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Q&A: Romanticizing Rural Desert Life, with Michael Branch [1]
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Date: 2025-04-18
Editor’s Note: This interview first appeared in Path Finders, an email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Each week, Path Finders features a Q&A with a rural thinker, creator, or doer. Like what you see here? You can join the mailing list at the bottom of this article and receive more conversations like this in your inbox each week.
Living in the desert is no easy feat, much less the rural desert on 49 hilly acres at the end of a 2.3-mile-long dirt road. But that’s exactly what environmental writer and humorist Michael Branch, his wife Erin, and his two daughters Caroline and Hannah did for over a decade outside of Reno, Nevada.
From his time living on so-called “Ranting Hill,” Branch wrote a number of books, including Rants from the Hill, a 2017 collection of essays on his “fascination with the durability of pastoral fantasy.” Branch moved to the rural desert with idyllic dreams of retreat, and came out the other end with a more, er… realistic sense of what it means to live miles away from urban splendors like a grocery store or a gas station.
I caught up with Branch earlier this year during the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, Nevada, over picons (a Basque cocktail Elko is famous for) and talked about how easy it is to idealize rural living, and our mutual love of the Silver State.
Enjoy our conversation, below.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Claire Carlson, The Daily Yonder: I feel like I see this a lot, where people will move to rural areas and not really realize what that actually means, they just want to romanticize the whole experience. So I’m curious, do you feel like you did that and then were slapped in the face with reality?
Michael Branch: You know, I didn’t really set out to be a humor writer, but I have become one. And I would say the three biggest influences on that choice were, first of all, just feeling that my environmental activism was often leading to despair. And that humor helped me to be more resilient and hopeful. But really, the two real-world experiences that made all the difference for me, one was becoming a father because you have all these ideas about yourself that a kid can detonate with a single question. So when your kid gets old enough to say, “Dad, why do you say you believe this, but you do this other thing?” and you’re like, ah, it’s true. I’m a hypocrite. There’s a lot of humor that arises in that incongruity between who you think you are and who your kids teach you that you actually are.
And that dynamic is at play in just the same way with rural living. I came up reading Emerson and Thoreau and kind of fantasized about this retreat from the vices of overcivilization to the wilderness. And then our dream came true. We got property in the middle of nowhere, we planned our own house and we got to live the dream. But it’s such an unforgiving landscape that all of those romantic notions about both children and the landscape are challenged every single day. So yeah, you’ve really hit it on the head. I romanticized it because I didn’t grow up [rural] and I came to it through a kind of literary dream world. I was going to be Thoreau heading for the pond or Huck Finn lighting out on the raft. And I got out there and it was Mormon crickets and flash floods and wildfires and blizzards.
Environmental writer and humorist Michael Branch fell in love with the high desert of Nevada, despite the real-world difficulties of living there. (Photo by by Kyle Weerheim, provided by Michael Branch.) I’ve got a buddy who says, “you have to always reckon the relationship between the real self and the ideal self.” And my ideal self was going to retreat to the wilderness and have these Thoreauvian epiphanies. And my real self was like, shit, I can’t even maintain my own driveway. And this place is going to burn down. So you learn to laugh at it because you’re laughing at yourself for these often kind of silly, idealized notions you had. And yet at the same time, it’s still amazing to be out there.
DY: It’s one thing to move to a rural place, but it’s another thing for that place to be Nevada, which as you just said can be a hard place to live with fires and drought and extreme cold and extreme heat. And you grew up on the East Coast – so what made you decide on Nevada?
MB: I moved to Nevada because I took a teaching job at the University of Nevada, Reno, and came out to start a graduate program in literature and the environment. I had offers at other places including the University of Oregon, and of course Eugene is great and Oregon’s great, and that landscape is immediately easy to love. And so I came to Nevada for professional reasons, but now I am an absolutely confirmed desert rat. I’ll never be able to leave the high desert. Think of all of the tropes of looking at the stars at night or looking out across the ocean, and that feeling of feeling really small in the midst of something really big and having that make you feel both tiny and also like everything is precious. And [Nevada] is a really hard landscape to love. And that’s part of what I address in my writing is that to me, places are people, and if we get in the business of saying that some are more beautiful or more important or more valuable than others, that leads down a pretty dangerous road.
Our environmental aesthetics have been trained on European romantic paintings and writing and music. If you look at a page from a Sierra Club calendar, you have no problem saying that’s a place that should be protected. But if you look at a photograph I took in the Great Basin, maybe that’s a good place to put nuclear waste. So a lot of what I try to address in my writing is what does it mean when we stereotype a landscape, and how is that like stereotyping a person? What do we lose? What do we miss? And ultimately, I try not to be too preachy about it, but I try to help people see that if you come through a landscape and say there’s nothing there, all you’re talking about is your ability to perceive.
It just means you haven’t learned to perceive that landscape yet, because there’s never nothing there.
DY: I find Nevada interesting because it’s actually the second-least rural place in the country (behind California) when you classify it by where people live – most are in the Reno or Las Vegas metropolitan areas. But when you come to an event like the Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, you realize there are so many people living here and there’s so much culture, but I feel like people overlook it, just forget about it. There are so many misconceptions about what Nevada is and that you can just store your nuclear waste here because people think there’s nothing here, but that’s so untrue.
MB: You’ve hit on a couple things that also fascinate me, and one way I’ve put it to people is that demographically, Nevada is one of the most rural and the most urban states in the country. We have this massive land area, and the book I’m working on now – the counties I’m writing about have an average population density of one person per square mile. In 1890, the standard for unsettled frontier wilderness was two people per square mile. So even in the 19th century, this would’ve been considered unsettled wilderness. And yet, as you say, almost everybody in Nevada – now don’t tell people on the ranches out here – but almost everybody in Nevada lives in the city. So it is a very curious relationship. And if you look at the politics of so many western states – Washington, Oregon, California, Nevada – it’s blue cities and red rurals.
There’s a lot of talk about the increasing wealth gap or political polarization, but one of the things I see happening in the country that worries me a lot is that increasingly it seems like people in cities do not understand what life in rural places is like, and vice versa. We’re not communicating with each other anymore. And I really wonder if the polarization that we’re suffering from politically, whether we can ever address it without also addressing this rural-urban divide.
This interview first appeared in Path Finders, a weekly email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Each Monday, Path Finders features a Q&A with a rural thinker, creator, or doer. Join the mailing list today, to have these illuminating conversations delivered straight to your inbox.
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