Sky’s Witness: A Year in the Wind River Range by C. L. Rawlins (review)

Reviews 147 the making. To them the earth is everything, the foods they grow, the adobe bricks that build their houses, fuels that heat their earthen sculptured fire­ places, their speech, an idiom mountain-made. And a reverence for the life-vein that runs through every rural New Mexican community—that with the Spanish Arabic name, acequia, the irrigation ditch. Page by page he seems to talk to you, this literary truck farmer. He tells of his acre-and-a-half of garlic, his most ardent love, its planting, hoeing, care from sown clove to harvested bulb; the acre of statice flowers, Rose Mary’s depart­ ment; and the two acres of common vegetables, summer squash among them, the sweetest of onions and basil to be made into leafy bunches. There is little mention of money. He writes of growing things with fondness and humility, even the weeds he calls his “companions.” You feel his pride in selling the display of his labor off the tailgate of his pickup truck at the Farmers’Markets of Santa Fe, Española, Taos—and at Los Alamos, where Scientists and men of genius reside. But he has chilling words for the heavily-fenced, closely-guarded Plutonium Facility, dedicated to “the inventing of diabolical machinery”— where, he writes, . . if some scientist or engineer or janitor presses the wrong button in the Plutonium Facility across the canyon a mile from where I sit on the back of my tailgate with my onions and garlic and basil, I’m a goner as surely as most of the city of ten thousand, or much of northern New Mexico, for that matter.” But this is a work mostly about kindly things, of plants and people who match the clean environment—a beautiful book to hold—and garlic in the head, heart and hand of Stanley Crawford serves a feast of delectable prose. i— JOHN L. SINCLAIR Bernalillo, New Mexico ^S ky’ s Witness: A Year in the Wind River Range. By C. L. Rawlins. Illustrated by Hannah Hinchman. (New York: Henry Holt, 1992. 326 pages, $23.95.) Lovers of fine nature writing should perk up at this collection of essays by C. L. Rawlins. Resuscitation of flagging spirits is badly needed. Nature writing has become so popular that it tends to be “genre driven,” as one practitioner of the art complained, delivering an expected set of responses. Rawlins avoids the danger in several ways. First, he has something to write about. His stay in western Wyoming’s frightfully cold and jumbled Wind River Range is no mere idling time in which the mind grows precious, but part of a demandingjob. H e’s collecting samples of snow for an air-pollution study. This leads Rawlins into numerous unexpected and sometimes dangerous challenges as he skis high above the world along the Continental Divide. He also has the skill to use the occasional “characters” he meets to avoid the bugaboo of nature writers, the slide into self-absorption. Yet on top of this, the book handles 148 Western American Literature passages on figures as various as Francis Bacon and Wallace Stegner by making them entirely appropriate commentary on the panoramas or crises at hand. Lastly, Rawlins moves easily from the humorous to the sublime, catching a ravenous partner stuffing himselfwith freeze-dried stroganoff, then lapsing into an “. . . almost saintly glow. . . . ” But then we’re reminded that the Shoshone Indians believed “. .. the souls of the dead go up into these mountains to spend eternity.” The following descriptions of an alpine empire that often seems all “. . . blue mountains and white storms” help us know the truth of the belief. What Sky’ s Witness offers, then, is not “nature writing” but fine writing that happens to be about nature. Hannah Hinchman’s illustrations are a wise addition to a graceful book. ^ E T E R W IL D University ofArizona I Got Cultured: A Nevada Memoir. By Phyllis Barber. (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1992. 189 pages, $24.95.) Growing up in Boulder City and Las Vegas, Nevada, during the forties and fifties, Phyllis Barber had to reckon with both the values of her Mormon family and those of secular society...