Customer Reviews

Where Rivers Change Direction

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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.

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.

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.

Call me an unsophisticated reader if you will but when I read a book, I do it for the story without much caring about the greater and deeper meaning. As I read Spragg's book I got to BE a "horse girl", I got to BE a ranch hand. I got to work a dude ranch and have far more responsibility than I could have imagined at that age. I got to live that life and still get the kids to soccer on time. It is the adventure I couldn't have imagined then and desperately needed now in my mid-forties with far less exciting responsibilities. I nearly passed on the book after reading the reviews, fearing it was too much "Art" and not enough "Story". Not only am I delighted I read it but am anxiously awaiting Spragg's next adventure.

I too grew up in Wyoming spending brittle springs on horseback for my family. If ever you have wondered what it feels like to connect with the silence and spirit of the wilderness Mark is your surefooted guide. Not only does he whisper the secrets of humanity, but he also makes you achingly aware that you probably have never searched the world or your soul like you should have. Yet, after you have closed his book, your spirit stirs as if it finally understands all of those profound moments of your life that passed by before you got the chance to understand the meaning of them. This book stays with you. It leaves you feeling slightly exposed and makes you want to understand more about yourself. I read it and became homesick for the plains and even that Wyoming wind. Bravo Mark, I couldn't put it down and I didn't want it to end.

One reviewer said of this book. "Mark Spragg's memoir makes you feel you've been somewhere, you've been out in the depths, and you've come back changed". This sums it up beautifully. There is not a page within these stories which will not grab your attention, hold you still while you absorb the soul of what Spragg has to tell you. It's a story of boyhood, of manhood, of the vast and unpredictable lands of Wyoming, where fences are strangers. There are stories in here which make the heart soar, and there are stories which make the heart break. As a reader, you're never quite sure where Spragg will take you next, you'll laugh with him, you'll tighten your throat at some of his words, and when you're done with this journey, you'll think the world around you has changed, but it hasn't, Spragg has just given you the magic to see it differently. Spragg lives his entire boyhood on the edge of manhood, unfolding himself into the landscapes and animals, both wild and domestic, which create his world. Of horses, he will tell you; "I believed that to have a horse between my legs, to extend my pulse and blood and energy to theirs, enhanced my vision. Made of me a seer. I believed them to be the dappled, sorrel, roan, bay, black pupils in the eyes of God". Of the dude ranch, where he learned about men and and animals, forests and water, of wind, he'll say; ".. but I did not know that I lived on the largest block of unfenced wilderness in the lower forty eight states. That is what I know as a man. As a boy, I knew only that I was free on the land". This memoir is beautifully written, from the first to the last page, Spragg's pen sometimes wounds the paper, sometimes heals it, and the reader is left feeling the scratching of a pen across the heart. This, for me, is one of the books that will sit always within easy reach on my bookshelves, there are times I'll seek Spragg's magic and bring it back into my world. This is a collection with something for everyone, because it touches the core of being human in a world where humanness is often the stranger. Do read, it's worth every moment of your time.

I read Spragg's novel, "Fruit of Stone," first, and was left rather cold. I'm glad I ventured forth with "Where Rivers Change Direction" because it is truly brilliant.

This is a writer who can burnish a sentence the way a saddlemaker polishes leather--the love of craft is obvious, and the end result is a quiet elegance that is breathtaking. He loves the passive verbs...so do I. The stately passivity take the wildness of ranch life from the hands of "action packed" Hemingway types and snares it in amber. Posterity over posturing? Sure, I'll take that!

He's capable of being thoughtful, brash, graphic, elegiac, and, at times, pretty funny. I adored "Wapiti School," wherein he nails Candy Dohse, his first true love, right on the forehead with a snowball during recess. He even put a pebble in the snowball first. Ah, young love!

There's no riders in purple sage, crazy saloon whores, shootouts, chuckwagons, or wacky Western shenanigans, and the "New West, worse than the Old West" place dysphoria/post-mod malaise is absent, as well. What you have instead is Spragg's life--from youth to maturity--carved away from the bone as if by a hunter's skilled hand. Okay, that was a (poor) attempt at a Spraggy sentence. So, don't read me...read him!

Mark Spragg's stories, like Jim Harrison's, feature larger-than-life characters, heroic actions, and spectacular landscape. They read like myths. But these are the true stories of Spragg's own childhood in a wondrous place. The exotic adventures are rendered so clearly that we feel ourselves in the middle of them, and see them as windows not only to Wyoming, but the human spirit. With descriptions so lyrical, dialog so trenchant, and passion so deeply felt, surely it is Spragg himself who turns rivers, with the power of his prose.

Mark Spragg does such an amazing job of pulling the reader into his enviroment that I could taste the dust, smell the horses, feel the bitter bite of the cold and visualize scenes that I sometimes wished I couldn't see so clearly. This is one I will read again and again.

This memoir by Mark Spragg is one of the best books I've read in years. And I read a lot of books. His imagery and descriptive lines aren't just written. The words are sculpted into exquisite granite sentences like the mountains that surrounded him as he grew up on a dude ranch in Wyoming in the 1960s. I read the book two weeks ago and can still remember one or two, paraphrased here. He's shoeing a horse with John, one of the hands, and he gets put down a bit by a man he respects, perhaps, more than his father. He writes that he didn't mind being a boy, but didn't like being treated like one. Later, in describing his school, which had about 12 children, he says it was painted the color of an elk's eye. I mean, this is terrific stuff and there are lines like that on every page. The only other writers I've read who do this well are Barbara Kingsolver and Owen Parry. Sure, there may be others, but I've not read them yet. You have to read this book. It will make you laugh, perhaps cry, it will give you goose bumps and it will make you think. It is a gem.