Blue as the Lake: A Personal Geography (review)

Book Reviews203 as if these images, having lingered longest in memory, now evolve fuUy formed into language. In Lord's writing, however, the state ofAlaska, itself, is known more intimately than any childhood hometown, maybe even more intimately than any one person she describes. Alaska, in fact, is hero, heroine , protagonist. She conveys Alaska to us in language at once as pristine as ice, at other times as lyrical as fields of lupine and cinquefoil. The language ofAlaska is Lord's own true original dialect that she learned some twentyfive years ago after landing in Alaska from New England. In Alaska, she claims, she feels as "fiercely at home ... as Burroughs ever was along the Hudson." In Green Alaska, the many short sections work to form a mosaic, a scene ofLord's present-day Alaskajuxtaposed with those comfortable explorers at the turn ofthe century. Readers ofLord's work will know thatAlaska'sjourney through this century is also hers, a century ofAlaska she understands— by taste, by touch, by imagination—as if she saüed it from its beginning straight to the present. Reviewed by Sue William Silverman Blue as the Lake: A Personal Geography by Robert B. Stepto Beacon Press, 1998 208 pages, cloth $23.00; paper $14.00 "Chüdren who do not walk places, either in the city or countryside, do not see things weU enough to study them, and generaUy miss out on the stimulations a walker navigates both toward and around . . ." Such walks, author Robert Stepto teUs us, allow for "blazing paths ofone's own invention," and the balance ofBlue as the Lake:A Personal Geography can be read as a record ofexacdy that: the author's personaljourneys through urban and rural nineteenth - and twentieth-century America. He explores as an imaginative child, a professional historian, and as an adult stiU reinventing himself. Blue as the Lake opens with the coUection's defining essay, "Idlewüd," a memoir of early boyhood summers passed in an aU-black summer resort town on an inland lake in the lower reaches of Michigan's north woods. There, Stepto, who lived the rest of the year in a middle class, African American Chicago community, had the "Up North" experience famiUar to anyone who, mid-century, spent a summer vacation in northern Minnesota, Wisconsin, or Michigan. The woods were second growth, the shores 204Fourth Genre crowded with cottages, the water with boats, and each resort had nightlife as weU as wüdlife. But it was a place where a city boy could see the stars and learn bird songs, cuddle with a neighbor girl at the end of a dock, and go for a wild ride on a half-tame horse. Like aU the places described in Blue as the Lake, Idlewüd was a place where famüy ties were celebrated and where the author's sense of himself as a part of a larger community was deepened. Idlewüd, unUke the other locations Stepto explores, was a place of innocence, which might explain why he returned only via his memory. An essay that visited contemporary Idlewüd— as a resort the town is long-faded and as a community it is beset with many ofthe same problems as Stepto's old neighborhoods in Chicago—would have been a fascinating complement. Those old neighborhoods, Washington Park and Woodlawn, are drawn from more perspectives. We see them through the eyes of a sheltered then increasingly aware boy, and on matters of race and urban decay, through those ofa world-wise adult. They are the locales of awakenings to prejudice and privüege. Stepto writes in "Washington Park," "When the lunch counter sit-ins began a few short years later in the South, and I watched the news films ofthe clubbings and draggings . . . my horror was matched only by my shame ... I recognized that aU I knew about lunch counters before 1958 was sweet talk and pretty ladies." In "Woodlawn," he writes that "the neighborhood has been wasted, as ifby war or disease," then offers his chüdhood memory, which includes the book-fiUed public library—"the existence of which we simply took for granted"—bustling shops, and an accompanying level (and...