Child of Steens Mountain, and: Another Way the River Has: Taut True Tales from the Northwest (review)

In these books, two fundamental Oregon landscapes are examined by authors who know them intimately and look with nostalgia at the ways they have changed. Eileen O'Keefe McVicker recounts growing up during the Great Depression on the high-desert rangelands of Eastern Oregon, where her family raised sheep, and Robin Cody compiles portraits of the people and places between Portland and the Pacific, particularly those on and around the rivers. Both offer stunning natural scenery and show how these distinctive western locales shaped the lives of those who settled there.

In Child of Steens Mountain, McVicker calls her childhood raising sheep "a hard, happy life with layers of riches" (14). She details both the hardships and pleasures of such a life, which many might consider archetypally western—homesteaders fighting to make a living out of a remote and arid patch of land, "high rugged sagebrush and juniper tree country," where "we didn't have modern conveniences like running water" and "there was always more to do than could be done" (2, 3, 24). The book shows how the family raised and tended their sheep, acquired and kept food, battled the weather, traveled, and interacted with animals that ran the spectrum from wild to domestic. McVicker provides affectionate characterizations of her family members, particularly her mother and father, and lovely descriptions of landscape: "There would be deer feeding quietly in the rim of big rocks; lichen in many colors; ... stones to gather for our pockets; and wildflowers that grew in abundance in the shade of the rimrock where it was cool and moist" (2).

Barbara Scot, McVicker's "writerly helpmate," as she is called in the foreword, has prompted and arranged these memories, but she also does an admirable job letting McVicker tell her own story. In the afterword, she explains their collaboration, mentioning that "memory is kaleidoscopic, not linear, and her collection was more of a collage than a narrative" in early drafts (130). That's largely the way the material is organized in the finished book as well, with chapters devoted to the various components of Steens Mountain living. These components are mostly delivered in overview rather than incident, though there are some notable exceptions, including an attack from a rabid coyote, a rattlesnake dropping from a root-cellar ceiling into the bath of a "wild Irishman," and a drunk man who is nearly buried alive by diligent ranch children (4, 19, 42). The most notable exception, however, is McVicker's elopement and its fallout, which ends the book with a nice push of narrative complexity and tension. It also culminates the falling away of this "hard, happy life," which McVicker looks back on with reverence: "As I watched my own little girl grow, I thought often of the Steens. What was it that had made my life there so happy? Certainly not material things. Was it that I knew I was important in making a living for the family? Was it the courage and love between my parents that made me aspire to be like them? Was it the natural beauty of the mountains?" (128). These are the questions her book explores.

Another Way the River Has is a collection of Cody's magazine articles interspersed with new essays about his adventures on The Turtle, a boat he helped build. In the magazine pieces, readers witness a number of blue-collar, quintessential western worlds—logging operations, rodeo tours, fishing controversies, environmental battles—but it is mostly in the new essays that Cody develops his primary themes, which are Darwinian meditations about the ways Euro-American settlers have shaped the Columbia River and the way the river has shaped the civilizations that surround it: "Where in the world, I wondered, have humans adapted so rapidly and radically to...