Reinhabiting a Separate Country: a Bioregional Anthology of Northern California ed. by Peter Berg (review)

70 Western American Literature barns, schools, churches, first loves, weddings, and deathbed scenes as the hero’s days unroll to the climax. Piloting an open-cockpit airplane with a telescope pointing downwards over a patchwork of mid-America is a way of suggesting the experience this book offers. All the possible joys and sorrows of growing up seem to be here. And the moving growth to a vibrant, nurturing maturity of the hero’s mother just at the time the boy takes on the full mantle of self-responsibility makes for an interwoven ending as powerful as Manfred has ever written. Ada, the heroine, closely resembles the mother Manfred has described in his autobiographical poems. I know of no other author who has so thor­ oughly dissected the one who brought him into this world. She appears on the pages as out of an extended notebook of drawings by Leonardo — toes to soul. A sense of the overall basic strength of life itself floods the scenes — stronger than in any American story I remember reading. The reader walks the corn field rows or the schoolhouse floors as though he is growing up here himself. The presences of the Bible and the weather are constant referral points. The spread of experiences is enormous: After a flood the boy hero climbs a plum tree to come face to face with the open eyes of a dead girl hanging by her hair. And a few chapters later the boy sees and smells the endurance of past life as a well drilling bit brings up a mammoth’s bone, remnants of flesh still attached. The most intimate details — of boys and girls, men and women, death­ bed items, fecal colors and body sounds — are described with the same disarming openness. This scope — from Holy Ghost to outhouse — gives the space for a reader to experience a unity of beingness. Nothing is left out; as a result one feels easily, decently at home with it all. On reading the final page of this novel, I felt I had uncovered a time capsule containing the years 1909-1929 buried by a Homer in a hill cave at the point where Iowa, Minnesota and Dakota meet. Here are our sources, stories caught and preserved. The book we forgot to write — our diary. WARING JONES, Minneapolis Reinhabiting a Separate Country: a Bioregional Anthology of Northern Cali­ fornia. Edited by Peter Berg. (San Francisco: Planet Drum Foundation, 1978. 220 pages, $6.00.) Where the western frontier was once reflected back on itself by the Pacific Ocean, a lifestyle based on living-in-place is emerging. In opposition to the frontier mentality still present in American culture, and transcend­ Reviews 71 ing the skepticism, resignation and disillusionment which followed the frontier shift, this book is a reflection of third-level consciousness. The diverse contents, ranging from collision terracy to the complex personality of John Muir, are well integrated around the basic theme of reinhabitation, of living with the land in a manner which helps heal the wounds of past exploitations. Essays, poems, stories, prose, interviews, and oral histories speak of the region’s ecological integrity and biological and cultural history, as viewed through the senses and feelings of people who live there. Although a higher level of ecological consciousness exists in Northern California than in most areas of this continent, it is far from being a reinhabitory society. The book’s afterword discusses goals towards making such a society a reality. Since arbitrary political boundaries are insensitive to ecological continuities, it ends with a proposal for separate, bioregional statehood, allowing residents to redistrict the counties into watershed gov­ ernments. This book is important for its vision. Equally important are the means of realizing that vision. Advocating appropriate values should be reinforced by the redesigning of government policies and institutions so they respond to ecological conditions, and provide information and incentives that re­ ward environmentally sensitive behavior while deterring actions destructive of environmental quality. Through the complementary interplay of these two approaches a responsive and vital localism can be realized. KRAIG KLUNGNESS, Utah State University H, L. Davis. By Paul T. Bryant. (Boston: G. K. Hall & Co.; Twayne’s United States Authors...