This autobiography was published in 1973 by a woman who had written the classic nature books - One Day at Teton Marsh, One Day on Beetle Rock, Icebound Summer. Those are all worth going back to and rereading or getting acquainted with today. Nature is not limited by time.
In this book Sally tells us about her life and how she came to her nature writing. The story is compelling and I am pleased that I finally got to reading it.
She was not raised in a home that praised nature, nor a home that praised her. She had a loving dad who was on the road with his work and perhaps to avoid being with her mother. Her mother developed a psychosis that might have started with a difficult delivery of Sally, and if it was not that, Sally was still the brunt of her outbursts.
Throughout her life her mother hinted that if she were like Sally she would kill herself. She made threats, she nearly starved Sally, she suggested that Sally could be poisoned and on and on. Sally had few friends until adulthood. She was stifled by a lack of self esteem - pretty logical.
When she found a stray dog that befriended her and lived on her porch for a while the mother made her get rid of the dog. She did this by riding a bike that the dog followed and then riding off and abandoning it. If it were at the home, she knew her mother would kill it. Talk about sad!
Yet Sally survived this, became a successful writer who often gave up jobs in advertising, radio, Hollywood when here ethics prevented her from doing what the job demanded.
Luckily she found friendship and nature. The friendship could not develop in to marriage and a child. After watching a young woman berate her elderly mother on a bus, Sally could not face the idea of having a child of her own because she was so fearful that she might have a child that would manifest the insanity that was so apparent in her mother.
What she did find in nature was acceptance. The animals came to her. She had an affinity for relating to wild things and they seemed to accept her. The stories of the animals coming in to her room and cabin are wonderful.
Her life in nature is expressed in the books she wrote and she left all of us with a real gift.
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