Discoveries
ACROSS OPEN GROUND
By Heather Parkinson
Bloomsbury: 248 pp., $23.95
When you read a beautifully written love story, love awakens wherever it has been sleeping in you. Not a simpering sentimental story, not a sex manual, but a story that conveys the balance of pain and sweetness that love is. You lean into stories like these, turning the pages quickly to get to the parts where the lovers finally enter their own world and leave the world of suffering outside.
“Across Open Ground” is such a story. It is set in Idaho in 1917. The characters are sheepherders and women who depend on the kindness of strangers. The landscape includes forked lightning, gullies and other natural and man-made hurdles. There is the rumble of world war and a lame red horse that must be shot.
Walter is a fine young man (perhaps in his early 20s) who doesn’t understand the heat that sweeps over him when he meets Trina. It takes a long time to get to their shivering kisses. We live through a lot of weather and hard work and misunderstandings and dreams to get there.
Heather Parkinson’s writing is strangely awkward at times; the sentence structure can seem strangled. But sometimes the awkwardness is like the fumbling that comes before grace, a stop on the learning curve, a point on the arc between humans and God.
*
CLIMBING FREE
My Life in the Vertical World
By Lynn Hill with Greg Child
W.W. Norton: 288 pp., $24.95
It can’t hurt that Lynn Hill is stunningly beautiful (which doesn’t affect her climbing but does enhance her celebrity status), this 5-foot-tall phenom who began climbing at 14 and kept doing it until she had won a World Cup and made the first free ascent of El Capitan’s notorious Nose route in one day (much of it in the dark). “Climbing Free” is one of those portraits of the good side of obsession: the side that leads to success and proficiency. But along the way, Hill loses many friends, particularly to high-altitude mountaineering. She decides early in her climbing life that what she loves is the feel of rocks, preferably without too many ropes and tools. She ascends above the machismo of the sport: “Everyone was equal before the rocks, it seemed to me. The beauty of climbing is that each person is free to choreograph his or her own way of adapting to the rock.”
Hill was born in 1961 in Michigan in a family of seven kids whose father left on Christmas in 1976. She discovered her love for climbing, like so many, in California at Joshua Tree and then Yosemite. The book is also a history of the sport, of the groups and ideas and evolution of climbing, from the Stonemasters, a group of California climbers in the 1970s, to the Camp Four Yosemite climbers in the 1980s.
These were the kids from all walks of life who lived to climb, redeeming soda cans and selling marijuana to live as close to El Capitan as they could get. Hill’s personal life is as chaotic as her climbing life is focused. She wins competition after competition and travels around the world-climbing in Vietnam and Tasmania and Europe. “It was clear to me,” she writes, “that the further I went toward the ‘extreme,’ the further I was from achieving a harmonious balance in my life.”
“Climbing Free” marks the point of change. “No matter where I am in the world or what summit I’ve attained, the greatest sense of fulfillment in my life is connected to people.” The book’s photographs of grinning friends on various peaks are a testament to that.
*
DIRT UNDER MY NAILS
An American Farmer
and Her Changing Land
By Marilee Foster
Bridge Works: 176 pp., $22.95
Marilee Foster farms 600 acres of family land in Sagaponak, N.Y., one of the most beautiful places on eastern Long Island, the most fertile and the most threatened to become “Hamptonized,” overdeveloped and crowded.
Foster’s claim to and love for this part of the world goes back four generations to her great great-grandfather, a whaling captain in the 1880s who purchased the land. She and her brother plant potatoes and various farm-stand vegetables. She is only vaguely tolerant of summer people who fall in love with the Atlantic Coast, and more than a little gleeful, it seems to me, when their enormous houses are pulled out to sea in winter storms. There’s nothing a farmer likes to see punished more than hubris.
Foster writes simply and specifically about the birds and seasons; you can smell the new asparagus and the strawberries. But she is also eloquent on the subject of weeds and ants and burrs and buying farm equipment from the Amish in Pennsylvania. She’s no romantic. “Dirt Under My Nails” gives the pleasant feeling of reading a local column or that testament to practical literature, “The Farmer’s Almanac.”