Where Rivers Change Direction [Paperback]

Mark Spragg (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 8, 2000

Mark Spragg grew up on the oldest dude ranch in Wyoming, a place of unrelenting winds, pitiless blizzards, fierce rivers, and the men who work there have to be tough to survive. He writes lyrically of this world, its animals - horses, bears, elk - and of its people, in particular his parents and John, an old cowboy who became his mentor.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Growing up in rural Wyoming, Mark Spragg learned early to read the stars. At 11 he was instructed to quit dreaming, and he went to work for his father on the land. "I was paid thirty dollars a month, had my own bed in the bunkhouse, and three large, plain meals each day." The ranch is a sprawling place where winter brings months of solitude and summer brings tourists from the real world--city types who want a taste of the outdoors and stare at the author and his family as if they were members of some exotic tribe: "Our guests were New Jersey gas station owners, New York congressmen, Iowa farmers, judges, actors, plumbers, Europeans who had read of Buffalo Bill and Sitting Bull and came to experience the American West, the retired, the just beginning." By the age of 14, he and his younger brother are leading them on camping trips into deep woods. "No one ever asked why we had no televisions, no daily paper. They came for what my brother and I took for granted. They came to live the anachronism that we considered our normal lives."

As Spragg comes to realize the strangeness of his life, he also detects flaws in his own character--a fear of suffering and mortality that first shows itself when he rides a sick horse too hard, until the animal hovers at the brink of death. He knows that if he had faced the possibility of sickness, if he had been brave, this animal would not have declined so quickly. Throughout his life, this inability to face death, this terror of losing the beauty of the world he so passionately witnesses, drives Spragg to distraction.

Where Rivers Change Direction combines a soaring spirituality with a visceral, often stomach-churning attention to detail. It's a book that continually dares the reader to turn away from its pages in an effort to digest the power of its confused emotions and hauntingly spare images (a "moon-fried plain," a stillborn child "baked alive in my mother's body"). Like Peter Matthiessen's The Snow Leopard, Mark Spragg's memoir makes you feel you've been somewhere, you've been out in the depths, and you've come back changed. --Emily White

From Publishers Weekly

Wyoming, land of wind and dust, of suicides, loneliness and fierce lovemaking, of uninterrupted vistas stretching 20 miles in every direction, of hard-drinking men and fighting women, forms the backdrop to Spragg's brave and beautiful coming-of-age memoir. Readers expecting a quaint, picturesque yarn will find instead an elemental, powerful confrontation with the naked realities of living and dying. Growing up on the high Yellowstone Plateau on the state's oldest dude ranch, a family business dating back to 1898, Spragg wrangles horses for his taciturn father, trying to win his respect and approval. At age 14, Spragg shoots and mercy-kills his beloved, aged, sickly steed, whose corpse will be used as bait for bears targeted by human hunters. The teenage Spragg joins his father on hunts, an experience he recalls ruefully (he no longer hunts, he reports, and became a vegetarian for five years). With self-deprecating wryness, the author, a screenwriter and essayist, re-creates adolescent crushes and hijinx. From quotidian eventsAcommuning with horses, attending a livestock auctionAhe fashions existential encounters with nature, self, fear, death, God. Composed in clean, crisp prose, his loping narrative is peopled with memorable characters, like his 40-ish mentor and bunkmate, John, a smiling, battle-scarred WWII veteran, or the mediumistic Greenwich Village waiter from India who tells Spragg, then 27, about his dead infant sister, reducing him to tears. Encompassing his marriage, divorce and remarriage, the book closes with Spragg's almost unbearably poignant account of caring for his mother, dying of emphysema and housebound on an oxygen inhalator. A piercing voice from the heartland, this resonant autobiography weds the venerable Western tradition of frontier exploration of self and nature with the masculine school of writing stretching from Hemingway to Mailer. (Oct.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 304 pages
• Publisher: Riverhead Trade (August 8, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1573228257
• ISBN-13: 978-1573228251
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.1 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (50 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #84,336 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

56 of 59 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Spragg could be a reincarnation of Hemingway, October 14, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Where Rivers Change Direction (Hardcover)

This is one of the most beautiful, enlightening and transporting books I have ever read. I am a housewife in Iowa and a contemporary of the author. I have never lived in a part of our country where man finds himself in the middle of the food chain. Mr. Spragg's essay's take me to that place in a way that my very senses become sotted with the sting of the Wyoming wind, the piercing cry of a horse's pain, the chaffing of a new pair of cowboy boots on a young boy's feet. His observations about the people in his life are precise, penetrating and without apology. I came to know the people in his world more intimately than I know friends and family in my own. It is amazing to me that the author lived the incredible life he has--in such an unforgiving, brutal, and spectacular environment as the Wyoming wilderness-- and yet retains the sensitivity to write about it with such clear, powerful, and poetic prose. This book cast a spell over me. I couldn't put it down and I didn't want it to end.

25 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The Child's Truth, May 11, 2002

By 

Jena Ball "Jena Ball" (North Carolina, United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Where Rivers Change Direction (Paperback)

What makes this book extraordinary is the author's ability to reach back into his child self, to recreate for the reader what it was like to be a young boy growing up in the foothills of the Wyoming wilderness, intimately connected to his natural surroundings and the creatures that inhabit it.

Horses, we discover, are much more than a means of making a living. They are part of this boy's blood, welded to his bone structure, and tuned to his thoughts. And it is through this fusion of boy and horse that we get our first glimpse of what it's like to live on the edge of wilderness, subject to the whims of high altitude weather, sharing the landscape with grizzlies, elk, coyotes and coons, and learning from an early age to deal with danger and pain.

As the book unfolds in a series of episodes, each a self-contained story connected by the boy's evolving perspective, we learn about how this harsh country shapes and defines its inhabitants. We learn about knives and guns, gentling horses and hunting bears, drunken cooks and the reality of death. This is a world that leaves little room for daydreams, but fills the heart and mind nevertheless with the vibrancy of life.

Rarely has a book touched me with such immediacy and precision. Anyone who has been out in the wilds as a child will immediately recognize and respond to the young boy's awareness of his place in the world, his connectedness to all things. If the book lacks anything, it is completion and resolution. The stories found later in the book are full of the author's adult dilemmas stemming from a childhood lived so far outside the norm. He struggles with cities and relationships, his need for isolation and the demands of family. Finally, he must come to terms with his mother's lingering death, which ends the book on a sad and frustrating note. This is an absolutely exquisite book, containing some of the finest writing I've ever read, but one that ultimately feels incomplete.

22 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars growing up cowboy, February 5, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Where Rivers Change Direction (Hardcover)

As a person who also grew up in the NW part of Wyoming in the time period of this book there is much here that resonates. To me this was the journey of a young boy expected to be a man, perhaps sooner than he should, expected to be self sufficent, to put emotions aside and to deal with life at it's basic level-- in essence to grow up "cowboy". In that journey Mark could have turned hard and cold, instead he became introspective and uniquely sensitive to the world in which he lived. As an adult he examined in detail and with prose those relationships and rememberances and gave them to us. If you have ever wondered what happened to the cowboys of the long-ago-time they are here in this book. These days few people can live by or appreciate that philosophical outlook and even fewer try to maintain the effort. At times this was a hard read, often harsh and emotional, but an excellent trip. It was also a rememberance of wonderful Wyoming and home. Thanks Mark.