Walking through a wilderness with the demons of the civilized world for companions, I couldn’t help thinking, what could go wrong? Gratefully, I feel like I lost some weight, and I can see better.

–Bill Porter/Red Pine

Of all the reactions to the ugly shock of Trump’s election in 2016, Brooke Williams; may be the best: his walk into the ancient order of the desert wild, and into the modern craziness of the American mind, is at turns hilarious, wrenching, and full of the kind of intense engagement that we need in order to endure (and even surmount) our present trials. 

-Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature

Brooke Williams journeys, both literally and figuratively, to understand his own demons in a country haunted by politics and pandemic. Pondering dreams, hermitry, patriarchy, and sacred nature, Williams delivers a lovely and ardent book.

–Betsy Gaines Quammen, author of American Zion: Cliven Bundy, God and Public Lands in the West

We go out to go inward, go to the wild to find our own wildness, and so Brooke Williams did when Trump was elected, to both escape and confront his demons and ours, his dreams and our possibilities. This is a book that invites the reader to wander with the author, through cloudy thoughts and solid red sandstone landscapes, to meet pack rats, ravens, hermits, bears ears, analyze the difference between stoke and awe, ponder the evolution of the species, masculinity toxic and otherwise, weave in and out of the dreamtime and the political scene. T.S. Eliot famously said, “And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time,” and this book of venturing forth and coming home is all about that. 

–Rebecca Solnit