Hawk Flies Above: Journey to the Heart of the Sandhills

by Lisa Dale Norton

A memoir of the author's life ranges from her childhood in Nebraska to her parent's separation, and a life of drinking and living on the streets

Genres: Memoir

240 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 1996

Reviews

[Dena]

Evocative and powerful writing about discovering yourself and the healing beauty of the natural world.

[Ashley Meyer]

Did not enjoy it. Boring. And I have no idea what the point of writing this book was.

[Ron]

Part memoir, part travelogue, Norton's book centers around her family's cabin on a small lake on the edge of the Nebraska Sandhills. The story is told in three parts: her childhood at the lake in the 1950s and 60s, a sojourn there in 1984 where she sets out to write a thesis and settles instead into a job at a small-town bar and becomes romantically involved with a man she meets there, and a return visit several years later as she crisscrosses the Sandhills gathering material for a book.

Read uncritically, the book is a rhapsody of appreciation for the beauty of the Sandhills and a story of recovery, from a violent sexual assault far from home and a subsequent period of hard drinking and restless wandering. It speaks of the healing powers of nature and of the search for a lost self through memories of childhood innocence.

Read more critically, the book often doesn't quite follow through with some of the themes it puts forward. I wanted to know more about her relationship with her mother after her parents' divorce, an event that shattered Norris' world. While her accounts of the men she came to know there as an adult (most of them cowboys who are predatory in their attraction to her) are vivid and unsettling, I would like to have learned more about how she came to feel safe with a man again and to love.

Her roaming around Nebraska in the last part of the book tends to be a catalogue of places seen without getting much beneath the surface of them. There's a little history, some talk of the impact of corn and cattle on the environment, and many references to the depletion of the great underground reservoir, the Ogallala Aquifer. But balanced against these larger issues, a reader may want for accounts of experiences that pierce through the abstractions to the living human drama they embrace.

I recommend this book for readers who like stories of personal journeys and recovery, especially as lived in remote and isolated places. Also recommended: Teresa Jordan's "Riding the White Horse Home," Mary Clearman Blew's "All But the Waltz," and Judy Blunt's "Breaking Clean."

[Jeff]

My appreciation of this book is undoubtedly colored by my appreciation of Ms. Norton. As a die-hard cynic and olympic-caliber eye-roller I've always scoffed at stories of The Teacher Who Changed My Life, but Lisa Norton really is that person for me. I studied Journalism under her in college and will be forever grateful for the way she very gently led me to question everything and take nothing for granted, and prodded my soft & lazy brain to truly think critically for the first time. Oh sure, I've experienced a lot of misery and anger that I wouldn't have otherwise known if I hadn't learned to be so damn Aware, but I'm a much better person for it. I love this book because it showed me, in beautiful and heartbreaking terms, the journey that made Ms. Norton the kind of person who could so deeply influence my own journey. And it made me think of Nebraska as an interesting and beautiful place.

[Joseph Gascho]

I read it because it's about Nebraska, where I grew up. It's more about the sandhills, west of my old tromping ground, but there is interesting and good material about the Ogallala Aquifer, the source of water in arid Nebraska, and the controversy about water use, drying the aquifer and growing corn. And the book was give to me by a friend, Roland Stock--he's getting rid of his books, he has metastatic lung cancer. Sobering.

[Therese]

I was fortunate enough to have her as a teacher and found an autographed copy of this book at Powell's.

[Foxglow]

An introspective look at the author's childhood home, young adulthood, and how these shaped her life.

[Peg]

dry