Discovering a giant in your back yard: the confession of a serial reader.

 Craig Childs, author

 Prairiebreak is pretty consistently focused on the world of plants and gardens, I realize. This may give the impression that it's the only thing I care about. I'm afraid I've given you the wrong impression! I have a couple other aces lurking up my sleeve.

Along with the natural world, I've been a pretty obsessive reader most of my life (although I lapsed from my book or two or three a week habit from 1980-1990 when a new career gobbled up most of my time and energy.)

I will not bore you (or try to impress you) with my literary tastes: let's just say I have almost as many books in my library as I have taxa of plants in my garden. How many is that? Let's guess between 4-5000 (I keep a log of plants I've grown that's twice that--but they do die).  And I have read MOST of the books I own--and I've read many more I gave away, sold as a penurious student or checked out of libraries. I keep a book log too--but only from the last few decades which stands at over 2000 titles--at least that many and more backlog I have yet to enter. Another project for me to pursue!

I have discovered most of the books I love when a friend tells me about them, or when the authors I like allude to books they like. I discovered Craig Childs perhaps the oddest way yet: I have been a lifetime member of the North American Rock Garden Society and as vice president of that society (and now president) I persuaded friends to host our conference in Durango. Co-chair Jeff Wagner and Lisa Bourey who both head the program and field trip committee suggested Craig Childs as a speaker.

They know Durango, and who best to speak--I was content not to question or grill them. But in correspondence they mentioned he'd written some books. I thought why not check them out? So I Googled Craig (you might want to too). To save you time, I'll copy the short Bio he sent Jeff to be put in the Conference website: 

BIO: Craig Childs is the author of more than a dozen books of adventure, exploration, and natural history including House of Rain and The Secret Knowledge of Water. At Adventure Journal Quarterly magazine he is a contributing editor, and his writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Outside, and The New York Times, where he has been called "a modern-day desert father." An Arizona native, he currently lives off grid with his wife in Southwest Colorado.

 Adventure. Exploration. Natural History: hey--I'm up for that. So I ordered a volume off Abebooks: The Animal Dialogues appealed to me: I'd like to dialogue with animals. I dipped into it when it arrived, and suddenly found I'd torn through 20 pages. Childs' prose is pretty damn gripping. And what he writes is not something you will have read elsewhere. There is a sense of something hovering behind--hard to describe: a higher consciousness? What Vladimir Nabokov describes as a velvet curtain--a resonance of a writer deeply steeped in language and experience. I ordered several more books--although I notice that first hardback editions of many of his books (which I like to possess) are not easily obtained on the internet: for a contemporary writer this signifies that they have a devoted audience.

And sure enough when I bring up his name, all my friends have read one or two of his books! How can he have escaped me? And he lives right here in Colorado!

Best of all, he will launch the Annual General Meeting of the North American Rock Garden Society's meeting on August 5 with a keynote presentation on "Rocks that Speak: Ancestral Imagery and Rock Art on the Colorado Plateau". And I shall be sitting there, front and center!

And perhaps you should too! Still time to sign up! Just click https://www.durangonargs.org/

Hope to see you there!