Broken Country
Mountains And Memory
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
C.L. Rawlins previous book, Sky's Witness, was praised by Jim Harrison for the "spaciousness of its thought and the antic wit of its style." Broken Country takes us back to the source: Wyoming's remote Salt River Range, where the author's life changed for good in the summer of 1973.
Thus--with a rift between himself and his family, his heritage, and a nation at war--Rawlins begins a journey to the American interior. He takes to the high country with a team of horses, three dogs, and a friend named Mitchell Black to watch over a herd of sheep. And there he encounters not only a rugged landscape but his own mythic legacy: the frontier West.
"To be found," he writes, "you must be lost or lose yourself...And to be whole, you must know that you are, or can be, or will be, broken."
Here is fresh air, ferocious mirth and a hint of silent terror as Rawlins tackles the questions we long to ask of ourselves and our tangled world. As our reach entends to the vastness of the land, it also deepens to touch the mysteries of the heart. In Broken Country we find both storm and shelter as the author guides us to the place of understanding.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In the summer of 1973, Rawlins (Sky's Witness: A Year on the Wind River Range), rebelling against his Mormon family over the Vietnam War, took a job herding sheep in Wyoming's Salt River mountains. Twenty years later, he returned and--using the journal he kept in 1973--has reconstructed those two and a half months on the trail without trying to reinterpret that time from a new perspective. The vivid descriptions of the mountains are breathtaking, and his wry observations on the rigors--and the very real dangers--of a greenhorn's life with a couple thousand uncooperative sheep are refreshingly unromanticized. Rawlins's moments of philosophical introspection, however, are more of an acquired taste: "Life is all we have. And a bear can kill so easily. I'm not a bear. It's a lonely thing to know." He also writes poetry and liberally quotes Homer--and other classical writers--from an anthology he brought along. Rawlins has an increasingly testy time with the other herder on the job (an old friend); his brother drops by (and is chased by a bear); his girlfriend shows up (for a bit of sex and to end their relationship); a chance encounter with some Basque shepherds reveals how amateurish Rawlins's operation actually is. But he learns his job, how to cook, round up wayward sheep and load a skittish pack horse. Toward the end, he sums up this way: "And after 47 days of... boredom, hunger, accident, storm, terror, mud, darkness, frost, fever, and snow, I felt as if the Devil himself couldn't kill me."
