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with energy executives and European vacationers bound for Yellowstone. We touch down in a summer twilight at an airport heavy with trophy heads, panoramic backlit images of geysers and bears, and life-size sculptures of horses and antelope surrounding the baggage- claim carousel. So the journey begins. Waiting curbside is a diminutive woman who strides forward with great energy and determination. I sense this is Mary Jane Edwards — or MJ, as she goes by — the capable artist, administrator, and best friend to the woman who invited (or rather, summoned) me here, to tell her story for the fi rst time to a bigger world. We barrel down the moonlit interstate toward Wyoming, passing two roadside signs that anchor us in a unique place in time: Little Bighorn National Battlefi eld and Welcome to Crow Country. Two hours later, we exit at Sheridan, Wyoming, and within 20 minutes are headed down a gravel road to a sprawling homestead, which even in the dark one can see is quite extensive. Neltje — at 80, simply goes by her fi rst name, and had it legally changed thus so — meets us despite the midnight hour. She is named after her paternal grandmother, a pioneering naturalist whose garden books published during the fi rst decades of the 20th century were popular Doubleday titles. The granddaughter and daughter of the Doubleday publishing dynasty whips up scrambled eggs for our trio as the clock nears 1 am. She is both warm and imposing: a tall, broad-shouldered woman in a fl owing caftan, curling gray hair that extends past her shoulders, with a colorful Swatch watch and a big turquoise ring. Part force of nature and part Earth Mother, she rules a kingdom of art and nature with kindness, strength, and compassion. Neltje's spread sits along the idyllic Piney Creek. Originally a modest cabin structure of few rooms, the house has been extensively expanded during her half-century in Wyoming. Rooms are decorated with comfortable furniture, craft, and artwork — a towering aboriginal painting hangs above the fi replace — as well as tribal objects of potent powers. Personally gathered from locals along the Sepik River region of New Guinea by Neltje and MJ, in the region where headhunters killed Michael Rockefeller in 1961, the artifacts lend vitality to the interiors, which are not so much designed as organized by Neltje. Her own ab-ex canvases — ambitious in scale, informed by great swirls of paint and evoking a sense of nature and landscape in pigments ranging from tropical to earth-hued — are also in evidence, as well as works by an early mentor, New York-based painter Jon Schueler, who makes a cameo in her book. In the following days, we pay a visit to the studio complex attached to the Piney Creek house, and picnic at her writer's cabin, Little Crazy, on the banks of the Little North Fork of Crazy Woman Creek. She is one of the best read people I've ever met; stacks upon stacks of the latest fi ction and nonfi ction releases reside in every corner of the main residence, as well as in Little Crazy. Her four indoor dogs, all rescues, have learned to navigate the volumes. Ambling throughout the house, we reach its terminus: a well-planned wing that's home to a series of studios. The fi rst is a well-lit and perfectly organized spot with expansive storage racks brimming with paintings (many quite large), a loading area marked by a jaunty red door, and rolling tables for collage work. The setup would be the envy of every artist I know, as well as many a commercial gallery. It gives way to a vast room with the ample proportions of a nonprofi t space or small contemporary museum, with an expanse of walls, and leather poufs from which to gaze at the canvases on display — a four-part series of her "Moroccan Suite." Inspired by one of her favorite travel destinations, each canvas measures 10 by 30 feet, and one from the series graces the catalog cover to her 2013 museum show at the University of Wyoming, Laramie. The word heroic is no understatement — whorls of pigment fl y across canvases seemingly as endless as the horizons of Wyoming. An adjoining room has space for fl at fi les; skylights wash light into the room, which leads to a courtyard, one of the many outdoor garden rooms; nature is never far away. The gardens, situated between the home and a fi eld of hay bales, are fi lled with poppies and peonies. Her legen- dary blossoms are kept fl ourishing by a crew of gardeners and landscape designers. T he book, out this month, is released during a high-profile year for women, especially in American politics — illuminating one woman's journey from an insecure, oppressed member of the weaker sex, to the capable, forceful presence I encounter in Wyoming. Her story and the environment she has carved out has the aura and spirituality of Donald Judd's Marfa or James Turrell's Rodin Crater. As a contemporary heroine, Neltje offers the role model for a 21st-century activist and environmentalist with the commitment of Rachel Carson; as an artist she possesses the steely tenacity and dose of eccentricity of Louise Nevelson, Louise Bourgeois, or Joan Jonas. If North of Crazy gets cast as a fi lm, Diane Keaton should play Neltje. Epilogue: During our Wyoming sojourn, we learn details of Neltje's estate plans — to donate her lands and Piney Creek home to the University of Wyoming for a future art and nature center. Announced during 2010, the gift is to date the largest ever made to the university. The cabins, though, will be bequeathed to her family, to foster future Doubleday generations' connection with the wilderness that impacted and revitalized Neltje's life. MEET THE AUTHOR/ARTIST AND ACQUIRE A SIGNED COPY OF NORTH OF CRAZY (ST. MARTIN'S PRESS), AT HER HOUSTON BOOK LAUNCH: TUESDAY, OCTOBER 4, 6 PM, AT BAYOU BEND VISITOR CENTER, AND WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 5, 7 PM, AT BRAZ OS BOOKSTORE. Little Crazy cabin, north of Wyoming's Crazy Woman Creek, which gives name to the memoir, and where it was written. CATHERINE D. ANSPON 76