Deep Creek
Finding Hope in the High Country
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $18.99
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
Winner of the 2020 Reading the West Advocacy Award
Winner of the 2020 Colorado Book Award for Creative Nonfiction
"This is a book for all of us, right now." —Cheryl Strayed, author of Wild
On her 120-acre homestead high in the Colorado Rockies, beloved writer Pam Houston learns what it means to care for a piece of land and the creatures on it. Elk calves and bluebirds mark the changing seasons, winter temperatures drop to 35 below, and lightning sparks a 110,000-acre wildfire, threatening her century-old barn and all its inhabitants. Through her travels from the Gulf of Mexico to Alaska, she explores what ties her to the earth, the ranch most of all. Alongside her devoted Irish wolfhounds and a spirited troupe of horses, donkeys, and Icelandic sheep, the ranch becomes Houston’s sanctuary, a place where she discovers how the natural world has mothered and healed her after a childhood of horrific parental abuse and neglect.
In essays as lucid and invigorating as mountain air, Deep Creek delivers Houston’s most profound meditations yet on how “to live simultaneously inside the wonder and the grief… to love the damaged world and do what I can to help it thrive.”
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Houston (A Little More About Me), a professor of English at UC Davis, brings compassion, a deep sense of observation, and a profound sense of place to essays centered around the 120-acre ranch in the Colorado Rockies that serves as home base in her busy life of travel and academic commitments. Houston's descriptions of ranch routine, which "heals me with its dailiness, its necessary rituals not one iota different than prayer," leads her organically toward graceful, "unironic odes to nature." Intimate but not sensationalized stories of Houston's upbringing in an unstable suburban household with an abusive father and a neglectful, alcoholic mother set off her gratitude for an adult life lived in the midst of a sometimes perilous but beautiful landscape. "Ranch Almanac" entries that alternate with the essays offer delightful appreciations of the ranch's other residents, including wolfhounds, lambs, chickens, and miniature donkeys; its human visitors, including her all-important "wood guy"; and the natural wonders visible there, notably including the Milky Way. Houston's vision finds a solid place among the chronicles of quiet appreciation of the American wilderness, without the misanthropy that often accompanies the genre; her passion for the land and its inhabitants is irresistibly contagious.
