14
" I have spent most of my life outside, but for the last three years, I have been walking five miles a day, minimum, wherever I am, urban or rural, and can attest to the magnitude of the natural beauty that is left. Beauty worth seeing, worth singing, worth saving, whatever that word can mean now. There is beauty in a desert, even one that is expanding. There is beauty in the ocean, even one that is on the rise. "
― Pam Houston , Deep Creek: Finding Hope in the High Country
19
" Last semester, when I asked my class, as I do each quarter, how many of them had ever spent a night sleeping in the wilderness the answer was zero, and I realized for the first time in my teaching life I might be standing in front of a room full of students for whom the words “elk” or “granite” or “bristlecone pine” conjured exactly nothing. I thought about the books that had shaped my sensibility as a young writer: Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Silent Spring, A Sand County Almanac, Refuge, A River Runs Through It, In Patagonia and Desert Solitaire. Now, amid the most sweeping legislative attack on our environment in history, a colleague wondered aloud to me whether it was feasible, or even sane anymore, to teach books that celebrate nature unironically. This planet hadn’t even been mapped properly a couple of hundred years ago, and now none of it, above or below ground, remains unsullied by our need for extraction. As we hurtle toward the cliff, foot heavy on the throttle, to write a poem about the loveliness of a newly leafed out aspen grove or a hot August wind sweeping across prairie grass or the smell of the air after a three-day rain in the maple forest might be at best so unconscionably naïve, and at worst so much part of the problem, we might as well drive a Hummer and start voting Republican. "
― Pam Houston , Deep Creek: Finding Hope in the High Country
20
" In the first big meadow beyond Freemon’s, I see Camp Papoose has been established, and it is filled with beautiful, dirty, exhausted women and men. I read this morning that by tonight there will be 895 firefighters in town, which is more people than live in this county. And here are a whole mess of them, our literal heroes, sitting in folding chairs outside of tents, eating cans of whatever with plastic forks, half-melted boots still on, suspenders loosened, charcoal-scarred arms coming out of filthy T-shirts, deep fatigue visible through the ash-exaggerated lines on their faces. I thought the sight of the burnt forest would make me cry, but in fact it’s the sight of these off-duty saviors that bring tears. I’ll go home, I think, and make the biggest sign imaginable and hang it on the front gate. THANK YOU FIREFIGHTERS! WE  YOU! There’s nothing that undoes me like the possibility of rescue. "
― Pam Houston , Deep Creek: Finding Hope in the High Country
