I bet you, somewhere in your mental picture, you had a saguaro cactus. Or maybe just a flat expanse of desert, empty save for a handful of tumbling tumbleweeds. Now, undoubtedly you pictured some majestic vista. I want you to picture the landscape of American Southwest in your mind’s eye. A Menace to the West David Grundman goes shooting at a stationary target - and breaks off more than he can handle We are a proud member of That's Not Canon Productions, a podcast network for independent podcasters of all stripes.ĭesigned and maintained by #13 at Lodge #777. All rights reserved, all wrongs reversed.
They are licensed under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 License. In the last lines of the story, however, the narrator sees from her departing footsteps that she has not been crippled or twisted by loneliness and grief: “There in the bare, hot sand the track of her two feet bore evenly and white.These articles and episodes are ©2019-2022 by their respective authors, and published by the Ancient and Esoteric Order of the Jackalope. But her baby died, and after its death she became a permanent exile, who has “walked off all sense of society-made values,” and who must wander alone for the rest of her life. Is she comely or plain? Crazy or wise? Twisted or straight? Her motives and destination are mysteries, too: “she came and went about our western world on no discoverable errand,” and “whether she had some place of refuge . . . was never learned.” The narrator meets the Walking Woman at a spring, and learns that she had begun by “walking off an illness,” which was caused by years of nursing an invalid and healed by the “large soundness of nature.” She declares that she has known three joyous experiences in her wanderings: loving a man, working with him as an equal partner, and bearing a child. In “The Walking Woman,” a female narrator tells the story of a mysterious wanderer seen in the hills of the San Joaquin Valley, about whom cowboys and sheepherders give conflicting reports.
Toward the end of her life she collaborated with Ansel Adams on a book called “Taos Pueblo,” from 1930. She cultivated a semi-mystic attachment to nature, and especially to the desert, with descriptions that implied a correspondence between the landscape and female sexuality. Despite her fame, Austin always saw herself as an outsider in an American Western literary culture generally dominated by men. In 1905 she put her daughter in a private institution in Santa Clara, where she died, thirteen years later. She labored to raise a severely disabled daughter, and, in 1907, left her unhappy marriage to pursue a successful career as a novelist, moving to Carmel, California, and joining a writers’ colony that included Jack London and Ambrose Bierce. As she wrote in “Woman Alone,” an anonymous essay from 1927, she had been an unloved child, and struggled to conform to rigid expectations of feminine subservience.
Her life uncannily foreshadowed the experiences of the women in Berkeley’s photographs. Mary Austin wrote more than thirty books, and was dedicated to exploring and celebrating the landscapes, religions, and Native American art of the Southwest. Printed on pages opposite the photographs, in white type against a light-blue background, the passages are ethereal, like skywriting or spirit messages, contributing to the feeling of the book as a timeless legend. This allegory of a woman’s lonely journey gives Berkeley’s book its title and theme. “The Walking Woman” connects their experiences visually through their settings-eerily remote towns and trailer parks in Arizona and Utah-against blazing sunlight and garish sunsets in a primitive landscape, which Berkeley describes as a mythic place “where everything appeared untouched . . . where it seemed possible that no one had ever set foot.” She combines her portraits with excerpts from a century-old short story, Mary Austin’s “The Walking Woman,” which was first published in The Atlantic Monthly, in 1907. Berkeley’s encounter with Ruth was the beginning of a long project that expanded to include another female outcast in the Southwest, who has a different history of damage and resilience.
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