Deep Creek: Finding Hope in the High Country

by Pam Houston

Overview

"How do we become who we are in the world? We ask the world to teach us."

On her 120-acre homestead high in the Colorado Rockies, beloved writer Pam Houston learns what it means to care for a piece of land and the creatures on it. Elk calves and bluebirds mark the changing seasons, winter temperatures drop to 35 below, and lightning sparks a 110,000-acre wildfire, threatening her century-old barn and all its inhabitants. Through her travels from the Gulf of Mexico to Alaska, she explores what ties her to the earth, the ranch most of all. Alongside her devoted Irish wolfhounds and a spirited troupe of horses, donkeys, and Icelandic sheep, the ranch becomes Houston’s sanctuary, a place where she discovers how the natural world has mothered and healed her after a childhood of horrific parental abuse and neglect.

In essays as lucid and invigorating as mountain air, Deep Creek delivers Houston’s most profound meditations yet on how "to live simultaneously inside the wonder and the grief…to love the damaged world and do what I can to help it thrive."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393241020
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	01/29/2019
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.20(h) x 1.40(d)

About the Author

Pam Houston is the prize-winning author of Contents May Have Shifted, among other books. She is professor of English at the University of California–Davis and lives on a ranch at 9,000 feet in Colorado near the headwaters of the Rio Grande.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Some Kind of Calling 1

Ranch Almanac: Buying Hay 13

Part 1 Getting Out

The Tinnitus of Truth Telling 19

Ranch Almanac: Stacking Wood 31

Retethering 35

Ranch Almanac: Donkey Chasing 48

Part 2 Digging In

The Season of Hunkering Down 55

Ranch Almanac: Leonids 65

Mother's Day Storm 67

Ranch Almanac: Puppy 86

A Kind of Quiet Most People Have Forgotten 89

Ranch Almanac: Log Chain 100

The Sound of Horse Teeth on Hay 103

Ranch Almanac: Born in a Barn 116

Ranch Archive 119

Ranch Almanac: First Warm Day 139

Eating Phoebe 142

Ranch Almanac: Lambing 155

Part 3 Diary of a Fire

Diary of a Fire 161

Ranch Almanac: Carving Rivers 222

Part 4 Elsewhere

Kindness 227

Ranch Almanac: Woolly Nelson 240

Of Spirit Bears, Humpbacks, Narwhal, Manatees and Mothers 245

Ranch Almanac: Almanac 271

Part 5 Deep Creek

Deep Creek 275

Acknowledgments 301

Editorial Reviews

★ 09/17/2018
Houston (A Little More About Me), a professor of English at UC Davis, brings compassion, a deep sense of observation, and a profound sense of place to essays centered around the 120-acre ranch in the Colorado Rockies that serves as home base in her busy life of travel and academic commitments. Houston’s descriptions of ranch routine, which “heals me with its dailiness, its necessary rituals not one iota different than prayer,” leads her organically toward graceful, “unironic odes to nature.” Intimate but not sensationalized stories of Houston’s upbringing in an unstable suburban household with an abusive father and a neglectful, alcoholic mother set off her gratitude for an adult life lived in the midst of a sometimes perilous but beautiful landscape. “Ranch Almanac” entries that alternate with the essays offer delightful appreciations of the ranch’s other residents, including wolfhounds, lambs, chickens, and miniature donkeys; its human visitors, including her all-important “wood guy”; and the natural wonders visible there, notably including the Milky Way. Houston’s vision finds a solid place among the chronicles of quiet appreciation of the American wilderness, without the misanthropy that often accompanies the genre; her passion for the land and its inhabitants is irresistibly contagious. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly

"There is so much beauty, wisdom, and truth in this book, I felt the pages almost humming in my hands. I was riveted and enlightened, inspired and consoled. This is a book for all of us, right now."

Cheryl Strayed

"Always impressive, Houston is in striking form here. Her talent remains remarkable and her words extraordinarily affecting and effective."

Booklist (starred review)

"This book is endlessly wise, funny, and full of heart. To say that its clear-eyed, doom-laden—yet loving—message is important and timely would be an understatement. It is unapologetically sincere, utterly moving."

Tommy Orange

"In the face of the world’s turmoil, this book is utter clarity. In the face of the world’s harshness, this book is a soft place to land…If you find yourself careening toward despair, pick up Deep Creek and read even just one page. The words there will lift you back to hope—not the sentimental kind, but the kind that can and does change the world for the better. What gratitude we owe to Pam Houston for writing it."

B. K. Loren

"Full of wisdom, wit, and loving attention, Pam Houston’s survey of her life and land should be required reading for anyone who loves this planet we call home."

Camille T. Dungy

"Deep Creek is a love letter to earth, animals, and the best of humanity. Pam Houston has taken our heartache and woven it back into hope. Her stories of love, loss, and a life lived in relationship to land give us good reasons not to give up on ourselves or each other. This is the book we need right now to remind us how to endure—passionately. An unstoppable heart song."

Lidia Yuknavitch

"Houston has a great range of vision, and she’s fun to read. She gets the land right…In this perfectly American memoir, a restless heart finds its place."

Craig Childs

★ 2018-10-02

A collection of essays about finding and maintaining one's place on our changing planet.

In her latest, Houston (English/Univ. of California, Davis; Contents May Have Shifted, 2012, etc.) writes with the same unvarnished, truth-loaded sentences that made her short story collection Cowboys Are My Weakness (1992) a contemporary classic. Her nonfiction persona, like many of her fictional narrators, is tough and full of gumption. "Did I ask myself whether putting 5 percent down on a 120-acre ranch I had no idea how to take care of and no foreseeable way to pay for might have been taking the idea of retethering to the earth to a radical extreme? I did not," she writes, continuing, "if buying the ranch was a gross overreaction to either my mother's death or my book's [Cowboys] unexpected turn, it was a secret I kept from myself." Of course, the author made it work, and the ranch served as a connecting point between seasonal teaching and her many travels. The author's affinity for the place is clearly powerful—and infectious for readers. "Ranch Archive," which mostly recounts the history of the ranch itself, is the least engaging piece, but the rest are excellent, as the author enthuses readers through her prose and attitude alike. Writing in the face of climate change, she refuses to shrink. "I am celebrating because this magnificent rock we live on demands celebration," she writes. "I am celebrating because how in the face of this earth could I not?" By the end of the book, she has been through it all—fires, blizzards, murdered animals, and more—and we understand when she writes, "when you give yourself wholly to a piece of ground, its goodness enters your bloodstream like an infusion. You will never be alone in the same way again, and never quite dislocated. Your heart will grow down into and back out of that ground like a tree."

A profound and inspiring love letter to one piece of Earth—and to the rest of it, as well.

Kirkus Reviews

"Insightful and evocative"

Los Angeles Times - Nathan Devel

"Pam Houston's Deep Creek is (of course) fantastic."

Outside - Heather Hansman

"If Cowboys Are My Weakness was Pam Houston’s call to millions of women—blasting us with self-recognition of how we give away our own power—then her new book is the response to that call."

Rumpus - Amy Reardon

"Good writing can make you envious, no matter how foreign the terrain. Other times, you read a good memoir and find yourself wanting to track down the author and become friends. A third kind of book is so insightful and evocative, you shelve it beside other favorite and instructive titles. Deep Creek might just do all three."

Los Angeles Times - Nathan Deuel

"Pam Houston is the rodeo queen of American letters. In Deep Creek, her voice has never been more fully realized, and her message never more important."

Samantha Dunn

"Pam Houston is in possession of a deep, heart- achingly beautiful love for her own personal piece of earth. And as equally deep is her ability for hope."

Chicago Review of Books - Sara Cutaia

"There are few books I have read that remind me how knowing a place, studying a place—the soil and weather and beasts and flora and trails and light at a given time of year, and scent at another, and sounds at another—is one of the ways we heal, one of the ways we de-alienate, one of the ways we return to what we are—the earth; our home. Pam Houston’s Deep Creek is a miracle this way. It reminds us how to get home."

Ross Gay

"There is so much beauty, wisdom, and truth in this book, I felt the pages almost humming in my hands. I was riveted and enlightened, inspired and consoled. This is a book for all of us, right now."- Cheryl Strayed, author of Wild


"This book is endlessly wise, funny, and full of heart. To say that its clear-eyed, doom-laden?yet loving?message is important and timely would be an understatement. It is unapologetically sincere, utterly moving."- Tommy Orange, author of There There


"Deep Creek is a love letter to earth, animals, and the best of humanity. Pam Houston has taken our heartache and woven it back into hope. Her stories of love, loss, and a life lived in relationship to land give us good reasons not to give up on ourselves or each other. This is the book we need right now to remind us how to endure?passionately. An unstoppable heart song."- Lidia Yuknavitch, author of The Misfit's Manifesto

From the Publisher

Pam Houston reads her high-country memoir in the clear voice of a lifelong storyteller who is at home in front of the mic. Her skill with words animates this richly detailed and honest-to-the bone work. She narrates with an assured tone and admirable poise, since her life has been packed with toils and snares. This audiobook reveals the dark—her father was horribly abusive and her mother detached, both were alcoholics. And the light—with every cent she has, she buys a remarkable mountain ranch in the remote reaches of Colorado. There she lives with her Irish wolfhounds, donkeys, horses, and sheep. Adversity is never far, but her mountain life, where snow is measured in feet, allows for solitude and whets her love of the outdoors. A.D.M. © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine

JULY 2019 - AudioFile