Raising Wild Read online

  Sign up to receive free projects and special offers from Roost Books.

  Or visit us online to sign up at roostbooks.com/eroost.

  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 floor—not just to live with but to know them. Michael Branch’s book points forward, not back.”

  —GARY SNYDER

  “I have long considered Michael Branch one of the true visionaries of western American literature—and 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 photograph by David J. Slater / Alamy Stock Photo

  Cover design by 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 Credits 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 haunts—Great Basin. | Wilderness areas—Great Basin. | Branch, Michael P.—Family. | Parenting—Great Basin. | Sustainability—Great Basin. | Great Basin—Biography. | Great Basin—Description and travel. | Great Basin—Environmental conditions. | BISAC: NATURE / Essays. | BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Personal Memoirs. | FAMILY & RELATIONSHIPS / Parenting / Fatherhood.

  For Hannah Virginia and Caroline Emerson

  contents

  PRE-AMBLE

  Learning to Walk

  PART ONE

  Birthing

  1. Endlessly Rocking

  2. The Nature within Us

  3. Tracking Stories

  4. Ladder to the Pleiades

  PART TWO

  Wilding

  5. The Adventures of Peavine and Charlie

  6. The Wild within Our Walls

  7. Playing with the Stick

  8. Freebirds

  PART THREE

  Humbling

  9. Finding the Future Forest

  10. My Children’s First Garden

  11. The Hills Are Alive

  12. Fire on the Mountain

  CODA

  The V.E.C.T.O.R.L.O.S.S. Project

  Reading Group Guide

  Acknowledgments

  Credits

  About the Author

  E-mail Sign-Up

  PRE-AMBLE

  Learning to Walk

  “Off the trail” is another name for the Way, and sauntering off the trail is the practice of the wild. That is also where—paradoxically—we 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 life’s 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 dog—I’d 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 on—just 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 mountain’s 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 mountain’s 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 life’s 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.

  On her fourth birthday, Hannah blew out the candles on her birthday cake and then turned immediately to me.

  “Dad, am I old enough to climb Moonrise now?” she asked, as if the process of extinguishing the candles had suddenly brought her to a new level of readiness for outdoor adventure.

  “Not yet, Bug. How about if we go up on your seventh birthday?” I replied.

  “How about birthday six instead?” she persisted. The look on her face was both plaintive and determined.

  “OK, kid, six it is. Two years from today. Put it on your calendar.”

  “Can CC come?” Hannah asked, looking down at her six-month-old sister, Caroline, who was at that moment pulling herself upright by grasping the seat of the kitchen stool upon which Hannah sat. “It wouldn’t be fair not to take her with us for something this important.”

  “Good point,” Eryn replied. “Sure, you guys can take CC. It will be the first ascent of Moonrise for both Branch girls!”

  During the two intervening years, Moonrise was never out of sight, either literally or figuratively. For Hannah it was as if the days were being counted down, the anticipation rising as her sixth birthday approached. She often told Caroline stories about the upcoming “Moonrise Expedition,” as she called it, an expedition that also appeared in Hannah’s writings and drawings and even in her dreams. In an attempt to document insights gleaned from one dream of the great expedition, Hannah drew a detailed map, which she reasoned we could use to navigate safely to summit and thus avoid the explorer’s fate of becoming forever lost in this vast desert wilderness. I explained that because our house would never be out of sight during the hike, we’d probably be fine, but I thanked her for the map just the same, and we agreed that it would be a good idea for her to add it to the day pack whose contents she had begun assembling more than a month before the epic climb was to take place.

  When the day of her sixth birthday arrived, Hannah shouldered her little red day pack, and Eryn lifted Caroline into the baby backpack I had buckled around my waist and chest. After we made sure we had everything needed for the Moonrise Expedition, Eryn took pictures of the momentous occasion, and I set off with the girls toward the western horizon.

  By the time we finished bushwhacking up the brushy draw behind the house, Hannah was tired and thirsty, and she had been caught a few times on the sharp thorns of the desert peach bushes that choked the ravine. But she was tough, continuing to slog uphill, her sinewy little legs driving downward as she leaned into the grade, pumping her elbows side to side like an old Scotsman striding into the wind. Hannah kept this up for two more hours, when at last she plopped down on the steep southern exposure of Moonrise. At this elevation the brushy canyon slopes had given way to open, sandy desert dotted with wild rye and ephedra. Patches of snow hid in the shade of a few boulders across the canyon, while the delicate yellow flowers of sagebrush buttercup were visible here and there in damp spots in the granitic sand.

  On this steep desert slope we all drank water, ate snacks from Hannah’s pack, and marveled at how tiny our house appeared, so far below us down in the sage. “You’ve come a long way today, Bug,” I affirmed, looking homeward. “This is your biggest hike ever. How do you feel?”

  “I’m pretty pooped, Dad. Do you think I can make it?” She looked tired, flushed, and also a little worried about the fate of the expedition.

  “I do. It is so steep from here to summit that you’ll have to use your hands, though, and scramble up like a desert monkey. We can go home anytime you want. Moonrise will always be here for you. But if you want to go all the way up, I think you can make it.” She sat quietly, gazing out over the Great Basin. I couldn’t tell what she was thinking or if she even knew. There were countless occasions on which I had taken the long view across our home desert with that same exhausted, exhilarated, open-hearted gaze.

  “What do you think we’ll find at the top?” she asked, as if weighing the prize of the summit against the cost of her fatigue.

  “The thing about climbing a mountain is you never know what you’ll find at the top. You’ll just have to go up and see. But you don’t have to do it today, honey.”

  Hannah paused for a moment and then stood up, though I still wasn’t sure what decision she had made. “Let’s go see what’s at the top of Moonrise,” she said resolutely, as she began to clamber up the final pitch with renewed energy. I trudged along behind, using my hands now and then for balance, watching Hannah rising into the sky above me as Caroline bounced in her pack on my shoulders.

  Thirty minutes later our expedition’s leader shouted back, “Dad, I think I’m almost there!”

  “Just a little farther, Bug,” I replied. “You go ahead and be the first up there, and we’ll be along soon.”

  Five minutes later, panting with the weight of Caroline on my back, I crested the ridge and lifted my head. There, on the rocky summit of Moonrise, stood my six-year-old daughter, wearing the widest grin her little face could contain and holding up an immense, gracefully curved, many-fingered, bone-white mule deer antler—the largest and most perfect imaginable.

  “Look what was on top of Moonrise!” Hannah exclaimed in delight. “Did you know this was up here?”

  I stood in silence, genuinely astonished at the remarkable antler. “No, honey, I didn’t,” I finally managed to reply, breaking into a wide smile to match hers. “I think your expedition was a success. Happy birthday, Bug.”

  I looked down at our little home, a small island in a vast sagebrush ocean, a sanctuary huddled among the scattered green dots of wild juniper trees below. It was a more meaningful view than I’d ever achieved from a higher ridge or even from the summit of my majestic home mountain. In that moment it occurred to me that maybe Moonrise actually was my home mountain. Our home mountain.

  For more than a decade now we have lived together—my wife, Eryn, and our two girls, Hannah and Caroline—in these high, dry wilds, on this windy knoll, amid the remote ridges and canyons of the western Great Basin. A vast 200,000-square-mile expanse of sagebrush steppe high desert, the Great Basin extends from the Columbia Plateau up north to the Mojave and Sonoran Deserts down south, from the Rocky Mountains all the way out here to northwestern Nevada, where we live among the arid hills that ripple out beneath the rain shadow of the towering granitic escarpment of the Sierra Nevada.

  The Great Basin is the largest and least familiar of American deserts, and it is among the most extreme landscapes in North America. To call conditions here “extreme” hardly does justice to the apocalyptic nature of life in this isolated high desert place. Since making our home here we’ve seen temperatures close to 110 degrees on the
top end and 20 below at the bottom, while day-night swings of 40 degrees occur often. We’ve had high winds whip up into impenetrable sandstorms of swirling alkali dust, while other periods have been so breathless and stultifying that it seemed the earth had ceased to turn on its axis. Some spells have been so dry that we went six months without feeling a drop of rain, while other years have brought thunderstorms so intense as to trigger flash floods, which blasted through this open desert in broad sheets led by roiling, muddy, foot-tall snouts, sweeping our road away and leaving us stranded. Because we’re in one of the most active seismic zones in the country, earthquakes have on occasion rattled books off our shelves, and smaller tremors are common. And, of course, this is fire country. There have been wildfires on the nearby public lands almost every summer or fall, and we have twice been subject to emergency evacuation as a curtain of wind-driven flames raced toward us across the desert plains beneath billowing black clouds of acrid smoke. Although we’ve occasionally been forced out by fire, we’ve more often been snowbound on our isolated hill, sometimes for days and often without electricity, huddled by the wood stove, gazing out at the beauty of snow that has sometimes been wind driven into drifts five feet deep.

  The critters here are as wild as the weather. Mountain lions hunt our high valley each winter, and on several occasions a bobcat has tried to make a meal of the few laying hens we keep. This is winter range for mule deer, which join us in autumn to avoid becoming the snowbound prey of lions up in the Sierra, and it is also the year-round home of pronghorn antelope, which we see gliding effortlessly through the open desert at speeds of up to sixty miles per hour. Coyote are everywhere in this landscape, loping through the sage and bitterbrush by day and yipping by night in bands whose shrill chorus is carried downcanyon on moonlit wind. Desert cottontails are dwarfed by seven-pound black-tailed jackrabbits, which are struck from above and eviscerated by big redtails and by the fierce, silent great horned owls that have repurposed our home’s peaked roof as a hunting perch. The golden eagles are much larger—so immense that they prey successfully on pronghorn fawns—while the white pelicans that glide high above us in splintered Vs on their way from one remote desert lake to another are larger still, each one a cross of alabaster drifting through the azure sky on a ten-foot wingspan that is second in length only to that of the California condor.