Reviewed by Flavia Potenza
Thank you, Linda Ballou, for “Embrace of the Wild,” and introducing us to the extraordinary equestrian explorer Lady Isabella Lucy Bird (1831-1904) and her lust for adventure in the American West.
“Her mission was not to walk in the footsteps of famous explorers or literary figures, but to get to places others had not gone,” Ballou writes in the introduction.
Lady Isabella’s books chronicling her adventures, are compilations of her letters written to her younger sister who arranged to publish them. It was her book, “A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains,” that inspired Ballou to meet the challenges inherent in fictionalizing her by “writing her story in the first person…and keeping to the spirit of her letters without plagiarizing.”
For Isabella, who suffered from lifelong back pain exacerbated by riding side-saddle and sometimes wore a brace, it was sheer determination for her to embark on a long sea voyage to the Sandwich Islands (now Hawai’i). Here she learned to ride astride her horse, to “charge up the flank of a living volcano, ford roaring torrents…, feel the loving touch of the healing hands of a Hawaiian elder…and let go of a lifetime of chronic pain.”
On the way back from a treacherous journey of sixty miles to Waipio, the Valley of the Kings, they spurred their mounts “through coffee and kalo fields. I was one with my sturdy mare, riding barefoot with my hair loose and whipping the wind. My cheeks stung and felt flushed and my blood was up. I was loving every second of being alive! There would be nothing or no one that would ever stop me from knowing this raw freedom again!”
