PRAISE FOR RAISING WILD
Sigurd F. Olson Nature Writing Award Honorable Mention
Association for the Study of Literature and Environment creative book award finalist
Finalist for the Evans Handcart Award
“This book is not exactly about wild landscapes but the life of a house-holding family placed out there with two verge-of-puberty daughters. It is about our daily reality, not our fantasy possibilities, and who knows today what these girls will have to say later? So it is remarkably interesting, lively, nontheoretical, and hopeful. The wild might be wildfire or bushy-tailed woodrats under the floor—not just to live with but to know them. Michael Branch’s book points forward, not back.”—GARY SNYDER
“At last! A home for Michael Branch’s joyous dispatches from the high desert, which I have long followed with delight. If you’re unfamiliar with Branch, prepare for your first encounter with a singular sensibility, bracing yet affable. In part a memoir of building a unique home in an extraordinary place, in part a treatise on cultivating, protecting, and loving the wild, and each other therein, Raising Wild is a wholly defiant, tender book bristling with spirit, intelligence, and mountains of laughs.”—CLAIRE VAYE WATKINS, author of Battleborn and Gold Fame Citrus
“Michael Branch has been an essential figure in western letters for years. Now, in his marvelous Raising Wild, he brings us an intimate look at one remarkable family’s lucky life situated more deeply into their place than most will ever know. Hugely loving but ardently unsentimental, open and curious yet skeptical as desert dust, Mike’s dispatches shimmer. They mean so much, I could enjoy reading them even upside down, or back to front.” —ROBERT MICHAEL PYLE, author of Sky Time in Gray’s River
“Not since Rachel Carson’s Sense of Wonder has there been such a lively and evocative account of intergenerational experiences in nature. Michael Branch’s Raising Wild offers breathtaking lyricism, sage wisdom, and big belly laughs in equal measure. Most importantly, this collection is a testament to the value of marrying memory and place—especially while in the company of those we love.”—KATHRYN MILES, author of Superstorm
“Reading Michael Branch’s prose is like attending a great and raucous party. A party held around a campfire in a secret corner of the wilderness full of intense talk, laughs, liquor, and deep insights. That the kids are invited this time makes it even better. A profound and moving book that just might change some lives.”—DAVID GESSNER, author of All the Wild That Remains
“I have long considered Michael Branch one of the true visionaries of western American literature—and here is further proof. This beautiful, often raucous account of fatherhood and (wild) faith takes us even deeper into his remarkable kinship with northwestern Nevada. A place where, through the ‘daily practices of love, humility, and humor,’ we can all learn to be at home in this world.”—JOHN T. PRICE, author of Daddy Long Legs
PRAISE FOR RANTS FROM THE HILL
“Think: Cagney amid the cacti.”— Las Vegas Review-Journal
“Lyrical and subversive, the book is a rollicking celebration of living a joyously untamed life. An engagingly quirky collection.”— Kirkus Reviews
“There have been dozens of hermit-in-the-woods Walden-like memoirs and essay collections written since Henry David Thoreau’s death, but few capture Thoreau’s raw, stubborn love for the natural world with as much humor and honesty as Michael P. Branch’s Rants From the Hill.” —Chicago Tribune
“Branch’s humorous storytelling offers both natural history and life lessons. Readers may not realize they are learning while smiling….Branch communicates his love of family and the natural environment through both wit and seriousness.”— Whole Terrain
ALSO BY MICHAEL P. BRANCH
Raising Wild: Dispatches from a Home in the Wilderness
Rants from the Hill: On Packrats, Bobcats, Wildfires,
Curmudgeons, a Drunken Mary Kay Lady, and Other
Encounters with the Wild in the High Desert
ROOST BOOKS
An imprint of Shambhala Publications, Inc.
4720 Walnut Street
Boulder, Colorado 80301
roostbooks.com
© 2018 by Michael P. Branch
Excerpt from “A Certain Weariness” from Extravagaria (“Cierto cansancio” from Estravagario, © 1958, Fundación Pablo Neruda) by Pablo Neruda, translated by Alastair Reid. Translation copyright © 1974 by Alastair Reid. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux; and Fundación Pablo Neruda.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Cover art by inacioluc/istock
Cover design by Daniel Urban-Brown
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Names: Branch, Michael P., author.
Title: How to cuss in western: and other missives from the high desert / Michael Branch.
Description: Boulder, Colorado: Roost Books, 2018.
Identifiers:LCCN 2017044337 |ISBN 9781611804614 (paperback)
eISBN 9780834841543
Subjects:LCSH: Branch, Michael P.—Homes and haunts—Great Basin. | American wit and humor. | Wilderness areas—Great Basin. | Parenting—Great Basin. | Natural history—Great Basin. | Great Basin—Description and travel. | Nevada—Description and travel. |BISAC:HUMOR / Form / Essays. |NATURE / Essays. |BIOGRAPHY &AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Personal Memoirs.
Classification:LCC F789 .B725 2018 |DDC 979—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017044337
v5.3.1
a
For my wife, Eryn
without you no stories
Everything is held together with stories. That is all that is holding us together, stories and compassion.
—BARRY LOPEZ, Winter Count (1981)
* * *
—
However, a good laugh is a mighty good thing, and rather too scarce a good thing; the more’s the pity. So, if any one man, in his own proper person, afford stuff for a good joke to anybody, let him not be backward, but let him cheerfully allow himself to spend and be spent in that way. And the man that has anything bountifully laughable about him, be sure there is more in that man than you perhaps think for.
—HERMAN MELVILLE, Moby-Dick (1851)
* * *
—
I hope to make pictures like I walk in the desert—under a spell, an instinct of motion, a kind of knowing that is essentially indirect and sideways. Of all the things I wondered about on this land, I wondered the hardest about the seduction of certain geographies that feel like home—not by story or blood but merely by their forms and colors. How our perceptions are our only internal map of the world, how there are places that claim you and places that warn you away. How you can fall in love with the light.
—ELLEN MELOY, The Anthropology of Turquoise: Reflections on Desert, Sea, Stone, and Sky (2002)
Laughing Matters
Few and Far Between
Walking to California
Tired of Chickens
The Leprechaun Trap
Will the Real Fake John Muir Please Stand Up?
Such Sweet Sorrow
Them! and Us
Scout’s Honor
Imagining Shark Mountain
The Moopets
Desert Flood
What Would Edward Abbey Do?
Lone Tree
How to
Cuss in Western
Desert River Music
Shit Happens
Sir Rantsalot in the Dead Tree Forest
Road Captain
My First Rodeo
IH8 DMV
Don’t Fence Me In
Cowboys and Aliens
Trial by Jury
Closing the Mountain
Pleistocene Rewilding
Uncle Hedgie
Upon the Burning of Our House
Running into Winter
Missives from the Hill
Credits
Acknowledgments
About the Author
E-mail Sign-Up
IF YOU’RE FAMILIAR with my recent books Raising Wild and Rants from the Hill, you already know that I live with my wife and two young daughters at 6,000 feet on a windy, desiccated hilltop in the remote western Great Basin Desert of Nevada. It is a choice of home that has led some folks to question our sanity, but this extreme landscape suits us perfectly. Our passive solar home floats like a speck in a vast sagebrush ocean, while the immensity of land surrounding it—rocky hills, expansive playas, forking arroyos, imposing snow-capped peaks—inspires and humbles us daily. Here we are beset by blizzards, flash floods, earthquakes, drought, and wildfires, not to mention the mundane challenges of packrats living within our walls, rattlers shading on our porch, and scorpions hiding beneath, well, everything. It is not despite these challenges but rather because of them that we consider this the most captivating home imaginable.
In the fifteen years my family has been dug in here on Ranting Hill, we’ve come to appreciate that this landscape is more sublime than beautiful, that it still has the power to terrify us. The allure of this gorgeous place is closely related to the fact that it is such a difficult place to live in—an apparent contradiction that hints at the complicated relationship I have with my home desert. Big winds sweeping down from the Sierra have driven snow a yard deep on our half-mile-long driveway, trapping us on the hill for days. Flash floods have blasted through the open desert, cutting away the roadbed and rendering our home inaccessible. Three times we have been forced to evacuate as wind-driven wildfire scoured these desert hills, with the closest call occurring last summer when a curtain of flames came within thirty feet of our outbuildings before the Jackpot Fire was at last stopped using our dirt driveway as the final firebreak. This is no pastoral retreat but rather a place of direct encounter with the daunting forces of a vast, high-elevation desert. Where we live, the idea of human control over nature is an unsustainable fantasy that we simply can’t afford to maintain. But in place of that dangerous fantasy, which the wider culture propagates at every turn, this landscape offers the far more redemptive insight that we are part of something much larger than ourselves. This is a simple intuition but one so wild and expansive as to thoroughly shape our shared life here on Ranting Hill.
Living in such a wild landscape has two opposite and equally profound effects: developing a deep love of place provides solace, but it also threatens despair. We consider our home desert the most spectacularly beautiful place on earth, but in our years on Ranting Hill the storms have become more intense, the droughts more severe, and the wildfires more frequent and dangerous. My family simply cannot ignore the all-too-real effects of climate change. Rather, the new normal of powerful storm, drought, and fire directly affects our safety and quality of life, as well as placing new strains on the health of our home ecosystem. In the larger world beyond Ranting Hill, global warming and biodiversity loss are just two of the planetary-scale environmental crises that must now be faced. For those of us who care deeply about environmental protection, this is an especially trying time.
While no writer can offer readers an antidote to despair, How to Cuss in Western is my attempt to share with you three of the most sustaining and sanative influences in my life—positive forces that have buoyed me as I’ve bobbed along in the vastness of this sagebrush sea.
The first of these three nourishing influences is place itself. Soon after we moved to this remote desert, I set out on a mission: over the course of a single year, I would walk at least 1,000 miles within a ten-mile radius of our house. My rationale for the experiment was that structuring my ambles according to this arbitrary annual goal might help me to get the lay of a land so vast and open as to at first feel inhospitable. Over time, this pedestrian experiment in covering miles became a kind of walking meditation that I found indispensable, and so I have over the intervening years continued my annual “thousand-mile walk to home,” as I called it in Rants from the Hill. The experience of walking my home desert day after day, in all weathers and all seasons, has become richer and more meaningful to me over the years, as I’ve developed an intimacy with the land that would have been impossible for me to cultivate by any other means. These daily walks have now become small parts of a single, longer walk: a casual, fifteen-year, 20,000-mile stroll around my wild neighborhood.
Over the course of the many years I have been taking this long walk, life has had its ups and downs. But I have found that my ritual hikes through this desert wilderness have provided a vital form of stability and peace, a ballast when I am buffeted by crosswinds, a safe space even beneath the relentless sun and amid the coiled rattlers. There is solace in the liberating realization that this landscape, which was here long before me, will be here long after me as well. The desert abides. In that humbling perspective is a wild consolation that has brought calm in times of tumult, quiet in moments of distortion and noise. And while my high desert home remains an alien landscape to anyone who has not spent time in the Great Basin, strong attachment to place can occur anywhere, so long as the relationship is mindfully cultivated. The environment is an abstraction we can study, value, and manage, but a place is something we can love. I hope you will find the insights in How to Cuss in Western portable to your own home landscape, wherever you may happen to live.
The second of the three main salutary influences on me is family. When my wife, Eryn, and I made the decision to move out to Ranting Hill, we did not yet have children and could not at that time have imagined the joys and challenges that raising kids in such a wild place would bring. I can now say without hesitation that sharing this unusual adventure with my daughters has been the most hopeful experience of my life. It isn’t simply that my countless field excursions with Hannah and Caroline are exciting, fascinating, and pleasurable—that we explore together how this wild desert works and what critters make their home here—but also that I’ve learned so much from the girls about how to engage with the natural world. In Raising Wild, I shared my observation that dwelling in the high desert has a great deal in common with parenting, because both are daily practices of love that inspire self-examination and ultimately lead to meaningful personal growth.
While I resist superficial platitudes regarding the angelic wisdom of children, there is something about our girls’ playful and spontaneous approach to their home desert that I have found encouraging and even liberating. We grown-ups, freighted by our troubled pasts and distracted by our uncertain futures, tend to miss the magnificent, fleeting landscape of the present. Even so emancipated a saunterer as Henry David Thoreau occasionally carried the burdens of town life with him into the woods, writing in his provocative essay “Walking” that “it sometimes happens that I cannot easily shake off the village.” The spontaneity and instinctiveness of childhood imagination, by contrast, offers a more direct path into the visceral beauty of the natural world. Being with my family in this wild place is a reminder to me of the immense value of reinhabiting the present, of striving to discover what Thoreau’s mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson described as “an original relation to the universe.” And that, I suppose, is the alchemy of love.
The third restorative influence I share with you in How to Cuss in Western is humor. Edward Abbey, my patron saint, once advised his readers to “Be loyal to what you love, be true to the Earth
, and fight your enemies with passion and laughter.” Our challenging historical moment has already demonstrated the striking efficacy of political satire, and I believe that the sword of humor will be wielded with increasing force and effectiveness in our ongoing battle against not just environmental injustice but social, economic, and racial injustice as well.
This book, however, offers humor not as a sword but rather as a shield, as a small inoculation against the diseases of frustration and fatigue that are epidemic among those of us who lament the uncertain fate of the planet. Because we care so deeply for this world yet fear we may be forced to watch it burn—or melt—we find that our love for nature is never unalloyed but is instead a bittersweet affection shot through with grief. For those who believe, as I do, that the global environmental crisis is urgent, and that it requires a moral as well as a strategic response, it may be difficult to imagine what’s funny about any of this. But it is my belief that humor, in its remarkable power and dynamism, can help us to preserve the resilience that ultimately enables our courage and creativity.
In addition to having positive emotional and psychological effects, laughing has physiological benefits: it raises the heart rate and pulmonary ventilation, increases brain activity and alertness, stimulates the production of endorphins from the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, reduces the perception of pain, and enhances relaxation. Comedy also nurtures empathy, because the appreciation of humor requires flexibility, acceptance, and often the capacity to forgive both oneself and others. And humor has the power to bring people together, helping us to reexamine and, if necessary, rebuild our shared values and sense of common purpose.
I am concerned that those of us who care deeply about the environment have begun to imprison ourselves—and, worse still, our audience—within a windowless cell of humorless sanctimony. We extoll the virtues of sustainability, yet, in the intensity of our pursuit of what we feel certain is right, we often fail to sustain each other or even ourselves. We valorize community, yet too often lash out from a position of wounded isolation that keeps us from the joy we might otherwise discover, both in nature and in each other. How long will readers continue to turn the pages of another brittle eco-tirade or tacitly agree to suffer the misery registered in writing that functions primarily as tombstone? How to Cuss in Western instead employs the comic mode in the hope that humor can introduce some playfulness and pleasure to environmentalism—without compromising the fierce moral seriousness of its aims.
How to Cuss in Western Page 1
