Reviews for Riding Backwards Down the Gila
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Neil, let me put your literary achievement into perspective:
There are more than 670,000 emails in the main LRG computer, dating back to 2001. During the decades that I have been receiving and answering emails from would-be equestrian travellers I have learned that 90% of those who write seeking advice never set out. Of those who complete a journey, 30% express a desire to write a book about their journey. Only 10% ever manage to summon the discipline needed to create a book.
So you are to be congratulated on completing this special type of journey, one that took you back along the road of memory with your beloved Appaloosa, Tiger Lily.
— Kind regards, CuChullaine O’Reilly, longriders@thelongridersguild.com
“Riding Backwards Down the Gila…takes one on a contemplative journey across the American West within a deceptively shifting time frame. Although riding a horse from California to the Continental Divide suggests a trek made during the 1800’s, the meditative prose of this travelogue highlights the trials and tribulations a modern “long rider” faces. Neil’s insights on the practicalities (or not) of maintaining a horse on such a journey and completing daily tasks from eating to sleeping simultaneously suggest 19th-century challenges and 20th-century realities; the latter reminding the reader this is very much a modern journey…with both the author and reader learning as they go”.
— Michael Seman, Director of Arts Management at Colorado State University
“As Neil Hammari, “Nitai”, knows, I took a ‘long ride’ with my horse Pogo in 1973, but our journey was across the southeastern U.S., from the Virginia coast to the Gulf in the western panhandle of Florida. Having just read Nitai’s delightfulaccount of his and his horse Ti’s 1994 long ride across the southwestern U.S., I was struck by both the similarities and differences between our trips. As one might expect, a horseback ride across the deserts and mountains of the southwest would be much different than a long ride through the more populated, forested and wetter southeast. Learning about their trip was fascinating and revealing. The similarities, however, were equally rewarding to read. Our journeys both began in the winter, and there were naturally problems to overcome with terrain, river crossings, finding food and shelter, keeping both oneself and the horse in good shape. However, the love of and experiences of intimate contact with the land, the outdoors, the personal reflection and growth, and especially the wonderful, helpful types of people whom we both encountered are testaments to the value of taking such a trip.
Nitai’s Riding Backwards Down the Gila is a relatively quick and easy book to read, and while it doesn’t have the photographs that I was expecting, his many illustrations grew on me and in many ways made his account more personal. It is a fine book and I recommend it to anyone considering taking a long ride, for the increasing population of folks who have already taken one, and especially for those who want to discover what such journeys, what “ancestral rides,” are all about.”
—Jim Cummins, Long Rider, Harpers Ferry, WV
I enjoyed this little book with entries and drawings straight from the trail. Not intended to be a day to day account, it is an authentic depiction of a journey through a challenging but beautiful landscape, with his horse whose welfare the author places above his own. In a time prior to Google Earth or even internet as we know it today, he often hitch hiked ahead just to make sure there was adequate grass for his mare.
The author has to work around family responsibilities, a physical disability from which he is healing and an impending war-time commemoration on his mind, which makes his adventure real to anyone. He appreciates the diversity of people he meets on the trail. Tiger Lily, who clearly bonds with him as well, is at the heartof it all. It’s both a complex and a simple depiction from a person who has a reverance for life. As a “long rider” myself, I would have enjoyed meeting this rider on the trail, sharing adventures by the fire. You both move on, but you feel enriched somehow. I recommend this delightful little book for anyone who wonders, even slightly, what else might be “out there”.
— Lucy Leaf, Bristol Peninsula, Maine
Other Writings by the Author:
Vision Questing, Thanksgiving and Surrender
(in The Wellspring Journal, Feb 1996)
Two Raven Vision Quest (2024)
100 Sketches of Japan (2024)
Coming soon:
500 Love Letters to Mindanao
and
The Mermaid of Alubijid
Riding Backwards Down the Gila
The Journal and Sketchbook of the Author With the Appaloosa Mare, Tiger Lily, on Their Ride from the Coast to the Continental Divide, along the Butterfield Stagecoach Route of 1849, the Gila, Salt and Verde Rivers, the General Crook Trail, and the San Francisco River.
by Neil “Nitai” Hammari