Customer Reviews

The Way Out: A True Story of Ruin and Survival

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Craig Childs explores and describes the canyon country of the Colorado Plateau like no one else can. In "The Way Out", Childs and a friend navigate through a maze of canyons incised deeply into the Navajo Sandstone of northern Arizona. This could be just another wilderness adventure, a book to sit beside the countless other wilderness essays on bookstore shelves, but it is not: I have seen the land Craig Childs navigates in this book, a land of twisted canyons so disturbingly chaotic that I feel tremors in my solar plexus whenever I see it, and I have never had the courage to try to cross it.

As they struggle through the twisted canyons, Childs flashes back to his turbulent relationship with his father, and he describes his friend's long and torturous career as a police officer. At first I found these flashbacks to be too personal and intimate; I was almost embarrassed for Childs' inability to keep these deeply personal thoughts to himself. As their adventure progresses, though, these past experiences come alive in the stone, creating a web of life and continuum whose lessons are seen at every turn. In his final act, Childs takes his father's ashes into the desert where he intends to release them in the only place where he can find peace. A storm blows up though, and his father's ashes are taken by the wind and the crash of lightening. This seems to prove to him that his struggles through nature are the same as his struggles with his father: enigmatic; tempestuous; dichotomous.

"The Way Out" is a powerful story of emotion and survival in the wilderness of the land and of the mind.

Where most people go to resorts or on a cruise for time away from their everyday lives, Craig Childs and his close friend and traveling companion Dirk Vaughn walk the desolate deserts, canyons and chasms of the American West.

The Way Out describes Childs' walk through a forgotten and imposing fracture in the crust of the earth rarely if ever seen by white people. The indigenous tribes through millennia have passed this way, but until Childs and Vaughn receive permission from an elder Dine shepherd, no one has walked this route in recent times.

Childs' style of writing is metaphorical. It engages you and makes one understand the element he is traveling like no other author I have read. It flows like prose from the early days of the last century when authors painted their stories with words.

In the short period of time that the two men spend in their search through this chasm, they reflect on the lives they have led that have brought them to this adventure. Childs' life is one of dark memories that would have pushed those without his outlook upon life to the depths of depression. In his compatriot Vaughn, we meet a man that has seen the distasteful underbelly of big city crime in his days as a police officer.

Yet neither man allows those past experiences to dampen their spirit in their quest to explore the forgotten realm in which they have intentionally placed themselves.

I must admit, I almost put this book down. But as I forged forward I began to understand the author's style and what he was trying to communicate.

Armchair Interviews says: The Way Out will make you take solitary stock of what has happened along your own walk through life.

I loved this book, which is a feast for the soul. The novel profiles an inner and outer journey of two men through the most intense environment. Beyond the physical endurance required to pass this route, the 2 men reflect on their past struggles with society, family and personal demons.

It's another incredible book by Childs, and I think marks a change in his writing style. Rather than a collection of journeys, this is a single story which becomes a legend or tale.

Read this book. It reaches into the soul of men, in a way few contemporary stories can.

A two-weep trip through the American Southwest with a good friends turns into a challenge which will test friendship and survival skills in THE WAY OUT: A TRUE STORY OF RUIN AND SURVIVAL. Any with a special affection for the Southwest will find vivid descriptions of its terrain and desolation as they enjoy this memoir of survival, a hit in hardcover and newly available in paperback to provide a hard-hitting account of discovery.

Diane C. Donovan

California Bookwatch

Rebeccasreads highly recommends THE WAY OUT as an "Amazing Grace" vision quest that is both hair-raising & immensely satisfying.

Anyone who has read Craig Childs' other books, such as THE SECRET KNOWLEDGE OF WATER or SOUL OF NOWHERE knows this man knows the desert. This time, however, the spectacular wilderness gets the better of him.

Or perhaps that's what vision quests are all about: to walk through the valley of your own death to come out the other side, pounds lighter, with a clearer focus on who you are, where you came from & where you're going.

Craig Childs writes like Georgia O'Keeffe paints -- spare, brilliant & memorable.

Subtitled "a true story of ruin and survival," The Way Out is an account of Childs' and his good friend Dirk Vaughn's mid-winter crossing of a convoluted wilderness area along the Arizona-Utah border. During their sixteen day adventure the two men face not only the challenges of the broken, primeval terrain, but they also deal with their own inner demons--Childs' anger over the psychological damage inflicted by his late alcoholic father; Dirk's memories of the persons he harmed (including one man he killed accidentally) during his career as a policeman.

If highly detailed description of a multi-day exploration through a maze of canyons carved out of Navajo sandstone, including flashbacks to earlier traumatic experiences, is your bag, this is the book for you.

I, however, was almost as tired of the duo's adventure as they were by the end of the book. There may be such a thing as too much description.

Craig Childs and Dirk Vaughn have trekked together the United States for ten years, but as they drive in Utah to their latest starting point feels different. The plan is to hike the canyons of the American Southwest deserts where practically nothing lives for two weeks. Both men understand theoretically the danger of this quest as they carry as much food with them as possible because living off the land is impossible as even vegetation is scarce. This is survivor at its fittest as Craig and Dirk know maps are not very specific, the terrain is unfriendly, and they have no exit strategy.

On the wilderness journey, the men think back to what led them to this seemingly insane potentially deadly trip especially when they see early on the bleached bones of someone who failed to make it. Each reflects on their past: fights in bars and insane risk taking culminating with a need to prove themselves.

Both the journey and the surprising flashbacks grip the audience who take each dangerous step along aside the two explorers. --we discover the surprising legacy of violence that each man is escaping. Displaying candor Craig Childs pulls no punches as he exposes himself and Dirk to the scrutiny of true life tale advocates for he could have hidden the background and told a tale of two intrepid men undertaking the quest in a Sir Edmund Hilary context of it is there. Instead genre readers obtain a powerful biographical adventure tale that will haunt readers when they follow the why of needing the cleansing of the souls.

Harriet Klausner

The Way Out is a book you'll want to read over and over again. It's just too powerful to fully absorb in one reading. As with "The Secret Knowledge of Water", Mr. Childs leads you into the very psyche of Living Land. He bears his soul and humbles himself before a chasm of rock. An absolute master of imagery and metaphor, Mr. Childs doesn't just take you into the majesty of a canyon or the solitude of the desert, he empties you out there so that you might fill again. "The Way Out" is his best work yet.

Susan Haley, Author

RAINY DAY PEOPLE

Childs get personnel in this rugged hike/climb book. The very difficult walk around at hand is intermingled nicely with flashbacks that explains why he and his hiking partner have become accomplished outdoors men. More than a few raw surprises keep the story from getting predictable. It all fits together well at the end. A different Craig Childs kind of book, but in the end you still get the great writing about why wilderness is so vital to the survival of each of us.

Where is the tale of survival? If I had known it was a story of two men waxing poetic over " the clean slabs" of canyons and their "striations of claret colors", I never would have spent 9.99 downloading it to my kindle. This tale should never be placed under survival genre. The endless prose..."Man, you might say, is nature dreaming, but rock And water and sky are constant...." Oh please!!! My brain is tired of all this dribble. If I wanted it I would go sit and meditate at some new age commune. I wanted a good survival tale..not listening to this "Dirk" character rage on and on. I truly spent half the book anxiously awaiting the monent when one of them would fall into a canyon slot, you know...get his hand or foot stuck or something! The trip was exhausting, self important, and boring. Amazon...please place it in philosophy. That is what it is!