The Road Is How

A Prairie Pilgrimage through Nature, Desire and Soul

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 walk to sort through questions that rushed in upon the enforced stillness of waiting for his body to heal. The Road is How re-enchants our modern map of desire, spirit and nature by taking us on a three-day walk down an ordinary prairie road. Detouring along rail beds, over hills and into fields, sitting next to sloughs, waiting for a sparrow to sing to the dusk a second time, we enter a territory where imagination and experience carry us beyond the history of our transgressions to the soul’s contact 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 on the culture but on the individual. Attended by a pair of hawks and his remembered conversations with an old friend, the author discovers the depth of his own weakness and obsessions, and begins the longer walk into the second half of life by facing his own part in the spiritual failures of men and how that plays out in family, community and landscape.

The Road is How matches landscape to the travelling soul and offers believers and skeptics alike an illuminating look at how brief passages in our lives can help us find grace in our footsteps on this good earth.