The Road is How

We hear every day how we are messing up the world—melting glaciers, destroying forests, and eating our way toward empty oceans and grasslands. It is the road we have been on for a long time, and it looks to be the road ahead. Trevor Herriot’s new book, The Road Is How, suggests that while you and I may not be able to change that road by ourselves, we can choose, in our individual lives, how we walk it. Three months after a serious accident, Herriot sets out along an ordinary prairie road, to sort through the questions that rushed into the enforced stillness of healing. Unfolding over three September days, this enchanting narrative reconceives our modern map of desire, spirit, and nature. Meeting farm people who stop to talk, detouring along railbeds and into fields, sitting next to sloughs, or waiting for a sparrow to sing to the dusk a second time, we enter a territory where imagination and experience carry us beyond the psychological imprint of our transgressions, coming at last to the soul’s reconnection with a broken land. Attended by a pair of hawks and remembered conversations with an old friend, the author takes an honest look at the intersection of the moral and the ecological in his life, ultimately facing his own part in the spiritual failures of men, and how that plays out in family, community, and landscape. Before the trip is over, we find ourselves considering afresh the possibility that changing how we move through life may be the best way to influence the larger social, political, and cultural forces that shape the human path in the wild world. Beautifully told in the characteristic style of Herriot’s bestseller River in a Dry Land, this moving account of one man’s journey is by turns irreverent and meditative, lyrical and analytical. Though we may be imperfect creatures of flesh and spirit, Herriot illuminates how each of us can find, in brief passages in our lives, a measure of grace as we walk this good earth.