Books, Books, Books

My favorite . . .

This fall has been all about the books. I don't usually write about my work here, but it has been sort of dominating other aspects of my life for the past few months, so now, with the last of the season's books out to print, there is some possibility of reflection. On Buffalotarrak, I had the privilege to work with musician, author, and Bascophile David Romtvedt from Buffalo, Wyoming. The title is a Basque-English hybrid created by one of essay authors, Jeanne Marie Etchemendy, meaning, "those from Buffalo." It is a collection of essays with photos from the influx of Basques to this small town. My personal favorite essay is "With Simon at Four Mile," and its stories about the little piece of land that David, through his wife and father-in-law Simon Iberlin, came to know called the Four Mile Ranch, like Clyde Rickett, who homesteaded a dryland piece and yet, while all other homesteaders withered away, grew a luscious crop of corn, and Simon himself:

There's one last story. Each year in June, the sheep were moved from winter pasture at Four Mile up to summer pasture in the Big Horns. The move took several days . . .

"I was  moving the sheep and my dad was going to come that night with food and water. I had a little bit of bread inside my shirt but it wasn't even really lunch, just a snack. I was hungry. In the late afternoon, it began to rain hard. I was soaked, cold, hungry, tired. My dad never showed up. I got the sheep bedded down but couldn't sleep myself. I ate the bread. I was miserable. The next morning my dad finally showed up and we had a huge breakfast and I got dry clothes then it was time to move the sheep again. Ha! That's it."

That's it. At Four Mile, the ghosts are not ghosts, they are presences, passing with us over the land. Then we are both on our way.

The battleground

Not all has been so smooth. This book was a battle. It started smoothly, the translation was fast and quite good, but the issues were giant. This book could occupy the career of someone, and we had less than a year to publish it. So each page represents this battle by the most famous of the Basque nephews (guess who the bust in the background is to win bonus points).

The easy one

The last one, the reprint of a book already published. Not much to do here, right? Well, not, there's always something. And it's in British!

Yeah Shit Street!