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New West Book Review

Last Farmer Standing: A Woman Chronicles Building a Log Home in Central Oregon

By Jenny Shank, 11-08-10

River House
by Sarahlee Lawrence
Tin House Books, 272 pages, $16.95

River House is the searchingly honest, foursquare memoir of a young woman struck with an unconventional dream: After college and years of world travel, Sarahlee Lawrence decides she wants to build her own log house on the high desert ranch in central Oregon where she was raised.  This is nonfiction, but Lawrence’s life provided her the material of a classic, woman-vs.-nature drama that makes this a transfixing read.  Even if the closest you’ve ever come to building a house involved the use of Lincoln Logs, you’ll be taken in by River House.

There’s a daunting task ahead of Lawrence—building a log house with minimal equipment and the help of only her father, with just a frigid winter’s worth of time to complete the bulk of the project before she has to return to work as a river guide.  The story largely revolves around the elemental triad of mother, father, and child as Lawrence pushes the three of them through this job she’s set for herself. 

Lawrence’s father is a fascinating figure, a pot-smoking surf-obsessed hippie from California who fell in love with a ranch girl from Oregon—Lawrence’s mom.  For twenty-eight years, he’s buckled down to the tough work of hay farming ("Mom’s dream,” as Lawrence often describes it), but he longs for the ocean.  Lawrence loves him madly, and although she’s independent, with a full complement of mechanical, agricultural, and carpentry skills, in the task of building her house she depends on her father almost to his breaking point.

In her early twenties, Lawrence surprised herself with a powerful urge to return home while she was in the middle of a yearlong river exploration adventure that she’d won a fellowship to complete.  The book opens in Cusco, Peru, where she has agreed to run a river with an Italian kayaker she barely knows.  In a suspenseful passage, she questions the wisdom of her decision after she finds herself alone in raging rapids in the jungle.  At night in her tent, Lawrence reads the copy of Thoreau’s Walden that her mother sent, and dreams of home:

“For the previous four years, I’d been in one river canyon after another, and I’d finally hit some kind of claustrophobia.  I was homesick for Oregon and for my family’s farm.  I wanted the sky that my dad worked against like a red ant, where we watched storms build for hours and flood east over the mountains before swinging north over the fields of fresh-cut hay.  It was more than open land that I suddenly craved: I wanted to interact with more of nature’s elements than just water.  I wanted to get my hands in the earth.  I also missed my father and felt remorseful that I’d left him to farm alone.”

Although Lawrence completes her proposed course of river exploration during the fellowship period, she resolves to return home, even though in doing so she becomes one of the only people of her generation to choose to farm the area where she grew up.  Lawrence sees the land around Terrebonne, Oregon encroached by the development in Bend, with new light pollution, demands on limited water supply, and million-dollar homes in view.  Lawrence has picked a tough, lonely course for herself and she questions her decision: “I wondered if I would miss the chemistry of that fling with the river.  I felt crazy for leaving something so good, but I guess it was like any fling—I just couldn’t imagine it being enough to sustain me forever.  And though I loved to play, I’d been missing real work, in a real place, with real people who work the land.”

Lawrence falls to real work in earnest, on the at-times-Sisyphean task of building herself a log home as her “back-to-the-lander” mother did before her.  She still makes a living leading river trips, so she must complete the building during the punishing winter months.  Despite challenges and setbacks, and her dad’s advice, “only fools make dreams with dates,” she’s determined to finish her house, and to do it in a way that she thinks is the proper one.  For example, she decides to dig the hole for her foundation by hand rather than rent a backhoe.  “I just wanted to be in my space, getting the job done as I could do it with my own body,” she writes.

Lawrence’s mother is busy at work in town, but helps her with advice on building.  When she finds out Sarahlee hasn’t even glanced at the book about log home building she provided, she says, “‘You’re so experiential, Sarah.  You just extrapolate from your available knowledge how to get what you want, and it’s often missing ‘B’ on your way from ‘A’ to ‘C’.  That’s how you’ve always been, but this is your house,’ she said with an emphasis on house.”

With the help of her father, Lawrence pours the foundation and begins the painstaking process of building the walls of her home.  She was raised to do everything herself, and obeys her training almost to a fault.  She writes of her father, “"When I was a child, my dad did not hold my hand or protect me from small dangers.  He let me fall and he let me pull myself back up, brushing the dirt off myself.” And she writes of her mother, “Her philosophy on mothering was one of release:  a bow that shoots an arrow into the world.” But when Lawrence realizes she needs help, she’s willing to ask her neighbors, and in doing so forges a bond with them that her “almost exotic” father never developed.  “Between the wretched weather and the travails of my building project, I had the ticket to knowing my neighbors, mostly because I lacked ego completely and was willing to ask for help.”

Although Lawrence relishes the time with her father that building the house provides, he becomes increasingly dissatisfied with life on the ranch as they labor, and his pot-fueled ideas turn wild and focused on an escape to Mexico’s beaches.  At the same time Lawrence commits to returning to the land, her father determines to leave.  This story of a daughter’s love for her complicated father is poignant and refreshing, and the prose has the beauty of apt simplicity. 

The end of River House leaves a reader begging for a sequel.  What happened to Sarahlee’s father?  How is it working out as she fashions a life that is true to her convictions?  Lawrence’s bio notes that she currently operates an organic vegetable farm.  One can only hope she’s taking notes on this experience, preparing for a follow-up to this satisfying, unusual memoir.

Sarahlee Lawrence will tour throughout the West this month to discuss River House.  Her stops include The Country Bookshelf in Bozeman on November 13 (4 p.m.), Fact & Fiction in Missoula on November 15 (7 p.m.), Chapter One Books in Hamilton on November 16 (7 p.m.), Maria’s Bookshop in Durango on November 17 (6:30 p.m.), Back of Beyond Books in Moab on November 18 (7 p.m.), The King’s English Bookshop in Salt Lake City on November 20 (2 p.m.), the Blue Sage Center in Paonia on November 22 (7 p.m.), and Bookworks in Albuquerque on November 30 (7 p.m.).

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