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Outside Magazine April 2002

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Dispatches: Books
Hard Living (Cont.)

BREAKING CLEAN
BY JUDY BLUNT
(Knopf, $24)
MOVIE STARS DON'T keep glamour ranches in Montana's Hi-Line country. The cold lonesome flatland is, 47-year-old first-time author Judy Blunt writes, "a country so harsh and wild and distant that it must grow its own replacements, as it grows its own food, or it will die." Blunt was one of those replacements, raised on a cattle ranch so isolated that she had to move alone to the two-block "city" of Malta to attend high school. In this remarkably assured and moving memoir, Blunt chronicles the warts-and-all realities of modern ranch life: the anarchy of a one-room schoolhouse, the countywide panic of a prairie fire, the tyranny of in-laws living just down the road. Through it all simmers her growing indignation over the backward treatment of women on the farm, which finally boils over when her father sets her straight: Sons inherit the ranch, daughters don't. "We girls would be left something of value," Blunt writes, "but we should know at the outset that we would never inherit the land." The most remarkable episode of Blunt's story—when she divorces her rancher husband and raises three kids in Missoula while getting a college degree—gets short shrift, but perhaps she's holding that material for a second book. We can only hope.
—B.B

FROM OUR PAGES
"I don't climb mountains to prove blind people can do this or that," writes Erik Weihenmayer. "I climb because it brings me great joy." This month, the mountaineer recounts his successful Everest bid in the new afterword to TO TOUCH THE TOP OF THE WORLD (plume, $14), first excerpted in Outside last December. In June, he will attempt to summit—and then ski—Russia's Mount Elbrus.

Also hitting bookstores this month is Greg Child's OVER THE EDGE (Villard Books, $25), an account of the four American climbers kidnapped in Kyrgyzstan in August 2000. First reported in Outside and now in development with Universal Pictures, Child's story follows the hostages from their capture by Bin Laden—funded Islamic extremists to their risky midnight escape. He dismantles the claims of fraud that have dogged the climbers since one of their captors, last seen falling off a cliff, turned up alive weeks later. "This is the story of a story that refused to stop unfolding," writes Child. Luckily he never tired of pursuing it.

And don't miss frequent contributor Ian Frazier's collection of piscine quests, THE FISH'S EYE: ESSAYS ABOUT ANGLING AND THE OUTDOORS (Farrar,Straus and Giroux, $22).

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