Rants from the Hill Read online

  ALSO BY MICHAEL P. BRANCH

  Raising Wild: Dispatches from a Home in the Wilderness

  ROOST BOOKS

  An imprint of Shambhala Publications, Inc.

  4720 Walnut Street

  Boulder, Colorado 80301

  roostbooks.com

  © 2017 by Michael P. Branch

  “Anecdote of the Jar” from The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens by Wallace Stevens, copyright © 1954 by Wallace Stevens and copyright renewed 1982 by Holly Stevens.

  Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC and by Faber & Faber Limited. All rights reserved.

  “How to Like It” from Velocities: New and Selected Poems, 1966–1992 by Stephen Dobyns, copyright © 1994 by Stephen Dobyns. Used by permission of Penguin Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC and by Harold Ober Associates.

  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.

  This page constitutes a continuation of the copyright page.

  COVER PHOTOGRAPH BY EDSON HARDT / ISTOCK

  COVER DESIGN BY DANIEL URBAN-BROWN

  eBook design adapted from printed book design by Daniel Urban-Brown

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Branch, Michael P., author. | Branch, Michael P. Raising wild.

  Title: Rants from the hill: on packrats, bobcats, wildfires, curmudgeons, a drunken Mary Kay lady, and other encounters with the wild in the high desert / Michael P. Branch.

  Description: First edition. | Boulder: Roost Books, 2017.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016053828 | ISBN 9781611804577 (paperback: acid-free paper)

  eISBN 9780834840911

  Subjects: LCSH: Branch, Michael P.—Homes and haunts—Great Basin. | Wilderness areas—Great Basin. | Deserts—Great Basin. | Branch, Michael P.—Family. | Parenting—Great Basin. | Natural history—Great Basin. | Great Basin—Social life and customs. | Nevada—Social life and customs. | Great Basin—Description and travel. | Nevada—Description and travel. | BISAC: HUMOR / Form / Essays. | NATURE / Essays. | BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Personal Memoirs.

  Classification: LCC F789 .B74 2017 | DDC 979—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2016053828

  v4.1

  a

  For my parents, Stu and Sharon Branch

  without you no hill

  Benedictio: May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds. May your rivers flow without end, meandering through pastoral valleys tinkling with bells, past temples and castles and poets’ towers into a dark primeval forest where tigers belch and monkeys howl, through miasmal and mysterious swamps and down into a desert of red rock, blue mesas, domes and pinnacles and grottos of endless stone, and down again into a deep vast ancient unknown chasm where bars of sunlight blaze on profiled cliffs, where deer walk across the white sand beaches, where storms come and go as lightning clangs upon the high crags, where something strange and more beautiful and more full of wonder than your deepest dreams waits for you—beyond that next turning of the canyon walls.

  —EDWARD ABBEY, preface to the 1988

  reprint of Desert Solitaire (1968)

  CONTENTS

  The View from Ranting Hill

  The Ghost of Silver Hills

  A Thousand-Mile Walk to Home

  Customer Cranky

  Trapping the Bees

  Feral Child

  Ground Truthing the Peaceable Kingdom

  Lucy the Desert Cat

  How Many Bars in Your Cell?

  A Visit from the Mary Kay Lady

  The Washoe Zephyr

  Balloons on the Moon

  Guests in the House of Fire

  In Defense of Bibliopedestrianism

  Lawn Guilt

  Time for a Tree House

  Harvesting the Desert Shoe Tree

  Most Likely to Secede

  Planting the Dog

  My Home Lake

  Chickenfeathers Strikes Water

  Anecdote of the Jeep

  Mockingbird on the Wing

  What’s Drier Than David Sedaris?

  Hunting for Scorpions

  Beauregard Puppy

  Desert Insomnia

  After Ten Thousand Years

  Words and Clouds

  Singing Mountain

  Towering Cell Trees

  Rantosaurus Silverhillsii

  Hillbilly Cyborg

  Out on Misfits Flat

  I Brake for Rants

  Wild Christmas Pinyon

  An Assay on Auld Lang Syne

  The Bucket List

  Credits

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  E-mail Sign-up

  THE VIEW FROM RANTING HILL

  I WAS NOT ALWAYS DEVOTED to the pastoral fantasy of living in the remote high desert of the American West. Earlier in life, I worked my way through the serial pastoral fantasies of withdrawing from the din and superficiality of overcivilization to a rustic life in the Blue Ridge Mountains, by the Atlantic seashore, and in a Florida swamp. But I like to think that I have become more focused over time, as I succumbed and committed to the driest and most impossible of pastoral fantasies more than twenty years ago: I am now a confirmed desert rat.

  It might be said that all things pastoral are a form of fantasy, in the sense that our escapist dreams are our least achievable and most necessary. But there was something especially irrational about my passionate desire to retreat to a landscape as extreme and inhospitable as the one that became my home. The Great Basin is the largest of American deserts, a 190,000-square-mile immensity of alien territory that rolls out from the Rockies west to the Sierra Nevada, bordered on the north by the Columbia Plateau and down south by those better-known deserts, the Mojave and Sonoran. From this inconceivably vast desert basin no drop of water ever reaches the sea. Out here in northern Nevada, on the far western edge of the Great Basin, we live in the rain shadow of the Sierra, which limits our annual precipitation to about seven inches. Because the elevation is almost 6,000 feet it is cold here as well as hot, subject to blizzard as well as wildfire, and characterized by extremes of weather and temperature unmatched by any other US state.

  While environmental writers often deploy the metaphor of falling in love to evoke a magical moment of intimacy with a natural landscape, the Great Basin Desert is so titanic, inhospitable, and unwelcoming that the urge to dwell here is not easily understood, even by those of us who have chosen to act on it. Given that pastoral fantasies remain perpetually vulnerable to threats as simple as bad weather or the need for a day job, my attempt at bucolic retreat in this land of wildfire, hypothermia, desiccation, and rattlers might seem ill-advised. But the sheer vastness and starkness of this place attracted me and then worked on me slowly, over time, like wind on rock, until I had no ambition greater than to make a life in these high, dry wilds.

  Finding the way out here was a long, challenging process. Initially, my wife, Eryn, and I moved to a semirural area about fifteen miles northwest of Reno, Nevada. There we hiked, gardened, and played music but also worked, saved, and planned, always eyeing a move even farther into the hinterlands. After several years, we had saved enough to begin our search for a piece of raw land in a spectacular but isolated area of desert hills and canyons adjacent to public lands and at the foot of a stunning, split-summited, 8,000-foot mountain. Because it was so distant, high-elev
ation, fire-prone, and so frequently rendered inaccessible by snow, mud, and terrible roads, land in this area was relatively inexpensive—and because water is the name of the game here and only one well is permitted per parcel, large pieces of land were only marginally more expensive than smaller ones.

  After a search that lasted several years, we purchased a hilly, 49.1-acre parcel near the end of an awful, 2.3-mile-long, nearly impassable dirt road. The land had no well, no building pad, and no access road, but it was wild, alluring, and very close to Bureau of Land Management (BLM) lands stretching all the way to the foot of the Sierra Nevada in neighboring California. For several more years, as we saved up to build, we visited the property regularly—hiking, working to reduce fuels to prepare for wildfire, and considering where a house might someday be constructed. Before long, we cut a narrow, sinuous driveway, a half-mile-long strip of perilous caliche mud that wound to the top of a prominent hill at the back of the parcel. There, we later sunk a well and cleared a small patch of sagebrush and burned-over juniper snags in hopes of someday making a home. To help us visualize the house, I drove rebar stakes along the perimeter of the would-be structure and connected them with twine. We often trekked up to the site, opened camp chairs somewhere within the twine house, and imagined what it would be like to someday sit in that spot within our home, taking in that particular view of the distant, snowcapped mountains.

  In partnership with my family, and with my dad serving as our chief designer and general contractor, we eventually succeeded in designing and building a passive-solar home on the high hill at the back of our land. But life has a way of starting the next thing before you can quite finish the one you were working on. By the time we moved into our new home on New Year’s Day 2004, we had become parents—a life change that puts pastoral fantasies in an entirely different light. Somehow our wild, romantic, and profoundly uninformed decision to embrace such an extreme mode of living now seemed even more extreme with ten-month-old Hannah Virginia in tow, and even the twenty-five-mile drive to town to buy diapers and whiskey (the first of which necessitates the second) seemed daunting. The realization that we might be in over our heads dawned with our second morning on the hill, when I began a mental list of all the local critters either large enough to eat or poisonous enough to kill our baby girl. Mountain lions, bobcats, and coyotes. Rattlers for sure. Possibly scorpions. Maybe a stray black bear from the nearby Sierra. Out here, great horned owls eviscerate six-pound, black-tailed jackrabbits, and golden eagles with seven-and-a-half-foot wingspans prey on pronghorn antelope fawns, so I was not entirely sure our kid would be safe even from the birds. But Hannah pulled through just fine and was joined, nearly four years later, by little sister Caroline Emerson. The four of us have been living a very challenging, gratifying, and uncommon life up here ever since.

  In a media landscape that appears increasingly fragmented, ideological, and scientifically uninformed, High Country News has produced reliable, detailed, thoughtful, and well-written long-form environmental journalism about the American West since 1970. I had long been a subscriber when, in the spring of 2010, the folks at the magazine invited me to contribute a monthly column to their online edition. They offered me a great deal of creative freedom, and it was from that room to roam that the essays in the “Rants from the Hill” series emerged. The concept was simple: I would send missives about land and life from our remote hill in the western Great Basin Desert, and I would do so in a voice and with an angle of vision that would add a new perspective to the magazine’s longstanding engagement of natural environments in the West.

  Since that time I have written a big stack of small essays about our unusual life here on Ranting Hill, and out in the nearby canyons, playas, and mountains. The book you now hold is an embodiment of the “Rants from the Hill” series, although the essays have been selected, revised, resequenced, and, in many cases, renamed. This book is now a collection of what Walt Whitman called “specimen days”: the essays are representative moments of encounter with the places, weather, characters, flora, and fauna of our remote corner of northwestern Nevada’s high desert.

  In his 1841 essay “Self-Reliance,” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “I would write on the lintels of the door-post, Whim.” I have been guided by that spirit of spontaneity in composing the Rants, which have emerged organically from the events, ideas, characters (both human and nonhuman), and experiences that have, over time, come to make up my shared life with Eryn and our daughters on Ranting Hill. In this sense, the fires and floods, mountain lions and bobcats, rattlers and scorpions—even the eccentric rural neighbors—wrote themselves into the Rants simply by making appearances in our life. Although the events and characters I describe have been sculpted with the tools of creative nonfiction and often spun into shape on the lathe of humor, they are grounded in our very real experiences here in the remote foothills of the western Great Basin.

  Three driving concerns inspire this book. The first has to do with the longstanding, centuries-old misperception of deserts in the American cultural imaginary. It has rarely been necessary to explain to Americans why a mountain, river, lake, forest, meadow, or seashore is a beautiful place. We have long seen such places celebrated on Sierra Club calendars and in bad oil paintings on motel walls. Arid lands have not fared as well in the American environmental imagination, and even among deserts—which are arguably the most maligned natural landscapes in North America—the Great Basin has been doubly disenfranchised. This vast country lacks the postcard red-rock arches of southern Utah, the epic majesty of Arizona’s Grand Canyon, or even the saguaro-sentineled sandscapes so often represented in American cinema—a fact attributable less to the undeniable beauty of the Mojave than to its economically convenient proximity to the dream factory of Hollywood.

  The Great Basin is immense and sublimely beautiful, but as with all things sublime, it can inspire feelings of unfamiliarity, vulnerability, and even fear—feelings that engender an environmental aesthetic that has caused this high desert to be too often viewed as a barren wasteland, rather than as the rich and biodiverse network of natural interrelationships that it actually is. Unfortunately, that landscape aesthetic has very real environmental consequences. For example, it is no accident that during the Cold War Nevada was chosen as the place to detonate nine hundred nuclear weapons, or that Yucca Mountain has, for decades now, been the proposed repository of the nation’s high-level radioactive waste. While I do not intend the Rants to solve such political problems, I do hope they highlight the unfortunate and sometimes dangerous connections between our misperceptions of desert lands and how we ultimately choose to understand and treat those lands.

  My second abiding concern is how often environmental narratives willfully erase families and children from the scene. Beginning with the earliest literary adventures—from James Fenimore Cooper’s The Pioneers (1823) and Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851) to Theodore Roosevelt’s Ranch Life and the Hunting-trail (1888) and John Muir’s My First Summer in the Sierra (1911)—wild places have often been represented as the province of men, while masculinity has been characterized as a form of brave solitude that could only be tested fully against the life-threatening power of nature. Both the fictional and real heroes of American environmental literature have often been men in flight not only from the pressures of civilized life but also from their roles as husbands, fathers, and neighbors. But I am no Natty Bumppo, Rip Van Winkle, Ishmael, or Huck Finn—no Henry David Thoreau, Edward Abbey, Everett Ruess, or Christopher McCandless. Although I value solitude and walk well over 1,000 wilderness miles each year without company, my primary connection to nature is through my family and, especially, through shared experiences with our daughters. To the degree that the canon of environmental writing has depended upon narratives of solitude to valorize intimacy with the natural world, it has failed to account for what is most important in many of our lives: family. My favorite endorsement of the Rants essays came from an editor at High Country News who claimed, “If Thorea
u drank more whiskey and lived in the desert, he’d write like this.” Much as I embrace and treasure this characterization, for it to be accurate it must expand to imagine an arid-lands literary descendant of Thoreau who, like John Muir, loves the wild but is also a husband and the father of two daughters.

  Finally, I hope the Rants demonstrate the pleasure, power, and poignancy of humor as a redemptive mode of engagement with the natural world. Environmental discourse has long been dominated by the jeremiad and the elegy—stylized, often predictable forms of expression that emphasize either our anger in the face of environmental degradation or our mourning in response to both immediate and impending environmental loss. With respect to the ongoing environmental crisis, let me be the first to say that anyone who is not angry and sad about current affairs is simply not paying attention. But there are substantial liabilities to environmental writing that is relentless in its insistence that we attend only to what is wounded and not also benefit from the regenerative potential of meaningful contact with place. Our default may be to feel that humor is an ineffective or perhaps even an inappropriate response to the degraded environmental conditions in which we find ourselves—that to welcome laughter is the moral equivalent of fiddling while Rome burns. I disagree. Humor not only is an effective means of examining our own behavior and exposing flaws in our culture’s most misguided values and destructive practices, but also functions as a crucial mode of self-reflection and self-protection. The comic is a life-giving force, because comedy encourages resilience and thus helps us to combat despair. As a writer, I believe that the craft of humor is an essential element of the art of survival.

  In addition to these primary drivers—appreciation for deserts, inclusion of families, and an embrace of humor—the Rants reveal a wide range of other preoccupations. Among these I count the power of place to shape one’s character and sensibility; the relationship between human and nonhuman animals; the correlation between material nature and the language used to describe it; the difficulty of balancing a desire for freedom and solitude with a need for social interdependence; the fascinating, idiosyncratic characters who are both attracted to and produced by isolated modes of dwelling; the power of imagining the land up and down a range of geological and temporal scales; the environmental consequences of culturally devaluing certain landscape types; the tension between childhood and adult perceptions of the natural world; and, the myriad ways in which, try as we might, our assumptions about nature are usually wrong.