Review by Frank And Sue Snively
High Plains – March 2008 – Colorado Central Magazine
West of Last Chance
by Peter Brown and Kent Haruf
Published in 2008 by W.W. Norton & Company
ISBN 0393065723
WHEN YOU RIDE EAST from the Rockies on a motorcycle, you have to forego the luxury of a radio or of conversation with fellow passengers, and concentrate on the countryside. At such times, I’ve found myself looking for that one special scene that can produce a photograph that sums up the entire “Plains Experience.” But after a good many trips, I’ve been forced to conclude that there’s no such thing.
Now, however, there is a book of photographs by Peter Brown with text by Kent Haruf, which does the job.
The photographs have a powerful impact, when you look at a succession of them — even if one alone could not possibly do the job. Haruf’s passages in this book are lean, but a few words can create a masterful summary. One small set of words, combined appropriately with the photographs is all that’s needed — at least if you can write like Kent Haruf and take pictures like Peter Brown.
As Haruf says, “You have to know how to look at this country. You have to slow down. It isn’t pretty, but it’s beautiful.”
Both Brown and Haruf obviously know how to look at it.
The Great Plains pictures are taken in states from Texas up through South Dakota with the majority portraying eastern Colorado. It is probably no coincidence that most of the photographs were taken in places wracked by black rollers during the Dust Bowl era. The lack of trees and bushes is an integral part of this countryside.
A personal comment: While I have certainly ridden through all these states many times, on major highways, there was only one picture of the countryside that I immediately recognized — and it wasn’t of the wide open, relatively flat spaces which the wind swept away, but rather of an abandoned highway in the Sand Hills of Nebraska. For reasons that are surely well known to the Nebraska highway department, they do not tear up an old highway to repave it in the Sand Hills, they construct another highway alongside.
The abandoned road that Peter Brown photographed was decorated with many yellow stripes (so it seems reasonable to guess that at the end of a work day, the highway crew discharged the remainder of the day’s paint on a piece of old highway — thereby emptying their tanks and avoiding any pollution of the ground water).
The pictures of the open plains, abandoned buildings, and lonesome highways, show the stark grandeur and beauty of the country. The cumulative impact is indeed as Haruf says, “one of Beauty, though not prettiness.”
On the other hand, the pictures taken in the towns are generally rather depressing. There are a lot of vacant buildings, and even a new Wal-Mart somehow looks a bit forlorn and dusty.
— Frank Snively
ANOTHER ROAD PICTURE is of a straight, narrow track that travels up a slight rise, and disappears in the distance. In this photo, it’s not the vastness of the Great Plains that impacts the mind (as it is in many of Brown’s pictures), but rather the lone tortoise ambling slowly across the road in the foreground.
That tortoise becomes a dramatic focal point of the script in Haruf’s account of a pregnant country girl whose husband has left to go to town, 60 miles away. The man leaves his wife at their desolate homestead even though she’s due to deliver any day.
Her time comes in the evening, and she makes her way along the dark, lonely road to the nearest farm house two miles away. Because of the dark, her condition, and her fear of getting lost, the woman slowly crawls along, feeling for the shoulder of the road with her bare hands, moving much like the tortoise in Brown’s picture.
Two days after the baby was born, the husband returned to find his wife gone. He made his way to the nearest neighbors, who told him about his wife’s slow journey in the dark and the subsequent birth of his child. After relaying the story, the neighbors waited patiently for his reply, and the husband finally turned to them and casually replied, “Well, is that so?”
In his ending comment, Haruf, as he frequently does, captures the heart and soul of that man and others like him, when he says about the husband, who was his uncle, “In a land of taciturnity, my uncle was taciturn to a fault.”
The photos and text in this book work in tandem, creating powerful images which display the spirit of the plains people, revealing their stoicism, determination, endurance, and ability to see the humor in life.
But in a few places, Brown’s pictures and Haruf’s words don’t quite seem to go together, which had me flipping back and forth in the book, trying to figure out the relationship between the two. In a few places, the relevant pictures seemed to lag behind the text. For example, on page 56 there’s a story about a woman listening to a tape as she drives down windblown Interstate 80 and 76. The picture adjacent to the text shows a corn field, which is somewhat apropos, but for me it would have worked better if the page following the corn field had been placed next to the text, because it shows a glimpse of an actual Interstate.
IN OTHER INSTANCES, the relationship between the text and photographs was so subtle that I really had to look for it. For example, there is a picture of what appears to be a windmill along with a tale about a couple who had two boys but hoped for a girl. That didn’t seem to have much to do with a windmill, until after I looked for some connection about four times, and finally found what may have been a little girl at the base of the windmill.
There are other examples of this somewhat disconcerting dissonance (which I suspect will jar other readers, too). But I’m not sure whether it’s a flaw, a waker-upper, or just an inevitability, because West of Last Chance is not a conventional coffee-table book that merely offers marvelous pictures with poetic cutlines. This beautiful book is deeper, grittier, and more memorable, emotional, and profound than most photographic collections.
And for the most part, the book’s text and photos co-ordinate well. Certainly the pictures and writing portraying religious life on the Great Plains show absolute continuity between the photographs and writing. There is the church sign for Our Savior’s Lutheran Church; or more impressive the interior of a church showing the upright piano with a small bouquet of zinnias on its top, and the inevitable picture of Christ alongside a dangling double light fixture with one bulb socket empty. The still-life created by that humble light fixture, the zinnias and Jesus, speaks to Brown’s ability to capture the emotional essence of religious life on the plains.
Haruf does likewise in the preceding text, in which he writes about the fellowship of the church and emphasizes the church suppers that were (and perhaps still are) central to religious life on the plains. He describes the church ladies who were always in the kitchen, making coffee, heating the many dishes people had brought and cooling them down, sticking in serving spoons, and constantly carrying things back and forth from the kitchen to the dining areas. “And they all,” Haruf says, “short or tall, wore delicately-pale much washed flowered aprons over their dresses, and they all kept talking and chattering, and getting into one another’s way, so that there was a great efficient cheerful commotion back at the rear of the Fellowship Hall.”
HAVING GROWN UP on the midwestern plains, I could really relate to all of this. When Haruf started talking about the food, he had only to get to the celery and macaroni salad when I thought, “I wonder if he is going to talk about the JELL-O.” And he did, with vigor: There was just the Jell-O, then the Jell-O with tangerines, the Jell-O with bananas, the Jell-O with mandarin oranges and the Jell-O with cottage cheese.
I had, up until then (having read his novels), concluded that Haruf always manages to capture the essence of the plains life and the plains people. But with that last passage, it hit me like a bolt of lightning. Haruf not only captures their essence, it is evident that he is one of them. Haruf has lived among them and has gained the ultimate understanding of the plains and its people, just as Peter Brown has done with his photographs. It is that “capturing of the essence” that makes West of Last Chance such an outstanding book.
— Sue Snively
