All Roads Lead Me Back

A lice Andison's Standfast ranch is somewhere in the hills near Waitsburg, per- haps just across the county line in Columbia County.

Our town isn't described in any great detail in "All Roads Lead Me Back To You,' the debut novel by Walla Walla-based author Kennedy Foster. It's the place the main characters pass through on their way to Walla Walla and it's home to Alice's sister Janet and her kids who help out at Standfast where Alice, the lone patrona, is woe- fully shorthanded until a Mexican vaquero shows up in a winter snowstorm.

But farmers and ranch- ers will recognize the universal challenges of own- ing a piece of the country around Waitsburg in Ken- nedy's 344-page book published by Simon & Schuster in 2009. I came across a copy of the novel by accident in a tiny town north of San Antonio, Tex- as, on a recent visit to see my oldest son. I tried to contact Foster for an inter- view, but did not receive a reply to my email in time for this column.

In the book, she eloquently captures the cadence, or should we say, merciless rhythm of life on a cattle ranch and farm in what she erroneously calls the Palouse. There is the independent ranch owner, stoic female boss - heroine, yet subject to whims of nature and willingly in the hands of a proud Mexican drifter who is at constant risk of being deported.

There is the sister, who, like the author, teaches at a community college to a large number of Mex- ican-American students. There's the sister's teenage kids, who live in Waitsburg and are helpful on the ranch when they're not distracted.

All these characters and others find love and redemption within the boundaries of their up-anddown existence against the backdrop of ownership disputes, land prospects, immigration law, nearby meth activities and the small-town embrace of a rural community.

In part, Foster writes about what she knows. She was born in Detroit in 1944. Her father was a career officer, so she 'followed the gun' to Ger- many, to Virginia, to Cali- fornia, to Washington DC, to Kansas, to Alaska, back to Kansas, to Pennsylva- nia, back to DC, and back to Germany, according the bio on her web page.

She attended six elementary schools, three high schools, and two col- leges, finishing her BA at Grinnell College in 1966. She married a Grinnell professor. Because aca- demics were extremely peripatetic in those years, the family traveled a lot, from Iowa (where her sons John and James were born), to California, to Maryland, and finally to southeastern Washington state. During this period, she "rode a lot of borrowed horses, and wrote in bor- rowed styles," having de- veloped a transient's habit of re-inventing herself in each new place. In the Northwest she struck root, a delightful sensation. She gave up fiction, took writ- ing jobs of various kinds, grants, financial develop- ment boilerplate, newslet- ters. At 45, she discovered a vocation to teach. She has taught English as a second language, basic writing, and basic college skills at Walla Walla Community College since 1988.

"I've never done ranch work, but it's all around us here," she said in an online interview. "'Til a couple of years ago, the roping steers used to be trailed through town at fair time. We town- ies may not have irons in the fire, but we know what's going on."

"All Roads Lead Me

Back To You"

By Kennedy Foster

Pocket Books/Simon &Schuster, New York

344 pages - $15

http://www.kennedyfoster.com