Edna Calkins Price - Burro Bill and Me: A Memoir of Our Unusual Death Valley Love Story

I first came across this extraordinary memoir in 1978, soon after my graduation from Stanford University. Id moved into my folks vacation cabin in Idyllwild, California, a quiet village 5,200 feet up in the San Jacinto Mountains. Its where people from Palm Springs go to cool off and those from Los Angeles visit to breathe. I was hired as the sole reporter for the Idyllwild Town Crier, the local weekly newspaper. In addition to covering everything, I also wrote the Corner Post column and shot most of the photos.

On the surface, the move made little sense. Some of my Stanford classmates took jobs in New York and made healthy six-figure incomes on graduation, whereas I earned $12,000 annuallyless than Id been paying for a year of tuition. But the job put food on the table and gave me the freedom to finish my first book and freelance on the side for various magazines, leading to an editorship in Chicago and healthy pay raise a couple of years later. It also gave me the chance to work side by side with Luther Weare, the newspapers owner who, on something of a whim, first published Edna Prices Burro Bill and Me a few years before my arrival in town.

When I met him, Luther and his wife Marilyn had just returned from France, a trip financed by the film option for the booka deal hed struck with Melissa Mathison, a budding screenwriter who later became famous for writing the screenplays for The Black Stallion (1979) and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982). She was married for a stretch to Harrison Ford. This was all a pretty big deal in a pretty small town, so I bought a copy of Ednas memoir and read it over the weekend. It was quite the treasure, a jewel of Western Americana that detailed her unusual love story as a newlywed in Death Valley, one of the most uninhabitable and inhospitable places on the planet.

Edna had died five years before I landed in Idyllwild as a reporter, but Luther remembered her fondly and spoke of her uncommon gentleness as a kind of paramedic before such jobs existed. Trained as a nurse, she patched people up, trudged through snow with wilderness rescue teams, and did whatever she could to help her neighbors and friends. Doctors off The Hill kept her supplied with medications and various tools of the trade.

What really fascinated me about Ednas book was the extraordinary contrast between her refined upbringing and the life she chose as a young bride amidst the deserts blistery harshness. Raised as a well-to-do Virginia girl, she fell head-over-heels in love with a semiliterate and restless young man who left home at 14 and joined the circus. His dreams of adventure and freedom were as wide as the California sky. I cant take a soft life, he told his bride. It rots a man. So they set out for the edge of civilization. For ten happy years, 1931 to 1941, Edna and Bill abandoned the urban rat race and roamed sun-scorched Death Valley and the Arizona badlands afoot. They slept under the stars, scratched out a meager living from the wasteland, and befriended a motley cast of prospectors, outlaws, adventurers, and desert rats. In this place, Bill explained, a man can find his God.

Like my early newspaper publisher, I was drawn by Ednas clear and colorful voice, vivid characterizations, and the twinkle-eyed gaiety I heard in her every reminiscence. This was a woman who didnt just survive off virtually nothing. She thriveda desert flower rooted in peace.

Ednas amazing memoir of love and adventure lingered with me as my publishing career advanced. The book had been out of print for years when I founded the Alive Literary Agency in 1989. I made a few phone calls to Luther and eventually worked out a deal to represent the sale of the book in 1993 to Death Valley Natural History Association. By the time that edition had gone out of print, Luther had died and Id founded an epublishing company in 2012, Bondfire Books. When the opportunity presented itself, I travelled back to Idyllwild and met with Luther and Marilyns daughter, Andrea, to discuss the prospect of republishing Burro Bill and Me as an ebook myself. She passed the baton to her older sister Marla, and a deal was inked.

As Ive transitioned from being a cub reporter for a village newspaper, to magazine editor and author, to now owning a successful literary agency and epublishing company, I have never forgotten the love and adventures Edna and Bill shared in Death Valley after the Great Depression. I am eager to introduce you now to their story. May it leave you as awestruck and inspired as it has me these thirty-some years.

Rickly Christian
Colorado Springs, CO
July 2014