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Pam Houston’s book, Deep Creek, Finding Hope in the High Country, arrived, and I started reading and couldn’t stop. Though it includes a traumatic childhood, it’s a celebration of nature and survival.

 What surprised me though is that when she asked her class at UC Davis how many had spent a night sleeping in the wilderness, the answer was zero. Zero.

 I wondered what is it to lose contact with the land, the earth, to not see the full passage and shades of light, day to night, night to day. Ms. Houston gives us this passage through her observations and journeys. We share and feel the ups and down, fires and cold, and the beauty of love and connection shared. I felt my muscles, both physical and spiritual, firm as I hiked and traveled with her and shared the beauty of this earth.

 In 1971, Captain Edgar J. Mitchell, the sixth man to walk on the moon, was changed by seeing the earth from space. He felt the love we share, a universal love, what he called “quantum resonance with all that is”.

 We may not be able to spend a night in the wilderness but through Pam’s book we get a taste of seeing the earth in her wholeness and we even experience a belief in ghosts.

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. Houston’s ranch becomes her sanctuary, a place where she discovers how the natural world has mothered and healed her after a childhood of parental abuse and neglect.


In a work 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.”

Antigone rated it really liked it
Shelves: memoir-biography
Pam Houston, author and English professor, purchased a ranch on a wing and a prayer some twenty-plus years ago. She turns now, in mid-life, to examine what this Colorado homestead has meant to her in terms of finance, labor, lifestyle, and healing from the deep and dismal wounds of an abusive childhood. Beating beneath the text of a rich and beautifully depicted existence on a modern-day frontier is the racing heart of a daughter who could not relax a single day in residence with her father or risk a single unguarded moment with a mother who made it perfectly clear she would never measure up.

 When a raging forest fire threatens to jump the Continental Divide and rush down the mountain to her home, the triggers tip like so many serpentined dominoes...

 Any reasonable, self-caring person scheduled to teach twenty-one full days in a row without a single day off would take themselves the hell to bed. To say nothing of the readings, and panels, and the endless infernal cocktail parties. But in every picture that exists of me as a child I have rings around my eyes so dark I look anemic. Staying awake all night never kept my father from hurting me, but I wanted to know in advance when it was going to happen. I couldn't bear it if it took me by surprise.

 Left then to worry and wait, wait and worry, the familiar childhood factoring begins...

 Another lesson from my childhood: once the thing I fear most happens, there's no place to go but up. Being cut out of my father's Cadillac with a chain saw by highway patrollers on Christmas Eve, for instance, was so much better than sitting in the bar with him while he had his fourth martini knowing black ice was forming on the road outside. Being in the safety of the hospital while they applied my three-quarter body cast with all the nurses making a big fuss over my four-year-old self was so much better than knowing my father was about to pick me up and throw me across the room.

 Waiting is terrible, but soon, maybe very soon, the bad thing will have already happened, and I'll be able to start from whatever I have left...

 Most of this account remains on the ranch; its buildings, its land, its animals, its every struggle and ordeal. Carving out her safe space is what gives her journey meaning, her efforts value, that child's heart its reason to continue beating. And though the cost of maintaining this 120-acre sanctuary entails constant out-of-town employments, entails leaving the very protected state she's fought so hard to create, this is, conversely, a signal of just how committed she is to herself and her well-being. Whatever it takes.

 A moving memoir, and ridiculously well-written. One warning, though. Animals suffer through several of these pages, as they tend to do in wilderness locales. Those with sensitivities on this score will likely have to prepare themselves for that.



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.
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