Somewhere in the middle of America, far from the tourist-welcoming beaches of Los Angeles and buildings of New York, lies a land set back in time. Clifford, the environment editor of the Los Angeles Times, explores that land, the place where nature separates America the Pacific from America the Atlantic, the great wilderness known as the Continental Divide. Clifford seeks to dwell in the Continental Divide, to live and breathe its prejudices and people, to report on a Western way of life forgotten by most of the West. The author writes in stark, unadorned prose—a style befitting the ways of life and people he describes. Yet despite his sympathies with the few remaining cowboys and his efforts to help steer cattle or hunt coyotes, he always seems to be left on the outside of the action, a city boy looking in at these rural folk. And this alienation, conveyed in unconventionally barren language, ends up marring the book rather than making it. Despite the abundantly esoteric subject matter, the country folk Clifford encounters remain stereotypes (a token cowboy, an old recluse, rich urbanites looking for adventure), and both his descriptions and his rendering of dialogue do little more than sketch two-dimensional outlines of human existence, a rugged way of life in a wilderness that few know still exists. (May 14)
