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Sharman Apt Russell
Last updated on Monday, December 23, 2002
Sharman Apt Russell lives with her husband and two children in Silver City, New Mexico. Her books include When the Land was Young: Reflections on American Archaeology (Addison-Wesley, 1996) , The Humpbacked Fluteplayer (Knopf Books for Young Readers, 1994), Kill the Cowboy: A Battle of Mythology in the New West (Addison-Wesley, 1993,) and Songs of the Fluteplayer: Seasons of Life in the Southwest (Addison-Wesley, 1991.) Her work has won the Mountain and Plains Regional Award, the Zia Award and a Pushcart Prize Award, among others. Her essays and stories appear in a number of anthologies and magazines, including Walking the Twilight (Northland Press, 1994), The Stories that Shape Us (Norton, 1995,) The Threepenny Reviw, The Massachusetts Review, The Missouri Review, and The North American Review.
Sharman Apt Russell Sharman's recent books include a collection of essays on botany, Anatomy of a Rose: Exploring the Secret Life of Flowers (Perseus Books, 2001) and The Last Matriarch (University of New Mexico Press, 2000), a novel on paleolithic life in southern New Mexico, as well as When the Land was Young (reissued by University of Nebraska Press, 2001) and Kill the Cowboy: A Battle of Mythology in the New West (re-issued by University of Nebraska Press, 2001).
Articles by Sharman Apt Russell
At Jordan Hot Springs, in the Gila Wilderness of southwestern New Mexico, I lie full-length in the warm water. Ringed by ferns and lush vegetation, this deep pool is sheltered against a massive rock covered with spongy moss. The water temperature is about a hundred degrees. Tiny yellow wildflowers bloom at the pool's edge. I look up at a sky patterned in racing clouds and sycamore branches. A swallowtail butterfly circles the stalk of a purple bull thistle. Somewhere, anxiously, a brown towhee trills. A blue jay scoffs. I sink and slide and dream deeper.
If I listen closely - in this dreamy state - I can hear the wilderness whispering around me. Up and down the Gila River comes the murmur of secret lives: caddisflies, dragonflies, damselflies, trout, suckers, tadpoles, toads, lizards, snakes, mice, muskrats, foxes, badgers, bobcats, peccaries. The rare coatimundi drowses in the trees. Further up the canyon, mountain lions and black bears live discreetly. At twilight, after supper, we will surely see deer or a herd of elk.
It catches you by surprise. Unseen from the state highway, down a two mile spur of blacktop, the City of Rocks State Park rises, suddenly, from a vast yellow plain of waving grama grass. The columnar, pastel stones make an uneven and disheveled skyline. Some tower as high as fifty feet. Others hunker to the earth like brooding trolls. In the interior of "the city," the rocks meld and merge to form arches, curvaceous streets, and dark alleyways. Off to the side, isolated on the yellow plain, small groups of standing stone look like gentle giants - caught in a gossipy conversation. The range of cowboy poetry, tightly reined in by rhyme, is part of the pleasure. At a recent Silver City festival, the Grand Finale Show included a poem about lawyers, a hilarious bar comedy (smoothly delivered by professional Waddie Mitchell), a poignant eulogy, a historic account of the first round-up, a tribute to the flag, a love story, a graphic description of branding (read by a sweet middle-aged ranchwife in a puffed blouse and purple skirt), and an ironic commentary on drugstore cowboys. If the perfect dayhike combines beauty, drama, and moderate physical activity, then a dayhike to the Frisco Box is perfection. The drive to the trailhead is scenic. The walk is pleasantly level. And the 3 mile trek climaxes in a startling box canyon the width of a large living room. Through this room flows the San Francisco River. Craggy rock walls rise above the stream bed, which in many places is also the canyon bottom. Amid this harsh geology, cottonwoods and alders have found a foothold, adding further lushness to the green of Virginia creeper, grapevine, willow, and wild rose. In winter, gardeners look to their mail boxes. The seed catalogs are coming. I stare hungrily at the pictures of impossibly healthy vegetables and fruit. I am not just hungering for deeply-purple eggplant or baskets of red, ripe tomatoes. Today, the value of grazing cows on public land is being seriously questioned. And public lands ranchers like my neighbors are scared and angry. My valley is a microcosm of what is happening across the West. In these last ten years, we have grown from a small community of farmers and ranchers to a larger community of farmers, ranchers, retirees, school teachers, entrepreneurs, small gardeners, and others. We are increasingly polarized. "Cowboys" on one side. "Environmentalists" on the other. When my husband and I dug the foundations for our home in the Mimbres Valley of southwestern New Mexico, we found a metate - a large grinding stone - buried two feet deep. We had selected this building site, with its view of a distant mountain peak, because it was close to the Mimbres River but not close enough to be flooded in a rainy season. Now we knew that another family had made this same decision. Perhaps a thousand years ago, they too had chosen this place for their home. The way we treat the past speaks volumes about who we are at the present which is why Sharman Apt Russell's new book When the Land was Young: Reflections on American Archaeology (Addison-Wesley; June 20, 1996; $23.00), has garnered great interest from advance reviewers who have universally praised this unique book.
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