I had a lot of trouble focusing on The Hill. I'd read a page or two and my mind would
wander off. I don't think the problem was the setting. I've appreciated other depictions of life
in rural California. The book reminded me a bit of Valley People by Frances Marion, which
also presents a writer from the big city and a large cast of rural characters. Marion, however,
takes a more downbeat view of country life. David Greenhood, incidentally was a versatile writer whose forte may not have been fiction. His most famous work is about mapping.
The Hill by David Greenhood. Duell, Sloan and Pearce (1943), 266 pp.
A San Francisco writer takes a break from work and heads off into the Sierra. He gets lost, then his car breaks down. He finds himself in Wabash Hill, once a thriving mining town, now hardly a town at all. The place barely can claim fifty residents, and the buildings housing its few commercial establishments have been falling apart for decades. Ready for a change of scenery, the writer is fascinated -- not only by the town's spectacular setting, but also by its remaining inhabitants and the stories of their lives. Enticed by one intriguing episode after another, he prolongs his stay and eventually becomes a participant as well as an observer.
Greenhood depicts the remnants of the Gold Rush some eighty years (the book is set around 1930) after the event. A few residents of Wabash Hill were a there at the time. Most merely remember the days before the town had faded so far. Several are still working the mines. In one sketch after another -- the book has no overarching storyline -- Greenhood's first-person narrator shows the townfolk in their daily lives. They are a tightly knit and pretty contented group, longing neither to leave nor to have more exciting lives at home. (The one exception is a pretty young miner, stuck trying to eke out a living with her husband and his brothers.) These offbeat characters are not the sort found in Los Angeles or San Francisco. But eccentricity does not make them captivating. The book is pleasant enough in a meandering sort of way, and fans of fictionalized Californiana may enjoy it. In the end, however, it doesn't seem to amount to much.