Day: March 28, 2013

If you wish to buy this book, please consider purchasing it from Battenkill Books (518 677-2515) or e-mail [email protected] or from your independent bookstore. Battenkill Books is my local bookstore and I am their Recommender-In-Chief, thus these reviews. I will also sign and personalize any of my books purchased through Battenkill, and thanks for helping a wonderful local bookstore thrive.

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Mary Coin (Blue Rider Press) is an absolutely beautiful, wrenching and very compelling story of two  strong and remarkable women who met in a California pea field during the worst of the Great Depression, making history and changing both of their lives forever. The photograph on the cover of the book was taken (in black and white) by the great photographer Dorothea Lange in 1936 in Nipomo, California, and it was the inspiration for this novel.  Lange was photographing migrant labor camps for the federal government. The photograph she took was of a woman named Florence Owens Thompson and her seven children. Thompson, recently widowed, was living in a lean-to near a pea field.  She was absolutely desperate. Her children were living on frozen vegetables and dead birds. She had just sold the tires on her car for food. The photograph is called “Migrant Mother.” It became one of the iconic and enduring images of  suffering during the depression and made Lange one of the best known photographers in the nation.

It also sparked this great and fictionalized story of two people, one famous and the other forgotten, and of the enduring legacy sparked by their chance encounter.  I think women will especially love the main characters, who so bravely struggle with love, marriage, suffering, men and different notions of work.

In the novel, Florence Thompson becomes Mary Coin and Lange is Vera dare. Although it is inspired by real events, it is very much a novel, not a non-fiction recounting.

In Mary Coin,  Dare is more fortunate and privileged than Mary Coin, but her life is not simple or easy. A victim of polio when she was a child in New Jersey, she has a crippled leg and a bad limp that does not keep her from getting to San Francisco and starting a career as a society photographer. She meets and marries an older man, an artist, who is remote and unfaithful despite their having had two children together. Both of these women end up on their own.

Coin fled the farms of the Dust Bowl with her husband and made it to the California migrant labor fields as the depression deepens. Her husband is stricken with tuberculosis and dies in her arms and she is left alone with seven children, little work, and no food or savings. She is completely at the mercy of the men who hire workers, but she never surrenders her pride to them. She does do one thing out of desperation that she will regret her whole life.  Her encounter with Dare is a chance encounter, neither woman knows a thing about the other. Dare takes five images of Thompson and moves on, but each is haunted by the encounter and has reason to remember it all of their lives. (Lange recalled that she approached Thompson “as if drawn to a magnet.” Neither asked any questions of the other, but both, said Lange, sensed that they could help each other.)

The novel is rich, fast-paced, just wonderfully plotted and written. There is a third character in the book, a professor of cultural history named Walker Dodge who discovers a family mystery embedded in “Migrant Mother,” but he is greatly overshadowed by the very powerful characters of Dare and Mary Coin, each ferociously devoted to their children in very different ways. The book captures the emotional intensity of motherhood – the longing, guilt, doubt and love –  in the most grateful but truthful of ways.

In the novel, Mary Coin is aware of the image Lange took, it followed her through her life, although almost no one around her ever recognized her from it, apart from her family. Her life remains a modest one. In the novel, Dare writes a letter to Thompson that she carries around for the rest of her life. “There is a sense you get when you have taken the right photograph,” Dare wrote Thompson. “It is a feeling that you have lived that second of your life more completely than any other. The moment opens, and you realize how much larger your life is than you thought it was, how much closer to a kind of…it is happiness? I don’t know.” This is as wonderful a description of taking the right photograph as I have ever heard.

I should say that photographers will love this book as well as people who love good writing, because it so wonderfully captures the randomness and meaning of the image.  Most great pictures are chance encounters, I find.

Silver does a wonderful job with this book, inspired by the great photograph but not trapped by it. This story thrives on its own. Both of these women are stirring and admirable, determined and passionate. Between them, they embody the best of the feminine spirit in very different, yet not-so-different ways. Dare is a strong and famous working woman, fearless and focused. Coin is determined that she and her children will survive unspeakable poverty and suffering. Almost on strength of will alone, she carries them through.  There is much that is heroic about both of them. There seems to always be much hand-wringing about a woman’s place in at  home or at work and “Mary Coin” shows us – without ever lecturing us – that powerful women exist in both places. The story leads us to the photograph, and then follows each of these woman through the rest of their lives, including a very poignant scene where Mary struggles through a chronic illness to get herself to San Francisco to see an exhibit of Dare’s work and finds herself face-to-face with her own image.

You might have some tissues ready for that encounter. I loved this book and highly recommend it. There is no reason why men would not love it also, but I think it speaks to the female experience in the most poignant and powerful of ways.

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If you want the book, think about getting it from Battenkill. [email protected] or call 518 677-7136.

Go out into the pasture. Sit with a barn cat in your lap next to a pile of old tires. Watch your sheep eat their afternoon meal while your border collie keeps order. Somehow, it works.

Maria and I both woke up in a funk this morning. We thought we sold the farm, but as it turned out, we didn’t. It is still cloudy, gray and cold. We are in need of a vacation and won’t be getting one in the near future. I am trying to get my podcast going without spending thousands of dollars. Nothing seems easy. Lots on our minds. We both realized we were each in a foul mood. We are both intense and have been working hard on many things for a long time. This doesn’t happen often, this double foul mood. So we went to work in the morning. And in the early afternoon. I wrote and she worked on some fiber art. Then we went out to see the donkeys. Then we stacked a cord of firewood together (for next winter, more coming.) Then we planned the garden – we have rented a tiller for April 20 from the hardware store. We watched the chickens make their way into the coop. We watched the ducks who have arrived in our marsh.

Then we went to Momma’s down the road for a burger and met some of our new neighbors. They are very nice and quite curious about us. One said she had Florence’s horses in her yard once. Yes, I said, our sheep were there also. We heard more Florence stories, she was a legend.

I’m going to spend the evening putting up some photos and a book review, Maria is curled up in front of the fire, looking regal, surrounded by dogs and with a good book and a roaring fire. She had some wine, too, which helped. We came out of it just as the carrot cake arrived. I think it was stacking the firewood. There is nothing like it to crank somebody up and come out of a funk.

It was fun, in a way. We didn’t take our bad moos out on one another. We just both owned up to feeling foul, accepted it and went about our business. Feels like a good thing to me, like flushing the system.

All of her life, Florence Walrath showed a sometimes reckless thirst for challenge and adventure, a fearlessness about work and responsibility, a toughness and determination. Her response to adversity was to battle right back.  Her world gave her the opportunity to develop and strong and much-admired character. At age 60, she learned how to waterski and at 102, she was always badgering her friends to take her to the lake to go swimming. Everyone who met her spoke of her toughness, ferocious work ethic and passion for new experience.  Her journals are very skillfully put together, they show the path that led her to a rare and fully lived life. And the very fine line in her life between joy and tragedy, life and loss:

“The following year (after she got her horse Violet) there was a man named Capt. Eddy who had a camp at Hedges Lake. He wanted to put on a show of local talent in front of the grand stand at the Cambridge Fair. Blanche and I at once signed up with a group of girls from Salem, Cambridge, Shushan, Hoosick Falls and Greenwich. We only had a month to learn and get the show in shape. Captain had trunks of costumes sent up from New York City. I picked out a blue for the follies and we all had alike for the drill we were in. He was a strict man and took no fooling. Either you worked or out you went. I wanted to be in it so bad I forgot to laugh which was my weakness. The dance and songs we sang was the high light of my life. The drill due to my size almost got me toss out. 

 I was the one who marched out just to the right space to let all others fall into a V shape. I walked out without counting my steps or looking back to see when to stop and if all were in place. The first day I walked too far and boy did he tell me off. He said if you can’t do this, I’ll put someone in your place. I was mad and with tears in my eyes I decided I would show him who could do it, me. It was easy once I got started. We had two shows a day, one in the afternoon and one at seven-thirty at night. In between the shows we could go out on the mid-way. They all gave us rides and we played their games. They thought of us as one gang. After the week at the fair, Capt. Eddy gave us a dance. The gang each asked a partner. We received no money but I’m sure we had unforgettable memories for the rest of our lives. The only thing was after learning those dances, it was too bad we could not go on to other places, but then we would not be local talent.

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Somewhere along the way, Uncle Frank Qua moved just north of us. He had a step son, Rexford, a very good looking blond and smart. It seemed as though he never had to study. At the age of sixteen, Rexford was taken sick.  They did not pay much attention. They came to our house that day to fill silo. That night he was worse and they took him to the hospital, which had just been built. It turned out to be a ruptured appendix and no cure back then. The poor boy passed away. I was shocked that such a young boy should die. The others of our neighbor boys died that fall. Richard McGeoch and Ken Maynard both had appendix. This was very hard to take.”

Next: A painful time, accused of cheating.

When Frieda came into my life, I felt trapped between some wonderful and some powerful women. Maria loved Frieda dearly, and I had to figure out a way to get her to accept me, the dogs and the farm. Frieda is a powerful dog, a fighter a guard dog. As I wrote “The Second Chance Dog,” I began to piece together the details of her life, thanks to my blog. There were lots of great stories in her life. Her time as a junkyard dog guarding an auto body shop. The family she saved from a fire. Her abandonment in the Adirondacks. My biggest challenge at the beginning was Rose. Rose was like Frieda. She was strong, protective and fearless. She was not as big, and border collies are not really built to fight.

Frieda was large and powerful, with big jaws and huge claws and feet. I couldn’t imagine Rose besting her, but neither would Rose back off. She and Frieda just bristled at the sight of one another, and for one year, we had to always keep them separated. Frieda wanted to keep me away from Maria. Rose wanted to keep Frieda away from me. Rose had always watched my back around animals. She would take on rams or donkeys if they came too close to me (Red doesn’t care who comes close to me.) The biggest training challenge I ever faced with dogs was keeping those two from trying to kill one another.