3.5/5

From the height of a horse you look down to clean spaces in a shifty yellow soil, bare to the eye as a newly sanded floor. Then as soon as ever the hill shadows begin to swell out from the sidelong ranges, come little flakes of whiteness fluttering at the edge of the sand. By dusk there are tiny drifts in the lee of every strong shrub, rosy-tipped corollas as riotous in the sliding mesa wind as if they were real flakes shaken out of a cloud, not sprung from the ground on wiry three-inch stems. They keep awake all night, and all the air is heavy and musky sweet because of them.

This is a singular tome that could be better, but it could also be much worse. It is an old one, published just after finale of the anxieties that were the fin-de-siècle, and while Austin's prose is to die for, her title of "mystic" seems at times to amount to little more than racism with a naturalist's hat and a talent for words, most assuredly on paper and perhaps in speech. Nevertheless, I did learn many a thing or two about how the state that I've lived all my life in was at one of its borders with another more than a century ago, and what grew tedious at points with sensationalism was brightened by the variety of the sections and the love, if highly paternalistic and self-satisfied at times, Austin had for the land and its denizens, although she would have done better to not apply her personificating rhapsodizing to the various indigenous nations of the land and instead confined such to the flora and fauna and architectural wonders of rock and wood and water. Nonetheless, I am glad to see that this edition is a reissue, as the transition between the 19th and 20th still doesn't have much of a woman's perspective on the broader writing topics of life such as ecology, and even her anthropology, however, warped, has its uses in the larger scheme of things.

Austin's descriptions are appealing enough for me to seriously consider visiting, perhaps even dwell on the idea of moving out to the area for library work, such a landscape that she paints in her pages with its coyotes and its skys and its precious waters, but much of it has likely been "developed" since then, and the scrabble to avoid temperature spikes would get as dreary at times as it did during my Los Angeles schooling days. Still, I won't turn up my nose if a potential job appears in the area of the California/Arizona border and other areas with similar climates. As such, the author's comforting, gorgeous, and at times humorous characterizations make her moments of bigotry all the harder to bear, and fortunately these latter blots are so rare that broad swathes encompassing entire essays/chapters can be read on their own, and the worth of naturalistic appreciation can be maintained without aiding and abetting the genocidal nostalgia that views white civilization as inevitable and the current landscape the fever dream of a disease that must be cured. This is no [b:Silent Spring|27333|Silent Spring|Rachel Carson|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1442353674s/27333.jpg|880193], but it is an ancestor of the beautiful pictures scattered throughout hard scientific facts of the more recent work, and Austin's concerns with the development of the area mentioned in the Goodreads blurb makes me think there may be a work in her bibliography that is less passive in its observations and does more to call for preservation. This, despite the common myth of the one hit wonder woman author, is far from her only work, and while I have my reservations about her ideologies, other works of hers would be worth picking up if ever I should come across them.

I don't have many nonfiction books concerned with nature on my shelves. The brief tastes that I've gotten make me feel I should remedy that, but so much of what is lauded out there is so consciously, and falsely, apolitical that it wouldn't be worth my time. I've supplemented with [b:500 Great Books by Women|1503057|500 Great Books By Women|Erica Bauermeister|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1438987789s/1503057.jpg|1494514] entries thus far, but I'd need to make an effort to look for the sort of explicitly sociopolitically aware/postcolonial/settler state critiquing/feminist/queer analysis of the history of naturalism, and at this point, I don't have the time to do more than browse. Nonetheless, this is a path I'd like to pursue, both in terms of picking up more of Austin's wondrous, if misguided at times, prose and visiting the areas themselves, and it's rather nice to have concrete travel wishes beyond vague pretensions towards various areas of Europe and all that. Sometime in the future, with all the rest of my plans. For now, the weekend awaits.

Go as far as you dare in the heart of a lonely land, you cannot go so far that life and death are not before you.

Wasn't expecting vignettes, was expecting a more cohesive book. This set me off on the wrong start and I found it difficult to get through. Despite this, lots of insightful passages.

"The origin of mountain streams is like the origin of tears, patent to the understanding but mysterious to the sense." Thus is the prose in the beautiful little book. Only 76 pages long, but strong in beauty of the American southwest. More about flora and fauna than the people who live there, but an education in the hidden beauty in this dry arid land. Written in 1903 but very telling about the destruction man was doing even 120 years ago. "It is the economy of nature, but with it all there is not sufficient account taken of the works of man. There is no scavenger that eats tin cans, and no wild thing leaves a like disfigurement on the forest floor."

A short book of essays about life in the desert and the Eastern Sierras of California at the turn of the 20th Century. Austin is a female John Muir. Be ready for botany lessons and interesting observations on Native American culture as well as place and nature. Definitely want to read more of her works. She died in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Not the travelogue that I was hoping it was, but it fits the category "read a nonfiction book" (PopSugar 2015) for my2016 Reading Challenge. Austin published this in 1903 and it's a lyrical paean to the American West, specifically the sparsely settled dry lands. The book is actually a series of interrelated essays. My favorites were the ones about several Native Americans know to her: a Shoshone medicine man and a Paiute basket weaver.

Mary Austin lived in the Owens Valley of California in the early years of the 20th century. This book is essays about the flora, fauna, and weather of the area. This was a time when Indians still clung to the ways of the land; miners still looked for veins and pockets; stages still connected towns to railroads; and feuds were sometimes settled with guns.
The book is a little challenging to read. Austen uses an archaic, formal sentence structure and some words that seem to be unique to her. But it is easy to come toa love of the land of little rain and its denizens through Austen's words.

Naturalist admiration of the eastern Mid-Sierras, highlight essays are Water Trails of the Ceriso, The Mesa Trail, and Nurslings of the Sky.