Where Rivers Change Direction by
Mark Spragg
So Well Drawn
Growing up in rural Wyoming, Mark Spragg learned early to read the stars.
At 11 he was instructed to quit dreaming, and he went to work for his father
on the land. I was paid thirty dollars a month, had my own bed in the
bunkhouse, and three large, plain meals each day. The ranch is a
sprawling place where winter brings months of solitude and summer brings
tourists from the real world--city types who want a taste of the outdoors
and stare at the author and his family as if they were members of some
exotic tribe: Our guests were New Jersey gas station owners, New York
congressmen, Iowa farmers, judges, actors, plumbers, Europeans who
had read of Buffalo Bill and Sitting Bull and came to experience the
American West, the retired, the just beginning. By the age of 14, he and
his younger brother are leading them on camping trips into deep woods.
No one ever asked why we had no televisions, no daily paper. They came
for what my brother and I took for granted. They came to live the
anachronism that we considered our normal lives. As Spragg comes to
realize the strangeness of his life, he also detects flaws in his own

character--a fear of suffering and mortality that first shows itself when he
rides a sick horse too hard, until the animal hovers at the brink of death.
He knows that if he had faced the possibility of sickness, if he had been
brave, this animal would not have declined so quickly. Throughout his life,
this inability to face death, this terror of losing the beauty of the world he so
passionately witnesses, drives Spragg to distraction. Where Rivers
Change Direction combines a soaring spirituality with a visceral, often
stomach-churning attention to detail. Its a book that continually dares the
reader to turn away from its pages in an effort to digest the power of its
confused emotions and hauntingly spare images (a moon-fried plain, a
stillborn child baked alive in my mothers body). Like Peter Matthiessens
The Snow Leopard, Mark Spraggs memoir makes you feel youve been
somewhere, youve been out in the depths, and youve come back
changed. --Emily White
Personal Review: Where Rivers Change Direction by Mark
Spragg
What an unrelentingly gripping series of stories -- life, death, animals,
boys, girls, men, women, horses, snakes, water, wind, earth, blood, fire
and sky. Mark Spragg's style is a bit like David Hockney doing his
photograph collages. He doesn't show you everything, just bits and pieces
to make the whole. He lets you put some of the pieces in place. What a
style. It's shot through with his own strong character and some compelling
scenes of raw Wyoming life. The stories follow an amazing arc that you
don't see coming until the last chapter and then you just kind of want to
start all over again, and meet the boy that became the man. Beautiful stuff.
Look, I'm not really out here trying to sell my book at every corner but the
people who told me about Mark Spragg are readers of my book, "Antler
Dust." I had three recommendations from "Antler Dust" readers to check
out Mark Spragg, mostly because, I believe, of the detailed outdoors action
and the fact that my book takes place in a neighboring state, Colorado. I
am going to read more Mark Spragg but for others who like him, please
also consider Antler Dust.
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