Spend any amount of time in the orbit of writer Wendy Madar, and you quickly develop adventure-envy.

The Corvallis resident and associate director of the Oregon State University Center for the Humanities has lived deep in the Canadian wilderness, 100 miles from the nearest road.

She regularly slips away for sojourns to such remote places as a ridge near Hell's Canyon, a stone-and-wood cabin on the Imnaha River , and a research station high in the mountains of Taiwan with her partner, botanist and forest ecologist Duncan Thomas.

She even manages to make such seemingly mundane moments as a walk down the street or a trip to the nursery in order to plant tomatoes sound full of wonder and transcendence.

"Just rambling, without roads or trails, over the ground -- that seems to me a vanishing privilege," she says. "Few in our world, our culture, get to do that. People are on roads or sidewalks most of their lives. Few of us who don't live on the land . . . just walk out and head somewhere with no path."

Madar has spent much of her life venturing off the path, appreciating the lonely and beautiful and wild parts of our landscape -- and of ourselves.

Not long ago, she spent a summer alone at a gold mine in eastern Oregon -- a decision born less of a need for adventure than of a desire for emotional survival. And it is this territory that led Madar to her most recent unexpected rambling: Her first mystery -- "Death Pans Out" (Poisoned Pen Press) -- penned under the name Ashna Graves.

Kirkus Reviews called it one of the hot mystery releases of 2007 and heaped on the kind of praise that makes for beautiful cover blurbage: "A masterful mystery," and "a riveting page-turner."

What's so striking about Madar's mystery is how unexpected it all seems for a mystery.

Madar's main character, Jeneva Leopold, a 45-year-old columnist for the "Willamette Current," has holed up in an old mining cabin, miles from anyone, to try to recover from a double mastectomy. She's clearly trying to find her way out of a dark time. But she's not unapologetically damaged, either, living at the bottom of a bottle of scotch (though she's not above sharing some whiskey now and again with the locals). She's strong, but also mild and kind, open to everyone -- neither brash nor hot-headed nor cynical.

In fact the book is full of long meditative stretches, quiet moments of Jeneva trying to get herself back to herself, doing little more than walking and wondering at the beauty of her surroundings, alone. ("As she zigzagged upward, the pines thinned and the ground grew rockier. In a small meadow, larkspur made a carpet about six inches tall, the flowers a concentrated blue. Everything glistened today, the fine spiderwebs between the trees, the needles of young pines, the silvery lupine leaves, the smooth obsidian chunks embedded in the hillside. . . .")

In many ways, the landscape of eastern Oregon is as much a character as any of the local folks -- ranchers and miners and artifact hunters -- Jeneva ultimately meets along the way. When she started sending the manuscript around, Madar says she heard from a few East Coast editors who said that the story was just too unbelievable. "These same publishers seem to have no problem with women who go down dark alleys and carry machine guns . . . but somehow women don't go to the desert alone?"

When you considered Madar's background, it was really no surprise that she would craft a character so against type. Her parents, free spirits who met at Reed College in the 1940s, later built the "Mount Hood Indian Pageant" in Brightwood, where they staged Wild West shows. She remembers the family moving out of their home for entire summers and living in the woods because her father loved being outdoors so much.

And here her own serious off-trail rambling begins: At 17, she moves to London to do the conceptual drawings for a stage adaptation of John Lennon's books, "In His Own Write" and "Spaniard in the Works." There are seven years spent in Canada, driven by outrage over this country's involvement in the Vietnam War and a love of the back-country (two of those years spent deep, deep in the wild), a decision to pick back up the threads of an urban life, two children (son, Kurt, now 31, and daughter Laurel, 26), an eventual settling in Corvallis, and the day she decides that she would like to be a journalist (she had been writing for as long as she can remember).

She calls a number of papers and is told she needs a journalism degree. "In my usual hurry," she says, she decides to just write an article and submits it to the Corvallis Gazette-Times. Three weeks later, she says, they offered her a job. She becomes an award-winning investigative reporter, the editorial page editor and weekly columnist. Eventually, she is hired by OSU's Center for the Humanities.

Before trying her hand at mysteries? Her previous writing projects had included co-authoring "Through Another Lens," the memoirs of Charis Wilson, the model, wife and muse of photographer Edward Weston, and an ongoing project on Russian novelist and playwright Ivan Turgenev and his passionate 40-year love for French singer Pauline Garcia-Viardot.

Madar drew deeply from her own story when crafting Jeneva's.

In 1997, she was diagnosed with breast cancer and had a single mastectomy. "I recovered from that fine," she says, "Losing a breast in order to stay alive and happy was fine -- I had no problem with that." But not long after, she began to feel increasingly sick with what was ultimately diagnosed as chronic fatigue syndrome. By 1999, she says, she could barely move from exhaustion. That's when she started dreaming about the desert. A friend who was a retired expert on mined lands reclamation was able to track down a cabin near Hereford, in the arid-far-eastern edge of Oregon, that she could use for the summer.

"It was an act of desperation," Madar says. "I thought, 'I'm going to go out here and get better, or die and let the buzzards pick my bones.' Which might sound melodramatic, but two years of exhaustion really takes away your interest in life."

Much like Jeneva, however, she soon found herself restored by the silence and beauty of the landscape, where, as she puts it, "the bones of the earth are visible." She spent days just walking, slowly feeling her strength return to her.

She kept notebooks, names of the plants she saw, descriptions of the light, the salty vocabulary of her nearest neighbor, the daily mysteries she stumbled across in the form of weathered artifacts -- tobacco cans, abandoned cabin, a collapsed hutch -- remnants of past lives that also intersected this place once. It all ultimately found its way into her book.

"It could easily be assumed that solitary escape to a gold mine is some sort of proof of independence and freedom of person," Madar wrote in one of the notebooks she kept at the mine. "But it was an act of a woman about to crack from the combined assault of illness, emotional overload, anxiety, discontent with work -- our excuse for living -- revulsion at the relentless gray skies of the valley, in all, a negative act. I came here in a sense, to crack up in private, to spare myself and all around me the embarrassment of my disintegration. I got myself out, and instead of cracking up, have mended wonderfully. . . . The question is, can I take gold mine sanity with me and hang onto it?"

And this is where the adventure-envy kicks back in. Because Madar, who is under contract to write two more mysteries for Poisoned Pen Press, seems to understand that it is not just where we go, but what we do with it in the end, that matters just as much.