Arizona neighbors |
I
have two books to share today, but first I’ll be taking a brief memory trip. By
this time last winter, David and Sarah and I were in the high desert of
southeast Arizona, bedding down in a small cabin in a ghost town, with
mountains on all sides, and as I told David the other day, I think about it
more than he would ever guess.
“What
do you miss most about it?” he asked curiously. He never fell in love with the
area the way I did.
That
kind of question, though, is almost impossible to answer! It’s like asking what
you love most about someone you love: features and qualities of a person or
place are not discrete building blocks, not elements at all. Everything goes
together. But
it seemed a worthwhile question to try to answer, so I thought a while and then
said, “Maybe the light. The way the sun shone almost every day and the cabin
was so bright and full of light.”
Michigan winter |
Continually overcast winter skies in Michigan
are much harder to bear than snow and cold, although with the beginning of
February our days are already significantly longer, and, I say happily (on a
good morning), “Spring is only two months away!” Here
at home, our beloved old farmhouse is divided into small rooms in the way
people built in the old days in northern Michigan. Also, the gracious, windowed
front porch, where we spend so many evenings in other seasons but which is
unheated in winter, forms an insulating barrier along the front of the house,
as does the woodshed in back, meaning that our central room, the one where we
do most of our winter living, has no exterior walls and is thus protected from
cold winter winds. Evening coziness is the room’s strong suit. During the day,
however, it is almost as dark as tiny-windowed Basque stone farmhouse in the
Pyrenees.
Contrast that with --
Dos Cabezas sunrise |
Light comes in! |
The
ghost town cabin in the high desert was basically one large room, with
uninsulated plywood walls and lots of windows. I was up every morning before or
as the sun’s first light broke over the mountains to the east, and as the
morning progressed I moved between my writing table and the cabin windows, with
pleasure and satisfaction at the routine, first lost in working and then called
to adjust, once more, the slant of the blinds. The idea was to close them
against the night cold of the desert when darkness fell in the evening, open
them slightly for the first morning light, open fully once the sun’s warmth
became available, and then, later, angle them half-closed again to keep the
cabin air from becoming uncomfortably hot. The regularity of light and darkness
governed the hours of the days and nights.
I
could go on at this point and start listing other things I miss, but my main
point at present is only that the desert and mountains carved a place for
themselves in my heart, so now I read books set in the West with greater
interest and feel a personal sympathy that landscape and culture did not call
forth for me before our time there.
One
heart-rending book I finished reading last week was Dead in Their Tracks:
Crossing America’s Desert Borderlands in the New Era, by John Annerino, and I wish I’d known
about this book when Trinity was choosing to read on the subject of migrant
workers from Mexico. The author’s research went further into the dangerous
experience of border crossing than anything else I know or can imagine. At one
time he and the four Mexican immigrant workers he was accompanying on their
desperate bid to find work were out of water and facing death. His book, in
fact, documents as many as possible of the lives that have been lost over the
years in this dangerous crossing.
Art at border crossing |
(One
question: everyone stresses water, but no one, in either movies or books about la
frontera,
seems to mention electrolytes. I had plenty of water on my hike with a friend
in the mountains – water, food, sunshade, sunblock – but it took me many months
later, in conversation with someone who has spent years in Africa, to realize
that as perspiration and breathing wicked moisture from my body, I was also
losing salt and that water alone was doing nothing to replace the salt. I think,
in fact, that the more water I drank, the faster I was washing out and
depleting my electrolytes, because gulp as I might, I kept having spells of
dizziness when my entire field of vision became nothing but buzzing light, and
I had to sit down to keep from falling. Not many times in my life have I felt
life’s fragility so keenly. So what about salt tablets? Does anyone carry them
in the desert? If not, how do they manage without them? If so, why are they
never mentioned?)
My head is spinning, my body is convulsing with chills and nausea, and the ground is heaving at me in dizzying waves of sand and rock when Marcelino first sees Interstate 8: “Mira! La carretera!” (Look! The highway!)
Some
would fault -- have, I’m sure, faulted -- Annerino for lack of journalistic
objectivity, but I have no criticism of his book on that count. Here is a
writer who walked way more than “a mile” in the shoes of his subjects – and
walked with
them for miles, too. Is an objective account of such an experience possible?
Where is another journalist who has had the guts even to undertake such an
experience, let alone attempt to write about it dispassionately? Besides, any
reader is free to dismiss or skim over the writer’s pleadings on behalf his
subjects, and still the bare, unadorned, hard facts remain, facts that must
give rise to urgent questions demanding answers.
If
you are an American, whatever your views on immigration and border control, you
should
read this book.
My
only disappointment with this book was technical, in that the copyediting left
a lot to be desired. For that I do not fault the author, however, but the
publisher, the University of Arizona Press. The editing buck always stops with
the publisher, as I see it. So what gives here? I expect any book from a university
press to have regularity of pronouns and agreement between nouns and verbs. I
do not expect to find infelicitous, badly chosen adjectives or confusing
syntax. When my inner editor has to work as hard as it did with this book, more
than one someone has seriously fallen down on the job.
I’ll
zero in on one very specific criticism, too. With any obscure technical jargon
or regional idiom, i.e., in this book, “cutting sign” -- a phrase that appears
as early as the introduction and repeatedly through the book, sometimes as
frequently as two or three times on a single page -- I expect the first
instance to be accompanied by a definition for the uninitiated reader. In
context, we gradually figure out that “cutting sign” has something to do with
tracking, but is it different from tracking or just another way of saying the
same thing? If different, in what way? Informing and being mysterious are
mutually incompatible goals.
Still,
read the book. Read the book. Read the book! Too many people with
strongly held and very loud opinions about the border know nothing of its
reality in the lives of desperate men, women, and children.
From
the borderland, my reading next took me northward to Nevada. Sweet
Promised Land,
by Robert Laxalt,
first published in 1957, is now considered a classic of the American West.
Where Dead in Their Tracks informs readers about the present and
challenges them to envision a better future, Sweet Promised Land looks backward to the
rough frontier days of Nevada in the early 20th century, open range,
cattlemen vs. sheepmen, towns not yet come into their own, and immigrants who
came primarily to make money, perhaps also to learn English, with always the
dream of returning home to their native European villages as self-made American
success stories.
Such
is the time and setting of Sweet Promised Land, but that description
tells you nothing of the reading experience. Part memoir, part biography, with
much necessary history woven in, it is a book that rises above genre, but not
with fireworks or the least pretension. A small book, only 158 pages, it begins
modestly and proceeds quietly. You take it up with mild curiosity and find
yourself drawn into another world – another life, that is, stretching between
two very different
worlds – and you are reluctant to have it far from your hand when you stop to
do something else for a while.
“My father was a sheepherder, and his home was the hills.”
How
does that simple sentence cast such an immediate spell? It reminds me of Isaak
Dinesen’s “Once I had a farm in Africa” and also puts me in mind of the story
of a nonbeliever who demanded of Hillel that he explain the Torah to him while he was standing
on one foot. Hillel's response? “Love your neighbor as yourself. The rest is commentary.” In a very
real sense, the life of the author’s sheepherding father in America, Basque
origins in the Pyrenees, the long-delayed visit home to aged family back in
that mountain range between France and Spain, and the realization of father and
son that Nevada, not the Basque country, was now their own family home – all is
contained, in seed form, in the book’s perfect opening sentence.
First
the son tells of his own childhood and the relationship of his largely absent
father to the family. While their mother managed family businesses in town, the
father was in the mountains most of the time in his sheep camp, not a fixed
abode but one that shifted as the sheep were moved to new grazing. All the
Basque sheepherders talked of going back to France “next year” to visit
families, but very few ever made the trip. But with Laxalt’s aging sisters back
in the old country longing to see him again, Robert and his brothers conspire
to arrange for their father to take, at last, the long-delayed trip.
And
with that we leave the modern world behind altogether. In the Basque villages,
following two world wars, nothing in the way of life had changed since
Dominique had left:
...There was a little boy in a beret and short trousers, and under his arm a loaf of bread that seemed as long as he was. There was a crude, wooden cart pulled by two oxen, whose nodding heads kept rhythm with the gay fringes on their horns. There was a girl in a scarf and bright peasant dress....
Men
still wore wooden shoes to work outdoors, and women still cooked in huge iron
pots hung in fireplaces. Nothing had changed -- except the man returning to the
country and everyone he had left behind almost half a century before. Years
that left stone buildings exactly as they were had left their mark on human
beings. Dominique would see a familiar face and think he recognized an old
friend, only to learn that the friend was dead, and this was the friend’s son.
My
inner editor lay back, mental pencil hand idle, while I lost myself in Sweet
Promised Land.
The effect of beautiful prose is to carry a reader effortlessly forward, its
only drawback that the end comes too soon!
Besides
nonfiction categorization and Western subject matter, the third commonality of
these two books, and the most important, is the American immigrant experience.
In both stories we as readers encounter the hopes of immigrants and the new
land’s promise of a better life, if the newcomers only have the determination
to work very, very hard to conquer poverty, overcome prejudice, and win a place
for themselves in the sweet promised land.
Determination,
willingness to work, and, it must be added, the good fortune to see their
adventure through. One of Dominique’s fellow immigrants was not lucky. Many of
those whose stories Annerino tells are not.
And I want to dedicate today's post to my dear friend Helen. She will understand why.
Poverty in Agua Prieta |
And I want to dedicate today's post to my dear friend Helen. She will understand why.
2 comments:
"So, what about salt tablets?" sort of piqued my interest as an old retired chemist. The mammalian
electrolytic balance is for the most part
self adjusting: one of those very complex feedback loop enzyme directed biochemical processes our brain directs without our conscious awareness. Salt tablets are a longtime solution, but not
without their own problems. Too much sudden salt, for example. It makes one very thirsty so they need even more water and the kidneys go into overtime. If they cannot keep up, too much water remains in the body, blood pressure sky rockets, etc. (some recommend licking the evaporated "sweat salt" from the forearms, believe it or not!) So lately, profuse sweaters like endurance athletes opt for the liquids like gator-aide, which like the hospital saline drip, are isotonic. Like the blood stream, about 9 g/l. Another factor is that there are other essential electrolytes that are lost in dehydration which more modern tablets/solutions address Ref
Good question; perked me up. Next time I may get into the
chemistry of gargling with salt water for sore throat. :)
BB, long time, no see! I have missed you!
Yeah, I figured those commercial drinks would have good stuff that plain water lacks, but I am somewhat resistant to them, from a political point of view. Have since read that fresh lemon juice helps. Maybe squeezing a lemon into a gallon of water? Or maybe I should have been licking my arm throughout the hike? I think if my body had been self-regulating for the problem, it would not have occurred -- certainly not repeatedly. I was actually very frightened but lacked the energy for out-and-out panic, which I also wanted to avoid so my friend would not panic, also. The only roughly equivalent experience I can recall in my life was being given anesthetic before my son was born. As I was going under, I thought, I could die, and I wouldn't be able to call for help.
I look forward to your lesson on salt water gargling chemistry. Be well!
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