Letters on an Elk Hunt by Elinore Pruitt Stewart

 

This is the 1915 follow-up to her first compendium of letters home Letters of a Woman Homesteader [1914.] [Reviewed in-depth here.]

This non-fiction volume is, again, what the title states—Mrs. Stewart writing of an extended hunting trip in the mountains of Wyoming.

The first volume was full of charm, wisdom, grit and good cheer—this volume shows Mrs. Stewart had lost none of her comely character.

Let’s dip into a few passages that struck this reader.

At last we are off. I am powerfully glad. I shall have to enjoy this trip for us both. You see how greedy I am for new experiences! I have never been on a prolonged hunt before, so I am looking forward to a heap of fun.

·        “Greedy for new experiences.”

·        How often do we hear that sentiment outside an expression for a new show to binge-watch.

·        Most of us seem to eat the same foods, drive the same routes, thumb the same phone traceries with no seeming desire to be real-world experience-greedy.

·        We might be better for giving up the routine and we might have a “heap of fun” while we’re at it.

[In a rare show of discord we have the following exchange. Allow me to set the context.

·        They have spent time with a family having a hard go of it in a desert homestead.

·        They encounter two versions of events—the hard luck tale from the two adults.

·        And separately the two children, “suffering” under the same hardships have proudly been showing them what they have made and adapted in the harsh land.

After supper the men took their guns and went out to shoot sage-hens. Johnny went with Mr. Haynes and Mr. Struble. Miss Hull walked back with Ella, and we sent Mrs. Sanders a few cans of fruit. Mrs. O’ Shaughnessy and I washed the dishes. We were talking of the Sanders family. Mrs. O’Shaughnessy was disgusted with me because I wept.

“You think it is a soft heart you have, but it is only your head that is soft. Of course they are having a hard time. What of it? The very root of independence is hard times. That’s the way America was founded; that is why it stands so firmly. Hard times is what makes sound characters. And them kids are getting a new hold on character that was very near run to seed in the parents. Johnny will be tax-assessor yet, I’ll bet you, and you just watch that Eller. It won’t surprise me a bit to see her county superintendent of schools. The parents most likely never would make anything; but having just only a pa and a ma and getting the very hard licks them kids are getting now, is what is going to make them something more than a pa and a ma.”

Mrs. O’Shaughnessy is very wise, but sometimes she seems absolutely heartless.

·        Contrasting opinions.

·        Who is, right?

·        It seems disposition/mental attitude may tell the tale.

[The hunting party encounters a homesteader woman in the midst of a hard labored birth.]

They were powerfully glad to see us, and the young father left at once to get Grandma Mortimer, a neighborhood godsend such as most Western communities have one of. We busied ourselves relieving the young mother as much as we could. She wouldn’t leave the baby and lie down. The child is teething and had convulsions. We put it into a hot bath and held the convulsions in check until Mrs. Mortimer came. She bustled in and took hold in a way to insure confidence. She had not been there long before she had both parents in bed, “saving themselves for to-morrow,” and was gently rubbing the hot little body of the baby. She kept giving it warm tea she had made of herbs, until soon the threatening jerks were over, the peevish whining ceased, and the child slept peacefully on Grandma’s lap. I watched her, fascinated. There was never a bit of faltering, no indecision; everything she did seemed exactly what she ought to do. “How did you learn it all?” I asked her. “How can you know just what to do, and then have the courage to do it? I should be afraid of doing the wrong thing.” “Why,” she said, “that is easy. Just do the very best you can and trust God for the rest. After all, it is God who saves the baby, not us and not our efforts; but we can help. He lets us do that. Lots of times the good we do goes beyond any medicine. Never be afraid to help your best. I have been doing that for forty years and I am going to keep it up till I die.”

·        I call attention to the gorgeous phrase: Never be afraid to help your best.

·        How many of us do not step in, do not step up for fear of “Not knowing the exact right thing to do?

·        At those times refer to Grandma Mortimer and Never be afraid to help your best.

[Upon a scene witnessed while staying with another family.]

“As big Dave rode through the gate, our boy caught him by the leg and said, ‘I just love you, daddy.’ Big Dave bent down and kissed him, and said, ‘You’re a man, son.’ How proud that made the little fellow! Parents should praise their children more; the little things work hard for a few words of praise, and many of them never get their pay.

·        We are often scarce with our praise for young and old-- that makes us stingy.

·        Why die Misers of Love, Compassion and Good Cheer?

·        What are we saving it up for?

·        It costs us nothing and is often worth more than gold to the recipients.

·        Spread your gold coin around, Hombres!

[The morning after Grandma Mortimer having delivered the child. In the wee hours she told the tale of how she had lost her own child years ago and rather than wallowing in grief, thereafter, devoted her energy to helping wherever she could.]

Just then a sleepy little bird twittered outside, and the baby stirred a little. The first faint light of dawn was just creeping up the valley. I rose and said I must get back to camp. Mrs. O’Shaughnessy and I had both wept with Mrs. Mortimer over little Dave. We have all given up our first-born little man-child; so we felt near each other. We told Mrs. Mortimer that we had passed under the rod also. I kissed her toilworn old hands, and Mrs. O’Shaughnessy dropped a kiss on her old gray head as we passed out into the rose-and-gold morning. We felt that we were leaving a sanctified presence, and we are both of us better and humbler women because we met a woman who has buried her sorrow beneath faith and endeavor.

[The next day.]

There were a great many little lakes along the valley, and thousands of duck. Mr. Stewart was driving, but as he wanted to shoot ducks, I took the lines and drove along. There is so much that is beautiful, and I was trying so hard to see it all, that I took the wrong road; but none of us noticed it at first, and then we didn’t think it worth while to turn back.

·        One: So much to see. This is slow wagon pace. There are no earbuds. This is a woman alive to surroundings.

·        I see many who can’t survive a drive to the convenience store without assumed “needed” distraction devices.

·        Two: She’s not alone in this absorption in “What is.” I took the wrong road; but none of us noticed it at first, and then we didn’t think it worth while to turn back.

·        No one noticed the “wrong turn.”

·        Then once noticed, no one cared. Where they were was good enough.

·        Hell, maybe it was better.

·        A Zen Sage could do no better to describe this Serenity of Now.

[On facing a dilemma.]

I hardly knew what to do, but acting from force of habit, I reckon, I began cleaning. A powerfully good way to reason out things sometimes is to work; and just then I had to work.

·        This wisdom is almost General Patton-esque in its gorgeous utility.

·        A powerfully good way to reason out things sometimes is to work.

·        How many “problems” could we solve by skipping the whining, the worrying the bitchin’, the moanin’ and set ourselves to some task, any task and more often than not we “burn off that worry” and often surprise ourselves with a possible solution popping into our minds while we aren’t even dwelling on the “problem.”

·        A powerfully good way to reason out things sometimes is to work.

[Upon visiting a Game warden’s secluded cabin.]

The cabin walls are covered with pen-and-ink drawings, the work of the warden’s gifted children,— Vina, the pretty eighteen-year-old daughter, and Laurence, the sixteen-year-old son. They never had a lesson in drawing in their lives, but their pictures portray Western life exactly.

·        Precision drawing.

·        No lessons.

·        No YouTube tutorial.

·        Just…pick up the pen, dab it in ink and go!

·        We often hold back because we want someone else to tell us what to do.

·        How much of anything that surrounds us, anything at all would be here if we had to wait for an “instructor” a “leader” a “boss” to explain the ways of the world to us.

·        A powerfully good way to reason out things sometimes is to work.

[Upon returning home and her “Memory Bed.” A bed of flowers that provide living resonance to…well, read it in her own words, t’is beautiful.]

Can you guess how happy I am? Be it ever so humble there is no place like home. It is so good to sit in my creaky old rocker, to hold Junior, to feel his dear weight; to look at my brave little mother. I do not like the “in-law.” She is mother to me. Under the east window of our dining-room we have a flower-bed. We call it our memory-bed because Clyde’s first wife had it made and kept pansies growing there. We poured the water of my little lost boy’s last bath onto the memory-bed. I keep pansies growing in one side of the bed in memory of her who loved them. In the other end I plant sweet alyssum in memory of my baby. A few pansies and a tuft of sweet alyssum smiled a welcome, though all the rest of my flowers were dead. We have a hop-vine at the window and it has protected the flowers in the memory-bed. How happy I have been, looking over the place!

·        We can create places of heartfelt immortality and deeply moored memory or…

·        We can fill the house up with Trademarked items and souvenirs, artifacts of the work of others.

[The concluding lines of the last letter.]

I have had a fine trip; I have experienced about all the human emotions. I had not expected to encounter so many people or to get the little inside glimpses that I’ve had, but wherever there are human beings there are the little histories. I have come home realizing anew how happy I am, how much I have been spared, and how many of life’s blessings are mine.

·        Three sentences. So much wisdom.

·        Sentence One: I have had a fine trip; I have experienced about all the human emotions.

·        She does not insist on simply the fine of emotions of a “good vacation.” She faced grieving folk, happy folk, struggling folk, generous folk.

·        She faced humanity in all its spectrum.

·        This is a mature philosophy that does not insist that Life always be storybook—but that it be what it is and You bring what You can to it.

·        Sentence Two: I had not expected to encounter so many people or to get the little inside glimpses that I’ve had, but wherever there are human beings there are the little histories.

·        I emphasize: wherever there are human beings there are the little histories.

·        I have found this true in my own experience.

·        I am at my worst when I am oblivious to those around me.

·        I am at my worst when I give those around me the small change of small talk.

·        I’m at my best when I see each human as an alternate center of an entire Universe who has something to say, things they have seen, have experienced that I never have as there is only so much I can see from my own Center.

·        Each true glimpsed interaction expands the view from my Center.

·        Sentence Three: I have come home realizing anew how happy I am, how much I have been spared, and how many of life’s blessings are mine.

·        Needs no expansion from me. Gorgeous on its face.

I repeat what I said regarding her first volume…

·        Her lessons, her zest for life, her grit suits me just fine.

·        She goes into my Pantheon of Heroes of Real Life Warriors.

I love These Hosses of Yore!

I wanna be Elinore when I grow up.

Hoppy Serves a Writ [1943]

 

Director: George Archainbaud

Screenplay: Gerald Geraghty

I must admit as a long-time fan of the genre that this was my first, and thus far only, Hopalong Cassidy film.

Based on this one alone, I don’t think a 59-year-old adult is the target audience.

I have read and enjoyed in a small way some of Clarence Mulford’s Hopalong tales, and this film was the last to be based on one of Mulford’s works.

As per usual, I do not offer plot details as that seems a disservice to those who wish to view, I will mention that we have a young Bob Mitchum doing a little work here.

Overall, seems a fast efficient piece of industry filmmaking aimed at the very young.

Letters of a Woman Homesteader by Elinore Pruitt Stewart

 

This volume is literally the title--the actual non-fiction letters of Mrs. Stewart to her former employer in Denver.

Mrs. Stewart arrives in Wyoming in 1909.

This book is full of pluck, grit, and wall to wall good cheer.

This is who I have in mind when I think of can-do.

Real letters, real life from a Bonafide hero.

I am in love with this woman.

A+ to the rafters.

Now onto some tasty extracts for the curious.

Baby has the rabbit you gave her last Easter a year ago. In Denver I was afraid my baby would grow up devoid of imagination. Like all the kindergartners, she depended upon others to amuse her. I was very sorry about it, for my castles in Spain have been real homes to me. But there is no fear. She has a block of wood she found in the blacksmith shop which she calls her "dear baby." A spoke out of a wagon wheel is "little Margaret," and a barrel-stave is "bad little Johnny."

·        Mrs. Stewart worried “Baby” needed more to amuse her, this a century before smartphones and video games.

·        Baby did just fine with what she had between her ears.

·        Even the young’uns had grit and imagination.

·        Think of Baby the next time you or someone utters “I’m bored.”

·        How would they/you fare in 1909 Wyoming?

Such a snowstorm I never saw! The snow had pressed the branches down lower, hence my bumped head. Our fire was burning merrily and the heat kept the snow from in front. I scrambled out and poked up the fire; then, as it was only five o'clock, I went back to bed. And then I began to think how many kinds of idiot I was. Here I was thirty or forty miles from home, in the mountains where no one goes in the winter and where I knew the snow got to be ten or fifteen feet deep. But I could never see the good of moping, so I got up and got breakfast while Baby put her shoes on. We had our squirrels and more baked potatoes and I had delicious black coffee.

·        Most would worry plenty in the above scenario but I could never see the good of moping, so I got up and got breakfast while Baby put her shoes on. We had our squirrels and more baked potatoes and I had delicious black coffee.

·        Let’s all have some delicious black coffee and keep on truckin’.

[Her lovely sign-off on one of her letters.]

I wish I could do nice things for you, but all I can do is to love you.

Your sincere friend, Elinore Rupert.

[Does faith require a building? A peer group? A reference point? Or perhaps just what is in the heart and soul?]

We were all so very tired that soon Carlota Juanita brought out an armful of the thickest, brightest rugs and spread them over the floor for us to sleep upon. The men retired to a lean-to room, where they slept, but not before Manuel Pedro Felipe and Carlota had knelt before their altar for their devotions. Mrs. O'Shaughnessy and myself and Jerrine, knowing the rosary, surprised them by kneeling with them. It is good to meet with kindred faith away off in the mountains. It seems there could not possibly be a mistake when people so far away from creeds and doctrines hold to the faith of their childhood and find the practice a pleasure after so many years.

·        What we cleave to [faith/creed/demeanor/habit/behavior] in stark austere circumstances is more likely of real faithful value than anything we tout in comfortable circumstances.

Before they had finished eating we heard a shot, followed by a regular medley of dull booms. The men were in their saddles and gone in less time than it takes to tell it. The firing had ceased save for a few sharp reports from the revolvers, like a coyote's spiteful snapping. The pounding of the horse's hoofs grew fainter, and soon all was still. I kept my ears strained for the slightest sound. The cook and the boss, the only men up, hurried back to bed. Watson had risen so hurriedly that he had not been careful about his "tarp" and water had run into his bed. But that wouldn't disconcert anybody but a tenderfoot.

·        May none of us be disconcerted by the small stuff—Don’t be a Tenderfoot.

[For the next extract, erysipelas is an infection caused by Group A Streptococcus bacterium. It is usually introduced by a cut—large or small. Now easily treatable by antibiotics. Yet another example of the hazards facing the hardy ones who chanced all.]

So you see I was very deceitful. Do you remember, I wrote you of a little baby boy dying? That was my own little Jamie, our first little son. For a long time my heart was crushed. He was such a sweet, beautiful boy. I wanted him so much. He died of erysipelas. I held him in my arms till the last agony was over. Then I dressed the beautiful little body for the grave. Clyde is a carpenter; so I wanted him to make the little coffin. He did it every bit, and I lined and padded it, trimmed and covered it. Not that we couldn't afford to buy one or that our neighbors were not all that was kind and willing; but because it was a sad pleasure to do everything for our little first-born ourselves.

·        Do we lose something of the “healing” power of the grieving process by avoiding the “unpleasant”?

·        By farming our dealing with loss to the commercialized “pros”?

·        Do those who meet grief, misfortune, good fortune head-on drink a truer brew of life?

[Mrs. Stewart answers my question.]

As there had been no physician to help, so there was no minister to comfort, and I could not bear to let our baby leave the world without leaving any message to a community that sadly needed it. His little message to us had been love, so I selected a chapter from John and we had a funeral service, at which all our neighbors for thirty miles around were present. So you see, our union is sealed by love and welded by a great sorrow.

[In the midst of work, year-round toil, the loss of a child, the following shining perspective bolts through the blue of Mrs. Stewart’s soul.]

It is true, I want a great many things I haven't got, but I don't want them enough to be discontented and not enjoy the many blessings that are mine. I have my home among the blue mountains, my healthy, well-formed children, my clean, honest husband, my kind, gentle milk cows, my garden which I make myself. I have loads and loads of flowers which I tend myself. There are lots of chickens, turkeys, and pigs which are my own special care. I have some slow old gentle horses and an old wagon. I can load up the kiddies and go where I please any time. I have the best, kindest neighbors and I have my dear absent friends. Do you wonder I am so happy? When I think of it all, I wonder how I can crowd all my joy into one short life.

[Think of the last time you complained of a poor night’s sleep in your comfy bed and compare it to this slumber in the winter outdoors in Wyoming.]

Our improvised beds were the most comfortable things; I love the flicker of an open fire, the smell of the pines, the pure, sweet air, and I went to sleep thinking how blest I was to be able to enjoy the things I love most.

[The next is offered after having to improvise a Christmas for a destitute settler family—all went to work to make gifts and decorations, even hanging paper ornaments from a makeshift tree with hairs plucked from one’s own head.]

We all got so much out of so little. I will never again allow even the smallest thing to go to waste.

[Temperament is the key word.]

To me, homesteading is the solution of all poverty's problems, but I realize that temperament has much to do with success in any undertaking, and persons afraid of coyotes and work and loneliness had better let ranching alone. At the same time, any woman who can stand her own company, can see the beauty of the sunset, loves growing things, and is willing to put in as much time at careful labor as she does over the washtub, will certainly succeed; will have independence, plenty to eat all the time, and a home of her own in the end.

·        Again, the keyword in that passage is “temperament.”

·        Some people are better than others, and that “betterness” is simply sheer force of choice of attitude.

·        One finds nary a whine in this volume.

I would not, for anything, allow Mr. Stewart to do anything toward improving my place, for I want the fun and the experience myself. And I want to be able to speak from experience when I tell others what they can do. Theories are very beautiful, but facts are what must be had, and what I intend to give some time.

·        I repeat that last sentence…

·        “Theories are very beautiful, but facts are what must be had.”

·        No mired in YouTube research.

·        No “Just one more podcast episode and I’ll get started.”

·        No, “If I only had some help or this doodad or…”

·        Just skip the theories and abstraction and GO!

We are so rushed with spring work that we don't even go to the office for the mail, and I owe you letters and thanks. I keep promising myself the pleasure of writing you and keep putting it off until I can have more leisure, but that time never gets here. I am so glad when I can bring a little of this big, clean, beautiful outdoors into your apartment for you to enjoy, and I can think of nothing that would give me more happiness than to bring the West and its people to others who could not otherwise enjoy them. If I could only take them from whatever is worrying them and give them this bracing mountain air, glimpses of the scenery, a smell of the pines and the sage,—if I could only make them feel the free, ready sympathy and hospitality of these frontier people, I am sure their worries would diminish and my happiness would be complete.

·        This is a woman who loves where she is, what she sees, what she smells no matter the hardships involved.

·        I love this Woman.

[Decisive jack-of-all-trades Heroes and Heroines. Read on…]

It was Mrs. O'Shaughnessy who was the real help. She is a woman of great courage and decision and of splendid sense and judgment. A few days ago a man she had working for her got his finger-nail mashed off and neglected to care for it. Mrs. O'Shaughnessy examined it and found that gangrene had set in. She didn't tell him, but made various preparations and then told him she had heard that if there was danger of blood-poisoning it would show if the finger was placed on wood and the patient looked toward the sun. She said the person who looked at the finger could then see if there was any poison. So the man placed his finger on the chopping-block and before he could bat his eye she had chopped off the black, swollen finger. It was so sudden and unexpected that there seemed to be no pain. Then Mrs. O'Shaughnessy showed him the green streak already starting up his arm. The man seemed dazed and she was afraid of shock, so she gave him a dose of morphine and whiskey. Then with a quick stroke of a razor she laid open the green streak and immersed the whole arm in a strong solution of bichloride of mercury for twenty minutes. She then dressed the wound with absorbent cotton saturated with olive oil and carbolic acid, bundled her patient into a buggy, and drove forty-five miles that night to get him to a doctor. The doctor told us that only her quick action and knowledge of what to do saved the man's life.

[In the next, finding the way out of the complaint hole, no matter what. BTW-The “drunken Mexican” reference is regarding a man found trashing a cabin where they had intended to camp. They rolled on to not face that danger. No calling 911, no post a poor review to Yelp, just roll on and make do.]

As he had made no move to help me, without answering him I clambered out of the wagon and began to take the horses loose. "Ho!" he said; "are you goin' to camp here?" "Yes, I am," I snapped. "Have you any objections?" "Oh, no, none that won't keep," he assured me. It has always been a theory of mine that when we become sorry for ourselves we make our misfortunes harder to bear, because we lose courage and can't think without bias; so I cast about me for something to be glad about, and the comfort that at least we were safer with a simpleton than near a drunken Mexican came to me; so I began to view the situation with a little more tolerance.

I repeat…

“It has always been a theory of mine that when we become sorry for ourselves we make our misfortunes harder to bear, because we lose courage and can't think without bias; so I cast about me for something to be glad about.”

[A zest for Life, for every damn bit of it.]

Did you ever eat pork and beans heated in a frying-pan on a camp-fire for breakfast? Then if you have not, there is one delight left you. But you must be away out in Wyoming, with the morning sun just gilding the distant peaks, and your pork and beans must be out of a can, heated in a disreputable old frying-pan, served with coffee boiled in a battered old pail and drunk from a tomato-can. You'll never want iced melons, powdered sugar, and fruit, or sixty-nine varieties of breakfast food, if once you sit Trilby-wise on Wyoming sand and eat the kind of breakfast we had that day.

·        Appreciative of every damn thing like a Poet of the World.

[Mrs. Stewart sums her experience.]

I have tried every kind of work this ranch affords, and I can do any of it. Of course I am extra strong, but those who try know that strength and knowledge come with doing. I just love to experiment, to work, and to prove out things, so that ranch life and "roughing it" just suit me.

·        Her lessons, her zest for life, her grit suits me just fine.

·        She goes into my Pantheon of Heroes of Real Life Warriors.

I love These Hosses of Yore!

I wanna be Elinore when I grow up.

Thirty Notches by Brad Ward

 

Think of the woman in the Conestoga wagon, and the weak-faced man who almost killed them both. Think of her face, the strength of her shining through, the level eyes, the odd little gesture of brushing away the strand of hair from her forehead. Think of her, and the wagon, with a young girl and the baby; think of all of them, and envy the man who was too stupid to appreciate what he had.

This 1956 novel by Brad Ward [a pen name for Samuel Anthony Peeples] was my first Ward/Peeples Western—and it won’t be my last.

The plot is formulary to the hilt, but like the excellent craftsman Frank O’Rourke, Ward/Peeples makes the familiar his by giving us living breathing people and not mere heroic cut-outs to be pushed across the plot board to check the trope boxes.

Like O’Rourke, Ward/Peeples limns characters in small acts, terse dialogue—none of that “He was a hard-eyed man with a gaze that saw much but could still soften when the tease of a smile touched his lips.”

Ward/Peeples treats us better than that. We learn the men and women through their actions or failures to act.

I will also remark, the violence here is hard. A bit surprising a for a 1950s novel. Not hard in the gratuitous sense, simply truthful in that death by gun be it wielded by hero or villain is never pleasant.

A mature work of the formulary Western head and shoulders over highly touted works by many better-known-names.

Westward the Women: An Anthology of Western Stories by Women edited by Vicki Piekarski

 

She compared it all to her Indiana home. She saw the cool porch, the shade trees. She wanted to see the rolling lawns of the chief citizen. She missed the small church bickering and the news and gossip of the Ladies Aid. Baldwin made light of the rivalry of neighbors over the parlor sets and crayon portraits. He despised the jealousies of the “folks back home.” He even laughed at her charities “across the tracks,” calling them inadequate, and he never could be dragged to a bazaar. Meda doted on these pastimes. She delighted in the slumming among what Baldwin termed “the unwashed.” She felt she had lost her husband in this desert of soapweed. He believed in the somnolent hills; he was a part of their simplicity, their strength. She thought resentfully of his frank enjoyment of their isolation.—Mari Sandoz, The Vine

Knowledgeable editor Vicki Piekarski has offered us one dozen tales penned by women to expose us to the breadth and depth of the distaff side of the Western.

She has done us a favor.

They range from the melancholic tale such as Mari Sandoz’s The Vine, to the somewhat comic as in a tale from B.M. Bower, and a fanciful tale of the devil in a brief but thoughtful story from Helen Eustis titled Mister Death and the Red-Headed Woman.

As per usual in anthologies, some tales land more than others, but the quality here is quite high overall. She and her partner Jon Tuska have both done astonishing jobs in keeping the Western relevant for those willing to dig for their work.

Another extract.

We heard about them long before we saw them. News traveled fast in those days even though we didn't have telephones in the valley. Old Gus, the mailman, gave us the full report. “They come in from Laramie in a two-wheeled cart,” he said, “him ridin’ with her walkin’ beside the cart and the old sway-bellied to horse pullin’ it. That cart was mostly filled with plants, and she was carrying one in her arms, just like most women carry a baby.—Peggy Simson Curry, Geranium House

And another extracted from a non-fiction pioneer memoir by Juanita Brooks titled Quicksand and Cactus.

So sitting astride my dappled pony, my bonnet on my shoulders, my braids undone, I study this out and determined that I would see some of the world beyond the desert, that I would go to a college or university or whatever it was that one went to in order to learn of books, and how to talk like books. I would not wait for life to come to me; I would go out to meet it.

High marks for a fine volume by a knowledgeable editor.

Easy A.