Waterless Mountain (1932)
It’s a red flag when a Newbery winner isn’t part of Multnomah County Library’s 2.5 million-book collection. Think about that for a second. In children’s literature, the Newbery and the Caldecott are the two most widely recognized awards. Both have been around for about 100 years. It shouldn’t be that hard for the oldest public library west of the Mississippi (true!) to be sure they’ve got all of them in stock, even just for the sake of having the complete set. Not including some of the books seems less like an oversight and more like a deliberate choice. Waterless Mountain, a deep dive into Najavo (Diné) culture written by Laura Adams Armer, is the first Newbery book I haven’t been able to borrow from the local library, and after reading it, I’m bummed that it’s one I purchased for my own collection.
Sure, Waterless Mountain has some race issues, though it avoids the more explicitly mean-spirited racism we’ve seen from other books. It’s also terribly, terribly written—verb tenses change from sentence to sentence, the narrative jumps all over the place, and the whole thing is so incoherent it reads like someone Google translated the book from another language. (The writing is so dry, I’d recommend reading with a humidifier in the room.) But what bugged me the most about Waterless Mountain is that it’s a National Geographic article disguising itself as a children’s book.
I hate Idea Books. Idea Books are the Trojan Horses of the literary world, thinly veiled philosophies or research papers that an author drapes a second-rate story on top of rather than directly addressing their real point. Idea Book writers think it’s a good idea to couch their thoughts in a story, but then they don’t actually do the work to make that story compelling or believable or enjoyable for readers. The Alchemist by Paul Coehlo is an Idea Book. The Shack, which sent shockwaves through the rural evangelical church I grew up in as a child, is an Idea Book. And Waterless Mountain is an Idea Book.
It didn’t have to be this way, especially considering the author’s sterling reputation as a world-class artist. Laura Adams Armer’s first career was as a photographer in the San Francisco Bay. By all accounts, she was a wild success, winning a string of prizes from 1900 to 1919 and garnering praise as one of the early experimenters with color photography. The fact that she accomplished all this as a woman in the early 1900s is no small feat.
Her life took a major turn around 1919, when she left the Bay Area for the American Southwest. What started as an exploratory trip to visit the tribes of the area and soak in the landscapes ended up becoming the second phase of Ms. Armer’s career, as she began focusing almost exclusively on documenting the Hopi and Navajo tribes of the Four Corners area. By this point, Armer was 50 years old. She didn’t need the money, and she certainly didn’t need to leave the comforts of San Francisco for the harsh realities of the undeveloped desert. But she developed an intensely spiritual connection to the place and its people, so much so that she spent the rest of her life photographing, writing about, and living with the tribes. After ten years of intimate time spent completely immersed with the Navajo, she’d learned more about their culture than almost any other non-native person at the time, and she decided to share that knowledge through a children’s book.
Why on earth would Ms. Armer choose children’s literature as the foremost way to share all that she had learned? Waterless Mountain is bursting with anthropological detail (that’s pretty much all it is), but you can feel Armer trying to awkwardly shoehorn every single thing she’d learned about the culture into its pages. “This is how family relations play out!” “This is how they get water in the middle of the desert!” “These are their cultural myths and stories!” If it were a documentary or straight-up cultural biography, it would be a pretty interesting bit of history. But as a book for kids, it’s stupefyingly inept. Winning the Newbery for her first book likely did little to deter her from switching up mediums, but it also seems like she didn’t really need to—just a few years later, she nabbed a Caldecott Honor for her book The Forest Pool.
Laura Adams Armer led a fascinating life, was a devoted scholar to her subjects, and made some important contributions to the world of art before her death in 1963. That Waterless Mountain has been forgotten isn’t much of a tragedy, but I’m glad for Armer’s sake she got to have the Newbery Medal on her resume. For everyone else’s sake, though, don’t bother.
