Email this article

Still On The Loose

Renny Russell returns with his long-awaited second book

By Ken Wright

Found in: | Inside | Books |

I tell my students, it's not writing that takes time; it's living the life worth writing about.

Case in point:

Renny Russell has not put out a book since 1965, when he and his brother, Terry, penned (literally, since the book was done in Terry's calligraphy) the classic On the Loose. The book sold more than a million copies, and served as inspiration to many more (myself included) who in their rambles through the Universe at some point stumbled upon this truly unique collection of musings, quotes, aphorisms and photos. For those millions, On the Loose served as an incantation invoking the spirits of the trail and the river, and served as both signpost and compass bearing to wandering the big wild world, out there, everywhere where there's wild country.

So what has Renny been doing since then?

He's been living a grand experiment: applying in practice over the course of a lifetime the philosophy he articulated when he was still only a teenager.

Rock Me on the Water - Russell's long-awaited second book - is the field report on that experiment. The book is subtitled A life on the loose, but this is not a sequel or follow-up to the first. That work was a collaboration with Renny's brother, and it stands alone, as it should - and as Renny treats it in Rock Me on the Water. Rock Me on the Water is Renny's own book, his own story, and it's told his own way.

It's Renny's story, but nonetheless, On the Loose is a touchstone for Russell in this book. It has to be, because the story of On the Loose's conception, birth and life is Renny's story: On the Loose was first put to paper by the two brothers when Renny was 19 and Terry was 21. Due to family circumstances, at that point the brothers had already spent their lives growing up very together, and had spent that togetherness exploring the American West and its deserts and mountains, and, ultimately, the remote canyon country of Utah's Colorado and Green rivers.

Renny's story, though, is also this: It is on the beloved Green River where, on a river trip celebrating the Sierra Club's publishing of On the Loose, Terry drowned in a rapid. In shock and despair, Renny spent the next three days walking out of the wilderness he loved. He walked into a world changed and changing, on every level: into his own grief, into a transformed family, and also into the heart of the late 1960s hippie movement in California. He then walked away, to carve a solitary life in northern New Mexico. And also, eventually, he walked back to the river - as a Grand Canyon river guide in the industry's earliest days.

Finally, though, he also had to walk back to the place where Terry died. That quest took him more than three decades.

It is this narrative thread, of his returning to the site of his brother's being "taken by water," as he calls it, this time alone and in a hand-made boat, that weaves Rock Me on the Water together. In the course of that trip, we also take forays - in stories, photographs, and Russell's own soulful, hypnotic artwork - through his life. But there is a madness to this method: Through this style, the book becomes much more mosaic than linear, and so much like one's own chewing on memory and experience - so freeing each of us to draw our own insights from Russell's story.

When Renny tells us his story, it's also history: the story of the American West in the last 50 years. Russell's roamings, both before and after Terry's passing, cut to the heart of the West - both geographically and spiritually - and in particular the Four Corners country, where Russell's travels cast a wide-ranging net, from Glen Canyon before and after damnation, to the Henry Mountains, to the Grand Canyon, and points in between.

This, I'm sure, all seems it could end up rather depressing - from the one-time shock of an untimely death of a beloved brother, to the many-times-over pain of the deaths of beloved landscapes. But it just ain't so, for ultimately the spirit of Rock Me on the Water is all about the bigger circles we walk through life and land. "It's endemic to grumble," Russell muses at one point, "a challenge to inspire."

And that's where Rock Me on the Water and On the Loose finally do overlap - inspiring is Russell's goal. Again. Still. And we get that message by seeing how Russell chooses to honor both his brother's spirit and the land that embodied it: by actually living out the On the Loose philosophy.

The result has been a magnificent life. And a book that took 40 years to write.

Ken Wright is the author of A Wilder Life: Essays from Home, Why I'm Against It All and Monkey Wrench Dad: dispatches from the backyard frontline.