When American explorers crossed the Texas Panhandle, they dubbed it part of the ""Great American Desert."" A ""sea of grass,"" the llano appeared empty, flat, and barely habitable. Contemporary developments - cell phone towers, oil rigs, and wind turbines - have only added to this stereotype. Yet in this lyrical ecomemoir, Shelley Armitage charts a unique rediscovery of the largely unknown land, a journey at once deeply personal and far-reaching in its exploration of the connections between memory, spirit, and place. Armitage begins her narrative with the intention to walk the llano from her family farm thirty meandering miles along the Middle Alamosa Creek to the Canadian River. Along the way, she seeks the connection between her father and one of the area's first settlers, Ysabel Gurule, who built his dugout on the banks of the Canadian. Armitage, who grew up nearby in the small town of Vega, finds this act of walking inseparable from the act of listening and writing. ""What does the land say to us?"" she asks as she witnesses human alterations to the landscape - perhaps most catastrophic the continued drainage of the land's most precious resource, the Ogallala Aquifer. Yet the llano's wonders persist: dynamic mesas and canyons, vast flora and fauna, diverse wildlife, rich histories. Armitage recovers the voices of ancient, Native, and Hispano peoples, their stories interwoven with her own: her father's legacy, her mother's decline, a brother's love. The llano holds not only the beauty of ecological surprises but a renewed realization of kinship in a world ever changing. Reminiscent of the work of Terry Tempest Williams and John McPhee, Walking the Llano is both a celebration of an oft-overlooked region and a soaring testimony to the power of the landscape to draw us into greater understanding of ourselves and others by experiencing a deeper connection with the places we inhabit.

When American explorers crossed the Texas Panhandle, they dubbed it part of the ""Great American Desert."" A ""sea of grass,"" the llano appeared empty, flat, and barely habitable. Contemporary developments - cell phone towers, oil rigs, and wind turbines - have only added to this stereotype. Yet in this lyrical ecomemoir, Shelley Armitage charts a unique rediscovery of the largely unknown land, a journey at once deeply personal and far-reaching in its exploration of the connections between memory, spirit, and place. Armitage begins her narrative with the intention to walk the llano from her family farm thirty meandering miles along the Middle Alamosa Creek to the Canadian River. Along the way, she seeks the connection between her father and one of the area's first settlers, Ysabel Gurule, who built his dugout on the banks of the Canadian. Armitage, who grew up nearby in the small town of Vega, finds this act of walking inseparable from the act of listening and writing. ""What does the land say to us?"" she asks as she witnesses human alterations to the landscape - perhaps most catastrophic the continued drainage of the land's most precious resource, the Ogallala Aquifer. Yet the llano's wonders persist: dynamic mesas and canyons, vast flora and fauna, diverse wildlife, rich histories. Armitage recovers the voices of ancient, Native, and Hispano peoples, their stories interwoven with her own: her father's legacy, her mother's decline, a brother's love. The llano holds not only the beauty of ecological surprises but a renewed realization of kinship in a world ever changing. Reminiscent of the work of Terry Tempest Williams and John McPhee, Walking the Llano is both a celebration of an oft-overlooked region and a soaring testimony to the power of the landscape to draw us into greater understanding of ourselves and others by experiencing a deeper connection with the places we inhabit.

A "personal ecology" is what poet and writer Peggy Pond Church called the journals she kept for more than fifty years on New Mexico's Pajarito Plateau. Church's work appeared regularly in Poetry and Saturday Review of Literature and her biography of Edith Warner, The House at Otowi Bridge, became a regional classic. She had a profound relationship with the place now known best for the Los Alamos laboratories and the Manhattan Project. The journals from her childhood in the 1930s through 1986, the year of her death, are studies in spiritual and psychological responses to the landscape that informed her sensibilities and creative energy. The plateau she loved became both her subject and the basis of her connection to other women writers, particularly Warner, Mary Austin, and May Sarton. Church, Armitage says, has given us an extended lyric, essential to the growing critical awareness of women's autobiography, landscape studies, and creativity: The earth was not to us entirely a benign mother, but a place of uncertainty and strangeness. A chaos existed beneath our feet that broke forth occasionally in our dreams . . . I was ten and a half years old when I first saw Pajarito and experienced what it was like to live within the boundaries of a once sacred world. Two strains--earth as persona for mighty mother, terrain as sacred in its own right--become threads of consequence that Church herself retraces in editing the original journals. In an internal dialogue documented "by the red of Church's typewriter ribbon responding to its original black," Armitage notices the imprints of earliest childhood: I remember at Pajarito when I first fell in love with dawn, how I used to go out before daybreak in my bare feet and khaki middy blouse and bloomers, tiptoeing down the steep stairs between my parents' room and mine . . . the pale predawn sky arousing a resonance with all my life's dawn hours . . . the silence of a wordless world.

The Life and Work of the fascinating creator of the Kewpie doll.