Sunday, February 23, 2003

Steve Crandall writes: Having grown up in Montana I find this story about faith in an obvious charlatan fascinating. The drought in Montana has been in place for several years and many farmers are now beyond hope. [Steve Crandall's Surf Report 2.0] Wallace Stegner could have predicted this fractured marriage of old dry West beliefs with a Mt. Shasta self-appointed shaman with his geography of hope. I first read about farming in the arid West in Stegner's Beyond the Hundredth Meridian and Wolf Willow, as well as in his essays. More recently, in Jonathan Raban's Bad Land. Not forgetting Marc Reisner's Cadillac Desert.They wrote convincingly about the railroad marketing and wishful thinking of the settlement of the arid West: the rain follows the plow. When I travel West, I try to carry a Western-themed book. Stegner, Raban, Ivan Doig, John Muir, Norman Maclean. To help me begin to understand the human side of those compelling landscapes, and the brute facts that the myths hide. 10:38:02 AM