Going Over East: Reflections of a Woman Rancher by Linda M. Hasselstrom

Abstract

174 Western American Literature Cultural Hero” depicted strongly in works by Jack London, John Dos Passos and Jack Kerouac. Clyde Rice, who lives on the Clackamas River in the Cascade Mountains not far from Portland, exemplifies the phrase Jack London used to describe Josiah Flynt (author of Tramping With Tramps: Studies and Sketches of the Vagabond Life, 1899) : “The real thing, blowed in the glass.” Rice, 85, hobo’d during the 1930s Great Depression. Night Freight is an autobiographical episode in which Rice has left his wife and son behind in Tiburon and gone in search of gold in northern California. Riding on a flatcar loaded with green railroad ties in the freezing wind of the Sierras, Rice’s companions in Night Freight are a gambler and alcoholic drifter named Max, a troubled, religious, teenage boy and an old man running from the conventional expectations of his family, by far the most fascinating of the group. Rice has a perfect eye, ear and touch for recreating this era and the downand -outs it produced. One who had not been there and lived it could not write such a passage as this: “It seemed strange, paying for transportation with no effort but just endurance, staring up at the sullen dirty red of the following boxcar, listening to the groans and banging of the great iron coupling, the first grip of freight cars, and never unaware of the rolling flanged wheels’ indifference as to whether they carried you to the heart of family or carved you from existence upon the tracks.” In fact, few who have been there and lived it could write a passage like that. DALE L. WALKER University of Texas at El Paso Going Over East: Reflections of a Woman Rancher. By Linda M. Hasselstrom. (Golden, Colorado: Fulcrum, 1987. 206 pages, $13.95.) Hasselstrom’s second series of essays about ranching in western South Dakota (the other is Windbreak: A Woman Rancher on the Northern Plains) isunified by the writer’senvironmental concerns—our need to be more in touch with our natural surroundings and consequently more concerned with con­ serving them. The essays explore the spiritual and physical unity of humans with the land. Titled for a frequent sojourn on the Hasselstrom ranch, going over east, which means passing through twelve gates to monitor ranch oper­ ations and pastured cattle—these essays take as their departure points the physical landmarks and natural phenomena encountered on such a trip. Abandoned homesteads, animal skeletons, wild flowers, golden eagles, and intrusive technological incursions (mining, railroads, and wandering irriga­ Reviews 175 tion ditches) inspire Hasselstrom’s reflections upon the relationship of human beings to the land from which they wrest their livelihood—in harmony with or in violation of nature. Hasselstrom’s method isempirical. She isconcerned with how the particu­ lar suggests the universal. When she says “South Dakota is the center of the universe,” Hasselstrom expresses no narrow provincialism, but instead empha­ sizes the value of her life on the ranch and the fact that, to an observant and thoughtful mind, universal truths are to be found in the particularized minutiae of an everyday life lived close to the soil, not solely in urban cultural centers and academe. Admitting—or boasting—of having “an insatiable desire for seeing metaphors in ordinary incidents,” Hasselstrom asserts that “if we leave the natural world too far behind” we will not have progressed to some new technological nirvana but will have lost something valuable, part of our humanity. Going Over East will enlighten non-ranchers about the rough, demanding, isolated, and precarious existence of independent cattle ranchers of the upper Great Plains. Hasselstrom is passionate about her prairie home; she gave up college teaching to work the family land. Her loving but tough-minded essays on ranch life are grounded in the prairie, but point to implications far beyond. The environmental message of these essays is emphatic, but the didactic and the aesthetic are usually well in balance. Going Over East reveals a practical, roll-up-the-sleeves rancher and writer who is still “trying to see beyond the horizon.” KATE ARNESON Augustana College Plain Folk: A Commonplace of the Great Plains. By Jim Hoy and...