Cidermaster Of Rio Oscuro - Hardcover

Frauenglas, Harvey; Frauenglass, Harvey

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0874806607 ISBN 13: 9780874806601

Publisher: University of Utah Press, 2000

Synopsis

An orchard in New Mexico is the setting for 14 seasons of growth and harvest and one man's meditation on the natural cycles of life and death. Frauenglass describes days of incessant work pruning trees, pressing cider, and repairing buildings, and tells the stories of neighbors, of past cidermasters, and of his pregnant daughter's battle with cancer. The author is a farmer, cidermaker, and writer whose fiction and nonfiction have appeared in various magazines and journals. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

About this title

About the Author

Harvey Frauenglass worked for fourteen years in the national defense industry before becoming a farmer and cidermaker. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in various magazines an journals. He and his wife, the artist Gayle Fulwyler Smith, live on the Rio Oscuro in New Mexico.

Reviews

"Controlling nature is an illusion. We are controlled rather than controlling. And the harder we try to control natural forces, the more serious the consequences." Frauenglass knows whereof he speaks. A nuclear weapons research editor for 14 years at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, he resigned his position to take up raising apples in the highlands of northern New Mexico. One of his goals was to become a "cidermaster," which he describes in Taoist terms as someone who "encourages the orchard spirits and the human spirit in the orchard," aiming to learn all there is to know about the "living and growing and dying of the trees," as well as about cider-making. Woven into the horticultural lore of apple trees are stories of Frauenglass's own family and the history of his orchard, once the abode of a German missionary parson who wanders ghostlike throughout the text. Especially important is the author's charming and wise daughter, Marni, whose death from cancer is recounted in a series of flashbacks. This meditative, evocative memoir reads as if told by a combination of Thoreau and a Navajo storyteller, or perhaps the ancient Chinese farmer-poet, T'ao Ch'ien, whom the author cites as a personal hero. In a metaphoric event near the end of the book, a Vietnam veteran carves a "Cave of the Chambers of the Heart" into a mountainside. The private, healing act takes three years to complete, but it inspires many visitors and symbolizes the way communion with nature can ennoble a soul. Thus saith the cidermaster: "We go on, blindly, in great ignorance," and with great faith in the turning cycle of the seasons. This is a lovely, mystical book about love, life and apples. (Aug.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

"We came to farm living with the faith of the innocent. Gayle saw ancient fruit trees, vines growing over fences, mesas and mountains, and the river; it was a spot of beauty on the earth. I saw apple trees, more than I could count and I wanted to make cider. Inside the old farmhouse the mud walls were thick with grease and grime, the planked ceilings were laced with cobwebs, and the lights were bare bulbs in pullchain sockets hanging from fraying lamp cords which ran from room to room. The faucets spit and bubbled and bucket of water stood beside the toilet to help it flush. The whole farm was a midden of the broken, the used up, the forgotten, and the obsolete. . . . Everything here was ours and everything called at one and the same time for our attention. We had bought the farm."

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Utah Press
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0874806607
• ISBN 13: 9780874806601
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 208