Environmental writer Kuipers (Burning Rainbow Farm) recounts his family’s connection to Michigan’s landscape and its influence on his and his brothers’ relationship with their father. Despite their father’s philandering, domineering attitude and religious zeal, Kuipers and his younger brothers, Brett, who finds solace being alone in the woods, and Joe, an alcoholic with suicidal thoughts, had one positive connection with their dad: the outdoors—though the hunting, fishing, or trapping trips would usually end with father Bruce angry and distant. In 1989, Kuipers’ brothers and father bought a deer camp. Skeptical at first, Kuipers, then living in New York City, saw it as a chance to bond, but Bruce was unable to accept his sons’ ideas about restoring the camp’s overgrown farm habitat by cutting down stands of old timber and planting crops and trees and to better suit the ecosystem. Bruce fought to preserve the land as it was, causing continual friction with his sons; Bruce eventually relented, and in doing so, the men’s relationships changed: Bruce finally found respect, Kuipers found a loving grandfather to his young son, Brett continued to care for and improve the deer camp, and Joe learned to become his own man by finding a piece of land to call home. Kuipers’ gratifying narrative endearingly explores father-son relationships as well as the transformational power of nature.
