New West Book Review
How to Be a Good Western Neighbor
Linda Hasselstrom's new book, No Place Like Home: Notes from a Western Life gives lessons in being neighborly.By Jenny Shank, 12-21-09
No Place Like Home: Notes from a Western Life
by Linda M. Hasselstrom
University of Nevada Press, 211 pages
Linda Hasselstrom knows what you’ve been flushing because your sewage backed up into her basement. She knows how long you’ve been in the shower, wasting precious western water resources. She knows which punk kid lopped the tops off of all of the irises growing around her Cheyenne home. She knows which subdivision-dwelling newcomer ignited that grassfire in the South Dakota prairie near her ranch because he failed to disable the catalytic converter on his pickup. And she knows all about the shoddy planning for the new subdivision next door because a flood picked up one of the houses and set it down in her pasture. In her new book, No Place Like Home: Notes from a Western Life, she has a few things to say about all of these issues.
Linda M. Hasselstrom, the author of several books of nonfiction and poetry and the director of prairie writing retreats in her South Dakota home, is a passionate, entertaining, and cranky companion in the landscape of the evolving West, in which she finds more and more people who don’t think about the consequences of their actions. She describes herself and a friend as “a couple of cynical old broads who never benefited from innocence even when we had it.”
Hasselstrom suffers from some uncommonly bad neighbors at her houses in Cheyenne and rural South Dakota, such as the meth-using pink-haired mother who leaves her baby unattended while she gets high and flushes all manner of unspeakable items down her toilet. Hasselstrom goes out of her way to try to be a good neighbor—she lets the iris massacring kid off far easier than I would’ve— but she’s armed with a shotgun. Come around her place to intimidate her and she’ll fire off a round to let you know how things stand.
No Place Like Home is composed of essays on a variety of topics that appeared in publications including the High Country News and Orion. Most of them cycle around the idea of community, and what it means to be a good neighbor. Part of being a good neighbor, for Hasselstrom, is being mindful of the consequences that one’s action or inaction has on others.
For example, in “Selling the Ranch,” she writes about a land auction she attended in South Dakota in 2000. “That single sale changed our lives,” she writes, “put an end to the community where I grew up.” Hasselstrom grew up on a ranch next door to the one being auctioned off. As Paul, the owner of the neighboring ranch, aged, he made no plans for what would happen to the land after he died, and rebuffed neighbors’ offers to buy parts of his land. Neighbors speculate that Paul’s stepchildren, who don’t live in the area, couldn’t agree what to do with the land when he died, so his widow ends up selling the spread to the highest bidder, developers who quickly build a subdivision in the area without proper planning for things such as prairie floods, erosion, roads, and fire control.
“Each time I drive home to the ranch since the sale,” Hasselstrom writes, “I am amazed at the speed with which our community is disintegrating, almost as fast as a bulldozer can roll. Within months, the results of Paul’s sale were scattered through the pastures: houses three times the size of the one where Paul’s parents lived long and productive lives…If he’d tossed bombs through our windows, or set fire to the churches and the post office, we’d have thrown him in jail and repaired the damage. We can’t fix this, and few of us would even acknowledge that we should.”
Although Hasselstrom’s essays are not explicitly connected, the larger plot of the subdivision’s beginning and demise weaves through the book. When the subdivision is built, new neighbors move in, most of whom work elsewhere. She addresses one of them in “Dear John: How to Move to the Country,” explaining how his pickup caused a grass fire and why the community sued him to pay the firefighting costs. She also explains the nuances of country living, how he is “responsible fro the actions of workers [he] hire[s] to build the road,” and how “when you are standing on your own land, repairing the half of the fence to the right is your job,” and how if he doesn’t abide these customs then neighbors might fail to assist him if his truck gets stuck in the snow. The subdivision houses produce light pollution that dims the stars and more trash than the country can handle, and ultimately are wiped out in a 2007 flood that leaves 34 of the 36 new homes damaged or destroyed, one of them traveling a mile to land in Hasselstrom’s hayfield. No one takes responsibility for the cleanup, so Hassesltrom must live with the washed out trash of her neighbors.
Meanwhile, Hasselstrom lives in Cheyenne for part of the year with her companion in a lively section of the city that will be unrecognizable to those who thought Wyoming was all cowboys and horses. Hasselstrom confronts some very urban problems, such as the disaffected kids at the alternative school across the street who smoke on her property, drug activity, and a flood of sewage that backs up into her house because neighbors were flushing things they shouldn’t.
Near the end of the book, Hassesltrom describes how she and her husband came to move back to South Dakota and establish a writing retreat for women. Some of what she Hasselstrom writes about in No Place Like Home, such as the rampant construction of new subdivisions far out in the prairie, has slowed for the moment during the economic downturn. But when the economy picks up again, so will the building, and anyone who wants to develop in rural areas should keep Hasselstrom’s cautions in mind. And turn off the damn shower already. Out there, water doesn’t grow on trees.
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I misunderstood that Hasselstrom was discussing two different subdivisions in her book. I thought I'd share part of the email she sent me to clarify. She wrote:
"I misled you about the subdivisions, probably by having separate
essays about each of them. And by that old writer's bugaboo of having the terrain so firmly in MY mind that I assume I've described it correctly to readers.
The subdivision created on Paul's ranch is west across the highway
from where I live, and it's the one that creates light pollution and
where the houses are perched on pointy hills dissolving in the rain.
To the immediate north of my ranch house, more subdividing is going on; I mentioned that land going up for sale the day my Aunt Anne died.
Six miles farther north and somewhat east, along Battle Creek, is another subdivision which lies west of my hay ground; that's the one where the flood displaced 34 of the 36 houses-- and most of those poor folks are still there, because their insurance didn't cover the flood, and they can't afford to move. And no one will buy their damaged houses. So they have paid a high price for not looking at the consequences of their actions.
Unfortunately, the story is not as tidy dramatically as I would have liked, since the subdivision that opens the story is not the one struck by the flood. And in neither case has the developer suffered the consequences of his actions. Both developers continue to make money while their victims pay the price for not asking enough questions about the flood potential of the nearby creek, or the discomforts and dangers of building on pointy hills."
Don't assume the economy will pick up again like it did during the last boom before this bust. We may be "bust" for decades, which is in the remaining lifespan of many of us. This bust was different; not just another downturn in the business cycle that will soon turn up again. We have been through a structural change in the economic and political landscape, and the challenge will be in how we adapt to it.