All streets of the mountains lead to the citadel, steep or slow they go up to the core of the hills. Any trail that goes otherwhere must dip and cross, sidle and take chances. Rifts of the hills open into each other, and the high meadows are often wide enough to be called valleys by courtesy; but one keeps this distinction in mind, — valleys are the sunken places of the earth, cañons are scored out by the glacier ploughs of God. They have a better name in the Rockies for these hill-fenced open glades of pleasantness; they call them parks. Here and there in this hill country one comes upon blind gullies fronted by high stony barriers. These head also for the heart of the mountains; their distinction is that they never get anywhere.
All mountain streets have streams to thread them, or deep grooves where a stream might run. You would do well to avoid that range uncomforted by singing floods. You will find it forsaken of most things but beauty and madness and death and God. Many such lie east and north away from the mid Sierras, and quicken the imagination with the sense of purposes not revealed, but the ordinary traveler brings nothing away from them but an intolerable thirst.
MARY AUSTIN’S “THE LAND OF LITTLE RAIN” IS A LOVE POEM, IN PROSE, TO A LAND AND ITS INHABITANTS, HUMAN AND OTHERWISE. The landscape is the desolate country of eastern California, between the Sierras and Nevada. In Mary Austin’s words, the land is a living presence, evoked vividly and sensorially over the course of her slender tome. Her book is a work of nature writing inasmuch as nature is embedded in its pages, in the form of descriptions of landscapes, plants, and animals. Only once does Austin pause, at chapter’s end, to reflect on the human relationship to the natural world, and her pessimistic viewpoint is one I have encountered before in other writers from this time:
Man is the great blunderer going about in the woods, and there is no other except the bear makes so much noise. Being so much warned beforehand, it is a very stupid animal, or a very bold one, that cannot keep safely hid. The cunningest hunter is hunted in turn, and what he leaves of his kill is meat for some other. That is the economy of nature, but with it all there is not sufficient account taken of the works of man. There is no scavenger that eats tin cans, and no wild thing leaves a like disfigurement on the forest floor.
EXTRACTING FROM THIS WORK IS A DIFFICULT TASK. It is of one fabric, a tapestry of words that weaves the reader into the landscape, through encounters with its storms, topography, geology, cultures, and wildlife. Consider this rich evocation of the way to the home of the Shoshone Indians:
To reach that country…, one goes south and south, within hearing of the lip-lapping of the great tideless lake, and south by east over a high rolling distinct, miles and miles of sage and nothing else. So one comes to the country of the painted hills, — old red cones of craters, wasteful beds of mineral earths, hot, acrid springs, and steam jets issuing from a leprous soil. After the hills the black rock, after the craters the spewed lava, ash strewn, of incredible thickness, and full of sharp, winding rifts. There are picture writings carved deep in the face of the cliffs to mark the way for those who do not know it. On the very edge of the black rock the earth falls away in a wide sweeping hollow, which is Shoshone land.
South the land rises in very blue hills, blue because thickly wooded with the ceanothus and manzanita, the haunt of deer and the border of the Shoshones. Eastward the land goes very var by broken ranges, narrow valleys of pure desertness, and huge mesas uplifted to the sky-line, east and east, and no man knows the end of it.
It is a land that was, in Austin’s day, still partly unknown, despite the (scanty) human presence upon it. Consider, for instance, Austin’s account of the tulares, vast expanses of marsh covered almost entirely by tule, a species of sedge. Avoided by people, the landscape is a haven for birds:
The tulares are full of mystery and malaria. That is why we have meant to explore them and have never done so. It must be a happy mystery. So you must think, to hear the redwinged blackbirds proclaim it clear March mornings. Flocks of them, and every flock a myriad, shelter in the dry, whispering stems. They make little arched runways deep into the heart of the tule beds. Miles across the valley, one hears the clamor of their high, keen flutings in the mating weather.
Wild fowl, quacking hordes of them, nest in the tulares. Any day’s venture will raise from open shallows the great blue heron on his hollow wings. Chill evenings the mallard drakes cry continually from the glassy pools, the bittern’s hollow boom rolls along the water paths. Strange and farflown fowl drop down against the saffron, autumn sky. All day wings beat above it, hazy with speed; long flights of cranes glimmer in the twilight. By night one wakes to hear the clanging geese go over. One wishes for, but gets no nearer speech from those the reedy fens have swallowed up. What they do there, how fare, what find, is the secret of the tulares.
Finally, to close, here is perhaps my favorite passage from the book — a potent evocation of the western landscape, told almost entirely through its scents. (Dare I call it scentsational?)
Out West, the west of the mesas and the unpatented hills, there is more sky than any place in the world. It does not sit flatly on the rim of earth, but begins somewhere out in the space in which the earth is poised, hollows more, and is full of clean winey winds. There are some odors, too, that get into the blood. There is the spring smell of sage that is the warning that sap is beginning to work in a soil that looks to have none of the juices of life in it; it is the sort of smell that sets one thinking what a long furrow the plough would turn up here, the sort of smell that is the beginning of new leafage, is best at the plant’s best, and leaves a pungent trail where wild cattle crop. There is the smell of sage at sundown, burning sage from [Paiute Indian villages] and sheep camps, that travels on the thin blue wraiths of smoke; the kind of smell that gets into the hair and garments, is not much liked except upon long acquaintance, and every Paiute and shepherd smells of it indubitably. There is the palpable smell of the bitter dust that comes up from the alkali flats at the end of the dry seasons, and the smell of rain from the wide-mouthed cañons. And last the smell of the salt grass country, which is the beginning of other things that are the end of the mesa trail.
AS A POSTSCRIPT, A FEW WORDS ABOUT MY BOOK. Alas, I cannot afford a first edition of Austin’s work, priced in the hundreds of dollars. I settled instead for a 1961 paperback a Doubleday Anchor Book from the Natural History Library. Though well worn and weatherbeaten, the book was otherwise free of writing or other evidence of its history. The list of other titles in the series in back was particularly helpful; it enabled me to find two more writers from the first 42 years of the 20th century.