The Road Is How: Three Days Afoot Through Nature, Eros, And Soul, The

A naturalist’s three-day prairie search for heart, spirit and peace of mind

Prairie naturalist Trevor Herriot decides “the road is how.” Recovering from a misstep that could have been his last, he decides to go for a three-day walk to sort through questions that rushed in upon the enforced stillness as he waited for his body to heal.

The author sets off down an ordinary prairie road and then detours along railbeds, over hills and into fields—sitting next to sloughs, waiting for a sparrow to sing to the dusk. Each step takes him further into a territory where imagination and experience carry us beyond the psychological imprint of our transgressions to the soul’s reconnection with a broken land.

By turns irreverent and meditative, lyrical and analytical, this moving account bears the characteristic style of Herriot’s bestseller River in a Dry Land, but this time the focus of his critique is not the culture but the individual. Attended by a pair of hawks and his remembered conversations with an old friend, the author begins the longer metaphorical walk into the second half of life by facing his own part in the spiritual failures of men, and examining how that culpability plays out in family, community and landscape.

The Road Is How re-enchants our understanding of desire, spirit and nature. It offers believers and skeptics alike an illuminating look at how brief passages in our lives can help us find grace in the way we walk upon this good earth.