Where the Rain Children Sleep : A Sacred Geography of the Colorado Plateau

"The history of my people and the history of this land are one and the same.

Nobody can remember us without remembering this land.

We are forever connected." -Anonymous Pueblo Indian Inspired by a year of hiking 120 desert canyons, Where the Rain Children Sleep, is nature writing in the best tradition of Edward Abbey, Ann Zwinger, and Terry Tempest Williams.

Much more than one man's memoir of his time in these canyons, this collection is well-informed, critical, and in-depth, with flashes of humor, and whimsy thrown in.

The vivid thread tying this collection together is the Navajo concept of a "sacred geography." A cultural anthropologist, an instructor with Outward Bound, and a member of the Wild Rockies Field Institute, Michael Engelhard has traveled and explored the Southwest for close to twenty years.

His story of this region straddles the fences normally separating natural history, ethnography, personal reflection, and travel narrative.

Engelhard offers up his perspective on spatial intelligence; bears; the outdoors industry; places of power; motorized transportation; endangered species; a sense of place; overgrazing; John Wesley Powell; place names; catastrophic events; fish; the nature of beauty and the beauty of nature; dams; and wind.

The essays spring from a growing concern that the song of the land, and the stories and voices of these places and their non-human and indigenous inhabitants might not be heard against the din of bulldozers, powerboats, turbines, and four-wheelers.

Engelhard's passion and keen eye offer finely tuned observations, and his essays are small gestures of gratitude, of remembering what has been given to him.