The Earth Is Enough
Growing Up in a World of Flyfishing, Trout & Old Men
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- $23.99
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- $23.99
Publisher Description
In this touching memoir of his boyhood on a farm in the Ozark foothills, Harry Middleton joins the front rank of nature writers alongside Edward Hoagland and Annie Dillard.
It is the year 1965, a year rife with change in the world---and in the life of a boy whose tragic loss of innocence leads him to the healing landscape of the Ozarks. Haunted by indescribable longing, twelve-year-old Harry is turned over to two enigmatic guardians, men as old as the hills they farm and as elusive and beautiful as the trout they fish for---with religious devotion. Seeking strength and purpose from life, Harry learns from his uncle, grandfather, and their crazy Sioux neighbor, Elias Wonder, that the pulse of life beats from within the deep constancy of the earth, and from one’s devotion to it. Amidst the rhythm of an ancient cadence, Harry discovers his home: a farm, a mountain stream, and the eye of a trout rising.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
At the age of 14, as the country drifted into war in Vietnam, the author was sent to live with his great uncle and his grandfather on a farm in the Ozarks. In a world far removed from global events, these kind old men, content with solitude and a meager subsistence scraped from the land, occupied their time reading, trout fishing and steadfastly refusing to make concessions to modern technology. They measured the success of their resistance to change by the amount of disapproval they elicited from their God-fearing neighbors, the local preacher and the state agricultural agent, all of whom failed to indoctrinate the pair in the paths of righteousness and profitable farming. Middleton, outdoors columnist for Southern Living magazine, writes with humor and compassion of these witty and articulate eccentrics who changed his life and taught him to love and respect the earth and its creatures.
