Deep Creek by Pam Houston

On her 120-acre homestead high in the Colorado Rockies, beloved writer Pam Houston learns what it means to care for a piece of land and the creatures on it. Elk calves and bluebirds mark the changing seasons, winter temperatures drop to 35 below, and lightning sparks a 110,000-acre wildfire, threatening her century-old barn and all its inhabitants. Through her travels from the Gulf of Mexico to Alaska, she explores what ties her to the earth, the ranch most of all. Alongside her devoted Irish wolfhounds and a spirited troupe of horses, donkeys, and Icelandic sheep, the ranch becomes Houston's sanctuary, a place where she discovers how the natural world has mothered and healed her after a childhood of horrific parental abuse and neglect.

Why I Picked It Up

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I love reading memoirs from writers this year, and I always love reading nature writing. I say I'm most defined by a strong sense of place and a pull towards awe, and that's a North Star philosophy of mine—so I tend to resonate heavily with Mary Oliver, Sally Mann (a more recent discovery!), and similar writers and thinkers.

Last fall, I read Cowboys Are My Weakness, Pam Houston's debut collection of short stories, and absolutely loved it. It was so vivid and wind-swept and all-encompassing. (I do need to review that one too.)

What It's About

“When you give yourself wholly to a piece of ground, its goodness enters your bloodstream like an infusion. You will never be alone in the same way again, and never quite dislocated.”

A lot of Deep Creek is actually about the property that Houston bought for $21,000 (her first book advance) and a signed copy of her first book. The luck of that is something she frequently praises within the book, as she got the ranch that's defined her adult life for a shocking 5% down because some neighbors were compelled by her story.

Obviously, she got very lucky, and that awareness permeates the entire book. She's obsessed with her ranch, and so loving towards it, and she worked so hard to get to keep it. I respected her constant work ethic and inclination towards making things happen; she's active and grateful, not woo-woo.

On a survivalist front, Houston also got very lucky in her circumstances. The adventures she recounts are absolutely thrilling, occasionally death-defying, the type that would make my mom shudder and want to ban me from international travel. She had a lot of close calls in regards to personal safety, but speaks a lot about that inclination towards adrenaline, and how it likely stemmed from being attacked so frequently as a child that she might as well risk death on the pursuits she actually wanted. For that reason, she's seen a lot of the world, which makes her reverence towards this pocket of Colorado feel deep, specific, and considered.

Some might call some ventures idiotic, and some outcomes a product of extreme privilege; she has an essay on how she was raised to believe in the shocking, serendipitous Hail Mary moment from strangers coming to save her or bail her out. I cannot relate to that mentality whatsoever; I am the opposite, in that I largely assume I would be the one to have the bad luck that doesn't get me out of those scrapes alive or intact. (Relatedly, her close friendship with Cheryl Strayed makes a lot of sense, as Strayed embarked on the PCT underprepared and while actively doing heroin.) Although I'd say I have a higher risk tolerance than many peers, I feel too much personal responsibility for my outcomes to be able to throw caution to the wind in the same way—but that's partly why Houston's profile is so compelling.

(I do believe in the kindness of strangers, however, but man did Houston put herself in some dangerous situations.) When speaking of her travels and adventures, Deep Creek gives me that kind of voyeuristic hunger for someone else's experience in that I wish I were brave or unconnected enough to follow life the way she had, but I do not envy her the reason for having adapted in that way. I'd like to be able to reference Fiji and Patagonia and Lagos as fluidly as she does! And I also loved when she talked about which trips were actually horrible because she was doing so badly at the time, or out of her depth. She admits her luck, and so at all times, I respected her self-awareness.

Fair warning to those who are sensitive to on-page hardship that her family circumstances were truly horrifying; her father sexually and physically abused her for years, and her mother didn't do a thing to stop it—so there's a lot of really awful circumstance dictated very matter-of-factly. I tend to think we overuse the word "trauma," but Houston absolutely has it.

The book grapples with a lot in the vein of memoir. She'll pick a focus, like an incident with the sheep she raises, or a moment of kindness, or—perhaps most notably—a year with wildfires bearing down, when she was on edge for weeks trying to figure out if they would lose the ranch. As someone who's become very sensitive to the loss of natural disasters, having evacuated places I love multiple times, I resonated a lot with her experience and emotional terrain in that story.

The holistic nature of the book wraps up all of it—her horrifying childhood and history of abuse, the warm and unconditional love of animals, deep freezes in winter, her habits on the ranch—in that it all feels contextually relevant. Some may feel that her topical meandering is too associative, and not rooted enough, but I was obsessed and felt it really transported me. My brain works in that same bounce-off-of-everything way, so I relate and love a book like that. Deep Creek feels like its own ecosystem, which is my absolute favorite quality. Atmosphere!

For context, I'm currently gearing up for a city move, and am not particularly a city girl, so it was maybe the wrong time to read this one. Because a not-insignificant part of me wanted to pull a Pam Houston, grab a sleeping bag, and find a mountain valley to hunker down in. I want to homestead after reading this book; I want a ranch five hours away from the airport, and to jet off frequently to teach writing classes at Big Sur and in France and to take that boating trip she talked about in northern Canada.

“You have to be a certain age, I think, to understand longing as scarcely distinguishable from pleasure, and my love affair with the ranch is defined by a thousand leavings and a thousand returns. It's the only place I always miss.”

God, the descriptions were gorgeous. The nature specificity had me weak in the knees. That alone made this book a new favorite, because I could taste the pine and feel the snow and it was utterly transportative in a way that wrecked me with longing! It could be comforting in a way: that awareness of the existence of beauty. That's a feeling I read for, so it was so satisfying to experience in a book. I would like to read another book exactly like this immediately. Maybe six in a row?

Above all, I loved its precision. I loved how it was so granular, and so reverent. In my opinion, those combinations make for such an all-encompassing sensation of awe and beauty. Houston also has a sharp, subtle vein of humor I appreciate so much—almost adjacent to Fran Lebowitz, or John Steinbeck's Travels with Charley. She had some phenomenally funny lines.

I especially loved her pride over being handy around the ranch, and the various projects and scenarios she mentioned that made it clear she's built such an ecosystem out there—a fabric of friends, neighbors, favors, challenges that make the hugeness of her life so obvious and wonderful. Very textured, and I'm similar in that I feel most grounded and "like myself" when I am challenging myself to become more capable at something.

The overall sensation of nature and travel focus and aim to be centered in the midst of escapism reminds me of what people say they like about Peter Matthiessen that I can't entirely experience because of my dislike of his personality. She had a lot of the same euphoria towards challenge that I love from narratives like After the North Pole by Erling Kagge.

“...of unspeakable beauty and a kind of quiet, on a winter morning, most people on the planet have forgotten exists.”

And then on a personal note, we have similar philosophies when it comes to sensory inundation, what inspires good writing, etc. She believes that "metaphor knows more than you do" and you shouldn't try to overexplain too much, which I believe—but loved seeing as a framework that made a lot click for me. I'd never seen it phrased or laid out that way, and now I have a new reference. I loved her emphasis on her love for naming things and how that bleeds into her drafts. Really, just everything she said.

“I have always believed that if I pay strict attention while I am out in the physical world—and for me that often meant the natural world—the physical world will give me everything I need to tell my stories.”

“Motion improves any day for me—the farther the faster the better—on a plane, a boat, a dogsled, a car, the back of a horse, a bus, a pair of skis, in a cabbage wagon, hoofing it down a trail in my well-worn hiking boots. Stillness, on the other hand, makes me very nervous.”

“I have never been able to resist the names of things. In fact, one of the reasons I got myself so involved with horses, and backpacking, and river running is that each pursuit came with a whole new vocabulary...”

I deeply craved her lifestyle and her exposure after reading, which made me hungry in a good way.

“I read a headline the other day that said 80 percent of Americans live in a place where they can't see the Milky Way, which is why, in mid-November, I set my alarm for 3:00 a.m., pull on fleece pants, upper body layers and my arctic hat and mittens.”

And then some reviews say they lost interest because of the extra-long fire story, but I agreed with Houston's take on it, which was:

“Scary as it was, there wasn't a single day of the West Fork Fire that wasn't deeply interesting.”

Overall Thoughts

I frequently say I love any book that can make me feel someone's deep love for something, and that is Deep Creek. I would love to book club this one. I relished every line. It was so to my taste: stunning, specific, spiritual but not saccharine. I was absolutely obsessed with this book, and cannot say enough good things. I just adored everything about the experience of reading it, and I connected with so much.

For fans of:

Upstream by Mary Oliver; Art Work by Sally Mann; Cowboys Are My Weakness by Pam Houston; Wild by Cheryl Strayed; The Fran Lebowitz Reader by Fran Lebowitz; True Nature by Lance Richardson; After the North Pole by Erling Kagge; The Solace of Open Spaces: Essays by Gretel Ehrlich.