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