High times
Memoir of ranching in the Colorado mountains knits unlike subjects into a wide-ranging contemplation of life BOOK OF THE WEEK REVIEW
Please put this book on your must-read list for 2019 — Pam Houston’s “Deep Creek — Finding Hope in the High Country.” You won’t be disappointed.
On the contrary, it will fill you with the author’s indomitable joy of life as she comes to grips with hardship and death.
This memoir has so much going for it — the drama of storytelling, the power of love (of humans and animals), the strength to survive in harsh, isolated below-zero winters, the goodwill of neighbors and distant friends and the stark radiance of surrounding mountains and streams. It is a book of deeply felt and conveyed experiences in vignettes that illuminate relationships the author generously shares with readers. The geographical center of those vignettes is Houston’s 120-acre homestead near the headwaters of the Rio Grande in southwestern Colorado, and not far from the town of Creede. She has been living on the ranch with some members of the animal kingdom — horses, mini-donkeys, sheep, chickens and Irish wolfhounds — for about 25 years.
“I have always preferred the company of animals to the company of people,” Houston writes. “I’ve been told this means I am emotionally stunted in some way, and perhaps I am.” (She got married last August.) The vignettes are entwined threads that form a large, rich tapestry, mostly about her life on the ranch. The threads may be no more than one paragraph, although they are a kind of literary mixtape.
“I’m interested in how unlike subjects fit together,” Houston said in a phone interview. “That’s one thing I do with my work. I tend to write little bits of things that feel hot or painful or interesting or beautiful. Then I put unlike objects together. That’s the way I work. I don’t especially want to confuse the reader, but I feel there’s a lot of power putting unedited things together and how they relate to each other.”
She said she stayed with the ranch as the book’s dominant theme as long as she could. “And then I let other things attach to it — my upbringing, other things that come in later,” she said.
“I write a lot of things down. I used to have a really good memory. Now I’m 57 years old and my memory is not what it once was. I collect material all the time, even though I don’t know what book it goes in,” Houston said.
A blurb by author Cheryl Strayed on the back cover of “Deep Creek” is right on: “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.”
“Deep Creek” is Houston’s fifth book. Her first was the 1992 short-story collection “Cowboys Are My Weakness.” Her stories have been selected for the anthologies “The Best American Short Stories,” “The 2013 Pushcart Prize” and “The O. Henry Awards.” Houston has also published novels and essays.
She teaches at the Institute of American Indian Arts’ low-residency MFA program in Santa Fe and is a professor of English at the University of California-Davis. Houston co-founded the nonprofit Writing by Writers, which sponsors literary retreats.