The Walk

In The Walk, William deBuys writes about personal loss and the power of the landscape to nurture the recovery of hope. The book consists of three interrelated essays that move from a period of strife in the author’s life to a kind of limbo and eventually to a place of peace. 

The setting is deBuys’ small farm in New Mexico’s Sangre de Cristo Mountains. Each morning, he takes the same walk through the woods, arriving, as he describes in the first essay, at a clarity that comes from looking at the same vantage point for years. 

The middle essay, “Geranium,” takes its name from a mare deBuys had to put down, and whose remains become one with the forest. 

In the final essay, deBuys reflects on drought, the loss of a friend, and the resurgence of land and hope. 

Contemplative, compassionate, and quietly humorous, The Walk is nature writing at its finest.

William deBuys is a writer and conservationist based in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He is the author of The Walk and River of Traps, coauthored with Alex Harris, which was a finalist for the 1991 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction and a 1990 New York Times Notable Book of the Year. DeBuys’s other books are Salt Dreams: Land and Water in Low-Down California, which received a Western States Book Award, Seeing Things Whole: The Essential John Wesley Powell, and A Great Aridness. His shorter work has appeared in many publications, including Story, Orion, and the New York Times Book Review.