Mostly Water

April 15, 2020
Travels in the Northwest by Alaska-based journalist and essayist Odden. "My grandmother Mona was missing an index finger on her left hand because she cut it off with an ax when she was a little girl." So begins Odden's literate, occasionally florid collection, a piece celebrating the self-reliance and independence of country people while suggesting that all kinds of unhappy things can happen out on the land. In a narrative peppered with horses, cows, rivers, farms, and the people who work all of them, the author often arrives at exactly the right thing to say. Her description of a brooding thunderstorm over the arid plains of her home ground, for instance, is eminently memorable: "In eastern Oregon, you knew you were about to be in a storm when the sky would glint yellowish gray and the filmy veils of virga would start to descend." Sometimes, however, Odden lays the lily-gilding on a little too thickly, as when she revels in freshly picked berries: "In their moment I am privileged to be among them, their small dark roundness in my hand one at a time, or a lucky handful in the right season." There are a few throwaway pieces that seem dashed off to meet a deadline--e.g., a Foxfire-ish couple of pages about canning peaches. But though some of the expected tropes are there, given the country under discussion and its trees, lakes, bears, and salmon, Odden also turns in pieces that are marvels of compression, such as a celebration of country dogs that would do Rick Bass proud. "Our present dogs," she writes merrily, "have transferred most of their instincts to saving us from red squirrels." In a nice turn, the author closes by admitting that she's changed the names of people "I could imagine protesting portrayal in these pages" after turning in sketches that are mostly admiring, and that anyone familiar with the territory will appreciate. Not everything works, but there's much to like in Odden's observations.

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