Read Online The Carry Home Lessons From the American Wilderness Gary Ferguson 9781619025837 Books

Download As PDF : The Carry Home Lessons From the American Wilderness Gary Ferguson 9781619025837 Books

The nature writing of Gary Ferguson arises out of intimate experience. He trekked 500 miles through Yellowstone to write Walking Down the Wild and spent a season in the field at a wilderness therapy program for Shouting at the Sky. He journeyed 250 miles on foot for Hawks Rest and followed through the seasons the first fourteen wolves released into Yellowstone National Park for The Yellowstone Wolves. But nothing could prepare him for the experience he details in his new book.

The Carry Home is both a moving celebration of the outdoor life shared between Ferguson and his wife Jane, who died tragically in a canoeing accident in northern Ontario in 2005, and a chronicle of the mending, uplifting power of nature. Confronting his unthinkable loss, Ferguson set out to fulfill Jane’s final wish the scattering of her ashes in five remote, wild locations they loved and shared. The act of the carry home allows Ferguson the opportunity to ruminate on their life together as well as explore deeply the impactful presence of nature in all of our lives.

Theirs was a love borne of wild places, and The Carry Home offers a powerful glimpse into how the natural world can be a critical prompt for moving through cycles of immeasurable grief, how bereavement can turn to wonder, and how one man rediscovered himself in the process of saying goodbye.

Read Online The Carry Home Lessons From the American Wilderness Gary Ferguson 9781619025837 Books

"Gary Ferguson has been a voice for the wilderness for the past 25 years. His steady, sturdy prose has translated the power of wild places into 22 nonfiction titles like Hawk’s Rest, The Yellowstone Wolves, The Great Divide, and Walking Down the Wild.

Combining lyrical images, scientific research and hard-won, firsthand experiences, Ferguson has shown readers how the untamed natural world challenges, informs, inspires and awes us.

In his latest book from Counterpoint Press, The Carry Home: Lessons from the American Wilderness, Ferguson explores another dimension of the power of wild places: healing.

The Carry Home chronicles Ferguson’s quest to scatter his wife Jane’s ashes in several locations that she specified: the Sawtooth Mountains of Idaho, near a Forest Service cabin in southern Montana, a remote corner of Capitol Reef National Park in Utah, the Lamar Valley in Yellowstone, and Wyoming’s Absaroka Range.

It is one last adventure in the Great Outdoors for the couple, married for 25 years and bonded through their shared love of exploring, hiking, canoeing and road-tripping (they put 350,000 miles on a 1979 Chevy van).

Ferguson invites us to join him on this intimate journey, and as the tale unfolds, we witness the healing balm that nature provides.

“At first, the journeys broke my heart,” he writes. “Later they helped me to piece it together again.”

Ferguson’s books have excelled at telling other peoples’ stories, like wildlife biologists studying gray wolves or troubled teens in a wilderness therapy program. The Carry Home turns the author’s focus on himself, and his chronicle of grief is unstinting and raw, deftly avoiding maudlin and over-sentimental prose.

The reader travels alongside Ferguson—riding shotgun in the Chevy, hiking trails, paddling rivers—as he revisits hallowed ground and meditates on love, wild places and how both came to be braided together in the story of their marriage."

Product details Paperback 296 pages Publisher Counterpoint; Reprint edition (September 15, 2015) Language English ISBN-10 1619025833

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The Carry Home Lessons From the American Wilderness Gary Ferguson 9781619025837 Books Reviews :

The Carry Home Lessons From the American Wilderness Gary Ferguson 9781619025837 Books Reviews

• Review By Kathleen Wall The Carry Home Lessons from the American Wilderness by Gary Ferguson (2014) Counterpoint Press, Berkeley, CA.
  With vivid sincerity Gary Ferguson, a nature writer, depicts the power of the American wilderness to destroy and ultimately to heal. He describes the pilgrimage to wild places that invigorated his early life with his nature loving wife Jane. He engrosses us in the five majestic spots where he fulfilled his wife's wish to scatter her ashes. She died in a tragic canoeing accident, the drama of which was skillfully woven into the book between the treks. This interweaving allows the readers to be lifted up while experiencing the depth of Gary Ferguson's trauma, grief, and slow revival by again communing with the wilderness this couple loved.
  Interlaced were reflections on changes in the environmental movement while the wilderness itself took over the course of his life with Jane. Raw anger about the shooting of wolves, which they worked so hard to restore, to the poisoning of towns by mining, demonstrates the genuine losses. In contrast to idealistic days of their youth, he reflected on the complexity of integrating the many lives and values- that require respect as we attempt to learn the lessons of the American wilderness- while preserving the healing powers of mother earth.
  The book's tapestry was woven with golden threads of truth on the changing nature of life and the landscape itself. The spiritual maturation took place over the course of the journey. The profound awareness of the fleeting course of all of life, except that of the human spirit, was described as Gary Ferguson came to realize the natural places and all of life is ever transforming. Yet the human spirit is restored and soars from the pilgrimage of the book, The Carry Home Lessons from the American Wilderness. You will love this book give yourself and your friends this gift.
• Gary Ferguson has been a voice for the wilderness for the past 25 years. His steady, sturdy prose has translated the power of wild places into 22 nonfiction titles like Hawk’s Rest, The Yellowstone Wolves, The Great Divide, and Walking Down the Wild.
  
  Combining lyrical images, scientific research and hard-won, firsthand experiences, Ferguson has shown readers how the untamed natural world challenges, informs, inspires and awes us.
  
  In his latest book from Counterpoint Press, The Carry Home Lessons from the American Wilderness, Ferguson explores another dimension of the power of wild places healing.
  
  The Carry Home chronicles Ferguson’s quest to scatter his wife Jane’s ashes in several locations that she specified the Sawtooth Mountains of Idaho, near a Forest Service cabin in southern Montana, a remote corner of Capitol Reef National Park in Utah, the Lamar Valley in Yellowstone, and Wyoming’s Absaroka Range.
  
  It is one last adventure in the Great Outdoors for the couple, married for 25 years and bonded through their shared love of exploring, hiking, canoeing and road-tripping (they put 350,000 miles on a 1979 Chevy van).
  
  Ferguson invites us to join him on this intimate journey, and as the tale unfolds, we witness the healing balm that nature provides.
  
  “At first, the journeys broke my heart,” he writes. “Later they helped me to piece it together again.”
  
  Ferguson’s books have excelled at telling other peoples’ stories, like wildlife biologists studying gray wolves or troubled teens in a wilderness therapy program. The Carry Home turns the author’s focus on himself, and his chronicle of grief is unstinting and raw, deftly avoiding maudlin and over-sentimental prose.
  
  The reader travels alongside Ferguson—riding shotgun in the Chevy, hiking trails, paddling rivers—as he revisits hallowed ground and meditates on love, wild places and how both came to be braided together in the story of their marriage.
• The Carry Home is an intensely personal story. For most, the story would live in a damaged corner of our heart or mind, and would never be shared with the world. Gary Ferguson did a huge favor for so many of us, like me, who've toiled for decades, waiting til the time was right to pursue our passions. The palpable sadness, loss, and void in the author's life is salved (for me) by the fact that he and his late wife actually lived life to a fullness of which most of us only dream. I mourn for him and his loss, and I come away mourning for the decades my wife and I've allowed to slip by without pursuing our love of nature, wilderness, and creation.
  
  I have twin sons who are juniors in college. Over the years, I've assembled a very small essential library for each of them including The Seven Story Mountain by Thomsas Merton, Just Before Dark by Jim Harrison, Hole in the Sky by William Kittredge, and The Nick Adams Stories by Ernest Hemingway. The Carry Home has joined their collections. I hope, like the other books, it motivates them to seek passion every day of their lives.
• Ferguson, Gary. 2014. The Carry Home Lessons from the American Wilderness. Berkeley Counterpoint Press.
  
  This is the most moving book I have read in a very long time, certainly since Terry Tempest Williams’ “Refuge.” Ferguson and his wife Jane lived a full 25 years together exploring wildernesses of the American West. She had always wanted her ashes scattered among five of her favorite wilderness places. After she died in a wilderness canoe accident, Ferguson carried out that commitment - three times alone, twice with friends.
  
  While Williams’ “Refuge” brings us through the trauma of her mother’s cancer while reflecting on nature, “The Carry Home” is much more about the joy of their relationship. Of course the relationship ended too soon, and the book is full of heartbreaking moments and memories as he tells of the accident. It’s also a celebration of American wilderness and a life together.
  
  Plus, the man can write. Lyrically, movingly.
  
  Highest recommendation.