Where Rivers Change Direction

 “When I am older I will believe that following in their wake has filled me with the inconsolable joy of animals.”

I’m probably not qualified to say this, but I think Mark Spragg’s memoir “Where Rivers Change Direction” is almost perfect. For me, at least. It’s a collection of non-fiction essays about Spragg’s childhood and life in Wyoming. The essays are connected by place and time—the Wyoming, for the most part the sixties-and arranged chronologically. Spragg’s prose is clean and vivid and reading this memoir was a beautiful experience.  He gives an honest yet generous narration of the people from his past, including his father/boss, mother, other ranch hands and even a mangy cat.

           I enjoyed seeing through Spragg’s eyes, becoming for a moment a boy who loves horses, who is capable beyond his years with them, who grows through worlds of danger and beauty to become a sensitive, quiet, introspective man. For me, reading a memoir is like being carried around on someone’s shoulder while they look at their own past. Mark Spragg tells us stories and also lets us see for ourselves through his description of the places and people. Of all the things that literature can do, I can’t help feeling like this is the most worthwhile. It’s like I’m reading to live another life and to understand what it would feel to have another heart beating in my chest. I can’t help but appreciate the value of the stories of the people he writes about, people who can’t put their own stories into words. Stories that would have been lost if no one had written them down.

Another thing I find beautiful is the sense of quietness in his essays. More than Spragg’s thoughts or interpretations, in many instances we merely experience the quotidian details of a story that tangle themselves up in larger meaning over the course of the essay. One that was particularly poignant to me, for example, is “Wintering.” Here he’s graduated from college (maybe because that’s about where I’m at) and ends up spending a fall and winter in solitude, living way up in the mountains and watching out for the property of some rich people. In the beginning of the essay a horse screams horribly because it’s caught in a wire fence and he’s forced to shoot it. The essay describes his self-imposed solitude, his interaction with another recluse, the landscape, and finally his descent into town  when he starts to scare himself that he’s losing it. In the end, having finally left solitude for people, if only for one night, he says “I hold my breath and hear the clean red scream that holds us all as one.” There’s so much that the essay doesn’t tell us: why he jumped at the chance for almost complete silence and why the screaming dying horse haunted him through his self-imposed solitude. So even though he brings us along into his time of quiet, there’s still a sense in which he still protects his own privacy.

 I remember a speaker coming to BYU when I was there and speaking on reverence. He referenced the fog covered mountains that were right next to campus, and remarked that we reverence the half covered/half disclosed (or something to that effect). In any event, that’s what I felt reading Spragg.