Where Rivers Change Direction by Mark Spragg

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

(Note to fly fishers: this is not a fly fishing book, but is set in Wyoming, near Yellowstone. Many of you fish this area, and I thought might be interested in a book about the area.)
This is a memoir that, while reading, I was hoping wasn’t one of those “adorned” memoirs, you know, fictionalized autobiographies. The book is now ten years old and I don’t think there has been any “revelations” about the improprieties of the author in the telling of his life.

Why was I concerned about this? It is such a heartachingly good read, that it just seemed too good to be true. Most of the essays in the book were written at least 30 years after they took place. Spragg does such an excellent job of looking into the thoughts and feelings of his eleven year old self, and those thoughts and feelings are so deep, lucid and emotion-laden, that it is easy to imagine they are fictionalized. But, keeping in mind that a memoir is an examination of one’s life after the fact, one can see that it is easy to project an adult’s interpretation on events from childhood.

This book is an excellent example of writing about the American West and how it so recently was, and in some places still is. Spragg’s family moved to Wyoming to run a dude ranch and eleven year old Mark was expected to be part of the business. In his words:

When I was a boy my father had horses, over a hundred of them. He believed that horses were to use and that boys were nothing if not used…. I went to work for him when I was eleven. I was paid thirty dollars a month, had my own bed in the bunkhouse, and three large, plain meals each day. (p 1)
…It was my daily job to remind our horses of the union of man and horse, to gather them, halter them, grain them, doctor them, handle them, ride them, to ride the younger ones again and again until they became convinced that I was part of them and other men a part of me. They were my father’s horses. I was my father’s son. (p5)

It was this belief about boys working put to practice that gives Spragg the stories he has to tell, the stories of being a boy among men and growing to manhood himself.

Horses became an integral part of his life and character:

I was a boy and I believed in the sightedness of horses. 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. (p7)

I think that walking is different from riding. I am connected to the earth differently, more aware of the strike of my bones against the land, more aware of the surface. My breath comes sharp and strong. I think that when I am walking it is as though I am speaking each word of myself to the mountain’s ear. Aloud. I like the sensation. I also like being on a horse. When I am mounted it feels as though I must draw my breath through half a tone of animal to fill my lungs. My breath comes fuller, hotter; the breathing expanded, drowsy, and meditative. When I am older I will think of the difference between walking and riding to be the difference between prayer and the effect of prayer.(p36)

The book deals with the how raw and brutal nature can be and the men who live on the land. It shows that masculinity isn’t just about the way men behave, but that the reason they behave in certain ways is because there is no other way. When he was 13, wile out hunting elk with a ranch hand in his forties, John, Spragg has to be a man. As they are skinning the elk, John cuts his arm to the bone. They are on horses miles from home. They aren’t just hunting, but getting food for the winter. It is Spragg’s responsibility to bandage the man and continue skinning the elk. They spend the night and butcher the elk in the morning. During the night, as Spragg is awake, he takes the knife that skinned the elk and John, and hones the blade as he has seen John do it, reflecting on the sound it makes:

It is the sound John makes with the knife. It is the sound of flesh slippery against flesh. The sound of a man’s arms working against his sides in the sun. A shirtless man bent into his work, Loading hay. An old sound. The sound that n animal makes at the end of a day. A sigh. Again and again. Metronimic. I pause. There is always a pause. I bring the blade away from the stone, examine it, reverse the stone and spit again. (pp50-51)

He continues working the blade, then

I hold it to the light. I think of it in the sun: the small curved white reflection it casts; a thing become so polished that it mirrors the heat of the sun, and if held steadily to the dry, bent underfluff of the grasses it could ignite a fire simply by throwing the curve of that reflected heat. It feels hot and right in my hand. (p51)

Life in the American West is not always easy. The book is unapologetic in its rawness of life, death and work. Spragg’s father guides hunters. For grizzlies. They bait bears into an area so the hunters can shoot them. They use old, dying horses as bait. When the horse, Socks, 15 year old Spragg has ridden for two years gets cut with a wire and his leg is gangrenous, his father asks him to take the horse out to the grizzly blind and shoot him to use him as bait.

I stare at the reddish brown mound seventy-five yards in front of me. I have killed Socks in good place. Close to the timber that borders the meadow. A bear will safe in his approach. …And then I remember that I should have cut a window in his gut. Sawed through the hair and opened him to decay. A sore that coyotes and ravens can worry. A place that will help him rot. My father will be disappointed….I wonder suddenly why I am not crying. I think a boy would cry. I think maybe I have begun to be a man. I feel only quietly blunt, and desperate. (pp107-08)

Spragg’s early life was not without a woman’s influence. In speaking about a photograph of his mother standing next to Mark and, his brother who have a stringer of fish hanging between them, he says:

My mother has brought us to the river to further our instruction. It has never occurred to us to wonder why she knows how to fish. She is our mother. She teaches us how to manage in the world. We watch her smooth hands grip the rod’s cork above the reel. We watch the rhythm of her arms paying out the line in arcs over the river, working into the length of her cast. We follow the last presentation of line and breathe out as the fly settles on the river’s surface. If she were not our mother we would be struck by her beauty. We would argue to stand close to her. We would become nervous at the scent of her clean, sun-warmed skin. We would not have learned to fish. (pp240-41)

Spragg has a way of not finishing narratives, but rather focusing on the feeling and emotions of the piece to let each essay carry it to its conclusion. Because it isn’t necessarily the storyline that he is writing about, it is the inner experience. With all the masculinity of the book, there are plenty of times for tenderness as well. His mother had a hard time having children. She had a daughter a year before Mark was born. But the girl only lived a few months. He reflects on having an older sister:

I think about my sister when my mind is quiet; almost always when I am watching water. I see my sister as an encyclopedia of feminine advice. I see my sister as a doorway to the second half of the world. I wish I could call her name and have her turn her face to me and smile. (p27)

This book is a collection of essays, most of which, I believe, were previously published individually. The first three quarters or so of the essays are about his childhood, and for me are the most compelling and strongest of the book. The remaining several essays are about his adult life, and while excellently written, didn’t have the emotional impact on me as the others.

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