Waltzing the Cat, by Pam Houston

This 1998 novel-in-stories delves into the adventuresome love-challenged life of Lucy O’Rourke: mid-thirties, photographer, river guide, child of alcoholics, who doesn’t trust herself and finds untrustworthy men to practice her self-sabotage on. The writing is salty, frank, often funny, but also barbed. She knows (mostly) what she’s doing, that she can’t travel to the land of reliable lovers from where she lives on precipices – but that doesn’t stop her from her next fling. 

She has a handful of steadfast friends who keep trying to aim her better directions, but they can’t keep pace with her explorations heading all the wrong places. These are great stories – she can spin a yarn with such intensity, you know the dangerous parts have to be true: “[W]e were about to go straight down over the seven-story rock. We would fall through the air off the face of that rock, land at the bottom of a seven-story waterfall, where there would be nothing but rocks and tree limbs and sixty-some thousand feet per second of pounding white water which would shake us and crush us and hold us under until we drowned.” 

 She injects notes of mysticism as straightforward reportage: “ ‘I saw Carlos Castaneda in an airport last week,’ I said. ‘He tried to tell me some important things.’… I was getting closer to something then and I could feel it, like maybe I had jumped, for a moment, onto the wheel that makes everything turn, and at any second it might send me flying backwards, and I didn’t want to miss anything in the moment I was there.” 

That’s Houston in a nutshell: she’s flung, she’s in free-fall, but meanwhile the sight is amazing and all she can do is take it all in – thoughts about survival, personal well-being, are submerged. She cycles through men with fine qualities and deep failings, having thrills and fun and grief, but as each one fades into “that was never going to work” she bobs back to the surface, more exhilarated than chastened, unable to keep the next collision from pulling her down. As she claws her way through the Tenebrae of her disastrous upbringing, the reader realizes being sensible and steady is beyond her, so we just come along for a highly entertaining ride. You should too.

Deep Creek: Finding Hope in the High Country, by Pam Houston

This memoir was a timely read for me, given that a significant section describes the 2015 fire season in Colorado, during which her ranch was surrounded and narrowly escaped destruction. I was reading about this during our 2020 fire season, in which the largest, Pine Gulch Fire, threatens to overtake the 2002 Hayman Fire as Colorado's largest in history (for now!). I haven't seen the mountains ordinarily visible from the nearby park, for weeks, due to smoke from multiple wildfires, in Colorado and California.

She talks about the courage of firefighters, of friends who help evacuate her horses and burros to a safe location, about watching a wall of flame descend toward her buildings, including the 100-year-old hand-built barn, stopped ultimately by the moisture content in the aspen grove behind her house. And she gives some thought to how climate change and the drying of the western US exacerbates these fires, making them not only larger but more catastrophic, burning even the soil, turning the earth into a barren landscape. 

Starting life as the child of narcissistic alcoholics, she takes refuge in the woman hired to look after her, and flees home as a teenager. With a lot to work out of her system she finds high-risk occupations in the wild: Dall sheep hunting guide in Alaska, whitewater raft guide, had her arm broken into tiny fragments by a rearing thoroughbred's hoof... And becomes a successful author, able to make payments on her property by teaching writing at various universities, participating in conferences, and so on, which require her to spend significant stretches away from the ranch.

Nature and animals have been her refuge from trauma, and on one of the journeys she is gifted due to her writing, she observes: "We may have more complicated language, opposable thumbs, and this dangerous thing called reason, but any self-respecting llama or buffalo or spider knows enough not to destroy its own home." 

She is unafraid to call out the insanities of our culture: "It is the Wilderness Ranch Subdivision which remains evacuated (NFS Inci-Web). I pause over the words "Wilderness Ranch Subdivision." What in the f***, I wonder, what in the f*** is wrong with us anyway." Fair question. 

As the Trump administration busily removes all restraints on the most rapacious urges of corporations, which as Bill McKibben has pointed out have only a single purpose, to make money for their investors, and therefore cannot recognize consequences beyond that purpose, we are accelerating the catastrophic damage to our only home. This administration has weakened protections on air, water, forests, public lands - PUBLIC, not "his" - and the creatures who depend on them. He has rolled back regulations on methane capture - methane being among the most potent greenhouse gases accelerating our race toward an uninhabitable planet. There's no polluter, no matter how egregious, he does not support. There is no non-human creature who counts for anything. Endangered species? A wave of extinctions is arriving. The web of life itself? Of no concern to this administration. 

VOTE FOR THE EARTH - tell Trump it's time to go.