How to Cuss in Western

August 20, 2018
This essay collection from Branch (Rants from the Hill) depicts his home, the high desert of Nevada’s Great Basin, as a setting for austere natural beauty as well as a place which lends itself to colorful, eccentric lifestyles. Some of these pieces (most of which were originally published online in High Country News) are broadly humorous, like the title essay on western “cussing,” which carefully parses the distinction between chickenshit and horseshit. Some tell stories about the problems of home ownership in the desert, such as the times he “lost” his septic tank or was unexpectedly appointed “road captain”—the person responsible for maintaining the tiny road connecting his neighborhood to the main road. But Branch is at his best when reflecting on the existence of life in a seemingly barren place. In “Lone Tree,” he writes of the importance of a single juniper tree on his property; in “Shark Mountain,” Branch and his daughter journey to the top of a nearby mountain to leave behind sea shells and shark teeth, in a kind of imaginative reconnection with the desert’s prehistoric past as ocean floor. As it was for Branch’s literary heroes, Henry David Thoreau and Edward Abbey, the wild emerges here as a place of unlimited possibility. By turns hilarious and thought-provoking, Branch’s collection will not disappoint.