Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
May 2002
Abstract
"To love the land was all," concludes Caroline Marwitz in Naming the Winds: A High Plains Apprenticeship. Indeed, Marwitz's unlikely love for the dry sagebrush steppe surrounding Laramie, Wyoming, where she spent her youth, anchors this memoir. Focusing on the friendship and guidance of an older woman named Nasim, who serves as a kind of spiritual mentor, Marwitz traces her haphazard path to the realization that the place where she grew up-"that rough, left-alone land" where "the wind was blowing so hard we could barely stand up”-holds a unique and inescapable beauty all its own. "Even the most barren of rocks, the hottest of deserts, the coldest of polar seas support some life," she writes, in defense of the place one nineteenth-century explorer deemed "a vast barren basin."
Comments
Published in Great Plains Quarterly, vol. 22, no. 2 (Spring 2002). Published by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln. Copyright © 2000 Center for Great Plains Studies. Used by permission.