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Reviews
New Era: Reflections on the Human and Natural History of Central Oregon
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By Jarold Ramsey
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Oregon State University Press, Corvallis, 2003. Photographs, notes. 160 pages. $14.95 paper.
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Reviewed by Thomas C. Buell
Portland State University, Portland, Oregon
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| Professor emeritus Jarold Ramsey (English Department, University of Rochester) tells it like it was and, to some extent, still is. In a series of recollections, he summons up homesteading in central Oregon from 1900 through the present. Ramsey has returned to the family ranch, north of Madras, and he is writing so that his yarns, and those of his ancestors and their friends, will not "disappear as stories will" (p. 139). As custodian and recorder, Ramsey writes with verve, humor, and, yes, nostalgia about a past we would do well to keep and treasure. |
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The title essay, "New Era," is about his one-room school, named to suggest looking ahead, starting again, as his forebears did with optimism and downright grit. Many communities were named to commemorate that urge, as evidenced by Hopewell, Oregon, and other towns across the state. Ramsey's reflections illuminate the land the way regional fiction writers and historians have: H.L. Davis, Archie Binns, Craig Lesley, Don Berry, Charles and Ursula LeGuin, Molly Gloss, and even as far back as Washington Irving. New Era adds to the list, importantly. |
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Old-timers and newcomers will want to share Ramsey's book with others to discover and rediscover our past and present Oregon. The book draws you in and holds you. Begun in 1983 with the title essay, New Era contains a mother lode of dry, high-plateau reflections that concludes with the ninth and final essay, written in 2003, "An Impromptu on Owning Land." Ramsey knows, as Emerson and Frost did, that we do not own the land; it owns us. He asks, drawing on his mother's brief history, how Opal City, really only a tent town put up to house the builders of the bridge over the Crooked River, can even be called a ghost town. It didn't even leave houses to be haunted. And there were other plans unfulfilled: the railroad that never got to Prineville, "Quincy's Ladders" designed to haul water from the canyon for laundry. |
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Ramsey excels at linking disparate voices: the children and the adults, the settlers and the Indians they met. Friendships that cross borders emerge over and over in these stories. There is not always complete understanding among his cast of characters, but there is a sense of tolerance of what is left unsaid, the unexplainable. In "The Farm Boy, the Widowed Homesteader and the Old Indian: Conserving a Story," Jim Polk and the young John Campbell, on a pack trip into Jefferson and the Three Sisters wilderness areas with the Old Indian as their guide, never quite understand the unspoken reasons for decisions made, the voices on the trail, and the sense of menace avoided. The medicine is wrong; they turn back. But the end result, in some ways a coming-of-age story, in some ways one of redemption, remains. We acknowledge Ramsey's skill in listening to the story from every point of view and piecing it together. |
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Believing, with the author, that there is "an ecology of memory, imagination and story, just as there is an ecology of the land, water, and air" (p. 35), we can resolve to do our own homework and write or record orally, if only for our own children and their children. It would be hard to do better than Ramsey at describing a family pack trip, disasters on the trail, recalcitrant mules, and an equally recalcitrant boy (the author as child) trying to make himself as separate as possible from the rest of the group. We can learn from him ways to piece it all together, and how to see the threads that make the whole cloth. Ramsey reminds us that "life itself is an ongoing story, so our penchant for storying the truth of experience is literally a way of survival, not to be trifled with but cherished and conserved." He adds, quoting Leslie Marmon Silko, "There is not a story that is not true" (p. 37). |
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In keeping stories sorted out, Ramsey apologizes occasionally, though he need not, for "getting ahead" of himself. The book hangs together well. An academician as well as a published poet, he evokes literary sources, Melville and Wordsworth among them. Readers will enjoy his self-deprecating humor as well as the lyrical evocations interspersed in just the right balance: |
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"When you come into a place where time mainly shows itself in the weathering of old boards and the rusting of iron, and the perpetual succession of wildflowers, always new on the hillsides, what is there to improve?" (p. 147). That question is well answered in Jarold Ramsey's New Era. |
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