#249 Mountains Without Number- Luis Alberto Urrea
Urrea is a new author for me. Mountains Without Number is
the first story in his Pulitzer Prize finalist collection The Water Museum.
This is such a great start. Great style, nice slow pace, meaningful and full of
soul.
It’s the breakfast club at Frankie’s diner in New Junction,
Idaho. “Everything at Frankie’s is like
it ought to be, like it used to be.” New Junction is an old boom-town long past
it’s hay day. The oil fields and uranium mines have all dried up, and the big
roads have taken all the traffic miles from what’s left of this dying town.
“Is a town dead when
the old men die, or when the children leave?”
If you live in a city, with new buildings, new cars, new
people, everything is fast, exciting and about the future. But if you live in a
small town surrounded by times buttes and open sky, everything is slow, old,
and about the past.
“The Cliffs don’t count years—years are seconds to them.
Flecks of gypsum pushed off the edge by hot wind. They are the original
inhabitants of this valley. And they weren’t always cliffs. They were entire
mountains once, until the inevitable carving wind and scouring dust and
convulsive earthquakes and cracking ice trimmed them, thinned them, made their
famous face appear to oversee the scurrying of those below.”
Notable Passages: “Atop the butte, the spirits of the old
ones are indistinguishable from the wind.”
“She can never find Bon Jovi on the radio, only Jesus and
Trace Adkins.”
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