‘The Way to Rainy Mountain’

 N. Scott Momaday’s book is about place. More precisely, it’s about a journey through a place.

And the journey is an evocation of three things in particular: a landscape that is incomparable, a time that is gone forever, and the human spirit, which endures.

 

In Momaday’s telling, each journey is new. It’s a new appreciation of the land, a reimagining of the people and other living things that are gone, and a reconsideration of the human spirit.

In thinking of place, I tend to look at the landscape.

Momaday makes me think I’m seeing a-third of what’s there. 

• Source: N. Scott Momaday, The Way to Rainy Mountain; Albuquerque: The University of New Mexico Press, 1984, p. 4.