Where Rivers Change Direction

by Mark Spragg

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 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 truly unforgettable illuminations of the heartfelt yearnings, the unexpected wisdom, and the irrevocable truths that follow in his wake.

Genres: Nonfiction, Memoir, Westerns, Nature, Biography, Essays, Autobiography

304 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1999

About the author

Mark Spragg is the author of Where Rivers Change Direction, a memoir that won the 2000 Mountains & Plains Independent Booksellers award, and the novels, The Fruit of Stone, An Unfinished Life, and, Bone Fire. All four were top-ten Book Sense selections and An Unfinished Life was chosen by the Rocky Mountain News as the Best Book of 2004. Spragg’s work has been translated into fifteen languages. He lives in Wyoming with his wife, Virginia, with whom he wrote the screenplay for the film version of his novel, An Unfinished Life, starring Robert Redford, Morgan Freeman, and Jennifer Lopez, and released in 2005.

Reviews

[David Carr · Rating 5 out of 5]

Our primary impulse to read may be to enter another life, or to see another place through other eyes. Not to imagine it, but to see it. We abandon whatever or wherever we are and become a spirit, able to occupy a writer's strands of mind, thought, memory. In my experience, there are few, if any, writers whose written life I would more want to occupy my own thoughts than Mark Spragg. On the book cover, Terry Tempest Williams says it is "blood writing, every sentence alive," and I agree. We tend to mis-read the memoir as a form, ascribing its form to autobiography or memory, when in fact it is about becoming someone separate from others, experiencing enduring but invisible changes. It's not about the time or the place (although here Wyoming is magnetic to me, and the brutish elements seem to have identities of their own), but rather about the situation of a life found in and bound to that time and place. The person within this life has no choice except to be there and to live up to what is required and what is meant by the flawed human relationships within reach, including the relationship with himself. Such books are not about growing up but about growing through. Here it is growing through grasses, horses, cowhands, bears, winds, and snakes, but as I list them they are too specific, not subtle, nor really accurate. Always, in this writing, the wind (for example) is about the person who stands within it or near enough to hear it, or acute and perceptive enough to feel it within himself -- because it is always within himself. For a reader who understands how much he has missed, one who particularly missed the kind of living and breathing Mark Spragg tells here, the experience of reading is, as I say, becoming a spirit.

[brian tanabe · Rating 4 out of 5]

I listened to this author at a reading last night and I've never read any of his work. This apparently is his best though. (He also wrote the book that turned into the movie, Unfinished Life, which he apparently is not entirely happy with.) His achingly humble way of speaking and subtle wit were a pure joy to listen to. He said he could go on speaking all night and I felt like I could have scooted closer in my chair and listened to him all night.

Update: I finished the book a while ago, and while I find it completely lazy in others to quote another review, I shall do that here.

"Here is a book for women to read to learn the hearts of men. Here is a book for men to read to curse what they have lost. This soulful book walks us to a place of restoration, the big wide open of Wyoming. Mark Spragg's words, his stories are a fine example of blood writing, every sentence alive." --Terry Tempest Williams

[George Seaton · Rating 5 out of 5]

How do I describe this treasure? Significant that I've read it three times. Significant that I'll probably read it another three times.

This is a beautiful coming-of-age story, set in the Wyoming Yellowstone plateau where the protagonist, as a boy, works his daddy's dude ranch with no special consideration (he is the son, after all) because of his lineage. And, AND there are horses; reflections on the worth, the essential worth of horse. How best to capture my interest!

A favorite passage: "I was a boy, and I believed deeply in the sightedness of horses. I believed that there was nothing that they did not witness. I believed that to have a horse between my legs, to extend my pulse and blood and energy to theirs, enhanced my vision. Made of me a seer. I believed them to be the dappled, sorrel, rorn, bay, black pupils in the eyes of God."

Again--as with other reviews I've provided--this is a writer's lesson, as well as a reader's dream.

This is a precious read. Savor it. Please. Dare I say your soul will be enriched.

[Tifnie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love, love, LOVE this book. This book reminded me of something Robert Redford would pick up and make a movie about. It was calming, poetic, earthy, and it had a rhythym of the land that you fail to find in most stories.

Where Rivers Change Direction is about a boy growing up on the family's Dude ranch in Wyoming. It's about his relationships with horses, the land and water, his family, and the customers who come through looking for an adventure.

Mark Spragg, the author, gave the reader such an amazing detail of the land that you felt like you with him in Wyoming. You felt his fear, elations, smells, and his love of animals.

It was a pleasure to read a story that brings the reader back to simpler times, back to the Earth, and back to open land.

[Lindsay · Rating 4 out of 5]

I hate to sound like a broken record, but I heard about this book on TTBOOK and knew I had to pick it up soon. Spragg spent most of his childhood growing up on the oldest dude ranch in Wyoming, and he chronicles the formative experiences of this unique opportunity in such loving and heartbreaking vignettes.

I wasn't expecting for it to take me back to my childhood like it did. For a few years at least, my parents indulged my obsession for horses by sending me to camps to take care of them and go on the occasional trail ride. I got caught in my own flood of memories for part of the reading, remembering the ranch-hand lingo and the feel of the change of pace when devoting so much time to animals. Spragg's tenderness comes through so vividly and compassionately, it's hard not to get overly romantic about life on the range.

However, perhaps realizing the danger of getting too schmaltzy (and indeed sometimes his words did become a bit too poetically sentimental), Spragg also made quite clear the extremely harsh realities of this kind of life and that of one in Wyoming. I may have appreciated this side a little more despite that (or because?) it brought tears to my eyes on more than one occasion. Just as I was about to lose myself in planning an escape from a trivial corporate job for one so organic and fulfilling as working with animals, Spragg grounded me with his passages concerning the wind and cold, taking care of his dying mother, and having to kill his beloved horses (or learning how to swiftly kill an animal in general).

This book serves as a forgiving reminder that being away from the hustle and bustle of city life is in no way an escape, but also as a paean to a land and life the few of us have the opportunity or will power to endure. Recommended for the starry-eyed naturalist.

[Garlan ✌ · Rating 5 out of 5]

Where Rivers Change Direction (Across the Great Divide) – is a deeply personal memoir of the author's life growing up on a dude ranch in Wyoming. From early childhood, through adolescence, youth and young manhood, Spragg captures the emotions, thoughts, hopes and fears of every young male, regardless of where they grew up. This is a paean to the male rights of passage, using the beautiful but harsh wilderness of Wyoming as the backdrop. Some of the stories deal with the brutal realities faced in nature, or the fears of a young boy growing up in a man's world, but all are written with such honesty, and with a critical eye for the natural beauty of the region, that one only feels the poetry in the words. In one passage, the author sums up his experience with the following "I did not know that I lived on the largest block of unfenced wilderness in the lower forty eight states. That is what I know as a man. As a boy, I knew only that I was free on the land".
Of the 14 stories/essays here, only a couple didn't ring true, and they were stories of the author as a middle aged man, looking back on his experiences.

Larry McMurtry - “This is a book that deserves many readers.”
Terry Tempest Wiliams - "Here is a book that women can read to learn the hearts of men. Here is a book that men can read to curse what they have lost."

I wish I had said that....

[Chloe · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautifully honest and articulate rendering of a man’s life in the West, growing up in and among nature.

[Tamra · Rating 5 out of 5]

Best book I have read in a long time. Life story of a boy raised near the Shoshone River in Yellowstone. His family ran a dude ranch. The cowboys he hangs out with on the ranch remind me very much of my father and his colorful language and actions. It is written beautifully. Not really in story form; more like essays that string together his life and longings. Here are a couple of my favorite lines. "I lose my belief that anythings changes gradually. I realize that there is only the flash of accident and the level times afterwards where we are allowed to gather our strength for the next." and "She will feel starkly alone in the world, singular in her misery. I will not be strong enough to absorb the whole demon of her pain. I will try, and it will beat me back and return to her, and snarl as a vicious dog snarls to protect its mistress. My love of her will not seem enough."

[Bronson · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was the best book I’d never heard of. I picked it up at a bookstore because I liked the cover and was absolutely blown away. It’s a collection of essays by the author about growing up in Wyoming on a dude ranch, his love of horses and the outdoors. It reminded me a lot of Ivan Doig’s “This House of Sky” – it’s that good! At least until you get to the last 3 essays. I wondered as I was reading if there had been a long break between his writing the first ¾ s of the book and the last ¼ . It almost felt like a different author, the young boy who showed so much promise and was so capable became an average unhappy middle aged man. Overall I’d recommend this to anyone. I think the good far outweighs the bad but I was personally a little disappointed by the final chapters. So my star rating is 5 stars for the first ¾ and 2 stars for the final 1/4. I averaged it out at 4 stars overall.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

I like Spragg's laconic-feeling style and how he can bring that to this kind of a nonfiction book the way he can in fiction. There's some good stuff here, plainly moving. I do feel a little much of the pull resides in "manliness" and an enchantment with the cowboy that I perhaps do not completely share, but I think that blunts the book only a little for me, much less than I feared. All in all this was a good and moving book.

[RyleeAnn Andre · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really liked this book! I think it is technically considered a series of essays, but I read it more as a complete narrative and enjoyed how each chapter was about a different age or stage of life. Loved reading about his journey into manhood and his relationships with those around him. Last chapter specifically was pretty heartbreaking, but a testament to his mother.

[Angelique Simonsen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really simple and easy to read but at the same time a book that really takes you and deposits you into Marks world

[Vera · Rating 4 out of 5]

Such beautiful language in this book!

It's called a novel on the German cover, but each chapter is actually a stand alone essay. In chronological order, the author tells about his youth and adolescence on a farm in Wyoming, the last couple of chapters are about his adulthood.

The rough weather/living conditions in this northwestern state create rough (or tough) people, it seems - that's what I've learned from Annie Proulx Wyoming stories, too. But it also creates people that embody the essence of mankind, a society in which smartphones and consumerism have no place at all.

The way Spragg describes those living conditions, the landscape, the work that has to be done, his respect for his father and the farmhands - it goes under your skin. Even though I have no knowledge of Wyoming except for some books I've read, I had the feeling I could feel the wind pounding against my head and smell a mixture of grass, horses and leather.

Those last chapters don't take place in Wyoming anymore and don't have that magic sparkle. They feel a bit off in this collection, therefore the book didn't get 5 stars.

[Mark · Rating 5 out of 5]

After the first essay, “In Praise of Horses,” readers may be forgiven for wanting to stop, catch their breath, and read no further based on an assumption that the writing cannot get better than this. They would be tragically mistaken. Essay 2, “My Sister’s Boots,” enhances whatever quality metrics the reader encountered in essay 1, as does each successive essay. Mark Spragg’s remarkable coming-of-age memoir is exquisitely written, soulful and sincere. It is filled with intense relationships between people—fathers and mothers and sons, brothers, ranch hands, neighbors—and between man and beast, the latter consisting mostly of horses, although there is a sprinkling of barn cats, bears, and other critters of the wild.

But herein lies the conflict presented by Where Rivers Change Direction: the writing is so good that one is torn between wanting to stop after each essay, flip back through pages, and just savor precise and gripping prose, yet wanting to race to the next essay with the compulsion of an addict to the next fix! The author takes us from around age 11 to age 18, working daily at his father’s dude ranch in northwest Wyoming, catering for doctors, lawyers, business people who want to shoot bear, camp outdoors, and generally balance whatever city life they have with a taste of nature.

Spragg’s life from a boy is tied to the rhythms of the changing seasons, to rain and snow and wind, to the endless schedule of chores, the heaving rivers and forests…and to horses. Naturally, horses are a vital part of dude ranches in general, and Spragg lets readers know that he learns as much from horses as the other way around. One is left with the impression that, except for when a person sleeps, all waking hours appear to be spent in a saddle atop a horse.

Spragg grows up in the bosom of a priceless, gritty, loving community of family, friends, and ranch workers. The lessons he learns from his father are given subtly, yet with an unmistakable clarity that create enduring value. His shared accommodation with the ranch hands accelerate his understanding of mature, adult themes, but the education is packaged in gentle, bite-sized humor.

And there is humor, plenty of it! Stories of Wapiti School, the stereotypical one-room school house with a mere handful of children—some grades having no students at all!—are hilarious. So, too, are descriptions of first loves, although humor in these cases is delicately wrapped in layers of poignancy and heartbreak—as defined by 12-year-olds.

By the time readers reach the closing essays, Spragg has made it to adulthood and is in possession of a degree. By chance, the opportunity to house-sit a property in almost total mountainous solitude allows him to “try and write.” Never was a more propitious match made for a writer’s talent to take full flight. Spragg can comfortably stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Kent Haruf and Ivan Doig, legendary authors who established the tradition of stories of the west.

I only learned of Spragg’s memoir after devouring his three novels, each one easily a five-star rating: The Fruit of Stone, An Unfinished Life, and Bone Fire. Spragg has wrought words out of the Wyoming wind and wilderness in his bones. And after finishing Where Rivers Change Direction, readers should not be surprised to find a good deal of Wyoming in their bones too.

[Tim Stafford · Rating 3 out of 5]

A series of essays about life in Wyoming, growing up on a dude ranch, riding horses, dealing with weather. Some of the stories are gripping, some rather philosophical, all transfixed by wildness and landscape. Fine writing in a Hemingway style.

[Laura Freeland · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incredible selection of essays regarding his coming of age on ranch in Wyoming. I tried to savor this book as each essay was individually powerful and full of insight. I wondered if this appreciation for his unusual childhood was realized at the time or upon reflection as an adult. Either way, I was jealous not to have had such an experience of growing up where nature is the teacher of independence and maturity.

[Jon Manchester · Rating 3 out of 5]

I failed to grasp until pathetically deep into the book that this is a collection of essays...that explains the loose connection from chapter to chapter. My 3-star rating is partly due to my experience in reading this from that (lack of) perspective. This was a lesson that I should try to understand the book broadly before launching in to read it cover-to-cover.

At any rate, some of Spragg's essays really resonated, while others I lost interest as he delved fairly deep into the details of the environment/landscape in Wyoming. One of his best essays is entitled "Adopting Bear" in which he describes tracking a bear through the woods that they had shot, but not killed. It evoked the "fight or flight" that all of us feel as the narrator and his hunting companion realize the bear has circled around and is now tracking them:

"We stop and we listen, and then we move again. I can hear the thrumming of our hearts without stopping, even above the sounds of the forest. When I think of it I take out my sandwich and drop it behind me and walk away. I think of chunks of muscle stripped from ligaments; my blood staining a bear's coarse, silvery fur. My blood on a bear's nose. In his nostrils."

Another very good essay was "Wintering" in which he chooses to take a caretaker job of a ranch near Yellowstone for a (long) winter. Because the winter snow blocks the road(s) to the ranch, he is essentially alone for 5 months and Spragg makes you feel the desolation:

"I wonder about madness. About definition. I try to summon my mother's face, my father's, my brother's, the girl I thought I'd loved just a year ago, but they seem too far away to reimagine. As though they have all died, and I am left without their photographs. My body remembers emotion and demonstration, but vaguely: anger, affection, even caress seem blunted to my memory. They come as soft tappings on a roof - that disparate."

[Rae · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book started beautifully, it lost me late in the game, and then I finished it in tears.

It is a collection of stories/essays about the author's upbringing in the wilds of Wyoming. Great stories. His working life on his parents' dude ranch started well before he hit his teens. Mr. Spragg's love for horses and the solitude of nature rings through in all of his writing.

The best stories involve the responsibilities of the author and his brother, both serving as hands on the ranch. Many other ranch employees are memorable characters, and the boys share life-threatening, true-life adventures as they work as employees of the ranch. It left me feeling awed, soft and pampered in my civilized life. With tinges of regret.

I picked this book after loving An Unfinished Life and reading many positive reviews. I was not disappointed.

[Lori · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wish that every book I read came half as close to being as good as this one.

What is astounding about this novel is how simple it is. It is prose in its most delightful form- a poetry that is straightforward, honest, and whittled-down bared emotion in its purest, rawest form.

Each and every sentence is to be savored.

He verbally seduces the reader with his stark and vulnerable imagery of the western landscape.

Spragg rightfully deserves a place at the table with McCarthy, McMurty, and Enger as a master of a boy's journey into manhood while traversing wildly beautiful and savage lands.

I'm made speechless by how exquisite this novel is. You must run to a library or bookstore and secure a copy for yourself. This is literature at its very best.

[Lauryn · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a beautiful collection of essays based on the author's childhood spent living and working on a dude ranch in Wyoming. There is a visceral power to these essays, as Spragg writes with unflinching honesty and not a trace of sentimentality about his relationships: relationships with his family and the cowboys that work the ranch, but even more poignantly, his relationships with the unforgiving and inhospitable landscape of the American West and the animals, both domestic and wild, that share this landscape. Although a gifted novelist and screenwriter, it is in his nonfiction work where Spragg truly shines. Read this book.

[James Gash · Rating 4 out of 5]

I cannot disagree with the bulk of reviewers who found this book beautifully written, except to note that the last third of the book does not fit. The disjointed last chapters almost seemed to be added to fill it out as a complete book-sized book, but left me wincing for their inclusion. I had judged it a near-perfect work, tonally, until those last anticlimactic essays. I would guess they came from another time of writing, another place in his development. Whatever, they drag the last impression of the book downwards after such an impressive show earlier. A good editor might have prevented this.

[Liza · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book resonated with me. Maybe it is because I grew up on a ranch in Wyoming and still live and love it in Wyoming. We are a rare bred, there are just a few of us that can tough it out.I will admit that the ranch I grew up on was less rustic than his.
He has a truly beautiful way of writing, emotionally capitvating as well as heart wrenching. I love how he can take an ordinary experience and let you live every sense of it. He has a love affair with words and feeling nuances.
You can read just one essay or all the essays, they can stand alone.

[Carolyn · Rating 5 out of 5]

This memoir told in a series of essays is a master work. Poetic prose which surges straight into your heart, your brain and your very soul. It surprised me that this author's spare quality in style so effectively moved me so deeply. I was brought to tears by several of the stories. I also belly laughed as I read others. This collection is an absolute treasure. I already know I will reread this book many times to try to recapture the joy I felt in the reading.

[Clayton HANSEN · Rating 5 out of 5]

A life lived within the beauty of rugged wilderness, surrounded by the brutal truths of natural systems and under skies tolerably large, has seldom been rendered so sensitively.

Spragg's prose is a delight. His observations and search for meaning strike a tremulous, humming resonance; a pitch on that perfect chord between heart and mind.

[Maria Jansson · Rating 3 out of 5]

The first half of the book is a masterpiece, the second half not so much. The first half describes growing up on a secluded ranch in Wyoming. It's a vivid picture, full of horses and adventures. The second half is about the boys life, when he isn't a boy anymore, it's more negative, and I don't like negativity. I really enjoyed the first half, but would not read the book again.

[Emily · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful and eloquent, as promised, and left me wanting more, which I think is the point: more from this book, more from this character, more from this life.

[Cam Torrens · Rating 5 out of 5]

How have I read so many books but only just discovered Mark Spragg?

I was given this memoir to read by a trusted friend and fellow reader with the highest standards when it comes to literary writing. For the first two chapters, I felt like I did when I was a child learning to ski--too hard, I want to go home. I questioned my friend's taste. But then I stepped back and dove in with a new strategy--stop reading like I'm devouring one of my go-to thrillers and start reading every word. Spragg wields his prose like the rugged Wyoming environment he grew up in. He starts with the cold, the wind, and the scarcity of comfort--but if you can slow your reading to his pace, you enter his flow (like the skill I finally obtained in downhill skiing) and you discover what kind of characters survive in such a setting.

Setting: "The wind is out of the north, constant but not threatening. The sky, the color of undyed linen. The sun vague, as a dandelion blossom is vague when viewed through a dozen curtains of gauze. There is no heat. Flakes of snow strike the face as insects do. They are small, nearly moistureless chips of storm: a pail of them would yield little more than a teaspoon of liquid."

Character: "I am suddenly plunged into a shaft of darkness, there is the unease of vertigo, the air grows thick with lack of oxygen. I think that if Walter and Johnny had survived the mine that wind, any wind, would have tickled them to happiness, sugared every moment of every day. I see them standing in the wind, chewing on it as if it is their meal. My eyes clear. I feel torpid, puny, nearly suffocated and all too human. My joints ache. My head pounds."

By definition, a memoir is written with the author wielding the wisdom gained from hindsight. Spragg surprised me with the artful way in which he wrote his observations of his childhood and left most of the interpretation of the events to the reader, while gradually shifting his voice more and more introspectively as he grew older (and presumably wiser.) A subtle talent that makes this memoir stand above others.

Spragg has three novels. They're all moving to the top of my to-be-read pile!

[Signe · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not sure why this work isn't getting the tens of thousands of votes and reviews. Perhaps the people who read books like this aren't the type to write about it on the internet.

Also not sure why some of the published reviewers maintain this is a book about men when Mark Spragg doesn't seem to be the average man.

This is a wonderful series of vignettes that clears out the space inside a person. His writing reminded me of the experience of living in the remote areas, where it is so quiet that a person has the space and solitude to form impressions of their surroundings that live deep in the bones.

His writing style is spare but eloquent, sometimes a poetic prose. He deftly writes scenery and impressions that bring the country to life in the mind and seem visceral. The portraits of the people he grew up with are not complex, but from the simple perspective of a child who notices interesting things in himself and others. I had nearly forgotten how people and places leave such a mark on us as children before we are worn down by experience. It's a wonderful coming of age book.

He reminded me of the time when I also lived on horses, lived to be out in the wilds. I found myself remembering and feeling a great peace and gratitude that he wrote this memoir.

Amazing to think there are so many in the world who have never experienced anything like the life he grew up in and simply accepted.

By seeming accident I picked up a card to use as a bookmark for this book. The card reads on one side "grace" the other side reads, "beauty heart & soul". The perfect bookmark for this book.

[Kate · Rating 5 out of 5]

"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 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 truly unforgettable illuminations of the heartfelt yearnings, the unexpected wisdom, and the irrevocable truths that follow in his wake."

I don't know how to describe this book. On one hand, it was stories about life on a ranch in the Yellowstone mountains in the 1960s. Harsh, brutal but extremely satisfying. Reading these pages, I could almost smell the mountain air, taste the dust on the trail, hear the wind in the pines, feel the horse underneath me. It made me so homesick for the high mountains that at time I cried.

On the other hand, sometimes I had to turn away from the grimmer stories, the reality of a life in the wilderness, and the guts it took to live that life. As a boy he knew nothing else and loved the challenges, the beauty, the feeling of accomplishment. As a man, he came back, then left again ... for good.

All in all, it's a book I will remember for a long long time.

[Dawn Lennon · Rating 3 out of 5]

There is so much to say about this book, but I struggle to know what to write. It is a memoir focused on Spragg's youth starting in the 1960s and into his twenties when he lived on his family's dude ranch in the mountains of Wyoming. But it's not as straight forward as that. He tells his story in chapters that cover his experiences and what he's learned from them. None of it is warm, fuzzy, or expected. Buckle up!

This is a book about how hard life is when your life is governed by the harshness of nature, the demands of survival, the brutality of life and death realties faced head on, and how we're affected when we have to make irreversible decisions. It's fair to say that few of us know anything about living face-to-face with the relentless challenges of nature. Even those TV shows about living in the wild are trivial portrayals.

This is also a challenging read. Even as Spragg stuns the reader with this extraordinary descriptions of the natural world and the work of a young boy/man wrangling horses, some barely tamed, the terminology that describes his work, the way men talked to each other, and the visuals that are the book's backdrop are often foreign. I know a fair amount about horses, and I often had difficulty visualizing what was happening.

So it seems that I figured out what to write anyway. I confess it does no justice to this book. It's power lies in the reminder of how far removed we are from the power of wind, rain, snow, raging rivers, and wildlife that have been and likely will always be a wake-up call to our individual vulnerablities. A big thanks to you, Jennifer, for recommending this impactful book.