Where Rivers Change Direction

There are many ways to read these essays -- as nature writing, coming of age memoir, record of a vanishing way of life. For me, the essays are most absorbing when Spragg tells of his teenage years, working in the all-male world of his father and the cowboys who work for him. They capture the awkwardness of learning to take on a man's responsibilities when they require a fearlessness and stoic toughness more common to pioneers and the Wild West than the urban environment of most of his contemporaries.

There's a poignance that comes a bit clearer in the final essays, which skip forward in time to the author's middle years. Here you pick up a sense of something gone awry, a disillusionment and a good deal of personal anguish. There is a winter spent alone in a snowbound house as he recovers from a personal malaise identified by no more than the reference to severe leg pains. In the final chapters, he walks the back roads and irrigation ditches of Powell, Wyoming, in search of some measure of equanimity while his mother slowly dies of emphysema.

The title, "Where Rivers Change Direction," seems to be a reference to the Continental Divide, and maybe also to the watersheds that emerge in all our lives and pull us with a gravitational force we don't recognize at the time and come to know only long afterward. I recommend this book to anyone interested in western literature, personal memoirs, gender studies, and finely crafted writing.