Saving What Remains

Every now and then, I find myself captivated by a book I stumbled upon by pure serendipity. So much of life is like that, isn’t it?—a lifelong friend suddenly made, an unexpected alpine view, a chance conversation on a plane.

I am currently reading Pam Houston’s Deep Creek: Finding Hope in the High Country (2019), a memoir of healing from a traumatic childhood on a remote ranch in the Colorado mountains.

Her writing is electric, sumptuous with vivid metaphor, jolting the reader into an awareness of nature’s turning wheel and inherent vulnerability. She explores the solace of animals, the loyalty of friends who show up in times of need, the sharp contrasts between urban and rural life—all of it intuitive, and all of it beautiful

It is so superbly written that, should I ever need an exit from insomnia, I would choose its audio version to placate the night, inducing deep slumber as swiftly as anesthesia on a patient lying on a surgeon’s table.

What moves me even more than her narrative of healing from life’s traumas on a remote Colorado ranch is Houston’s passionate love for our wounded earth, currently suffering the consequences of human disregard in the pursuit of profit and self-indulgence.

I am imbibing this book not just cerebrally, but emotionally, as it adumbrates my own passion for saving what remains. I cannot fathom a world bequeathed to our children and grandchildren that is absent of seals, humpback whales, polar bears, and salmon-filled streams—a world where the last untouched forests have given way to roads, lumberjacks, and pipelines.

Houston’s book carries a profound urgency, reminding us how little time remains to get our priorities right:

“Something is definitely wrong….The closer one got to the North and South poles, the more dramatic and obvious the effects of climate change. I didn’t want to live in a world without polar bears. I wasn’t sure an ocean without whales in it was any kind of ocean at all. My entire life I had watched, heartbroken, as individual pieces of wilderness that mattered to me got destroyed or developed, but I had believed, for reasons I am not clear on now (propaganda? denial? naïveté?), that the earth contained vast tracts of land humans had not pushed into. Now, I understood this thing we called technology had advanced to a point where no place on the planet was safe from our penchant for destruction. I found myself glad we had never colonized the moon.”

Houston writes here of her 2015 journey as a journalist encountering British Columbia’s Great Bear Rainforest, the largest intact temperate rainforest in the world. No roads. No lumberjacks. No liquefied natural gas pipelines.

Five months later, an agreement protecting the rainforest’s fate was reached between the provincial government, the First Nations, and the logging industry, shielding 85 percent of the forest from felling.

Yet, only a few months after that, an inattentive tugboat driver fell asleep at the helm, running his ship and its towed barge aground, releasing more than 110,000 gallons of diesel fuel into the pristine waters of the Great Bear’s Seaforth Channel.

I relish this book for its affirmation of nature’s grandeur, mystery, and moods, and for its acknowledgement that our fellow animals are possessed of unique personalities, emotions, and an astonishing intelligence. Elephants mourn their dead. Chimpanzees recognize themselves in mirrors. And yes, they can suffer—and often do, largely at human hands.

In Houston, I have found a co-conspirator on their behalf, whether the creature is a dog, a horse, a lamb, or even a chicken:

“I had been born knowing that if you held the proper measuring stick, animals would always test smarter than people, and nothing I’ve seen in my lifetime has disabused me of that notion. We may have more complicated language, opposable thumbs and this dangerous thing called reason, but any self-respecting llama or buffalo or spider knows enough not to destroy its own home.”

Houston’s book offers both joy and sorrow, and it is well worth your time. Great books endure long after their final page is turned.

–RJ