Now Go Home: Wilderness, Belonging, and the Crosscut Saw

Great essays of working and surviving in the big woods as a young woman plus stories of her life that brought the author to the this remote national forest.

As someone who has worked on and supervised trail crews for the past decade, I highly enjoyed Now Go Home: Wilderness, Belonging, and the Crosscut Saw. Ana Maria Spagna draws the reader in with honest, funny, and witty stories from her time on trail crew and leaves the reader with heartfelt snapshots of her life. In the book Spagna not only teaches a valuable lesson about putting roots down, but also the journey one must take in order to gain a sense of place. I hope this winter she's happily holed up in her cabin producing more wonderful work.

I was assigned this book as part of a nature literature course. I did not care for the other books we had already read, so I thought I would dislike this one as well. But the opposite is true. The book is poignant, honest, evocative, funny. Unlike so many other nature novels out there, it is entirely unpretentious. Spagna does not pretend to be "better" than people with different viewpoints (as she holds a few herself), she is not afraid to laugh at herself and reveal her innermost thoughts. Really, this is not a nature novel per se. It is a book about finding oneself, about belonging, and about how wilderness was a catalyst for her own soul-searching quests. It can be taken at face value, but there are also many opportunities to explore deeper themes and symbolism. Highly recommended.

I was deeply inspired and moved by Ana Maria Spagna's essays set in or around Stehekin and the North Cascades National Park in Washington State. I've had a cabin in this area for over 30 years, but even if that weren't so, I'd still love this book! It is honest, witty, succint, insightful and of course, well written. Think Pam Houston (Cowboys are My Weakness, or, in this case, cowgirls) meets Anne Lamott (Travelling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith) with a little Whitman, Thoreau, and Emerson thrown in. Each essay kept me moving on to the next one, there are 17 in all. Some are really personal, others lighthearted. It is also great reading for anyone who loves the outdoors and nature. The references to Walden are to many to mention.