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Where Rivers Change Direction

Amazon.com Price:  $12.95 (as of 03/05/2019 04:10 PST- Details)

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Description

It is a voice that echoes off canyon walls, springs from the rush of rivers, thunders from the hooves of horses. It belongs to award-winner Mark Spragg, and it’s as passionate and umcompromising as the wilderness in northwest Wyoming in which he was born: the largest block of unfenced wilderness in the lower forty-eight states. Where Rivers Change Direction is a memoir of childhood spent on the oldest dude ranch in Wyoming—with a family struggling against the elements and against themselves, and with the wry and wise cowboy who taught him life’s most important lessons.

As the young Spragg undergoes the inexorable rites of passage that forge the heart and soul of man, he channels Peter Matthiessen and the novels of Ernest Hemingway in his actually unforgettable illuminations of the heartfelt yearnings, the unexpected wisdom, and the irrevocable truths that follow in his wake.
Growing up in rural Wyoming, Mark Spragg learned early to read the stars. At 11 he was instructed to quit dreaming, and he went to work for his father on the land. “I used to be paid thirty dollars a month, had my own bed in the bunkhouse, and three large, plain meals on a daily basis.” The ranch is a sprawling place where winter brings months of solitude and summer brings tourists from the real world–city types who want a taste of the outdoors and stare at the writer and his family as if they were members of some exotic tribe: “Our guests were New Jersey gas station owners, New York congressmen, Iowa farmers, judges, actors, plumbers, Europeans who had read of Buffalo Bill and Sitting Bull and came to experience the American West, the retired, the just beginning.” By the age of 14, he and his younger brother are leading them on camping trips into deep woods. “No one ever asked why we had no televisions, no daily paper. They came for what my brother and I took as a right. They came to live the anachronism that we considered our normal lives.”

As Spragg comes to realize the strangeness of his life, he also detects flaws in his own character–a fear of suffering and mortality that first shows itself when he rides a sick horse too hard, until the animal hovers at the brink of death. He knows that if he had faced the possibility of sickness, if he had been brave, this animal would not have declined so quickly. All the way through his life, this inability to face death, this terror of losing the wonderful thing about the world he so passionately witnesses, drives Spragg to distraction.

Where Rivers Change Direction combines a soaring spirituality with a visceral, ceaselessly stomach-churning attention to detail. It’s a book that continually dares the reader to turn away from its pages so that you could digest the power of its puzzled emotions and hauntingly spare images (a “moon-fried plain,” a stillborn child “baked alive in my mother’s body”). Like Peter Matthiessen’s The Snow Leopard, Mark Spragg’s memoir makes you feel you’ve been somewhere, you’ve been out in the depths, and you’ve come back changed. –Emily White

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