Where Rivers Change Direction by Mark Spragg (review)

2 7 0 WAL 3 7 . 2 S u m m e r 2 0 0 2 lifeless,” who stabs a man in a phone booth outside the store (69). A seventyyear -old Shoshone named Evan shoplifts Snickers bars. Woody, the adopted son of White ranchers, blows his brains out with his adoptive father’s rifle. Mountain City is a town of the dead, the dying, and the dysfunctional. Grandma, with a brain tumor the size of a fist, can no longer fasten her bra. Gramps, nearly blind and sucking oxygen through a plastic tube, can’t string up his boots. “I used to be able to tie them sonsabitches,” Gramps says (183). Gramps’s witty gumption signals the fun energizing Mountain City amid all the decay. Bleak facts hold small weight against the felt vitality of the town. Gregory Martin’s poetic sensibility hovers over scenes like a western Tiresias, fashioning vignettes into a memoir of startling humor and affecting sensitivity. Like Sarah Orne Jewett’s Country of the Pointed Firs, the book makes a declin­ ing way of life glow. A n emotionally rich world emerges from observations of small kindnesses— the old Basque who mows lawns for the sick and even the dead— and life-giving affirmations— the aging buckaroo in the Elko Basque hotel who at ninety-six gives up smoking. The authorial voice flips between the extreme ranges of the book’s characters— the laconic and the garrulous— each as western and Basque in expression as the other. Gregory Martin tells what he’s learning from his grandparents. “They’re teaching me how to grow old” (169). That’s part of it, but not all. What he really learns, as do we, is the power of home to invest lives with gratification. Young Martin mourns his distance from his cultural identity and homeplace in the Basque Country: “Three generations from that homeplace, I’ve lived in twenty-one places in twelve states in twenty-seven years” (55). But Gramps, Grandma, Uncle Mel, and Aunt Lou haven’t. Despite all the differences, they’re a lot like Robert Laxalt’s old shepherding father in Sweet Promised Land, who tried to return to the Basque Country only to discover the West had become his home. The denizens in Mountain City learn the same thing with­ out going anywhere. Their lives are rich because Mountain City is their home. Where Rivers Change Direction. By Mark Spragg. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1999. 267 pages, $21.95. Reviewed by Melody Graulich Utah State University, Logan “I’ve been raised with men,” says the narrator of Mark Spragg’s terrific col­ lection of interrelated essays about growing up on the oldest dude ranch in Wyoming in the mid-twentieth century. “I know that frustration and pain can turn quickly to anger” (45). The threat of violence— from humans, from weather, from animals, from chance accidents— looms over Spragg’s boyhood, dominated by men and by artfully preserved frontier values. His daily activi­ ties— chopping wood, hunting for food and butchering it, saddling horses, doc­ toring men and animals, trying to live up to expectations about “how it must be BOOK REVIEWS 2 7 1 about a man,” to quote Wyoming’s mythic progenitor, the Virginian— seem to cast him in a superannuated but perpetually romantic role: the dudes, he knows, “came to live the anachronism that we considered our normal lives” (3). Spragg represents himself throughout his childhood as yearning to grow into manhood, as hating being a boy, as staying awake at night “when the lone­ liness of not quite being a man wells up and makes sleep impossible” (111). The same anxieties torment his much-loved brother: after Spragg endures a particularly grisly experience, his brother, Spragg imagines, “wonders if we have grown apart in a day. If I am less a boy, and he more alone” (111). When his father forces him to shoot his injured horse, Socks, to use as bear bait for the inept dude hunters, and he does not cry, he thinks that “a boy would cry. I think maybe I have begun to be a man” (107-8). In the same...