River of Traps: A Village Life by William deBuys, Alex Harris (review)

Reviews 157 tion of the cowboy from 1840 on. Lawrence Clayton considers how cowboys change—and don’t. Clay Reynolds eloquently analyzes the cowboy as “the quintessential American hero,” finding him now mostly a nostalgic and parodical dream. Monte Lewis shares some yarns about a black cowboy.Jim Hoy enters again, this time to trace rodeo from the ranch to the arena of interna­ tional sport. Mildred Boren entertains wonderfully with directions on “How to Look, or Avoid Looking, Like a Real Cowboy.”And the book ends with Ernest B. Speck’s report on the well-attended third annual Texas Cowboy Poetry Gather­ ing in Alpine in 1989. In many ways dedicated to setting the cowboy’s record straight, The CatchPen also does plenty else, and it has a generous name index. But I wish the editors had done a betterjob of riding herd on dozens of printing errors. MICHAEL L.JOHNSON University ofKansas River ofTraps: A VillageLife. By William deBuys and Alex Harris. (Albuquerque: University ofNew Mexico Press in association with The Center for Documentary Studies, Duke University, 1990. 237 pages, $19.95.) We can grievefor these hard-used, hills,for the soil that washed away and thegrass that doesn’tgrow. Forthegreatgray stumps that rot in silence. And we can elegize the lives that hauled the wood and felt its warmth, lives that are ended, orending. But wait. For now, let’s applaud the passing years, the good and the bad Feliz compleanos, old man. It is agood day to beeighty, orany age. Woodpile Canto It is time to talk of the love of books and the nobility of those who write the best ones, preserving the people, the land, and the times in which they mix—for future readers, poverty stricken without such gifts. I met Jacobo Romero, the subject of this book, three years ago at Fort Bergwin, south ofTaos. He spoke through the arm wavings, glistening eyes, and crazily inflected Hispanic-English of Bill deBuys, who had become the old man for the presentation. As we looked at the black-and-white photographs etched on the stark screen above, DeBuys explained how some of the finer pieces of the book ‘just didn’t fit.”“So we named them ‘Cantos’in order to save them.”DeBuys took on the persona of the old man’s spirit as he imitated his stoop and the wonderful Anglo-Hispanic vocabulary and speech. Most of those attending the presentation were (and this is not hyperbolic 158 WesternAmerican Literature diction) somewhat awe-struck. Many, including me, approached the author and muttered a congratulatory note about the “nobility” of the undertaking: this preservation of Jacobo Romero, guardian of the traditions, gently withering repository of the old ways of El Valle—before the invasions of capitalism and Anglo America. The facts of the book belie its documentary—and symbolic— power. DeBuys, his wife Anne, and Harris move to Las Trampas to begin “their work.” DeBuys in scatter fashion works on what will become Enchantment and Exploitation: TheLife and Hard Times ofaNew MexicoMountain Range (UNM Press 1985); Harris, fresh from his success with Robert Coles (The Old Ones ofNew Mexico, [UNM Press, 1973]) involves himself in a number of photographic projects and experiments; Anne paints. One morning, on a thirty-year-old red horse with no name, the Quixotic septuagenarian, carrying his two walking canes, his mulas, rides into their lives and literally takes over. Jacobo is living documentation of the old ways, but his imaginative adaptive abilities make him the self-appointed tutor of these nouveau researcher-artisans. He manages their hard adventures with the water, the weather, the land, and their neighbors. Eventually, in an extreme break with Hispanic tradition, the gringo Harris will deliver the old man’s graveside elegy. DeBuys’ style, though not without humor, is chiseled; Harris’s photogra­ phy, though ascetically austere, is intimate and casual. Prose and photographs illuminate each other. This is indeed a noblework, both poetic and documentary. The Rio de las Trampas, the vein of life, that runs through it, offers the readerJacobo Romero as a friend for life. The documentary preservation of the man and his times is a noteworthy gift to the art...