![]() America, meet Wilma the worm. And Baby, a velvet blue jumpsuit-clad plastic doll with a strangely bendable head. And dust fairy sequins. And John T Price, who knows how to bend a sentence like Baby bends that head—"completely backward, allowing him to stare at you upside down with his glassy eyes." Which is to say, the ordinary ups and downs of Iowa family life will amaze and sometimes smite you with joy in this loving memoir called Daddy Long Legs: The Natural Education of a Father. You will also meet Steph, John's tolerant, positive wife and the mother of his two rambunctious nature-loving boys. You will never meet the novel John is never working on, due to teaching creative writing, repairing an old house with too many levels of decay, resisting doctor's visits (who needs the bad news?), and wondering why he feels so cut off from life (AKA exhausted) when daily his boys deliver muddy earthworms to his bed, shout at him to save every praying mantis in every Walgreens parking lot, declare a no-kill zone around their entire neighborhood (mosquitoes included?) and radiate so much joie de vivre in their buck naked red rubber boot clad explorations of John's back yard you want to lie down with him for a good long nap. But no, the next chapter brings new pleasures. New views on family life that make you say "oh, yeah, that's it!" Price's memoir is realism that redeems. And we could use some redemption, these days, help pulling our heads out of our own sorrows. If you've never had kids, there is the added bonus of gaining access to the adorable and maddening and crazy-great things toddlers say and do. I loved sharing the insider's view. (And not cleaning up any messes!) I met John Price at a literary conference in Kansas, and then heard him read in Denver. That's where I met Baby. And Pengy, his nemesis. And Gramma K. and her grouchy chihuahua. Do yourself and your dad and your best friends a favor—read this charming book and pass it along. Reading Daddy Long Legs felt like a huge nudge to pay attention to wonder and kindness and the release of self-interest. To join the family. But watch out for Baby—that blue velvet schemer has Pengy in his sights!
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I'm taking a summer break from blogging, but I just listened to a superb radio interview and had to pass this on. Author and Utah homegirl Jana Richman educates, informs and enlivens the debate about pumping water out of Utah's west desert. If you love the West, our big blue skies and vast open spaces, give a listen. You'll know more than you did about living in and really loving the West than you did when you woke up this morning.
Leave a comment. Tell your friends. Post the interview link on Facebook. Get folks talking about Utah's magnificent "big empty desert full of life." http://www.utahpublicradio.org/post/snake-valley-water-thursdays-access-utah I’m going to let Jana Richman’s characters speak for themselves. All women. All different. All stubborn and flawed and as real as your elbow wrinkles. There’s a 300-mile-long pipeline about to drain the aquifer from under eastern Nevada. That’s not fiction. That’s headline news. The Jorgensen clan inherits this problem, and it’s none too simple addressing it, as they are already torn apart by old family schisms. What Kate and Ona and Nell and Cassie Jorgensen say about that pipeline and their lives in the Schell Creek Mountains of Nevada—that’s the draw of The Ordinary Truth. ![]() Kate—the Las Vegas Water Manager "I’ll be sitting in my corner office—like I’m doing now— tinted glass from floor to ceiling, watching the sun drop behind the boxy horizon of Las Vegas skyscrapers and anticipating the neon dawn of evening, when for no good reason an image of my father will appear. A cloud, a shadow, a reflection, and there he is relaxed forward in the saddle atop Moots, his palomino gelding, arms crossed over the horn, looking amused to find himself surrounded by glass and steel. Moots stands lazily, his long-lashed lids drooping over soft brown eyes, one back leg bent so my father tilts slightly to the right. Dad holds an easy smile and seems as if he has something to tell me. On a good day, I’ll lean back with a cup of tea gone cold, kick my heels off to prop my feet on the garbage can, and exhort him to speak. And he does. Soft and soothing, like he’s speaking to a ten-year-old. 'How you doing, Katydid?' he says to me. I smile and tell him I’m doing fine, and for a moment we both believe it." Ona—Kate’s quiet ranching aunt "Sometimes, when a spring day turns unexpectedly warm and the house feels like an unrinsed plastic milk jug lying in the sun, I set a lawn chair in the fine dirt under the budding cottonwoods on the west side a the working pens and ponder the perplexities a life. From here, I can watch the goings on a Nate, Nell, and Skinny. Today they’re preg testing cows. I don’t spend much a my time this way, mind you, I have work a my own to get done. But every so often I sit here just to chew on things awhile." Nell—Kate’s cranky ranching mother "If an old woman pushing up against the far end a life has any sense at all, she won’t spend too many a her few remaining days trying to figure out how things ended up the way they did. Apparently I ain’t got that kinda sense. Course it don’t help that all the folks in Omer Springs are asking me, “What’s going on with Katie?” as if that’s a question can be answered with some degree a certainty like the current price a hay. When I shrug in response, folks get downright snippety. “She’s your daughter, Nell!” they proclaim as if that’s something mighta slipped my mind." Cassie—Kate’s college-age daughter "There’s something about a Nevada whorehouse can make a girl weepy around the edges. Near the third pass of Waylon Jennings’ Honky Tonk Heroes, I can barely talk myself into sticking with the plan. I do have a plan—a long-range plan. . . . To be honest, and I almost always am, my long-range plan is short on details. It basically consists of sitting on a barstool in a Carson City brothel until Mama and Grandma Nell start speaking to each other. How long that might take is anyone’s guess. But this idea that they can use me as a conduit to communicate—if you want to call it that—instead of speaking directly is beginning to piss me off. In fact, both of them as good as drove me here themselves. And if I’ve inherited anything from them at all, it’s their obstinacy. I don’t know what happens when three stubborn women each take up ground waiting for the others to move, but I aim to find out. Everybody pretends this is all about water rights and Mama’s job with the Nevada Water Authority, but I know damn well there’s more to it. Not that water isn’t enough to tear families apart in this state. I’ve seen grown men beat each other bloody over a diverted irrigation ditch. But I’ve been watching Mama and Grandma Nell all my life, and over the span of those twenty-one years, their conversations have been steadily dwindling like a spring creek at the end of a long, hot summer. It seems the two of them have simply exhausted themselves, run underground. So I have to ask myself: what is it between them that takes so much effort? I don’t know the answer to that yet, but I intend to find out. Hence, my radical—and possibly impulsive—plan. I know of only one thing that will undoubtedly force them to the surface. Me. More specifically, my safekeeping. What better threat to an innocent girl’s welfare, I figure, than a Carson City whorehouse?" I hope you’ll read this novel. And read this article to learn about the pipeline. And visit the Goshute’s website to meet the people this pipeline will harm. We need to raise a ruckus. There’s a dustbowl waiting behind our indifference. Jana Richman spent years caring with all her heart.
539 members of the Goshute tribe in western Utah are all that stand between the Southern Nevada Water Authority and a proposed multi-billion-dollar pipeline that would “pump billions of gallons of groundwater” from the Goshutes’ home in Spring Valley “to parched Las Vegas,” in a 92" wide pipe that would run for 300 miles. But how parched is Las Vegas—with its velvety golf courses, casino swimming pools and glittering public fountains—compared to the Deep Creek Valley Goshute Reservation, which receives the lowest annual rainfall in the state of Utah? A cover article in Salt Lake's City Weekly alerted me to this disaster in the making. The Goshutes, who are on the leading edge of the SNWA water fight, have a different approach to water—one we would all do well to study. They revere it. ![]() “In the Goshute language . . . water is referred to as a human being, a living entity. It is in the water that the spirits of their ancestors reside. If the water goes to Las Vegas’ fountains and man-made Venetian canals, the spirits will go there, too.” So says Rupert Steele, former chairman of the council of the Confederated Tribes of the Goshute Reservation. According to the BLM’s Environmental Impact Statement, groundwater pumping in these rural valleys would damage 300 springs and 120 miles of streams. From the Goshute Tribe website: “SNWA’s groundwater development application is the biggest threat to the Goshute way of life since European settlers first arrived on Goshute lands more than 150 years ago.” The Goshutes request our help in acknowledging their rights and addressing their concerns. Please support the Goshutes and local ranchers who are about to have their water pumped out from under them. The BLM’s environmental review comes out this July for public comment, with a final decision about the pipeline in September. We need to draw national attention to the SNWA’s proposed water grab now. ![]() Water—the very lifeblood of the entire nation of Goshutes, and of the local ranchers already living at the edge of survival—can't be harvested like wheat or mined like coal. Not with a citizenry who says NO. Imagine a 92" pipeline running through your back yard. Then do something: Forward this blog link and/or talk to friends interested in sustainability and water equity. Get them to spread the message and links afar. Contact local writers and any powerful journalists you know, to help generate national attention. Writing letters to local newspapers would also be great. Volunteer for and contribute to the Great Basin Water Network—the volunteer environmental group dedicated to terminating the pipeline. Attend the Snake Valley Festival, a fun fundraising weekend to support GBWN, June 15-17. Contribute time and money to the Goshute Nation. Contribute to Center for Biological Diversity, who have lobbied tirelessly on this issue, and have raised awareness about the Las Vegas water grab. Thank them for their work. Leave comments on the BLM’s draft environmental impact statement. Comments may be mailed: Penny Woods, BLM Project Manager, PO Box 12000, Reno, NV 89520, faxed: 775-861-6689, or emailed: [email protected]. Help raise a ruckus! You will be glad you did. And the Goshutes, ranchers, foxes, snakes, gophers, and countless flocks of resident birds who nestle in the swamp cedars of beautiful Spring Valley, Utah, will thank you, too. Let’s keep the spring in Spring Valley.
Many thanks to the Goshute Tribe website and the City Weekly article for photos and quotes. Hiking in Rocky Mountain National Park yesterday, I sang—heaven help me—“Rocky Mountain High." I pondered a Henry James novella I’d just read, “The Beast in the Jungle.” Because I wore brown-tinted sunglasses, the beetle-kill pines stood out on every slope, and I could not feel anything but implicated in and convinced of our changed planet.
In James’ story, the hero John Marcher misses the event of his lifetime. He feels chosen by an obscure destiny, waiting as if anointed for some beast to leap onto him and render his life profound. May Bartram, the only friend who knows of his obsession, stands beside him for decades, waiting, but Marcher’s self-absorption is so complete he only realizes when flinging himself on May’s grave that he has missed out on her love. That was his unrecognized beast. The twists and turns of James’ syntax far exceed plot points, and I dismissed “The Beast in the Jungle” as a windy staid study in the human ego; profound—the beast is within not without us—and a dated sleeper written by a man who spent all his time indoors. But as I hiked the thousand feet up toward Lake Helene, surrounded by vast browning slopes, the power of his novella came at me from an unexpected quarter, haunting my climb. James’ protagonist fit perfectly our environmental dilemma: we cannot really love the earth, though it offers itself, so we use it and simultaneously feel cut off from it, valuing our self-importance more than the opportunity to genuinely live, which makes us unable to stop pillaging, unable to stop missing the point, and we're just about to throw ourselves on its grave in misery and cowardice, like James' hero. Empty, when what is offered us is so full. I have found no good way to face such a grand-scale environmental demise. Which leaves me in the Jungle with John Marcher. Whatever you can do to plunge into this love, do it now. Torrey House Press is a welcome new press in Utah. Browse their website awhile! Here's my review along with other book reviews of great Western reads. “The Last Cowgirl” is a page-turner of a different sort. Or rather for a different audience. If you love the land, puzzle over our abuse of it, and wonder why you continue to live in (or near) Utah, the “Land of Cognitive Dissonance,” take a ride with Jana Richman. It’s a rough-and-tumble ride over dessert terrain just west of the Salt Lake Valley but unknown to many. If you listen closely, you’ll hear you can’t deny the land. ![]() Young Dickie Sinfield sets her heart against life in the rural backwater of Clayton, Utah. Her father George wants nothing more than to live a cowboy’s life, so he packs up his family of five and moves them onto a ramshackle ranch when Dickie is just eight years old. Due to a string of ranch-related accidents, Dickie sees herself as a fragile outsider in her father’s rugged life. Dickie won’t go native. But no one in her beleaguered family is better suited to the stark beauty of the Onaqui Valley—sixty miles west of Salt Lake City—than Dickie, and it’s her own self-betrayal that makes “The Last Cowgirl” sing. Told in alternating present tense and flashbacks, this story works backward into your heart like cheatgrass in an unsuspecting sock. Dickie Sinfield is middle-aged, cranky and moderately successful as a journalist in Salt Lake City when she gets news that her big brother Heber’s life was snuffed out in a nerve gas explosion at Dugway Proving Grounds. This takes a very reluctant Dickie back home. In Clayton, we meet Bev, the strongest wisest rancher in the valley, George, Dickie’s tough angry father, Holly, the best friend you wish you’d never had, and Stumpy, a red-headed cowboy raised by his grandpa and chock-full of the range. It is one of the mysteries of good novels, how they won’t let you go. Won’t let you leave them sitting alone for more than a few hours, covers closed. Yes, there are times when the smart-assed closed-off Dickie makes you want to shake her, but “The Last Cowgirl” isn’t only her tale. Richman writes men beautifully. Richman does not flinch from exposing family conflict. Richman knows the secrets of a land so spare the military slaps No Trespassing signs around hundreds of thousands of acres. There are caves in the Onaqui Mountains, there are secret springs, there are wild horse herds handsome with muck and bruises.
It is one of the mysteries of human nature, that we can find our home in a place, in people, and be the last one to recognize it. Dickie Sinfield is “The Last Cowgirl.” Drive out past the Oquirhh Mountains to the Onaquis. Sit quietly awhile. Let the silence inform you. Then read Richman’s novel for the backstory. It’s a sad Utah tale very likely to grab your heart. South Onaqui Loop, photos and hiking information BLM Onaqui Herd Management, photos and viewing information Dugway Proving Grounds Survivors, info and articles about chemical, biological and radioactive open air testing |