MENDOCINO REFUGE

Generations of inhabitants who revered and defended a sylvan California setting are commemorated in Brovarney’s nonfiction history.

The author, a former curator at the Grace Hudson Museum in Ukiah, California, celebrates Lake Leonard, a pristine body of water nestled amid the mountains and streams of Reeves Canyon in Mendocino County. She begins by surveying the natural history of the area, which is dominated by old-growth redwood trees big enough to generate their own microclimates and shelter a menagerie of fauna, from salamanders to mountain lions. She also discusses the local Pomo Indian culture. Brovarney then profiles the families who owned Lake Leonard and its environs from the 19th century to the present, focusing on two iconic women. The first is Una Boyle, who summered at the lake as a girl and lived there full time for 30 years, beginning in 1921; she escaped from a convent at the age of 13 and later became an amateur rodeo rider. The second is Boyle’s neighbor Hazel Dickinson Putnam, a riding instructor who greeted trespassers on her 200 acres with a loaded gun and lived by the motto, “I don’t shoot to threaten, I shoot to kill.” The author sets these stories against the inexorable encroachment of logging into the area, which obliterated surrounding forests but spared Lake Leonard’s vicinity thanks to its proprietors’ conservationist efforts (one owner saved a favorite redwood by telling the lumberjacks that it was on her land—and then bought the property the next day). Brovarney deftly mixes regional history, ecology, and character studies of people who shaped and were shaped by the land, writing in lucid, workmanlike prose dotted with flights of vivid lyricism: “An ancient redwood forest dwells deep in our sense long after we leave it—a cool stillness, the pungent sweet-citrus scent born of sun-heated sap, soft duff underfoot, duskiness broken by slender streams of light, the crystalline song of a hermit thrush.” The book’s many photos, some a century old, give an equally evocative sense of the primeval forest, its vast, corrugated redwoods dwarfing the people beside them.

A captivating homage to a wilderness sanctuary marked but not spoiled by human presence.