Where Rivers Change Direction | 
| Author: Mark Spragg
Publisher: Riverhead Trade
Category: Book
List Price: $15.00
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Avg. Customer Rating:  42 reviews
Sales Rank: 45663
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 304
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.7
Dimensions (in): 7.9 x 5.1 x 0.8
ISBN: 1573228257
Dewey Decimal Number: 978.742033092
EAN: 9781573228251
ASIN: 1573228257
Publication Date: August 1, 2000
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Condition: Stained Edges;stained cover Giving great service since 2004: Buy from the Best! 4,000,000 items shipped to delighted customers. We have 1,000,000 unique items ready to ship! Find your Great Buy today!
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Amazon.com
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
Book Description
"I knew the horses as I knew my family...When I was separated from them I felt wrong in the world. When I was separated from them I took no comfort in the sound of the creek. I felt chilled without the heat of them. In the short lulls between rides I leaned against the corrals, watching them roil like some captured pod of smallish whales, multi-colored, snorting at their handicapped buoyancy. When I stepped in among them, they would turn to me, roll their eyes until the whites showed, flick their ears. They were used to the sight and sound of me. I was the boy who straddled their hearts." If the West had a voice this is how it would sound. Passionate. Unequivocal. In the tradition of Ivan Doig's THIS HOUSE OF SKY, Mark Spragg's stunning collection, WHERE RIVERS CHANGE DIRECTION, renders an unforgettable story of an adolescence spent on the oldest dude ranch in Wyoming-a remote spread on the Shoshone National Forest, the largest block of unfenced wilderness in the lower forty-eight states. In this sublime and unforgiving landscape, Spragg's distant and mercurial father, his emotionally isolated but resilient mother, his fierce and devoted younger brother Rick, and his mentor, a wry and wise cowboy named John, cleave to one another and to the harsh life they have chosen. Unrelenting winds, pitiless blizzards, muscular rivers--from these elements Spragg divines the universal yearnings for self-reliance, trust, acceptance, and love. WHERE RIVERS CHANGE DIRECTION illuminates the unexpected wisdom and irrevocable truth embedded in the small, but profound dramas of one boy's journey toward manhood.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 37 more reviews...
 Loneliness and Abandonment October 13, 2007
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
These are two feelings I got from reading this memoir. Life in NW Wyoming is not easy. Days are spent with horses and one's life is taken by horses. In fact, if you love horses this is a great book.
One thing that kept creeping into this book is the distance the author had toward his parents, especially his father. Little but dialogue is written about the father, but he comes across as callous and more worried of turning the boy into a real man. The boy, in turn, writes about his concerns about the man he will become. At times that dragged on too much.
Still, it's wonderful prose written in a manly tone. For rugged cowboys and ranchers it's a perfect read.
So Well Drawn August 23, 2007
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
What an unrelentingly gripping series of stories -- life, death, animals, boys, girls, men, women, horses, snakes, water, wind, earth, blood, fire and sky. Mark Spragg's style is a bit like David Hockney doing his photograph collages. He doesn't show you everything, just bits and pieces to make the whole. He lets you put some of the pieces in place. What a style. It's shot through with his own strong character and some compelling scenes of raw Wyoming life. The stories follow an amazing arc that you don't see coming until the last chapter and then you just kind of want to start all over again, and meet the boy that became the man. Beautiful stuff. Look, I'm not really out here trying to sell my book at every corner but the people who told me about Mark Spragg are readers of my book, "Antler Dust." I had three recommendations from "Antler Dust" readers to check out Mark Spragg, mostly because, I believe, of the detailed outdoors action and the fact that my book takes place in a neighboring state, Colorado. I am going to read more Mark Spragg but for others who like him, please also consider Antler Dust.
more than five stars July 26, 2007
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I'd worry about peope who don't hurt themselves laughing while reading Wapiti School. My goodness, these stories are terrific, sometimes tough and bitter, sometimes perfect poetry. Just wonderful.
Horses' Hearts May 23, 2007
Mark Spragg writes beautifully, even poetically, of teenage life in a Wyoming family struggling to make ends meet by catering to "dudes" come West for the seasonal fishing and hunting. His collection of stories is varied, but all are tied to the splendor of unshod love for the land and for the horses he rides through a journey that will steal your heart.
Good writing but I don't "get" where the author's coming from May 7, 2007
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
The author writes excellent prose with innumerable well turned phrases and descriptions. The subject matter is primarily his adolescence on a Wyoming dude ranch and hunting guide service that his family, Pennsylvania expatriates, operated in the 1960s, some vignettes from his adult life and descriptions of friends and conditions in windswept Wyoming. The chapters are actually a series of essays rather than a progressive narrative with the ones about life and work on and around his father's ranch, where he essentially lived as a hired hand in the bunkhouse with hardened wranglers from about the age of fourteen, being the most interesting.
I enjoyed the book principally due to the excellent writing and colorful recounting of the author's experiences as a real "cowboy" in an era when most of us male baby boomers only experienced the same thing through ubiquitous western TV shows and movies of the 50s and 60s. It was a life in another era when so many of us grew up in boring suburbia. I recommend it for these reasons.
But maybe I missed something because I never came across any explanation for the author's seeming sense of hurt, isolation, melancholy and general unhappiness that begins, for unstated reasons, during his college years.
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