It’s not a desert book – or mostly not – but the author is a desert writer working on a new book about the Joshua tree, so on that excuse we’re reviewing Walking with Zeke here on DesertBlog.

Chris Clarke calls Walking with Zeke “an edited compilation of several years of writing about my best friend’s life and death.” Though I have almost no familiarity with the books-from-blogs genre, and none with self-published books, I think it’s pretty safe to say that Walking with Zeke is the best self-published book of the year, and possibly the best “book that grew from a blog” of all time. Lifted straight from the author’s acclaimed Creek Running North web log (blog seems too coarse a word for the fine writing he’s done here) with only a little reworking, it’s surprising how well the story coheres, told in the original journal entry format.

This is a great animal book, but also much more than an animal book. It’s filled with the author’s love for his companion, deft characterizations of Zeke (both the young and lively dog we see in flashbacks and the slowing dog of the journal’s present), and moving accounts of the author’s near-heroic efforts to care for Zeke until the end. As an old writing instructor once said, “If you’re not risking sentimentality, you’re not even in the ballpark.” Treading on inherently sentimental ground, Clarke rises above sentimentality to deliver honest and often gripping emotion.

But beyond the central core of Zeke’s story, this is also a book filled with careful observations of nature in the author’s Bay Area community of Pinole, in the Sierra, in the Mojave, and elsewhere. There are also odd moments of humor, fascinating meditations on the convergent evolution of humans and dogs, and  thoughts on the intersection of wild and tamed nature. Here’s one nature moment desert enthusiasts will appreciate:

Then I turned. The raven was atop a Joshua tree. It just wouldn’t shut up. And then something else started barking. It sounded like a poodle. And then it didn’t. It was a coyote, and it was barking. At us. It stood at the base of the Joshua tree that held the raven, and it wanted to be where we were and therefore it wanted us to go away… 

It was the first time a coyote had ever barked at me, though I had heard them sing countless times. I stood with my family and watched the Coyote and the Raven in the Joshua tree, as close a thing to a Real Life Holy Trinity as I could imagine. 

Walking with Zeke achieves what all good nature writing should: it reminds us simply to pay attention. After finishing the book, I took my own dog for an evening walk along our local creek, where cool air pooling in the canyon bottom offered relief from a blistering day. As we climbed back out, a flash of wings: horned owl alighting in a eucalyptus. A common sight, but one I hadn’t noticed in years.

You can get the Zeke book here.