Hawk Flies Above: Journey to the Heart of the Sandhills

Growing up in a small Nebraska town, Norton had a magical childhood until her mother abruptly abandoned her family. Because of this and another traumatic event (shortly after college, she was raped and beaten by a stranger who left her for dead), life seemed meaningless, and for years she wandered aimlessly around the country, drinking, smoking pot, overeating and trying to run away from herself. In 1984, Norton returned for six months to the cabin on Lake Ericson in the Nebraska Sandhills, where she and her family had spent their summers, ostensibly to complete graduate school by writing about the place but actually to come to grips with her troubled past. Six years later, she went again to the Sandhills, this time to discover that the land she considered idyllic was suffering from its own problems--soil depletion, lakes fouled by farm chemicals, limited water resources. In this memoir, Norton recounts with disarming simplicity her attempts to find a purpose in life by returning to her childhood home, weaving her story together with sensitive descriptions of the windswept dunes, the vegetation, the wildlife and the people of the endangered Sandhills. Norton teaches writing at the Neahkahnie Institute in Oregon. Illustrations not seen by PW. (Oct.)