Raising wild - Michael P. Branch

Raising Wild is an intimate study of Nevada's Great Basin Desert, the wild and extreme land of high desert caliche and juniper, of pronghorn antelope and mountain lions, where wildfires and snowstorms threaten in equal measure. Within this remote, high desert landscape sits the home of Michael Branch, where he, his wife, and two daughters brazenly live out their days among the packrats and ground squirrels, rattlesnakes and scorpions. In Branch's hands, this exceedingly barren and stark landscape becomes a place teeming with energy, surprise, and an endless web of connections. It is in this wild landscape where building a ladder to the stars is still possible in the darkness that descends upon remote landscapes, where one can still find a connection to the past and to the heavens; where his children's first garden becomes not the quaint blossoming of seed to flower and fruit but a smoke-bomb-drenched exhibit of futility in the face of the inimitable antelope squirrel; where the surprise of fire acts as a reminder all too real of the unknowable that awaits us and for which we can never fully prepare. It is in this wildness that our ideas about nature and ourselves are challenged and changed.