Review by Ed Quillen
Mountain West – January 2007 – Colorado Central Magazine
The Landscape of Home – A Rocky Mountain Land Series Reader
Edited by Jeff Lee
Published in 2006 by Johnson Books
ISBN 1-55566-393-1
THIS IS AN ANTHOLOGY of essays about life in the West, and some of its two dozen contributors will be familiar to Colorado Central readers. Regular columnist George Sibley appears with “Sawmill,” my favorite piece from his Dragons in Paradise collection which came out a couple of years ago. Peter Anderson of Crestone, an occasional contributor, provides “Trail Notes” from his First Church of the Higher Elevation.
Other contributors to The Landscape of Home are people whose work I’ve enjoyed and admired, among them Stanley Crawford, Ann Zwinger, Andrew Gulliford, and Chip Ward. As for the rest, well, I’ll look for their work in the future — every piece in here was a pleasure to read.
“Pleasure” might not be the precise word, though, since some pieces evoked some unpleasant times. For instance, there’s “Tumbleweeds” by Mary Taylor Young. She got her mother to talk about crossing the High Plains of western Kansas and eastern Colorado during the Dust Bowl years.
Her mother’s family was relatively prosperous. They lived in Leavenworth on the east side of Kansas. To escape the summer heat, the family drove to Estes Park, Colorado, for a few weeks of vacation.
“The family road trips when I was a kid were long and dull, but we were always sure of finding places to buy gas and food. Not so in the 1930s, when traveling across the Dust Bowl was a serious undertaking. In those days, there were no McDonalds where families could stop for a quick hamburger. Knowing provisions might be hard to find along the way, my grandmother packed big jugs of watter and baskets of food to carry with them. They held the sandwiches, fruit, and cookies that make a road trip more bearable….
“‘The worst part was the ghost towns,’ Mom remembers. Many towns along the highway were empty, the inhabitants gone, fled perhaps to California, like the Joads in Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, but just as likely to be somewhere else in the Midwest. Entire towns, which a few years earlier had been bustling farm communities, were completely abandoned. These collections of empty buildings were eerie and disheartening to the young family driving into them, reinforcing their sense of being the only living things in a land of the dead…. The towns that still had occupants and offered a few services posted warning signs that said ‘No Gas for 100 miles.’ The men at those gas stations looked gaunt, dried-up, and dusty.”
PRAIRIE GHOST TOWNS always trouble me a lot more than our abandoned mountain settlements. Miners know a vein is going to pinch out someday. But those homesteaders thought they were building something permanent and sustainable, which makes pondering the wreckage of their dreams unpleasant — but what good writing.
For an unpleasant scene closer to home, there’s “Living Downstream,” taken from the book Leadville: The Struggle to Revive an American Town by Gillian Klucas.
“Earlier that day, five miles east of Doc’s ranch, rusty-hued sludge had poured out of an old tunnel cut into the hillside, a ‘Danger! Do Not Enter’ sign affixed to one of the decaying wooden beams holding up the tunnel’s entrance. The sludge entered California Gulch, one of many crevices dug into the mountains by glaciers that draw snow and rain into the valleys below. But this sunny winter afternoon, the gulch carried a vast toxic hemorrhage that cut a swath through fresh snow as it plunged down the hillside past dormant aspens and pine trees. It edged by the hard-knocks town of Leadville, picking up toxic strength as it flowed past the enormous mound of mining spoils that loomed at the end of Leadville’s main street. The sludge continued pouring west, over silvery green sage; past Stringtown, a collection of trailer homes and run-down wooden structures; and through the shadows of undulating gritty black hills before entering Doc’s beautiful valley. There it poured into the Arkansas River.”
Later that day, as Doc Smith crossed the bridge en route to a meeting in Gunnison, “he looked at the colorful river winding its way down the valley. He knew the toxic concoction was headed straight for the pump station that carries Arkansas River water out of the valley and over the mountains to supply the populous Colorado Front Range with drinking water. Doc smiled. ‘We got ’em,’ he said aloud, ‘We finally got ’em.'”
The selections in Landscape of Home are grouped into six categories, including “Living in the West,” “Working the Land,” and “Moving Across the Landscape.” I found the “Working” part refreshing, because so much writing about the West ignores that aspect of life here, or else relegates it to a romanticized history of daring miners and intrepid homesteaders. For local lore beyond Klucas’s Leadville piece, there’s also “Spring Ritual” about the sandhill cranes of the San Luis Valley by Audrey DeLella Benedict.
But even when the locale was distant, I enjoyed everything I read, whether it concerned the athleticism of bison, the floor of an adobe house in New Mexico, the asbestos of Libby, Montana. Or the Aulocara elliotti grasshopper of northern Colorado, described in “Good for Nothing” by Jeffrey Lockwood:
“I spent hundreds of hours from June to September sitting on the prairie with a video camera recording grasshopper behavior…. Remaining motionless to capture the behavior of the grasshoppers in an undisturbed state became increasingly difficult as summer progressed. The chill of dew-dampened mornings gave way ever more quickly to the searing heat of midday. The grasses set seeds, which took the form of variously modified darts that worked their way into socks, creases, and bootlaces. The sweat bees showed no gratitude for their feast, delivering burning stings whenever trapped between clothing and flesh…. I didn’t analyze the ten-foot shelf of videotapes until that fall, but even in the summer I knew full well what grasshoppers did most of the time: nothing. Absolutely nothing.”
I’d love to keep quoting from this wonderful collection, but at some point I would exceed the “fair use” allowed by our copyright laws. Landscape of Home is presented as the first of “a series of books on the land and communities of the American West.”
With the assistance of John Calderazzo, SueEllen Campbell, and David Waag, Editor Jeff Lee has done a stellar job of finding and presenting work. This is an auspicious start for the Land Library’s new book series; although it might be quite a challenge to maintain a standard as high as this in future editions. But this isn’t the time to worry about that. Read this book, relish these selections, and you’ll doubtlessly get inspired to look for other works by these fine writers.
