Michael P. Branch - How to Cuss in Western: And Other Missives from the High Desert

PRAISE FOR RAISING WILD

Sigurd F. Olson Nature Writing Award Honorable Mention

Association for the Study of Literature and Environment creative book award finalist

Finalist for the Evans Handcart Award

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, nontheoretical, 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.G ARY S NYDER

At last! A home for Michael Branchs joyous dispatches from the high desert, which I have long followed with delight. If youre unfamiliar with Branch, prepare for your first encounter with a singular sensibility, bracing yet affable. In part a memoir of building a unique home in an extraordinary place, in part a treatise on cultivating, protecting, and loving the wild, and each other therein, Raising Wild is a wholly defiant, tender book bristling with spirit, intelligence, and mountains of laughs.C LAIRE V AYE W ATKINS , author of Battleborn and Gold Fame Citrus

Michael Branch has been an essential figure in western letters for years. Now, in his marvelous Raising Wild, he brings us an intimate look at one remarkable familys lucky life situated more deeply into their place than most will ever know. Hugely loving but ardently unsentimental, open and curious yet skeptical as desert dust, Mikes dispatches shimmer. They mean so much, I could enjoy reading them even upside down, or back to front. R OBERT M ICHAEL P YLE , author of Sky Time in Grays River

Not since Rachel Carsons Sense of Wonder has there been such a lively and evocative account of intergenerational experiences in nature. Michael Branchs Raising Wild offers breathtaking lyricism, sage wisdom, and big belly laughs in equal measure. Most importantly, this collection is a testament to the value of marrying memory and placeespecially while in the company of those we love.K ATHRYN M ILES , author of Superstorm

Reading Michael Branchs prose is like attending a great and raucous party. A party held around a campfire in a secret corner of the wilderness full of intense talk, laughs, liquor, and deep insights. That the kids are invited this time makes it even better. A profound and moving book that just might change some lives.D AVID G ESSNER , author of All the Wild That Remains

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.J OHN T. P RICE , author of Daddy Long Legs

PRAISE FOR RANTS FROM THE HILL

Think: Cagney amid the cacti. Las Vegas Review-Journal

Lyrical and subversive, the book is a rollicking celebration of living a joyously untamed life. An engagingly quirky collection. Kirkus Reviews

There have been dozens of hermit-in-the-woods Walden-like memoirs and essay collections written since Henry David Thoreaus death, but few capture Thoreaus raw, stubborn love for the natural world with as much humor and honesty as Michael P. Branchs Rants From the Hill. Chicago Tribune

Branchs humorous storytelling offers both natural history and life lessons. Readers may not realize they are learning while smiling.Branch communicates his love of family and the natural environment through both wit and seriousness. Whole Terrain

ALSO BY MICHAEL P. BRANCH

Raising Wild: Dispatches from a Home in the Wilderness

Rants from the Hill: On Packrats, Bobcats, Wildfires,

Curmudgeons, a Drunken Mary Kay Lady, and Other

Encounters with the Wild in the High Desert

R OOST B OOKS

An imprint of Shambhala Publications, Inc.

4720 Walnut Street

Boulder, Colorado 80301

roostbooks.com

2018 by Michael P. Branch

Excerpt from A Certain Weariness from Extravagaria (Cierto cansancio from Estravagario, 1958, Fundacin Pablo Neruda) by Pablo Neruda, translated by Alastair Reid. Translation copyright 1974 by Alastair Reid. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux; and Fundacin Pablo Neruda.

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.

Cover art by inacioluc/istock

Cover design by Daniel Urban-Brown

L IBRARY OF C ONGRESS C ATALOGING - IN -P UBLICATION D ATA

Names: Branch, Michael P., author.

Title: How to cuss in western: and other missives from the high desert / Michael Branch.

Description: Boulder, Colorado: Roost Books, 2018.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017044337 | ISBN 9781611804614 (paperback)

eISBN9780834841543

Subjects: LCSH : Branch, Michael P.Homes and hauntsGreat Basin. | American wit and humor. | Wilderness areasGreat Basin. | ParentingGreat Basin. | Natural historyGreat Basin. | Great BasinDescription and travel. | NevadaDescription and travel. | BISAC : HUMOR / Form / Essays. | NATURE / Essays. | BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Personal Memoirs.

Classification: LCC F 789 . B 725 2018 | DDC 979dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017044337

v5.3.1

a

For my wife, Eryn

without you no stories

Everything is held together with stories. That is all that is holding us together, stories and compassion.

B ARRY L OPEZ , Winter Count (1981)

However, a good laugh is a mighty good thing, and rather too scarce a good thing; the mores the pity. So, if any one man, in his own proper person, afford stuff for a good joke to anybody, let him not be backward, but let him cheerfully allow himself to spend and be spent in that way. And the man that has anything bountifully laughable about him, be sure there is more in that man than you perhaps think for.

H ERMAN M ELVILLE , Moby-Dick (1851)

I hope to make pictures like I walk in the desertunder a spell, an instinct of motion, a kind of knowing that is essentially indirect and sideways. Of all the things I wondered about on this land, I wondered the hardest about the seduction of certain geographies that feel like homenot by story or blood but merely by their forms and colors. How our perceptions are our only internal map of the world, how there are places that claim you and places that warn you away. How you can fall in love with the light.

E LLEN M ELOY , The Anthropology of Turquoise: Reflections on Desert, Sea, Stone, and Sky (2002)