One Degree West: Reflections of a Plainsdaughter (review)

Book Reviews259 the people of the United States andVietnam. As memoirs go, The Circle of Hanh is a page-turner that culminates in a bittersweet good-bye scene with Hanh riding next toWeigl in a van. She feels bereft at leaving the other children of the orphanage and her viUage: "Many children were waving in the rain, their smaU hands through the distance like lotus blossoms on the fishpond , opening." This long-awaited autobiographical account of one of our most celebrated poets and translators does not disappoint but, in fact, leaves one hoping that someday Weigl wiU again turn his considerable poetic skfll to the writing of another memoir. Reviewed by Marcus Cafagua One Degree West: Reflections of a Plainsdaughter by Julene Bair Mid-List Press, 2000 192 pages, trade paperback original, $16.00 Julene Bair s new memoir takes a careful look at the farm life of the High Plains from her perspective as a plainsdaughter born in the fifties, growing up in the tumultuous latter half of the twentieth century. In a series of tightly linked autobiographical essays, Bair weaves her stories of childhood on a farm, her years raising her son alone in her family's abandoned farmhouse , and postgraduate work (having left the home place) during which she gains the understanding of her own identity as a woman whose source of power is place. Bair explores the differences between what she knew then and what she knows now, delving into memories peppered with tractors, family Thanksgivings, plows, summer outings, and acres ofwheat. The rhetorical stance she takes in her explorations gives her an opportunity to look at that past with the eyes ofsomeone who loved the farm and its people, but who has no fllusions about those farms in the larger context of economics and environment. She sees the great farms of our heartland as both myth and reality, and understands, as few writers do, the paradox of the successful modern farm. "With the aid of machinery and chemicals, and with families now a tenth of their former size, we conquered the plains, not just out of greed, but out of failure to recognize what we loved and that love was reason enough not to destroy. Unable to fill the Plains with people, we settled for writing our name onto every inch ofthem, lest we forget ourselves 260Fourth Genre and succumb to the spiritual vastness." In One Degree West, Bair writes of those wheat and sheep farmers who carved their names into the landscape they transformed. What makes the farm life she describes different from other memoirs of farm Ufe is the degree to which she understands how place shapes human perception. "Literary scholars," she teUs her students in the final chapters of the book, "point to a tendency in rural writers to honor landscape by having it function on the level of character. But characters are actuaUy overshadowed by setting in rural prose . . . which is nothing short of the right and natural order. We exist in a place. The place is our creator. This soulful truth is proven on every page ofvirtuaUy any westerner's work, ranging from WiUa Cather to WiUiam Kittredge." Bair sees her farm family in relation to, and in service of, the demands of the land that they, at the same time, changed irrevocably. Through aU the essays shaped out of this contradiction, she never forgets what makes the center hold—an awareness of place as the controUing factor ofher family's and her own identity. Removed from the Great Plains, Bair feels the need to re-create in her new home, the mountains ofWyoming, some of the solidity and comfort her stoic Midwestern family gave her, notwithstanding the cultural struggles that touched, and in some cases destroyed even the staunchest of famflies. Through the deaths ofher brother and father, she strives for a sense ofidentity that was lost by degrees as die family scattered and the farm turned into an agribusiness. The strength ofBair's writing rests in her writerly "eye," which sees a present defined by the past. Because her yearning leads the reader so inevitably to her viewpoint, we forgive that the narrative arc is sometimes weak, and...