The Land of Little Rain
Mary Austin, 1903
Field notes from the California desert — yuccas, buzzards, lone prospectors, Paiute basket makers — seen with a poet's eye and a resident's patience.
Mary Austin
1868–1934
Austin moved to the Owens Valley in 1888, learned its plants and Paiute basketmaking firsthand, and published The Land of Little Rain as her first book.
Feels like wonder, longing and nature.
What the night sky does to your sense of your own importance.
For all the toll the desert takes of a man it gives compensations, deep breaths, deep sleep, and the communion of the stars. It comes upon one with new force in the pauses of the night that the Chaldeans were a desert-bred people. It is hard to escape the sense of mastery as the stars move in the wide clear heavens to risings and settings unobscured. They look large and near and palpitant; as if they moved on some stately service not needful to declare. Wheeling to their stations in the sky, they make the poor world-fret of no account. Of no account you who lie out there watching, nor the lean coyote that stands off in the scrub from you and howls and howls. Books by Mary Austin
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