Mary Austin, The Land of Little Rain, 1903. [New York: Dover, 1996]

This is a poignant description of Eastern California before the drainage and reclamation of the Owens Valley and Mono Lake. East of the Sierra Nevada Mountains is Mary Austin's well drawn sense of place.

"There is neither poverty of soil nor species to account for the sparseness of desert growth, but simply that each plant requires more room. So much earth must be preempted to extract so much moisture." [5]

"East away from the Sierras, south from Panamint and Amargosa, east and south many an uncounted mile is the Country of Lost Borders." [1]

The Land of Little Rain

"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.... but men are bewitched by it and tempted to try the impossible." [7]

This is the nature of that country. There are hills. rounded. blunt, burned, squeezed up out of chaos, chrome and vermillion painted, aspiring to the snow line. Between the hills lie high level-looking plains full of intolerable sun glare, or narrow valleys drowned in blue haze."

Since this is hill country one expects to find springs, but not to depend upon them,..." [3]

Water Trails of the Ceriso

"The coyote is your true water-witch, one who snuffs and paws,again at the smallest spot of moisture scented earth until he has freed the blind water from the soil.... in localities where not even an Indian would look for it." [9-10]

The Scavengers

"The increase in wild creatures is in proportion to the things they feed upon: the more carrion the more buzzards."

The Pocket Hunter

Shoshone Land

"It is the country of the bighorn, the wapiti, and the wolf, nesting place of buzzards, land of cloud-nourished trees and wild things that live without drink." [25]

"Gopherus agasizii, the turtle that by feeding on buds, going without drink, and burrowing in the sand through the winter contrives to live a known period of twenty-five years." [28]

Jimville

"The town looks to have spilled out of squaw gulch, and that in fact, is the sequence of itsgrowth."

300 inhabitants and four bars

My Neighbor's field

"Curiously, all this human occupancy of greed and mischief left no mark on the field, but the Indians did, and the unthinking sheep."

The Mesa Trail

"These are working hours, and all across the mesa one sees the women whisking seeds of chia into their spoon-shaped baskets, these emptied again into the huge conical carriers. supported on the shoulders by a leather band about the forehead." [43]

Out West,...there is more sky than anywhere else in the world." [44]

"There is the spring smell of sage... there is the smell of sage at sundown....There is the palpable smell of the bitter dust thatvcomes up from the alkali flats at the end of the dry seasons, and the smell of rains from the wide-mouthed canons. And last the smell of the salt grass country, which is the beginning of other things that are at the end of the mesa trail." [44-45]

The Basket Maker

"To understand the fashion of any life, one must know the land it is lived in and the procession of the year." [45]

"Seyavi's bowls (wicker basketry) are wonders of technical precision, inside and out, the palm finds no fault with them, but the subtlest appeal is in the sense that warns us of humanness in the way the design spreads into the flare of the bowl."

"Sevayi cut willows for basketry by the ceek where it wound toward the river against the sun and sucking winds." [47]

The Streets of the Mountain

"All mountain streets have streams to thread them, or deep grooves where a stream might run." [50]

Water Borders

"I like that name the Indians give to the mountain of Lone Pine, and find it pertinent to my subject, -- Oppapago, The Weeper. It sits eastward and solitary from the lordliest ranks of the Sierras, and above the range of little, old blunt hills, and has a bowed, grave aspect as of some woman you might have known, looking out across the grassy barrows of her dead." [55-56]

"The origins of mountain streams is like the origin of tears, patent to the understanding, but mysterious to the sense." [56]

The Owens River

Other Water Borders

"It is the proper destiny of every considerable stream in the west to become an irrigating ditch." [61]

"It is difficult to come into intimate relations with appropriated waters; like very busy people they have no time to reveal themselves."

"Last and inevitable resort of overflow waters is the tulares, great wastes of reeds (Juncus) in sickly, slow streams. The reeds, called tules, are ghostly pale in winter, in summer deep poisonous-looking green, the waters thick and brown; the reed beds breaking into dingy pools, clumps of rotting willows, narrow winding water lanes and sinking paths." [65]

Tule is a grass, she suggests that these tules spread "Too slowly for counting they raise little islands from the bog and reclaim the land."

Nurslings of the Sky

"It always does rain somewhere among the peaks: the unusual thing is that one should escape it."

The Little Town of the Grape Vines

El Pueblo de las Uvas, "where all the speech is soft, all the manners gentle, where all the dishes have cile in them and they make more of the sixteenth of September than they do of the 4th of July." [71]

"when liberty awoke and cried in the provinces of Old Mexico." "Viva la Libertad." [74]

"At Las Uvas every house is a piece of earth-- thick walled, whitwashed adobe that keeps the even temperature of a cave;..."

"Come away, you who are obsessed with your own importance in the scheme of things, and have got nothing you did not sweat for, come away by the brown valleys and full-blossomed hills to the even breathing days, to the kindliness, earthiness, ease of Pueblo de Las Uvas."

top	site map	home