"Mary Austin was convinced that the valley [Owens Valley*] had died when it sold its first water right to Los Angeles--that city would never stop until it owned the whole river and all of the land. One day, in Los Angeles for an interview with Mulholland, she told him so. After she had left, a subordinate came into his office and found him staring at the wall. "By God, " Mulholland reportedly said, "that woman is the only one who has brains enough to see where this is going." [Cadillac Desert, by Marc Reisner]

Savvy about early 20th century CA water rights and politics and steeped in 19th century Transcendentalism, Mary Austin is best known for these exquisitely written vignettes that describe the landscape and the inhabitants of the Owens Valley. Her lyricism is finely tempered by acute observation. The book closes with an imperative: "Come away, you who are so obsessed with your own importance in the scheme of things, and have got nothing you did not sweat for, come away by the brown valleys and full-bosomed hills to the even-breathing days, to the kindliness, earthiness, ease of El Pueblo de Las Uvas." Come away, indeed.

*[from Wikipedia: "Owens Valley is the arid valley of the Owens River in eastern California in the United States, to the east of the Sierra Nevada and west of the White Mountains and Inyo Mountains on the west edge of the Great Basin section. The mountain peaks on either side (including Mount Whitney) reach above 14,000 feet in elevation, while the floor of the Owens Valley is at 4,000 feet, making the valley one of the deepest in the United States. The Sierra Nevada casts the valley in a rain shadow. The bed of Owens Lake, now a predominantly dry endorheic alkali flat, sits on the southern end of the valley. The valley provides water to the Los Angeles Aqueduct, the source of half of the water for Los Angeles, and is infamous as the scene of one of the fiercest and longest running episodes of the California Water Wars."]