I've continued my non-fiction kick over the last couple of weeks, and I've finished two books since I lasted posted here about my reading. Joan Didion's Slouching Toward Bethlehem is basically the first half of a two-book set with The White Album. Again the major topics and California and the 1960s, and the essays range from fairly straight reporting to intensely personal. The title essay looks at the culture of Haight-Ashbury around 1967, and the story is much more complex than the reminiscences of either conservatives or former flower children. Didion tells of the drugs without really moralizing, although she is clearly horrified by the five-year-old children "turned on" to acid and the like. She also tells of stories of free love and of rape--sometimes the same stories. But she is fundamentally sympathetic, even as she identifies these youngsters (and most are in the 14-18 range) as a type of not-exactly victim, but "product" perhaps of an anomic culture where bonds that held people together (she talks about concrete relationships--cousins, great aunts, lifelong next-door neighbors) have fallen apart. The historian part of my brain is skeptical of the explanation (plenty of people still grow up around great aunts, and plenty of people 100 years ago moved around a lot as children), but I appreciate the reportage--the combination of empathy and intelligence that tells me that Didion comes by her explanations honestly, even if I ultimately disagree with them. "Goodbye to All That" was also very interesting to me, as she told about how it feels to fall into and out of love with a new city as a young adult. Been there, done that, and though the details are very different, Didion definitely captures the idea.

Before Slouching I read Wallace Stegner's 1954 history Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West. The fact that I'd never heard of Powell until graduate school confirms something I also learned in graduate school--American history looks very different from the West than it does from the East. Powell led the first American expedition all the way from the beginning of the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon to the Virgin River at the Arizona-Nevada border. Powell's expedition and subsequent work in the West was central to modern mapmaking, geology, and other earth sciences. Since Stegner wrote this landmark account, Powell's ideas about water usage have also been seen as a tragic road not taken for many people who believe that water rights in the West have been granted in inefficient and unfair ways. I still don't know enough about Western water rights to comment intelligently on that idea, but Stegner does make a convincing case that Powell's waning influence in the late 1880s and onward was a tragic misstep orchestrated by a coalition of Western politicians and business interests, and certain "truisms" that held for the East and Midwest but not for the arid regions of the Plains and Rockies. Basically, Powell denied the idea that water would always ultimately be plentiful where it was needed and that "rain follows the plow", and suggested rational management of scarce resources.

The first section of the book stands out if you're looking for an exciting narrative--the story of the actual expedition down the Colorado is a true adventure story. The rest of the book is about Gilded Age politics and, to a lesser extent, science. Some things don't work for me, most notably the continued references back to Henry Adams as an Easterner and contemporary of Powell's with very different experiences and ideas. OK, that's probably true, but I'm not sure of its relevance or what it contributes to the book's arguments. Still, if you want some insight into the still complex and controversial water politics of the West, this is a good place to start. Supposedly the book to read on this subject is Marc Reisner's Cadillac Desert; I'm hoping to get to that before too long, and I will of course share my thoughts here if and when I do. In the meantime, I'll be taking a break from my break, as I'm actually getting back to reading my Western fiction thanks to a timely gift from the Beallsvonian's New Jersey correspondent.