<\/p>\n
Out of sorts as her mother ages and her brother falls ill, learning \u201cwhat it means to be in a space between what something was and what it is becoming,\u201d Shelley Armitage<\/strong><\/a> embarks on what she calls the \u201csummer of hikes,\u201d looking to the land she loves to ground her. A handsome volume that includes historical as well as contemporary photographs, Walking the Llano: A Texas Memoir of Place<\/a><\/strong><\/em> is her exploration of, meditation on, and homage to her home\u2014the place where she grew up and has always returned to, searching for a place for women amid the cowboys\u2014the Llano Estacado.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Armitage grew up in Vega, a tiny farming community in the western Panhandle of Texas, and on Armitage Farms, her family\u2019s two sections of land just outside of town. She is interested in how place shapes us and how we best fit into that landscape, looking for continuities in the places made by time and space, between before and after.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Armitage feels that time is compressed in the Texas Panhandle. The end of the Old West and the \u201cburgeoning wind-energy generation are separated by a little more than one hundred years.\u201d She explores still-discernible bison trails and archaeology sites; hunts for and discovers fossils, petroglyphs, and hidden springs; thrills to each wildlife sighting\u2014golden eagle, mule deer, porcupine, pronghorn antelope, bobcat\u2014and notes the health of cottonwood, willow, mesquite, and cholla; marvels that \u201cthe color, shape, texture, and attitude of the rocks signal the movement of wind, water, gravity\u201d in striations of ochre, purple, and orange.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n The Llano bears little resemblance now to the short-grass prairie traversed by the Antelope Creek Phase peoples and \u201cdiscovered\u201d by the Spanish. The \u201csea of grass\u201d has been permanently altered by \u201csheep, cattle, farming, strip mining, oil, gas exploration, feed lots, dairies, microwave and cell-phone towers, and now wind turbines,\u201d she observes. Armitage regrets altering the prairie ecology further even as she signs the contracts to allow wind turbines and transmission towers to be built. She explains the \u201cdewatering\u201d of the Ogallala from wells, irrigation, evaporation, and the rate of recharge and mourns the \u201cpaleowater.\u201d<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Armitage discusses imagist poets and then proves to be one herself. \u201cThe side oats grama wave like sailboat flags, their tiered semaphores flexed in the wind. Scaton is stately by comparison, its undulating trunk bearing a sparkler-shaped burst of seeds. Buffalo hugs the ground, short-legged like its namesake.\u201d<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u201cBiophilia\u201d is a field of study which \u201cposits that certain kinds of landscapes may attract us as a result of our evolutionary past.\u201d I know this is true whenever I travel to East Texas and get claustrophobia from the trees. A West Texas girl, I need to be able to see the sky and, preferably, the horizon. Quoting Nora Tilden (\u201cplaces \u2026 pretend to be blank, though beneath the surface is everything that has ever happened there\u201d) and Apache elders (\u201cbeing conscious of the storied place, of all that has gone before it, of the natural layers and the membranes laid down through time.\u201d), Armitage inspires us to become part of the landscape.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Review of Texas memoir<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":479,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[96,216,12,8,54,92,16,15],"class_list":["post-480","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-autobiography","tag-bookreview","tag-lonestarreview","tag-lonestarliterarycom","tag-memoir","tag-nonfiction","tag-review","tag-texasauthor"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/480","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=480"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/480\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/479"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=480"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=480"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=480"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}