Where Rivers Change Direction
by Mark Spragg

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Book Reviews of Where Rivers Change Direction

Book Review: Life as we know it in Wyoming
Summary: 5 Stars

Water is so vital to these vast spaces once called The Big Empty that it flows through our dreams, our industry and our very literature as both the real and symbolic essence of life. So it is with Mark Spragg's "Where Rivers Change Direction," a collection of essays about Spragg's adolescence as the son of a dude rancher in a half-tamed part of Wyoming where men have christened streams with names such as Sunlight, Mist and Cloudburst.

Spragg's collection isn't about water, but about growing up, not only as the son of a wilderness dude-ranch operator, but also as a working-hand in the family business. From the one-room school in Wapiti, Wyo., to the Crossed Sabers Ranch bunkhouse where he sleeps with the other hired hands, Spragg paints a vivid portrait of life in the American Outback.

A new, lyric literature of the West is beginning to trickle out of the high places toward the flatland, and Spragg's finely wrought essays are easily equal to much of the beautiful fiction that is beginning to define the region's connections between the living land and the ever-changing self. In this book, a river runs through a heart. For men and water, one stream becomes another and a little more about our Earth is revealed.

Summary of Where Rivers Change Direction

If the West had a voice this is how it would sound. Passionate. Unequivocal. In the tradition of Ivan Doig's THIS HOUSE OF SKY, Mark Spragg's stunning collection, WHERE RIVERS CHANGE DIRECTION, renders an unforgettable story of an adolescence spent on the oldest dude ranch in Wyoming-a remote spread on the Shoshone National Forest, the largest block of unfenced wilderness in the lower forty-eight states.

In this sublime and unforgiving landscape, Spragg's distant and mercurial father, his emotionally isolated but resilient mother, his fierce and devoted younger brother Rick, and his mentor, a wry and wise cowboy named John, cleave to one another and to the harsh life they have chosen. Unrelenting winds, pitiless blizzards, muscular rivers--from these elements Spragg divines the universal yearnings for self-reliance, trust, acceptance, and love. WHERE RIVERS CHANGE DIRECTION illuminates the unexpected wisdom and irrevocable truth embedded in the small, but profound dramas of one boy's journey toward manhood.

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. Throughout his life, this inability to face death, this terror of losing the beauty of the world he so passionately witnesses, drives Spragg to distraction.

Where Rivers Change Direction combines a soaring spirituality with a visceral, often stomach-churning attention to detail. It's a book that continually dares the reader to turn away from its pages in an effort to digest the power of its confused 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

Family & Childhood Books

• Subjects > Biographies & Memoirs > Family & Childhood
• Regional U.S. > West
• History > Americas > United States
• Science & Math > Earth Sciences > Rivers