If you ever travel Highway 395 beneath the rugged eastern escarpment of the Sierra Nevada, sooner or later you’ll likely drive through the little town of Independence, California. The town doesn’t seem like much, but the surrounding view is stunning, especially to the west: high desert country, stretching brown beneath the shadow of the great white-capped range, rising there almost 7,500 feet nearly vertically above the floor of the Onion Valley. If you’re struck by the setting– and everyone is–you might stop in the little town to appreciate the character of the local wilderness and learn a little bit more about the region, its natural and cultural history.
You could begin at a great local history museum, the Eastern California Museum. But if you want to expand on that experience, walk just down the street to a little brown house to ponder an invitation offered more than a century ago by the incomparable writer who once lived there, Mary Austin. Austin was a prolific writer who, among other things, wrote novels (my favorite is her 1917 work The Ford, which draws upon how Los Angeles developers appropriated water from the Owens Valley where she lived) and an unorthodox autobiography, Earth Horizon, published in 1932. But perhaps her best known work was her first published book, her 1903 collection of essays, The Land of Little Rain. The following is from its preface:
The country where you may have sight and touch of that which is written lies between the high Sierras south from Yosemite—east and south over a very great assemblage of broken ranges beyond Death Valley, and on illimitably into the Mojave Desert. You may come into the borders of it from the south by a stage journey that has the effect of involving a great lapse of time, or from the north by rail, dropping out of the overland route at Reno. The best of all ways is over the Sierra passes by pack and trail, seeing and believing. But the real heart and core of the country are not to be come at in a month’s vacation. One must summer and winter with the land and wait its occasions. Pine woods that take two and three seasons to the ripening of cones, roots that lie by in the sand seven years awaiting a growing rain, firs that grow fifty years before flowering,—these do not scrape acquaintance. 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. (ix-xi)
Alas, these days Austin’s house is in dire need of renovation, even as its location is marked by Historical Landmark No. 229 , placed there by the California State Park Commission in 1935 and which reproduces much of the quotation above, thereby pointing the visitor’s gaze west toward Kearsarge Peak.
The Land of Little Rain collects a variety of splendid essays. The collection ranges from pieces that feature deeply observed natural phenomena to others that offer portraits of people who have lived on the western edge of the Great Basin, individuals both native and not, like late-coming white settlers such as Austin. As scholar Beverly Hume notes, Austin has been faulted for a tendency to blur objective reality with a kind of soft-headed romanticism and for generalizing aspects of Native culture from her experience observing individuals. Still, as Hume notes, Austin’s “language succeeds in stimulating, even now, a sensory response in many of her readers to the intangible, complex, and intricate beauty of desertness, or, more broadly, natural wilderness, and their relationship to it” (73).
That’s exactly right. Thus for me, the handful of essays that focus more on natural phenomena and less on human beings (however inscribed) are the most compelling; for instance, the title essay, “The Land of Little Rain,” the first essay of the collection; “Water Trails of the Ceriso, which reimagines desert terrain from a perspective other than “man-height” (9); and “Nurslings of the Sky,” about the “sense of presence and intention in storm processes” (94).
To get a sense of Austin’s compelling voice in such pieces, consider this passage from “The Land of Little Rain”:
For all the toll the desert takes of a man it gives compensations, deep breaths, deep sleep, and the communion of the stars. It comes upon one with new force in the pauses of the night that the Chaldeans were a desert-bred people. It is hard to escape the sense of mastery as the stars move in the wide clear heavens to risings and settings unobscured. They look large and near and palpitant; as if they moved on some stately service not needful to declare. 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. (21)
Human beings, like coyotes, are social creatures who harbor relationships with each other and, just as importantly, with the larger world surrounding them, even a world that in its stark beauty appears almost lifeless. But Austin teaches us to look closer and discover how much activity lies all around in stark surroundings—if only you know how to look.
So even as we recognize the limits of Austin’s perspective, her language still teaches us to deeply appreciate the intrinsic beauty of desert spaces. The point of Austin’s essays, then, isn’t to offer a substitute for encounters with the desert but to offer an exemplar of such encounters as a guide to creating your own. In this way, Mary Austin’s The Land of Little Rain, despite the flaws that contemporary readers might note, works as a guidebook just as useful, but thanks to its language, a lot more moving than anything published by Audubon.
Sources:
Austin, Mary. The Land of Little Rain. Houghton Mifflin, 1903. Google Books. Accessed March 1, 2022.
California State Park Commission. Mary Austin’s Home. Historical Landmark No. 229, 1935. https://www.californiahistoricallandmarks.com/landmarks/chl-229. Accessed March 1, 2022.
Hume, Beverly A. “Austin’s Consuming “Desertness” in The Land of Little Rain.” Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory, vol. 68 no. 4, 2012, p. 61-77. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/arq.2012.0026. Accessed 7 March 2022.
“Kearsarge Peak from Independence, CA” by Will Keightley is licensed under CC Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license. Accessed March 2, 2022.
