In Mary Austin Country

I first heard of Mary Austin when searching for a new book to read. While perusing a list that the San Francisco Chronicle put out a few years ago ranking the 100 best nonfiction books about the American West, I noticed her book, The Land of Little Rain, at the very top. A laundry list of thoughts began to pile up in my head - I had never heard of her; I had never heard of this book; It was written in 1903 (by a woman roaming the high desert on her own, no less); How did this book make its way to the top of the list? As it turns out, this slight, unassuming collection of short essays opened my eyes to a whole new way of looking at the world.

Austin wrote about the West through her own direct experiences and observations. She reflected for a sentence, a paragraph or a whole chapter on subjects as small as an insect or as expansive as the sky. It was all connected in her mind, and therefore worthy of the time it took to explain how. She became a student of sheepherders and Native Americans - two groups who were marginalized and disdained by society at the turn of the last century. Her careful, compassionate observations of their daily life now provide us with a window into their world and an opportunity to reflect on our own perceptions and prejudices.

While on a road trip on the east side of the Sierra last weekend, I passed through the little town of Independence and took some time to visit the place Mary called home while writing The Land of Little Rain. At the local history museum I learned about resident Native American tribes, the Manzanar Internment Camp for Japanese-Americans during WWII, area mining claims, the Owens Valley water battle with Los Angeles, and details about many important local figures. Regarding Mary Austin, they had arranged a small glass case with original copies of a few of her books, a single photograph and a brief biography. I left the museum somewhat disappointed by this very humble tribute to a woman who has so illuminated our cultural and ecological understanding of the West. On the way out of town I passed by her home. A small historical marker stands out front with little information provided beyond a short, albeit compelling, quote. The 'no trespassing' signs around the property make it clear that this home serves as a monument only and not a museum. 

As I walked back to my car, I happened to glance to my right and noticed the flat wide street in front of her house heading due west out of town and straight up into the mountains. I heard her words in my head, "All streets of the mountains lead to the citadel; steep or slow they go up to the core of the hills." I realized that although her contributions may be assembled in a shadow box, summarized in a paragraph, or analyzed by professors in a classroom, Mary's real tribute is written across the vast landscape of the Eastern Sierra. She is a kindred spirit to those who wish to view the world with an unbounded sense of curiosity and wonder. How could such a spirit be contained inside four walls? 

And so here is my tribute to Mary...

"There is a Paiute proverb to the effect that no man should attempt the country east of the Sierras until he has learned to sleep in the shade of his arrows. This is a picturesque way of saying that he must be able to reduce his wants to the limit of necessity. Those who have been able to do so, and have trusted the land to repay them, have discovered that the measure is over-full. A man may not find wealth there, nor too much of food even, but he often finds himself, which is much more important."
-Mary Austin

"The shape of a new mountain is roughly pyramidal, running out into long shark-finned ridges that interfere and merge into other thunder-splintered sierras. You get the saw-tooth effect from a distance, but the near-by granite bulk glitters with the terrible keen polish of old glacial ages...When those glossy domes swim into the alpenglow, wet after rain, you conceive how long and imperturbable are the purposes of God."
-The Streets of the Mountain



"The lake is the eye of the mountain, jade green, placid, unwinking, also unfathomable. Whatever goes on under the high and stony brows is guessed at." 

- Water Borders

"The arrow-maker had a stiff knee from a wound in a long-gone battle, and for that reason he sat in the shade of his wickiup, and chipped arrow points from flakes of obsidian that the young men brought him from Togobah, fitting them to shafts of reeds from the river marsh...They drove bargains with him for arrows for their own hunting, or for the sake of the stories he could tell. For an armful of reeds he would make three arrows, and for a double armful he would tell tales."

- Mahala Joe

"Sometimes she plaited willows for the coarser kinds of basket-work, or, in hot noonings while the flock dozed, worked herself collars and necklaces of white and red and turquoise-colored beads, and other times sat dreaming on the sand." 

- The Coyote-Spirit and the Weaving Woman

"It is difficult to come into intimate relations with appropriated waters; like very busy people they have no time to reveal themselves. One needs to have known an irrigating ditch when it was a brook, and to have lived by it, to mark the morning and evening tone of its crooning, rising and falling to the excess of snow water; to have watched far across the valley, south to the Eclipse and north to the Twisted Dyke, the shining wall of the village water gate; to see still blue herons stalking the little glinting weirs across the field."
- Other Water Borders

"None other than this long brown land lays such a hold on the affections. The rainbow hills, the tender bluish mists, the luminous radiance of the spring, have the lotus charm. They trick the sense of time, so that once inhabiting there you always mean to go away without quite realizing that you have not done it." 

- The Land of Little Rain

"But if ever you come beyond the borders as far as the town that lies in a hill dimple at the foot of Kearsarge, never leave it until you have knocked at the door of the brown house under the willow-tree at the end of the village street, and there you shall have such news of the land, of its trails and what is astir in them, as one lover of it can give to another." 

- Quote on the historic marker outside her former home