In the fall last year, with another long pandemic winter looming ahead, I invited the ladies of my nuclear family to join me in a monthly book club. To my surprise and delight, they all said 'yes'. Each month one of us would choose a book, and at the end of the month we'd get together online and chat about it. Four months later, we decided to keep it going, so I chose a book that had sneaked up on my radar recently: Miracle Country by Kendra Atleework.
On the one hand, the cover was enticing - I'm a sucker for woodblock-style art, and combining that with a very desert-like tree was a recipe for drawing my attention. But when I read what the book was about, I had to add it to the list (a Trello board of all the books I am interested in reading, currently sitting at 52 non-fiction, 38 fiction), and when we decided to keep up the book club, I felt that this would be an excellent next pick.
I was not wrong.
Atleework basically does in this book what I have tried to do in my own nature writing-memoir hybrid (unfinished) works. Her details of the landscape and the people are intimate and lovely. The way that she shares her family's pain and promise, it's growth and rootedness, is incredibly personal and relatable. She writes with such love for a life entwined with the Eastern Sierra that I came of age in, in which I feel strings of my own heart have rooted and tangled in the stones and sage, and where she had the fortune of living her entire life (with intermissions) - albeit a little further south than where I roamed. Our ranges (and our ages) are so close, I can't help but wonder if we ever had opportunity to cross paths.
A big player in the book is the ghost of Mulholland and the water theft of the Owens Valley watershed, and the ghost of the water itself. I marveled at her balanced view on the subject. My senior thesis in undergrad was all about the water theft and the fight for water rights of these little communities against the big bad LA City (which the little communities won, by the way, in a manner of speaking... though the rewards are still uncertain and tenuous). I was pretty one-sided. I was also, looking back, remarkably eurocentric. Not only did Atleework add an incredible depth to the story by teaching me about the experiences of the First Peoples in that watershed, but she also treated Mulholland with a level of humanity that I in my early twenties was unable to imagine. Would I have been able to see him as a whole human if I were writing that paper now? To see him as a man with a dream to improve the city in which he lived (albeit to the utter detriment of the future of an entire region)? In my adult life, I have tried to see the whole person more, whether it's the latest media bad guy or the person annoying me at work. They aren't like this with everyone, I tell myself. This person has friends, family, maybe even pets. I admit that I had always viewed Mulholland as only a bad guy. Being able to see him as another failing human was good.
Perhaps what I love the most about Miracle Country, as alluded to briefly above, is the way she wove in the history of the region with her own story and that of her family and community. She draws heavily on Mary Austin, a writer of the water war years that I think will have to be added to the reading list. Atleework didn't stop at white European history, though. She delved deeper, reading and meeting with Native American elders and making certain that their story of sixty generations was just as present in the landscape that she painted. I learned things I did not know about the people who lived there before whites barrelled in - that they built irrigation canals, that they grew and harvested various grasses for food, that white ranchers brought in cows which grazed all their crops and were totally oblivious (or so they claimed) to the harm they had done. Yet another example of European Americans' blindness to any kind of agriculture that didn't look like Farmer McGregor's Garden. Though this one I find even more appalling because it's irrigation ditches and fields of wild grain - how blind can we be!? I learned that the Inyo National Forest, 'inyo' meaning "dwelling place of the Great Spirit," - a name I've always loved - was actually created as part of the conspiracy to allow LA to take the water by limiting where development could occur, while also further reducing the lands of the people who had lived there for sixty generations. Such a beautiful name, with a not-so beautiful history. I'm not sure why I should've been surprised, though, given the history of public lands in Native American displacement in this country.
The final verdict is this: if you'd like to read a book that feels adjacent to a piece of my own heart, or just want to delve into some fascinating local history and family feels surrounded by beautiful nature writing, this is a great book. For me, it was thrilling and also felt a little bit like I was being egged on. "Write it already, I just published mine," she seems to be saying. And maybe this year will be the year (I say, for another year running) that I really delve seriously back into my own writing again. But maybe this will be the year. After all, I started writing on this blog again, didn't I?
Until next time!
No comments:
Post a Comment