by Mark Spragg
reviewed by Julie Trevelyan
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Although Mark Spragg’s Wyoming boyhood home does not fall precisely into the generally accepted parameters of the Colorado Plateau, it lingers strongly in his memory and with readers as a sharply-defined, much-loved place that helped create his essence. Navigating the vagaries of life with all the usual triumphs and failures of growing up, he spent his formative years on his family’s dude ranch, where hard work was simply what he did. With the simple grace that shapes most of this work, he states “As a boy I knew only that I was free on the land…a wild, unspoiled part of the earth.” (p2) This satisfaction with the land that challenged, nurtured, and formed him flows through each essay, giving strength to the power with which a boy’s life became realized by the wild spaces he called home.
Boyhood meant chores for the young Spragg. Rising well before dawn to feed horses, wrangle horses, shiver horses out of the high country to return to semi-civilization on the ranch every spring, he based his early opinions on life around the equines whose very existence promised sustenance for the Spragg family as they beckoned to tenderfoot visitors each summer. “I knew horses as I knew my family,” (p5) he notes, and in his recollection he was “the boy who straddled their hearts.” (p5) When he and his brother were but 14 and 15, by themselves they began to take wide-eyed guests on lengthy horsepacking trips deep into the Wyoming wilderness. Entrusted by their father with such responsibility, Mark and his brother knew how to keep the Easterners safe, even if the guests at first doubted their abilities. But such was his and his younger sibling’s connections to the sure-footed creatures who packed them into and out of the wild lands that Spragg associated himself with the horses in a way that meant he understood the weight of his duties: “[W]e scented the earth and the wind that moved across the earth, with wide, open nostrils…we felt the gravity in river water against our legs and stomachs..our feet became hooves that skated for balance on the round and moss-covered rocks of streambeds…we nibbled at the world with soft, blunt lips.” (p13)
Spare language that evokes deep sensation is Spragg’s hallmark. Like a more tender, reflective, and deeply feeling Hemingway, Spragg’s economy of words delivers a punch that thwacks with an unexpected yet satisfying wallop of appreciation. Although after the entirety of the book I almost began to tire of the brief sentences, my heart still thrummed at passages such as this one:
I think that walking is different from riding. I am connected to the earth differently, more aware of the strike of my bones against the land, more aware of the surface. My breath comes sharp and strong. I think that when I am walking it is as though I am speaking each word of myself to the mountain’s ear. Aloud. I like the sensation. I also like being on a horse. When I am mounted it feels as though I must draw my breath through half a ton of animal to fill my lungs. My breath comes to me fuller, hotter; the breathing expanded, drowsy, and meditative. When I am older I will think of the difference between walking and riding to be the difference between prayer and the effect of prayer. (39-40)
His stories weave around and through one another, from the ranch to the valley he grew up in to school to first love to hunters to animals to family to timeless questions of self and life. Humor snakes through the pages as he recalls Wapiti School in a way that should evoke howling memories of the horrors of schoolyard interaction in just about everyone who reads it. The later essays seem far removed from the boyhood Wyoming stories, although they equally serve to offer enticing, somewhat shrouded glimpses of the man Spragg evolved into. The most fearless and vulnerable sections come in the pieces about how the harsh yet loved Wyoming land thrust him into an understanding of himself and his place in this world, even in those moments when he acknowledged he understood nothing at all, when he felt as if he were “only moving through a slice of time between what I have done and what I will someday do.” (p270) The landscape itself allowed him to “grow more comfortably wild” (p213) in ways that will resonate with many readers—even those who never step into the wild places yet still welcome them into their hearts and souls by delving into the telling, succinct words by such authors as Mark Spragg.
Be wild & joyful,
Julie K. Trevelyan
Wild Girl Writing
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