Branch - Raising wild: dispatches from a home in the wilderness

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Praise for Raising Wild

This book is not exactly about wild landscapes but the life of a house-holding family placed out there with two verge-of-puberty daughters. It is about our daily reality, not our fantasy possibilities, and who knows today what these girls will have to say later? So it is remarkably interesting, lively, non-theoretical, and hopeful. The wild might be wildfire or bushy-tailed woodrats under the floornot just to live with but to know them. Michael Branchs book points forward, not back.

GARY SNYDER

I have long considered Michael Branch one of the true visionaries of western American literatureand here is further proof. This beautiful, often raucous account of fatherhood and (wild) faith takes us even deeper into his remarkable kinship with northwestern Nevada. A place where, through the daily practices of love, humility, and humor, we can all learn to be at home in this world.

JOHN T. PRICE, author of Daddy Long Legs: The Natural Education of a Father

Raising Wild

DISPATCHES FROM A HOME IN THE WILDERNESS

Michael P. Branch

ROOST BOOKS

BOULDER

2016

Roost Books

An imprint of Shambhala Publications, Inc.

4720 Walnut Street

Boulder, Colorado 80301

roostbooks.com

2016 by Michael P. Branch

Cover art by Westend61/Getty Images

Cover design by Jess Morphew and Daniel Urban-Brown

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Witness from The Rain in the Trees by W. S. Merwin, copyright 1988 by W. S. Merwin. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

The section constitutes a continuation of the copyright page.

Title page illustration 2016 by grop/Shutterstock

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Names: Branch, Michael P.

Title: Raising wild: dispatches from a home in the wilderness / Michael P. Branch.

Description: First edition. | Boulder: Roost Books, 2016.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016000871 | eISBN 9780834840553 | ISBN 9781611803457 (hardcover: acid-free paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Branch, Michael P. | Branch, Michael P.Homes and hauntsGreat Basin. | Wilderness areasGreat Basin. | Branch, Michael P.Family. | ParentingGreat Basin. | SustainabilityGreat Basin. | Great BasinBiography. | Great BasinDescription and travel. | Great BasinEnvironmental conditions. | BISAC: NATURE / Essays. | BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Personal Memoirs. | FAMILY & RELATIONSHIPS / Parenting / Fatherhood.

For Hannah Virginia and Caroline Emerson

PRE-AMBLE

Off the trail is another name for the Way, and sauntering off the trail is the practice of the wild. That is also whereparadoxicallywe do our best work.

GARY SNYDER, The Practice of the Wild

I earned my whiskers as a desert rat out in the remote, hilly, high-elevation western Great Basin Desert, scurrying across the land, scrabbling up every dome, running each ridge, scouring all the canyon draws, poking my snout into any rocky crevice I could find. My lifes ambition had been to inhabit a place so remote as to provide immediate access to solitude and big wilderness. After many years of making incremental decisions that inched me closer to this dream, at last I took the leap. I put my life savings down on a parcel of raw land in the hinterlands of northwestern Nevada. My new property was not only suitably isolated and rendered nearly inaccessible by mud, snow, and unmaintained access roads, it was also at 6,000 feet in elevation and adjacent to public lands stretching west all the way to the foot of the Sierra Nevada mountains in neighboring California. Never mind walking the dogId be able to launch solo backpacking trips from my own front door. Of course I had no front door and no house to hang it onjust an exposed, windy patch of sand and sagebrush out on the threshold of a vast, beautiful high desert wilderness.

My first hike from the secluded hilltop where I would eventually build a passive solar home began at sunrise. I set off alone, tromping west up a nearby hill that I would later name Moonrise. From the crest of Moonrise I looked out across a sage-filled draw that swept gracefully up to the rocky cliffs ornamenting a higher summit ridge I would later call Palisades. Another hour of stepping out brought me to the top of Palisades, from which an even higher ridge came into view. Harder scrambling brought me to the boulder-strewn crest of that third ridge, which I would name Prospect. From Prospect I gazed west over my dream landscape. Below me steep slopes of sage and scree, dotted yellow-green with mounds of ephedra, fell away to a deep, broad, sweeping valley. Several miles away, on the far side of that wild valley, rose my home mountain, an impressive, 8,000-foot-tall, fifteen-mile-long sleeping giant whose rocky north-facing flanks held streaks of late-season snow. From Prospect Ridge I enjoyed an expansive view of a high desert montane landscape on the monumental, inhuman scale that is its signature. A small cluster of pronghorn antelope could be seen gliding across the bitterbrush-stippled flank of the distant mountain. Two glossy black ravens wheeled silently beneath me. I felt the exhilaration of solitude.

Descending the ridge in a long, semicontrolled slide down the scree slope, I soon reached the broad canyon and made my way across its sunny, sage-strewn expanse to the foot of the big mountain. From the wildfire-scorched bitterbrush flats at the mountains base I began an 1,800-foot ascent into the cloudless azure sky. Halfway up the mountain I discovered a small seep, where I paused to refill my water bottles. Looking back from there across the Great Basin I saw broken hills and alkali-white playas separated by juniper-dotted ridges rolling east to the horizon. Above me to the west twisted a faint game trail, rising through copses of bitter cherry and coyote willow and dodging between granite cliffs tattooed with chartreuse lichen.

Finally cresting the mountains 8,000-foot ridge, I found myself in a sweeping summit meadow that reclined between a brace of rocky peaks and was graced with groves of gnarled aspens and the occasional green dome of a snowberry bush. Spreading out before me in all directions was an undulating yellow blanket of flowering tower butterweed. As I stood in the swell and ripple of that wild meadow, I gazed even farther west, first to the valley 3,000 feet below and then out over green California, its thick conifer forests and towering granite turrets and gables ignited by shafts of high-elevation sunlight. I was a man alone in the wilderness, and in that moment of summit bliss I imagined there was nothing that I could not see. Only later would I discover that, even from that high peak, what mattered most remained invisible to me.

Ever since they were toddlers, our daughters, Hannah and Caroline, have had as their lifes ambition to achieve the summit of Moonrise, to finally stand with their fists in the air on the crest of what is in fact a modest bump in this immense landscape. An officially nameless little knoll of the sort that are numberless here in the Great Basin, Moonrise is less than a mile from our front door and perhaps only four or five hundred feet above us. It is the kind of summit a desert rat scurries over on his way to bigger, wilder quarry. But to a kid Moonrise looks imposing, and the idea of gaining a ridge carved so high into the sapphire desert sky has proven irresistible to the girls. The first ridge westward from our house, Moonrise is in sight on every walk we take together. It is what you notice when you walk Beauregard the dog, what you look up at when Dad pulls you overland in the sky-blue toboggan. The girls see it clearly from their play structure and from their tree house, too. If the window shades are up, Hannah and Caroline can see the etched crest of the ridge as they lie reading stories with my wife, Eryn, in their bunk beds. To a little kid, Moonrise fills the western sky.