“Dear Mad’m” – A Book Review Of An Adventurous Old Lady

thefootloosescribbler

I want to go to the Siskiyou Mountains and look upon the “rushing, talkative” Klamath River. I long to hike where Dogwoods gleam “white in the forest,” and wild roses and purple lilacs bloom by the roadside.

Why do I have these romantic notions? Because I read a memoir called, “Dear Mad’m,” and I can’t get the story of this 80-year-old woman out of my head.

In the early 1940’s, a lady named Stella Walthall Patterson (Dear Mad’m), decided to leave her friends and relatives in San Francisco and move to a mining claim she owned in the Siskiyou Mountains of Northern California. Her goal was to be completely independent: “How wonderful would it be,” she wrote, “to do exactly as I pleased, see no one for days at a time–maybe even weeks.” She vowed to try it for a year.

What follows is a memoir of adventure and discovery for this brave, and rather naive, old lady. Her attempts to go-it-alone are immediately thwarted by the arrival of two young men (Dearsir and Up’nUp) who do the annual assessment work on her claim. They adopt Dear Mad’m as a surrogate grandmother, and frankly, make it possible for her to live “alone” in the mountains.

Not to say that Dear Mad’m wasn’t brave and resourceful–an encounter with a mountain lion proved that! And though twenty years older than me, she seemed far stronger. She was also a better writer. Her descriptions of the natural world are simply marvelous. Here she writes about the variety of birds in her part of the forest:

“Jays flashed their blue wings and assaulted my ears with their harsh squawks. A pair of brilliant yellow-and-black orioles hung their strangely elongated nest in the oak tree above my cabin and raised their family of four lively babies. Tiny wild canaries, looking like animated bits of sunshine, dashed here and there chirping sweetly, and sometimes, aloft in the blue sky, a buzzard, made beautiful and mysterious by distance, soared and floated with no apparent effort. Slender, iridescent hummingbirds poised in mid-air to dip nectar from the white croft lilies in my garden and the wild honeysuckle that hung over the bank, Ruffled pink hollyhocks, with centers of yellow pollen that tempted the great velvety bumblebees to overeat, unfolded their petals on thick green spikes that stood taller than my five-foot-two.” (page 109).

Dear Mad’m doesn’t just write about the natural world and her adventures, she also writes lovingly of the characters she meets in the nearby town of Happy Camp and its surrounding environs. We care about these people–Dearsir, Up’nUp, Nora, Frenchy– and we learn, along with Dear Mad’m, perhaps the most important lesson, as stated by Dearsir: “Nobody can get along very well unless they’re needed by someone.”

One day I will visit the Siskiyou mountains. Until then, I will have to content myself by re-reading Dear Mad’m. I hope you enjoy the book as much as I did.