Back from Vacation/"The Hacienda" (1997)

I've been back from vacation (southern Utah and San Diego) for nearly a week and half now, but am so busy trying to catch up that I haven't had a chance to post. Southern Utah was absolutely sublime; I'll write much more about that as the weeks go on and I get a chance to sort through the 1,200 images I made there.

In the meantime, a book I finished--nay, devoured--while on vacation: The Hacienda, by Lisa St. Aubin de Teran. A friend gave me this book several years ago, but it sat on my "going to get around to reading" shelf, but never made it to the top. Then, in casting around for a book to accompany me on vacation, I decided finally to tackle The Hacienda.

The book is a memoir, but sort of a dreamy, stream-of-consciousness memoir. It doesn't proceed chronologically, which was a bit of an affront to my arrow-straight, anal-retentive personality. And, realistically, it made the account a bit of a challenge to follow since time was mutable. But the book was a haunting and often harrowing recollection of a very young Englishwoman's transplantation to a decaying agricultural estate in the foothills of the Venezuelan Andes. St. Aubin de Teran tells an amazing tale of endurance by detailing her day-to-day combat with nature--human and otherwise.

Lisa St. Aubin was a romantic 17-year-old when she marries an exiled Venezuelan aristocrat, Jamie de Teran, 20 years her senior. Seduced by tales of his ancestral home, she leaves England for the Teran's vast Venezuelan sugar cane plantation. Soon after her arrival there, though, the fantasy disintegrates and Lisa finds herself trapped in an exotic and unfamiliar world, married to a man who grows increasingly unstable, and counting as her closest companions a pet vulture, two pedigreed beagles, and the illiterate peasants who live and work on the estate. Through the seven years that follow, Lisa discovers a reservoir of personal strength and, in the end, uses it to save her life.

In her review of the book, Michiko Kakutani of the New York Times wrote, "It reads like a combination of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Daphne du Maurier..." and I have to agree that she was spot-on in her observation. The story borders on the unbelievable and, for the first forty pages or so, I nearly put the book down because I just couldn't buy the Gothic quality of it all. But, after a while, the allure of the story drew me in completely and I honestly had to decide whether I wanted to keep reading or go hiking in the slickrock canyons just a few miles away. (Incidentally, the hikes always won out; I relaxed and read after dinner).

Bicycle Diaries

David Byrne, founder of the Talking Heads, has compiled a series of short essays about bicycling in cities around the world. The bicycling essays are accompanied by additional essays about music, friendship, city planning, and the scale of human communities that were inspired by thoughts that sprang into Mr. Bryne's head while he was riding his bicycle, visiting with colleagues, and performing. Mr. Byrne is an unabashed liberal, and he doesn't suffer fools lightly; I got the impression that he's of an age (mid-50s) and financially comfortable enough that he doesn't have to take any guff from anyone. His perspective is refreshing.

Having enjoyed the book, I have to point out that there's not much here that hasn't been said before, especially about city planning. I enjoyed the bicycling essays the most, and especially enjoyed his reflections about bicycling in New York (where Mr. Byrne lives), in other American cities, and in Berlin; the essays about other world cities were not as fully developed. The recollections of interactions with musical colleagues might be interesting to fans of world music, but I hurried through most of them. A good (but not great) read, and a gentle introduction to city planning for those not already familiar with the basics. The book is 291 pages long, but the pages are small and there are lots of photographs.

The Professor and the Madman by Simon Winchester

From the blurb on the back cover:

The Professor and the Madman, masterfully researched and eloquently written, is an extraordinary tale of madness, genius, and the incredible obsessions of two remarkable men that led to the making of the Oxford English Dictionary--and literary history. The compilation of the OED, begun in 1857, was one of the most ambitious projects ever undertaken. As definitions were collected, the overseeing committee, led by Professor James Murray, discovered that one man, Dr. W. C. Minor, had submitted more than 10,000. When the committee insisted on honoring Minor, a shocking truth came to light: Dr. Minor, an American Civil War veteran, was also an inmate at a British asylum for the criminally insane.

This was a compelling page-turner. But, it was also over-long, overwrought, and laden with purple prose and sesquipedalians (look it up!). I wish that I'd had a copy of the OED on my nightstand as I read the book, but even the two-volume condensed version of the OED (with a magnifying glass) weighs 25 pounds and won't fit on my nightstand!

The Journey Home by Edward Abbey

The Journey Home

I just finished reading The Journey Home, a collection of 22 essays by Edward Abbey (author of the justly lauded Desert Solitaire) originally published in 1977. While Abbey and I are kindred spirits in lamenting the destruction and desecration of the natural world, the collection on the whole is only moderately satisfying.

Abbey is at his best when he combines his deeply personal recollections with a narrative thread. He accomplishes this best in "Hallelujah on the Bum" (retelling his hitchhiking and train-hopping trip from Pennsylvania to the West Coast and back in 1944), "Down the River with Major Powell" (an account of Abbey and two friends' trip down the Green River in Utah 101 years after John Wesley Powell made the first exploratory trip), and the second half of "Mountain Music" (in which Abbey recounts a climb to the knife-edged col between Mt. Wilson and Wilson Peak in Colorado). I also loved the three-page "Shadows from the Big Woods," but that's because it struck a particularly personal chord with me, but does not follow the "personal narrative" pattern of the other three excellent essays.

Slightly less effective are five other essays: "Disorder and Early Sorrow" (a very humorous recounting an ill-advised and ill-fated trip in a passenger car on an abandoned jeep track in Big Bend National Park in 1952), "Death Valley," "Manhattan Twilight, Hoboken Night" (written about the time Abbey spent in Hoboken, NJ, before the city became gentrified), "The Crooked Wood," and "Freedom and Wilderness."

Abbey stumbles in the remainder of the 13 contributions when he tries to be a naturalist and when he laments the loss of natural places. He's certainly spot on about his sentiments, but the essays come across as cynical and snide. Some are also outdated, especially "Return to Yosemite: Tree Fuzz vs. Freaks" and the longest contribution, "The Second Rape of the West" about strip mining for coal.

The book's only 239 pages long (in the hardcover edition I read) so it's not a major commitment. Plus, the great essays are gems to be savored.

Gila Descending by M.H. Salmon

Having visited southwestern New Mexico in May and hiked several day trips around the Gila Wilderness, I looked forward with anticipation to reading Gila Descending, an account of Silver City, NM resident M.H. Salmon's trip by foot and canoe down most of the length of the Gila River in New Mexico and Arizona. In the end, I was a bit disappointed. I didn't much like the author as he portrayed himself. He's a self-described "houndsman" and coyote hunter, and he never lets you forget it. I have no problem with hunting for meat or to maintain an ecological balance, but M.H. Salmon clearly loves to pursue and kill coyotes (whose pelts he does sell, at least). Nevertheless, his love of hunting was a turn-off for me.

I also disliked his writing style. He informs his readers that he writes for outdoors magazines, so clearly he is able to sell his writing, but I found his style to be affectedly "down-homey"; it didn't ring true to me.

It was also irresponsible of him to bring a cat along with him on this trip. The cat could easily have wandered off, and in one instance, the cat nearly drowned when the canoe capsized with the cat leashed to the struts. But, like nearly everything else in the author's life (according to irritating little hints dropped throughout), he had a truly ambivalent relationship with the cat.

Salmon is not good at describing the landscape and the countryside. I did not come away from the book with a clear, well-developed picture of the rugged landscape of the upper Gila.

Though Salmon reports that the Gila disappears well short of its historic mouth at the Colorado River, he ends his trip before he reaches the de facto "end" of the river. I kept waiting for him to discuss the river's demise in the irrigated deserts of Arizona, but he didn't.

The book, divided into three sections, would benefit from more maps. There is one map of the entire Gila drainage at the beginning of the book, but a more detailed map of each of the individual sections would have been a welcome addition.

While I have gone into great detail about why I was disappointed by the book, it was by no means a waste of time. His trip was interesting and depicted with enough sense of adventure that I'd like to try it myself some time. Furthermore, the author's heart is certainly in the right place when it comes to enjoying and defending the Gila in particular and wilderness in general. So, all in all, the book's a good--but not a great--read.