272 Western American Literature John Telford’s55 elegant photographs capture the fragile beauty of sand stone bathed in light, slot canyons, grottoes, turrets, bluffs, and the essential river. Perhaps where Abbey, Austin, and Krutch taught us the words that lock these places into our memory, Telford captures the incredible hues and curva ture of stone with skill and reverence one can relish as proof Coyote’s Canyon is not an illusion. Or is it? MARGARET PETTIS Hyrum, Utah Baja Journey: Reveries of a Sea-Kayaker. By Robin Carey. (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1989. 175 pages, $29.95/$12.95.) I’ll be honest: I didn’t even know there was a Sea of Cortes. And I sure didn’t knowwhat it might be like—the people, the landscapes, and the weather, and the fish. But now, after reading Robin Carey’sBaja Journey, I’ll never for get it. It’s easy to lose sight of the fact that this iswhat literature issupposed to do—that this is all it issupposed to do:showus new things, or new feelings—or old things in a new way. The book is subtitled “Reveries of a Sea-Kayaker,” and is Carey’s—a kayak enthusiast, outdoorsman and professor of Shakespeare—version of the Odyssey: to paddle along the wild, usually-empty coast of the Sea of Cortés in his kayak. He makes the first part of the journey with his son for company, and then another leg of the trip with his wife, but finishes solo, and it is here— in the last half of the book—that not only do the experiences seem richer than in the first half, but the writing, too, is stronger. In the early part of the book, it’s possible that in a few cases Carey may bang home his metaphors a little too hard, as in his description of examining a garbage pile in which he finds, strangely, his own picture from a travel brochure (Carey used to guide whitewater trips in the Northwest). He rambles for a page and a half on the mystery and meaning of this discovery, diluting it—and there are places, early on, where the writing isa little awkward —a sentence here and there—but Carey gets in shape literarily, as well as physically, with a little more paddling. Muscles loosen, and the fat falls away from the prose, as in his description of birds (“The parrots had long faces like French prime ministers.”), or his landing of a giant cabrilla, on his fly rod. “. . . I led him close, hooked his underjaw with the gaff, and skittered him ashore. “One bulbous eye looked up off the luminous sand. One huge gill-plate rose and fell like half a bellows. The white streamer glowed in a shred of his lip, and his belly heaved. ‘How far have you come to meet me?’I asked. “He said nothing. I hit him over the head with a stone. He quivered and flipped, then lay still. I lay back, myself, in the sand.” Reviews 273 And Carey writes wonderfully of paddling with his son in a tempest. “I read his lips more than heard him. The wind scattered his words. It was hard, also, to keep track of each other in the waves. Whole minutes went by sometimes before we would top waves together and take bearings on each other. Salt so smeared my sunglasses that I peeled them away and tossed them into the kayak. The world shimmered in squinting light. Spray hammered our faces, and wind stiff-armed us, gusting.” In its best places, the newness of this country does the same thing to us, in Baja Journey—hammers us, stiff-arms us, gusting with strangeness. Thanks to Robin Carey for bringing to the more sedentary, less-traveled of us such a new and rare world. RICK BASS Troy, Montana A New Collection of Thomas Bangs Thorpe’s Sketches of the Old Southwest. ByThomas Bangs Thorpe. Edited byDavid C. Estes. (Baton Rouge:Louisiana State University Press, 1989. 392 pages, $40.00.) Thomas Bangs Thorpe is best known as the author of “The Big Bear of Arkansas,” almost universally acknowledged as one of...