In the book Rants From the Hill, Michael P. Branch describes his family’s life in the outback of the Great Basin, an area he dubs Silver Hills. A sampling:
• But the best thing about mud season in Silver Hills is the “gumbo luge” ... (Page 39)
• The most surprising item in this remarkable, wild digs was stacked neatly beneath one corner of the tarp: an impressive cache of surprisingly well-preserved Nixon-era Playboy magazines. In effect, I had made the astounding anthropological discovery of a western Great Basin Mancave, circa 1973. (Page 3)
• I realize that this kind of self-righteous, tree-hugging sermonizing dodges the central issue, which is that cell phone towers are just plain ugly. (Page 156)
• He began to swing the feathered bob back and forth hypnotically over the sand, apparently feeling for the water through some invisible vibration along that feathered string, listening for the life-giving water percolating in its rock sanctuary far below the desiccated surface of the Great Basin. “You’ll go 400 feet and get twenty-six gallons a minute,” he declared, “and that water will be sweet as honey in the rock.” (Page 100)
• I have made close observations of cattle out on the BLM land here in Silver Hills, and I do not like what I see. (Page 165)
• Communities around Yreka, California, have tried to leave the Union to form the State of Jefferson, an ongoing effort since 1941, when some independent-minded folks declared they would attempt to secede from the United States “every Thursday until further notice.” (Page 82)
Rants From the Hill: On Packrats, Bobcats, Wildfires, Curmudgeons, a Drunken Mary Kay Lady & Other Encounters With the Wild in the High Desert, by Michael P. Branch (Roost Books, $14.95)