Horizontal Yellow: Nature and History in the Near Southwest

Description

Author: Flores, Dan  (1948-)

Publisher: University of New Mexico Press

Pub Date: 1999

Binding: Paperback

Condition: Fair.  Binding tight.  No tears.  Previous owner’s name, date, and locational information on ffep/half-title page.  Pencil markings throughout.  Lower front cover corner has an approx. 1/8″ bend, worn.   A couple of pages have very small bends at upper corners.  Edge and corner wear.

Notes: “The Near Southwest” is Flores’s term for the bio-region that encompasses New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, and portions of Colorado, Kansas, Arkansas and Louisiana.  “The West is a place we all recognize when we’re there, but you don’t have to cast eyes on cowboys, miners, or even Indians or Hispanics to know, because the West is all about the imprint of external impressions through our senses.  Drive up out of Houston or Tulsa three or four hours toward the sunset, stop to gas up the car, and you step out into air that is fundamentally different, light that is brighter and more transparent, skies of an icier blue, stars that are polished and enlarged, ground no longer covered by a mat of green but exposed as hard edges in pigmentations of off-white, buff, red.  The farther west you go toward the mountains, the greater the combined effect of these changes seems to be.  Elevation is not the cause, although it contributes and you are climbing into more rarified air as you ascend the Rio Grande or Canadian Aridity, the elemental Big It at the heart of the West, is the cause.  What makes the West almost everything it is, is the result of dry.”  (Page 136)  John Wesley Powell couldn’t have said it better.