nary a word is offered in protest of this desecration. But Austin does offer us some measure of hope. The desert, she says, changes men and not the other way around. Hopefully it will recover from the rapes of the last decade as those who work in it come to see their destruction for what it is. If not, all that will remain of the desert will be the words of Mary Austin, and few among her future readers will be able to understand them.