A Sense of Place

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On Today’s Menu:
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** Share some mesquite-flour birthday cake for a Southwestern naturalist.
** Linger to ponder what our hometowns mean to us.
** Savor a last ½ cup smiling over poetic descriptions of beloved desert creatures.
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STT-26

First Sip:

To understand the fashion of any life,
one must know the land it is lived in
and the procession of the year…

Never believe what you are told, that
midsummer is the best time to go…
for seeing and understanding, the best time is
when you have the longest leave to stay.

And here is a hint…
travel light, and as much as possible live off the land.

– Mary Austin

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Slice of Cake:

On a mirage-breeding September morning…the
vast dim valley of the San Joaquin,
is palpitatingly hot and the air breathes like cotton wool.

– from The Land of Little Rain (1903)
by Mary Austin

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In her first book, The Land of Little Rain (1903),
Mary Austin evocatively recounts her travels through the deserts
of the American Southwest.

She writes of her “twice seven years’ wanderings” through country that
“begins at the foot of the east slope of the Sierras
and spreads out by less and less lofty hill ranges
toward the Great Basin.”

She describes plants, animals, and people in prose that reads like poetry.

Austin did not live the
typical life of a woman of her era
and that was reflected in her writing.
Austin sought in nature a place that was
not domesticated and that did not domesticate women.

– Stacy Alaimo
in Studies in American Fiction

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Mary Austin helped establish the Santa Fe Community Theatre.
She directed its very first production on February 14, 1919.

It’s now called Santa Fe Playhouse—and it is the
oldest continuously-running theater west of the Mississippi.¹
(Their 2019 season included eight plays.)

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Austin also helped found
The Southwestern Association for Indian Art in Santa Fe.

Next summer they’ll have their 99th Annual Santa Fe Indian Market.¹

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During the 1920s,
Austin was active in trying to save the Owens Valley
(a deep, arid valley south of Mono Lake in California).

It was a fight ultimately lost to
water diversions for the city of Los Angeles.

Out West,
the west of mesas and the unpatented hills,
…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…
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…

There is the palpable smell of bitter dust that comes up
from the alkali flats at the end of the dry seasons,
and the smell of rain from the widemouthed canyons.

– from The Land of Little Rain (1903)
by Mary Austin

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In 1929, Mary Austin’s good friend Ansel Adams took her picture. ²
She was less than pleased with the result.

She wrote to him:

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Sounds like she must have forgiven him, though!
Because the very next year, Mary Austin and Ansel Adams
co-authored a book called Taos Pueblo (1930).

The residents of the pueblo, along with the Taos tribal council,
allowed Adams access to photograph in and around the pueblo,
which is one of the oldest continuously inhabited communities in the United States.
(It became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1992.)

It was Ansel Adam’s very first book of photography.
Each copy included 12 of Adam’s original photographs—
I mean actual prints—not reproductions. (!)

To see one of these books,
you can go to the Rare Book Collections at the New York Public Library,
They have number 57 of the 108 copies that were printed.

It includes autographs
of “the artist” Ansel E. Adams and “the author” Mary Austin.⁴

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Happy 151st Birthday
*** Mary Austin ***

– born September 9, 1868
in Carlinville, Illinois

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Linger Awhile:

You can’t pick your home
any more than you can choose your family.
In poker, you get five cards. Three of them
you can swap out, but two are yours to keep:
family and native land.

– from An American Marriage
by Tamari Jones

I’ve been thinking this week about what it means to have a hometown; what a geographical place
can give us, what we take away when we leave it, and what we learn from it when we come back again.

I believe there is a certain kind of knowledge that comes from learning a little bit about a lot of places.
But there is another kind of knowledge that comes from sticking around, and
getting to know one place really, really well.

This past month I got to visit two hometowns: My mother’s and my own.

First to Northern Michigan…

…to see a half dozen cousins
and to visit with two of my mom’s much-loved siblings.

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Now to answer the questions I started with:

A) What does it mean to have a hometown?
For me it meant going to one elementary, one junior high, and one high school—
all of which my 4 older siblings had been to before me.
It meant living in a place where names of the businesses downtown
were the last names of kids on the playground.
Where people I didn’t know knew me, because my face “looked just like” this sister or that brother.

B) What can a geographical place give us?
Mine gave me:
a fussy snobbishness as to the ripeness of both apricots and peaches;
a tolerance for hot, dry weather;
a preference for mountains rather than flat landscapes;
and a life-long appreciation for the incomparable beauty of trees in bloom.

C) What do we take when we leave it?
What I took away was a familiarity, stability, and a sense of belonging that has helped me
to create home wherever I’ve found myself.

Home is where you sidestep the ‘No Trespassing’ signs, and keep on going.
Home is where, when you forget your keys, you know how to find the spare.
Home is where barking dogs have wagging tails.
Home is where you can find the light switch in a dark room.
Home is where, as Robert Frost wrote,
‘when you have to go there, they have to take you in.’

D) What did I learn when I came back?
Once, several years ago, I flew into Sacramento, rented a car, drove 20 miles or so—
then realized I was lost. Which is not unusual for me.
What was unusual was how undisturbed I was by it;
I figured sooner or later I’d come across some road I recognized.

It took me a while to fully realize what was missing: Anxiety.
Unlike every other city I fly to and get lost in, here I felt a conspicuous absence of worry.
I was able to take a deep breath and think: I may not know where I’m going, but I know where I am.
Because I knew I was almost home.

My own hometown…

Of all the things that a person’s childhood did or did not give them,
having just one hometown does not make the List of Very Important Things.
(Good parents, a bed to sleep in, shoes. Those things make the list.)

But I’ve always appreciated having this sense of place, and I believe it helps me
find my bearings, no matter where I land.
And I love being able to say: See those pretty hills over there, covered with scrub oak,
walnut orchards, and wild oats? That’s where I’m from.

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“Half Cup More”

Several of my favorite passages from The Land of Little Rain
describe the desert animals that Mary Austin loved.

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Take-Away Box

For all the toll the desert takes…it gives compensations,
deep breaths, deep sleep, and the communion of the stars…
Stars move in the wide, clear heavens
to risings and settings unobscured…
They look large and near and palpitant…wheeling to their
stations in the sky,
they make the poor world-fret of no account.
Of no account you who lie out there watching,
nor the lean coyote that stands off in the scrub from you
and howls and howls.
– Mary Austin

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Thank you for reading!
— Kelly J Hardesty

Thoughts? Questions?
Scroll down to the end—and you can leave me note!
Always so lovely to hear from you.

You Can Read More…

…about another nature writer, Annie Dillard,
also muskrats, over-sharing,
and the gruesomeness of insects!

extra rambling footnotes + photo credits:
———————————————–

I am very grateful for the permission to use
the beautiful wildlife photos by
Gail Halm, Yessica Wheeler and Paul Lottner.
I’ve so often admired your photos on the
Backyard Wildlife of the Southwest site—
Thank you for letting me share them
with sky-t-tray readers.

1.
For more info about the 2 organizations that
Mary Austin helped start, see:

— Santa Fe Playhouse
https://santafeplayhouse.org/history/

— The Southwestern Association for Indian Art
https://swaia.org/

2.
I found the photo of Austin by Ansel Adams
at the Owens Valley History site:
http://www.owensvalleyhistory.com/mary_austin/page49.html

3.
I found the letter excerpt from Austin to Adams in Terry Tempest Williams’
wonderful introduction to the 1997 reprint of
Mary Austin’s ‘The Land of Little Rain.’

4.
For the card catalog entry about Taos Pueblo at
the New York Public Library, see:
https://catalog.nypl.org/search~S1?/tTaos+Pueblo/ttaos+pueblo/1%2C11%2C18%2CB/frameset&FF=ttaos+pueblo&3%2C%2C6

By the way,
If your curious about current prices of the books with the original Ansel Adams photos, see:
https://www.finebooksmagazine.com/blog/mary-austin-and-ansel-adams

Coda:
This week I emailed Rebecca Rego Barry, author of the article in the link above.
She’s editor of Fine Books & Collections.
She kindly emailed me back and, among other things, she said that
there is a 2019 audiobook (!) of Mary Austin’s Land of Little Rain and it recently
won an “Earphones Award”.
She said that several reviewers have noted how well the narrator, Ellen Parker,
evokes the poetic quality of Austin’s writing.

The article also has the following lovely quote about Mary Austin:

“Seldom have I met and known anyone of such
intellectual and spiritual power and discipline.” 
– Ansel Adams

An ‘it’s-all-connected’ aside:
In the article, Ms Barry references Ken Sanders Rare Books,
which is a bookshop in… Salt Lake City!

STT-26

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© Kelly J Hardesty 2023