Life on the Knife-Edge

An armchair tour of the heart of America, Pam Houston's memoir Deep Creek: Finding Hope in the High Country immerses the reader in ranch life with the kind of details you'd expect to hear over coffee with a friend -- especially a friend whose robust life inspires envy and leaves you wondering if you'd be strong enough to survive. 

Houston's voice is confidential, anxious, humorous, matter-of-fact, enthusiastic, gritty, and sorrowful, as the situation demands. And there are a lot of situations, a lot of demands. Her recounting of how she purchased the ranch displays both her own character and the character of the small town community she joined by buying it. Loving her land deeply and leaving it frequently -- to do the academic work that allows her to pay for it all -- provides constant tension, while natural and animal challenges threaten her balancing act at every turn. 

The wildfire section is particularly terrifying; it left me shaking my head at how Houston could bear to be teaching in another state while watching the forest service fire bulletins to find out if her home and her animals would survive or be consumed. She is a master of the right word in the right place, unafraid to explore the edge of prose poetry to tell her stories.  

No matter how thoroughly Houston connects events with natural cycles and with human decisions that bring environmental consequences (she is very good at that, without growing dull), ultimately the big picture's impact on her singular life is what resonates through these pages.   

It's life on the knife-edge and it makes for great reading: intense and satisfying. The joy and beauty, for Houston, are worth the struggle and the pain, and on a much larger scale than most of us know. At the end, I feel like I know her -- but I wouldn't want to be her.  

Excerpt:

There are times when I understand all too well what my colleagues in Davis are trying to protect themselves from. Times when seeing the world's bright beauty is almost more than I can bear, when my mind is running the grim numbers the scientists have given us right alongside. And it is also true, had I never laid eyes on [the orphaned elk calf], I would not have spent five sleep-deprived hours weeping -- often sobbing -- in the car that morning on the way to [the airport]. If I hadn't slept those three nights on the porch with [my dying dog], it would have been three fewer nights of my life spent with an actively breaking heart. But a broken heart -- God know, I have found -- doesn't actually kill you. And irony and disinterest are false protections, ones that won't serve us, or the earth, in the end.