Hard Road West: Alone on the California Trail by Gwen Moffat

Abstract

Reviews 357 Part II leaves farm and church but relates the theme to making love and a new family. In “The Barn,” for example, Heynan writes: It is like entering a bam, coming close to you .. . like a farmer with cold hands to the heat of a steady flank. The secrets which throb in the steaming walls of a barn are like our love. . . . The barn of love is insubstantial as the following poem, “Falling Out of Love,” implies; yet, as long as the love lasts the poet can claim: “We are building a barn/or the reason for barns.” The poet has discovered for him­ self the reasons for farm and church, but, the reader realizes, he can do no more than potter in a small garden and perform the rite of poem-making. To reduce the thematic complexity of this book to one simple scheme, however, is to do it a disservice. The poems are replete with themes that complement and enrich and move beyond the farm-church pattern. How­ ever, the reader who expects the thematic unity of Parts I and II to continue may be disappointed by Part III. The first two parts manifest the patchwork harmony of the well-laid-out flatland farm, while the third (titled “Touch­ ing the River”) resembles the crazy quilt configurations of the upland farm, straggling into the hills. Here earlier themes do echo in such poems as “Farewell, Oregon” even as new themes of uncultivated nature emerge in “Approaching a Hill in November,” and “Fall Poem.” GAYMON BENNETT Northwest Nazarene College Hard Road West: Alone on the California Trail. By Gwen Moffat. (New York: The Viking Press, 1981. 198 pages, $13.95.) Hard Road West is a journal-like account by an English woman, writer, and mountaineer of her trip along the California Trail in our time. Although Moffat has relatedness to Francis Parkman, she sees no “wild men and wild beasts.” Like Parkman, Moffat finds what she seeks, but what she seeks is community. If Parkman gave her an initial idea, he did not give her her particular vision, the California Trail, or the language through which we receive her understandings of both. Moffat bursts not into language on first sight of unknown regions. She starts stunted and unsure, gradually chang­ ing with respect to the ease with which words come and to the whole struc­ ture of her language; we see that changes in her language occur when her experience starts to deepen and as, in “shared solitude,” she establishes a 358 Western American Literature bond with those who have gone before her. Moffat writes of a literal, pioneer trail and a metaphoric, personal one. She tells us that for her they fuse, that the literal and the metaphoric come together in the western moun­ tains. At the start of her trip, Moffat’s first descriptions are so factual that it is not easy to recognize preoccupations with states of mind. The land, not Moffat, is “alien”; morning is “like a bad day in the Scottish Highlands.” (She had lost a friend there.) Moffat, as seen by us through language, is unresponsive, better-oriented to things she already knows, caring about quantitative measure, using language that is controlled, unimaginative, unfeeling, but without falsification. “The country looked flat, but once into it, it was a maze of dry gullies of varying depths.” By Wyoming there are changes. Moffat reports herself “punch-drunk with images.” As she becomes changed by experience her sentences expand, her ideas become more complex, and image and metaphor become abundant. She uses cliches, seldom chooses what gives pleasure as a perfect word; and yet words work for her. She can call a “vista” a “world,” and when her statement comes after paragraphs of increasingly-expansive prose a reader can set aside cliché and believe that Moffat means and feels that what she looks out on could in fact be everything. Hard. Road West depends on language that makes dual statements. The language of experience, that looks as if it derived from an actual preliminary journal, gives us emergent metaphor and style that come spontaneously when life becomes joyous; superimposed, controlling metaphors order the book...