"By God, " Mulholland reportedly said, "that woman is the only one who has brains enough to see where this is going." After she had left, a subordinate came into his office and found him staring at the wall. One day, in Los Angeles for an interview with Mulholland, she told him so. "Mary Austin was convinced that the valley had died when it sold its first water right to Los Angeles-that city would never stop until it owned the whole river and all of the land. One or more will be a favorite, and if you’re like me each will seem to have said something new, even if just in a passing observation. But the badger is not very well contrived for looking up or far to either side.” Each short chapter is an individual undertaking, aware of the others but its own self entire. Life, its performance, cessation, is no new thing to gape and wonder at.”And while she doesn’t strain after poetic effects, sometimes it can’t be helped: “If the fine vibrations which are the golden-violet glow of spring twilights were to tremble into sound, it would be just that mellow double note breaking along the blossom tops.” She must enjoy her thoughts too, to write this: “Very likely if he knew how hawk and crow dog him for dinners, he would resent it. Jerome in the desert, so also in the elder day did gods. Beyond that it endures without sniveling, renounces without self-pity, fears no death, rates itself not too great in the scheme of things so do beasts, so did St. This gives her book even more interest, and there’s plenty to enjoy and consider, in the valley or elsewhere, as she writes of Indians, long-time Mexican residents, miners, wildlife, and natural wonders all about.Austin’s prose has a disposition:“Somehow the rawness of the land favors the sense of personal relations to the supernatural…All this begets…a state that passes explanation unless you will accept an explanation that passes belief…it represents the courage to sheer off what is not worth while. After diversion of much of its water supply to Los Angeles it couldn’t be. Mary Hunter Austin lived there during the late 19th and early 20th centuries but the valley she wrote about in 1903 isn’t the same as ours. California’s sparsely populated Owens Valley is the geographic heart of this volume, a place familiar to seekers of high-altitude trips in the eastern Sierra Nevada or access to the state’s northernmost desert lands. It has 48 photographs taken by Ansel Adams. If you can, choose to read the 1950 edition of The Land of Little Rain.
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