The Ride of Her Life by Elizabeth Letts

Fact is stranger than fiction. Consider the story of a woman who lost everything and was given a diagnosis of four years to live and decides to mount a horse for the first time in thirty years to ride across the entirety of America. She wanted to see the Pacific Ocean.  

She had never seen a movie or lived with electricity and indoor plumbing. She had an arthritis and a cough. She had little money. She had no map of the country, no flashlight, no cell phone, or GPS. She had no knowledge of the world. She had never traveled. Never seen a thruway. She didn't know how far south she had to travel to find warm weather.

She did have a sturdy Maine Morgan horse named Tarzan and a perky dachshund mix named Depeche Toi. And along the way, was gifted Rex, a Tennessee Walker.

Donning men's clothes, she packed up her bedroll, and with a few dollars set off in the autumn of 1954. 

What Annie Wilkins did have was faith and persistence and a dream--and the love of her four-footed companions. 

Annie found a country filled with people who believed in hospitality to strangers, people willing to care for her and her animals. She found the helpers. 

Annie also found a country on the cusp of huge changes. Cars whizzed by without consideration, people were leery of strangers, a gang harassed her, and newspapers and celebrities lionized her.

Elizabeth Letts has written beloved books including The Perfect Horse, The Eighty-Dollar Champion, and Finding Dorothy. The Ride of Her Life is another triumph, a much needed inspiration in an America that has lost its sense of community. It was a joy to read.

I received a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley. My review is fair and unbiased.

The Ride of Her Life: The True Story of a Woman, Her Horse, and Their Last-Chance Journey Across America
by Elizabeth Letts
Random House Publishing Group - Ballantine
Pub Date  June 1, 2021  
ISBN: 9780525619321
hardcover $28.00 (USD)

from the publisher

The triumphant true story of a woman who rode her horse across America in the 1950s, fulfilling her dying wish to see the Pacific Ocean, from the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Perfect Horse and The Eighty-Dollar Champion

“The gift Elizabeth Letts has is that she makes you feel you are the one taking this trip. This is a book we can enjoy always but especially need now.”—Elizabeth Berg, author of The Story of Arthur Truluv

In 1954, sixty-three-year-old Maine farmer Annie Wilkins embarked on an impossible journey. She had no money and no family, she had just lost her farm, and her doctor had given her only two years to live. But Annie wanted to see the Pacific Ocean before she died. She ignored her doctor’s advice to move into the county charity home. Instead, she bought a cast-off brown gelding named Tarzan, donned men’s dungarees, and headed south in mid-November, hoping to beat the snow. Annie had little idea what to expect beyond her rural crossroads; she didn’t even have a map. But she did have her ex-racehorse, her faithful mutt, and her own unfailing belief that Americans would treat a stranger with kindness.

Annie, Tarzan, and her dog, Depeche Toi, rode straight into a world transformed by the rapid construction of modern highways. Between 1954 and 1956, they pushed through blizzards, forded rivers, climbed mountains, and clung to the narrow shoulder as cars whipped by them at terrifying speeds. Annie rode more than four thousand miles, through America’s big cities and small towns. Along the way, she met ordinary people and celebrities—from Andrew Wyeth (who sketched Tarzan) to Art Linkletter and Groucho Marx. She received many offers—a permanent home at a riding stable in New Jersey, a job at a gas station in rural Kentucky, even a marriage proposal from a Wyoming rancher. In a decade when car ownership nearly tripled, when television’s influence was expanding fast, when homeowners began locking their doors, Annie and her four-footed companions inspired an outpouring of neighborliness in a rapidly changing world.

Rooted: Life at the Crossroads of Science, Nature, and Spirit by Lyanda Lynn Haupt

During this pandemic I have seen friends on social media share rejuvenating experiences in nature through daily walks or hikes into the wilds, views from windows from homes in cities and woods and moors, experiences with fox frolicking in suburban yards or wild birds landing on outstretched palms offering seed and suet.

In the deep green woods, photo by my brother

My brother walks every weekend with his girlfriend, through every weather. They seek out the lonely places, the empty dirt roads, the parks only populated in sunshine. 

A lonely view by my brother

I have the local city park filled with towering oak trees and black squirrels hopping across the grass, a hawk watching overhead, or the protected woods were trillium carpet the forest floor in spring.

Trillium in suburban Tenhave Woods

Even my own patio, sitting under the apple trees, offers a daily respite, watching the robins joyously splash in the bird bath, the sparrows flitting in and out of their nesting box, while bee and butterfly visit the herb garden and zinnia, perhaps oblivious to the rabbit who sneaks in to steal leaves from the rose bush.

in my own back yard

How does anyone get through a week without communing with nature? A glimpse of flowering tree or autumnal glow of color across the grass? The raucous call of the Blue Jay or the hoot of an owl in the night?

Oak tree in the city woods

Lyanda Lynn Haupt writes that being rooted in nature is a spiritual practice. She shares her personal stories of walking barefoot and alone in the forest, camping and walking blind at night, healed, and sometimes afraid, by the experience. 

The spirituality of oneness with all the earth is ancient, the connectedness of all life part of religious experience found in many faiths, including Christianity. But modern humans live in houses and work in rooms and Western society buys and uses and discards; we have lost wonder and respect and stewardship for Earth.

Haupt's witness shows us how to regain the sacred, how to claim sisterhood with all living things, how to embrace the darkness, and how to heal the earth and ourselves.

I received a free galley from the publisher through NetGalley. My review is fair and unbiased.

I previously read the author's book Mozart's Starling, which I reviewed here.

Rooted: Life at the Crossroads of Science, Nature, and Spirit
by Lyanda Lynn Haupt
Little, Brown Spark
Pub Date May 4,  2021 
ISBN: 9780316426480
hardcover $27.00 (USD)

from the publisher

Deepen your connection to the natural world with this inspiring meditation, "a path to the place where science and spirit meet" (Robin Wall Kimmerer).

In Rooted, cutting-edge science supports a truth that poets, artists, mystics, and earth-based cultures across the world have proclaimed over millennia: life on this planet is radically interconnected. Our bodies, thoughts, minds, and spirits are affected by the whole of nature, and they affect this whole in return. In this time of crisis, how can we best live upon our imperiled, beloved earth?

Award-winning writer Lyanda Lynn Haupt’s highly personal new book is a brilliant invitation to live with the earth in both simple and profound ways—from walking barefoot in the woods and reimagining our relationship with animals and trees, to examining the very language we use to describe and think about nature. She invokes rootedness as a way of being in concert with the wilderness—and wildness—that sustains humans and all of life.

In the tradition of Rachel Carson, Elizabeth Kolbert, and Mary Oliver, Haupt writes with urgency and grace, reminding us that at the crossroads of science, nature, and spirit we find true hope. Each chapter provides tools for bringing our unique gifts to the fore and transforming our sense of belonging within the magic and wonder of the natural world.