Miracle Country: A Memoir of a Family and a Landscape

by Kendra Atleework

Overview

WINNER OF THE SIGURD F. OLSON NATURE WRITING AWARD

“Blending family memoir and environmental history, Kendra Atleework conveys a fundamental truth: the places in which we live, live on—sometimes painfully—in us. This is a powerful, beautiful, and urgently important book.”
—Julie Schumacher, author of Dear Committee Members and The Shakespeare Requirement 

Kendra Atleework grew up in Swall Meadows, in the Owens Valley of the Eastern Sierra Nevada, where annual rainfall averages five inches and in drought years measures closer to zero.

Her parents taught their children to thrive in this beautiful if harsh landscape prone to wildfires, blizzards, and gale-force winds. Above all, the Atleework children were raised on unconditional love and delight in the natural world. But when Kendra’s mother died when Kendra was just sixteen, her once-beloved desert world came to feel empty and hostile, as climate change, drought, and wildfires intensified. The Atleework family fell apart, even as her father tried to keep them together. Kendra escaped to Los Angeles, and then Minneapolis, land of tall trees, full lakes, water everywhere you look.

But after years of avoiding her troubled hometown, she felt pulled back. Miracle Country is a moving and unforgettable memoir of flight and return, emptiness and bounty, the realities of a harsh and changing climate, and the true meaning of home. For readers of Cheryl Strayed, Terry Tempest Williams, and Rebecca Solnit, this is a breathtaking debut by a remarkable writer.
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781643750552
Publisher:	Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill
Publication date:	07/14/2020
Sold by:	Hachette Digital, Inc.
Format:	eBook
Pages:	320
Sales rank:	973,545
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Kendra Atleework received her MFA in creative writing from the University of Minnesota. An essay that formed the basis for a chapter of Miracle Country was selected for The Best American Essays 2015. She is the recipient of the Ellen Meloy Desert Writers Award and the AWP Intro Journals Project Award.

Table of Contents

Preface xi

Part 1 Wind

1 Kindling 3

2 Search and Rescue 25

3 Whiskey's for Drinking 40

4 Flight Plan 74

Part 2 Wildflowers

5 Lupine Land 103

6 Miracle Country 121

7 Last Days of the Good Girls 135

Part 3 Rivers

8 The Indestructibles 157

9 Locals Only 166

10 A Child's History of California 189

11 Dust 205

Part 4 Moonrise

12 Rim of the World 217

13 Walk Home 236

14 Dawn of Tomorrow 246

15 Sunset 2.54

Part 5 Summit

16 Three Points of Contact 261

17 Wings 280

18 The Hardest Part of Flying 295

Research and Inspiration 304

Acknowledgments 305

Questions for Discussion 306

Editorial Reviews

★ 05/25/2020

Essayist Atleework recalls her family roots and explores the history of California’s arid Eastern Sierras in her ambitious, beautiful debut. Nearly two centuries of conflict over land, water, and individual rights flow through parallel stories involving the region’s first inhabitants, the Paiutes indigenous peoples, and ditch digger turned public works czar William Mulholland, who, beginning in the 1880s, drained the area’s rivers and lakes to provide water to distant Los Angeles. Atleework writes of her parents—jack-of-all-trades father Robert Atlee and educator mother Jan Work—who married and settled in Swall Meadows, population 200, in Owens Valley, a once-fertile area laid waste by Mulholland’s aqueduct system. Atleework’s childhood “on this obsidian edge of California” reads as mythic, with her bedroom opening onto towering Mount Tom and Wheeler Crest, and her loving parents as everyday gods who offered protection, especially during harsh winters: “We were never quite safe; we were never quite in danger.” She writes about her mother’s cancer death when she was 16, weaving in accounts of beauty from Mary Austin, a late-19th-century Owens Valley writer captivated by the desert, as well as of Paiute centenarian Hoavadunuki, who shares with her his story of white settlers’ desecration of the land in the 1920s. Atleework’s remarkable prose renders the ordinary wondrous and firmly puts this overlooked region of California onto the map. (July)

Publishers Weekly

A Washington Independent Review of Books Favorite Book of 2020

“Truly something special and refreshing. Kendra Atleework’s powerful debut is the rare trifecta that seamlessly blends personal narrative with historical nonfiction and highly charged, activist-style rhetoric with rarely a misstep or heavy hand . . . Whether you’re in it for the emotional roller coaster or want an armchair view of an area of California not on your radar, Miracle Country works on multiple levels. It reminds us to hold our loved ones close, conserve our resources, treat the land as sacred and stop putting our collective heads in the sand when it comes to climate change.”
—San Francisco Chronicle

“Drawing parallels between her upbringing and the region's history, [Atleework's] memoir celebrates her home and the region while lovingly portraying her family's eccentricities. Her ability to relay naturalistic majesty in exquisite detail is dynamic yet tender, resulting in captivating storytelling . . . A breathtaking environmental history. Atleework is a shrewd observer and her writing is a gratifying contribution to the desert-literature genre.”
—PopMatters

“Atleework captures how the history of the landscape affects how people feel in the present in prose charged with emotion . . . Miracle Country is a beautiful read, Atleework’s prose steeped in her passion for the region and her striking observations. Even more, though, the memoir is important because it reveals Atleework’s deep understanding of the region, of a life defined by an absence, and she points us to the power in this understanding—it can be a tool to stay safe in a desert or on a cliff, a way to connect with other people, a call to counteract climate change, or, as in Atleework’s case, a reason to return home.”
—Ploughshares
 
“[A] shimmering memoir . . . A bittersweet tribute to home and family in breathtaking prose that will appeal to lovers of memoirs and history, as well as anyone who enjoys beautifully crafted writing.”
—Library Journal, starred review

“[A] beautiful debut . . . Atleework’s remarkable prose renders the ordinary wondrous and firmly puts this overlooked region of California onto the map.”
—Publishers Weekly, starred review

“Atleework pays tribute to the drought-ridden California desert of her childhood in this gimlet-eyed memoir . . . Nature lovers will immerse themselves in Atleework's vibrant prose and meditative musings."
—Booklist

“Can a book be both radiant with light and shadowy as midnight's Miracle Country can. I felt the thrill I once knew reading Annie Dillard for the first time. Kendra Atleework can really write. She flies with burning wings."
—Luis Alberto Urrea, author of The House of Broken Angels

“Kendra Atleework has written the most beautiful book about California I ever have read. The author locates the mystery and beauty of her life in the small town of Bishop, on the eastern slope of the Sierra, decades after Los Angeles has stolen the water.  Her poet's prose, on every page, honors the dry land and breathes Nature to life.”
—Richard Rodriguez, author of Darling: A Spiritual Autobiography

“Miracle Country is truly some kind of miracle, combining a moving family story with deft, deeply researched history. Written from the crucible of California's water wars, combined with a family story of love and loss in the high desert Eastern Sierra Nevada, Kendra Atleework's book joins the great American accounts of the West, a step beyond Joan Didion, moving from a beloved geography into a jeopardized future.  Kendra Atleework is that rare writer—capable of heart-stopping memoir while performing a work of keen observation and serious history. A work of stunning acuity and candor, essential reading, already a classic narrative.”
—Patricia Hampl, author of The Art of the Wasted Day
 
“A soaring homage to California and to the sparsely populated and drought-prone Eastern Sierra, where the author grew up. Blending family memoir and environmental history, Kendra Atleework conveys a fundamental truth: the places in which we live, live on—sometimes painfully—in us. This is a powerful, beautiful, and urgently important book.”
—Julie Schumacher, author of Dear Committee Members and The Shakespeare Requirement 

“This eloquent narrative is both a natural history of the author's home place, a seemingly arid region, and a loving portrait of an extraordinary family. Kendra Atleework has an uncanny wisdom and a deep sense of people and their origins, and she writes like an angel.”
—Charles Baxter, author of There's Something I Want You to Do

From the Publisher

★ 05/01/2020

Atleework's shimmering memoir is set in California's Eastern Sierra, where water is never far from the minds of those living there. Fires, drought, and high winds are regular occurrences causing devastating losses that Atleework and her family experience firsthand. However, it was the loss of her mother that complicated Atleework's relationship with the area and caused her to leave. Both memoir and memorial to place, this account has a haunting quality of sadness and loss, of well-watered land that could have been, and of family that might have been different. In her research of both the history of Owens Valley and Los Angeles, and the water rights that entangle them, Atleework traces the various indigenous peoples and settlers who called it home. However, more than a work of environmental change or history of place, this is a love letter of sorts to Atleework's mother. Her presence is felt in every page, and it is in the pursuit of peace amid her loss that ultimately brings Atleework home. VERDICT A bittersweet tribute to home and family in breathtaking prose that will appeal to lovers of memoirs and history, as well as anyone who enjoys beautifully crafted writing.—Stacy Shaw, Denver

Library Journal

2020-03-15
A sensitive, thoughtful portrait of a part of California that few people see—or want to.

The area around Bishop, California, was robbed of its water decades ago to fuel the growth of greater Los Angeles. That is the central fact of Atleework’s celebration of a place swept by vast dust storms and economic dislocation, its neighboring mountains prone to burst into flames at a moment’s notice. Another central fact is a family that is indisputably eccentric but perfectly suited to the place. “Every family cultivates a culture and lives by its own strangeness until the strangeness turns normal and the rest of the world looks a little off,” she writes, and the aperçu is exactly right. Her mother labored for years under the death sentence of a little-understood cancer while her father sold maps he made and explored the surrounding country with the inquisitive intensity of a 19th-century surveyor. All deserts are places of absence, but the desert of the Eastern Sierra is more lacking than most. As Atleework writes, “In my first five years of life, less than twelve inches of precipitation fell.” And yet, as one environmentalist remarks, the fact that LA takes away such little water as the place can deliver means that growth is something for other places to experience. The locals like it that way just fine, by Atleework’s sometimes repetitive account. One who traveled to LA for medical treatment returned appalled by the smog and traffic, even more so by plans to desalinate ocean water to sustain still more growth. “Imagine this state with unlimited water,” he told the author. “Just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should.” It makes a fine motto for a region that Atleework clearly loves.

A welcome update of classic works on California’s arid backcountry by Mary Austin, Marc Reisner, and Reyner Banham.

Kirkus Reviews