The Jump-Off Creek

Beautifully written, low-key, with the truthfulness of life itself. [return][return]Molly Gloss excels at stories of life on the edge: one of my very favorite novels is "The Dazzle of Day," her beautifully written, low-key and truthful story of a group of Quakers who flee political and ecological chaos on Earth in a generation starship headed for a distant star. "The Jump-Off Creek" reverses the polarity of Gloss' imaginative time-machine, and recreates world of the 1890s Oregon frontier, and the life of Lydia Sanderson, a young widow who has sold up all the baggage of her unhappy marriage and bought a smallholding in Oregon, with little more ambition than, for the first time in her life being her own boss, and keeping body and soul show more together. [return][return]Encounters with her neighbours -- fellow smallholders, scraping a living from the land during a depression that is adding to the general struggle to survive, their wives, who raise and bury children, and long for brief opportunities for female companionship, and "wolfers," embittered young cowboys who scrape a living from the bounty they receive for killing the wolves that prey on cattle and sheep -- build up to a narrative of her first year in her new home on the Jump-off Creek.[return][return]I can't think of any way to put it better than the late, Blessed Ursula Le Guin, who described it as " ... the West behind the swaggering and hokum." A marvellous story of the quiet courage that went into the settling of America. show less

I loved this book, and it's by an Oregon author! This is the story of a woman homesteader, Lydia Sanderson, who is trying to create a home in Easter Oregon in the 1890's. She is a widow, escaping what seems to have been a loveless past, with no desire to remarry. Gloss appears to have done a lot of research, including with her own great-grandmothers, and the story feels very real. Life was hard work, with very little time for any luxury. (I ended up really appreciating my house, with heating and plumbing and a floor. )

Gloss also shows the poverty of her characters inner lives. They all had hard childhoods, and grew up with a limited emotional range -- but still with a human need to connect. The two main characters, Lydia, and a nearby show more rancher, Tim Whiteaker, develop a relationship of sorts, and throughout the book struggle to discover what they mean to each other.

This is a short book, and Gloss uses spare, carefully considered language to great effect. This simplicity reflects the homesteading reality and keeps the reader in Lydia's reality. show less

It's all "between the lines," in the silences - I probably shouldn't be reading Molly Gloss. I'm a guy, after all. But maybe, at 64, some of the nastiness of being a guy has finally worn off. Because I love the way this woman writes. The Hearts of Horses hooked me, Wild Life wowed me, and now, this earlier absolute gem of a novel just blew me away. How does she do this thing where the essence of the story lies in what is not said? Lydia Sanderson, Tim Whiteaker, Blue Odell. None of them say very much of any real significance. All are stoic and uncomplaining of the "narrow circumstances" life has dealt them. In fact they are nearly inarticulate; yet all these feelings - of yearning and loneliness, of sorrow and regret, they are all show more somehow laid bare in the pauses. The descriptions, the gestures, the sidelong glances, the facial expressions - all become muted dialogue. Even the one character who seems unabashedly bad, the angry bigoted boy that is Harley Osgood, has an element of humanity in him that doesn't quite let you hate him. There are no simple black-and-white characters in Gloss's fiction. There are, instead, infinite shades of gray, and an attention to descriptive detail that makes you understand implicitly much of what is left unsaid. The years-long friendship between the two cowboys Whiteaker and Odell is perhaps one of the best portrayals of love between men that fiction has to offer. And I'm not talking about any "Brokeback Mountain" kinda stuff here either. These are just two men who have stuck together through thick and thin, mostly the latter, and a bond has formed that is stronger than most marriages. Enough said. This is simply a superb story. There oughta be a ten-star rating for books of this caliber. And by the way, what a wonderful film for thinking adults this could be. Thanks again, Molly. I'll be watching for the next book, so please, Write on! show less

Maybe it's the fact that The Jump-Off Creek takes place in 1895 and times are hard, hard, hard; maybe it's just the way Gloss wanted her characters, but everyone in The Jump-Off Creek is stiff, dour, reserved, uncomfortable. It got harder and harder for me to read. There is no real joy in this book. On the one side you have Harley Osgood and his companions. They are poisoning cows to attract wolves. Wolf pelts are going for a pretty penny and it's nothing personal. They are just trying to make a living because as I said, times are hard. On the other side, Tim and his partner, Blue, are trying to keep their livestock safe from the poisonings, but even pet dogs are not safe from the strychnine. [Note: heartbreak alert.] In the middle is show more Lydia Sanderson, a lone (and lonely) widow who has come back to claim her homestead. The Jump-Off Creek borders her property and while the surrounding land needs a great deal of work, she is determined to make her way. show less

Beautiful, well-crafted, richly-textured, gem of a novelette. The true joy here is the characterizations, where so much is communicated is communicated between the lines, in the silences between things that are not said.

The Jump-Off Creek by Molly Gloss is about homesteading in Oregon in the late 1800s. A woman who has been widowed comes to this remote area, near the Umpqua Mountains to take up her claim. She purchased the deed to an abandoned site so she starts with some land cleared and a ramshackle cabin. Her nearest neighbours are a couple of single men who are raising cattle. This was a very hard life as just in order to survive, she must work all day at tending her goats, improving her cabin, planting and caring for a garden, and clearing the land. She also had to live with the loneliness, insecurity, and the dirt.

The story is told plainly and without romanticizing any part of the life. The author used pioneer diaries, journals and the stories of show more her own relatives to portray an accurate picture of the hardship that was frontier life. Although there is a story about an on-going feud between a squatter and one of her neighbours, the author really concentrates on the actuality of pioneering with descriptions of branding cattle, milking goats and logging. These descriptions draw a portrait that is very effective at both giving us insight into the hardships but also a glimmer of the slow development of community.

The Jump-Off Creek is an engrossing and moving read about pioneering, a subject I love to read about but am most appreciative that I don’t have to live it. show less

This novel, about homesteading the Oregon wilderness in the late 19th century's Long Depression, succeeds in creating a convincing and poignant sense of the isolation experienced by its characters. Their vulnerability and the tenuous viability of their way of life invests the narrative with a riveting, real-world tension. The prose is honed and beautiful.